All posts by Paul Raven

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Somalian pirate ‘stock exchange’

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piratesThe Somalian tanker pirates are back in the news – apparently they’ve set up a sort of ‘stock exchange’ to handle the influx of business and investment opportunities and feed their ransom money back into the local area [via BoingBoing; image by bazylek100]

The gangs have made tens of millions of dollars from ransoms and a deployment by foreign navies in the area has only appeared to drive the attackers to hunt further from shore.

It is a lucrative business that has drawn financiers from the Somali diaspora and other nations — and now the gangs in Haradheere have set up an exchange to manage their investments.

One wealthy former pirate named Mohammed took Reuters around the small facility and said it had proved to be an important way for the pirates to win support from the local community for their operations, despite the dangers involved.

“Four months ago, during the monsoon rains, we decided to set up this stock exchange. We started with 15 ‘maritime companies’ and now we are hosting 72. Ten of them have so far been successful at hijacking,” Mohammed said.

First point I’d make is that this reads much like a press release – as if the Reuters guy went down, got a few quotes from the people involved (who were only too keen to put a gloss of success on the operation for the international media) and filed the copy. This is a story about bad guys, so if the bad guys want to appear like they’re really bad, why not quote ’em verbatim? I doubt things are running quite as smoothly as they’d like us to believe.

That said, the core of the story is eminently believable… and if the stuff I read in my old job as an employee of the Royal Naval Museum is to be believed, there’s considerable historical precedent. The buccaneers of the Caribbean had thriving dependent communities and investment programs, and operated with a similar degree of impunity at the peak of their powers, as did the Barbary corsairs. As the nation-state model of political power decays, I suspect we’re going to see more interstitial criminal communities arising to skim the cream from international trade – those tens of millions of dollars that the pirates are raking in aren’t comparable to the higher cost of sending navies out to stop them. Which in turn leaves the door open for the rise of mercenary navies to take on the work of protection…

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Bookstore futures from Shirky and Doctorow

bookstore signContinuing the increasingly ubiquitous discussion of the future of bookstores (in the wake of Borders in the UK going into receivership), two heavyweight thinkers have thrown their opinions out into the ring in the last few days. First of all, Clay Shirky, who notes that there are three basic groups of people arguing for bookstores to be rescued from what seems to be an unstoppable decline, and that it’s the one that treats bookstores as having in intrinsic community value that has the most hope of coming up with a workable model for the future:

[This] third group, though, is making the ‘access to literature’ argument without much real commitment to its truth or falsehood, because they aren’t actually worried about access to literature, they are worried about bookstores in and of themselves. This is a form of Burkean conservatism, in which the value built up over centuries in the existence of bookstores should be preserved, even though their previous function as the principal link between writers and readers is being displaced.

This sort of commitment to bookstores is a normative argument, an argument about how things ought to be. It is also an argument that might succeed, as long as it re-imagines what bookstores are for and how they are supported, rather than merely hoping that if enough nice people seem really concerned, the flow of time will reverse.

Then we get a response from Cory Doctorow, who can come at the question from multiple angles – as someone who has both frequented bookstores and been employed by them, and as someone whose creative output is sold through them. As always with Doctorow, out-of-the-box thinking comes as standard; for example, instead of seeing print-on-demand technology as a business-killer, why not look at how you can use it to add value to the bookstore experience?

At the Harvard Bookstore, they have someone who spends the day mousing around on Google Book Search, looking for weird and cool titles in the public domain to print and shelve around the store, as suggestions for the sort of thing you might have printed for yourself. This is a purely curatorial role, the classic thing that a great retailer does, and it’s one of the most exciting bookstore sections I’ve browsed in years. And even so, there’s lots of room for improvement: Google Books produces the blandest, most boring covers for its PD books, and there’s plenty of room for stores to add value with their own covers, with customer-supplied covers (the gift possibilities are bottomless), and so on. I can even imagine the profs across the street producing annotated versions — say, a treatise on Alice in Wonderland with reproductions of ten different editions’ illustrations and selling them through the store’s printer and shelf-space, restoring the ancient bookseller/book-publisher role.

Plenty of room for one-person middle-man businesses in there, as well… maybe the publishing houses should start thinking in this direction, too. What if they outsourced the physical side of book publishing – design, layout, so on and so forth – entirely to custom designers? You’d quickly get a range of services from the utilitarian to the luxurious, and add an element of individuality to a medium that has become increasingly homogenised… [image by jayniebell]

Blue-sky thinking aside, Doctorow and Shirkey make it plain that there’s no reason bookstores have to die off… but it’s up to the people that run them (and, to some extent, those who use them, too) to make some changes in the direction of sustainability.

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The scent of dead stardom – Eau de Jacko

Michael Jackson statueAh, December – time to crank out the ‘silly season’ media stories to fill the gaps in between the “best of the decade” posts. So here’s a way-out weird  news article for you: an LA-based company called My DNA Fragrance (there’s a clue in the name) has joined forces with a collector of celebrity hair and started making perfumes based on DNA extracted from snippets of the barnets of superstars. [via The Daily Swarm; image by Sjors Provoost]

No, apparently this is a true story. But I hope you’ll excuse me the levity of slicing a quote from the coverage and using it out of context (purely for the lulz, you understand):

“The biggest seller is Elvis, but MJ is selling very well too. It’s a powerful fragrance and there is no alcohol in it.“

Oh, the irony. 🙂

We’ll leave aside the speculations about our bizarre obsession with celebrity (after all, is this so different from touching relics of the saints and other such Medieval behaviours?), and leap instead straight to the copyright problem. What happens if my hair is harvested without my knowledge, while I’m treading the red carpet somewhere*? Don’t I or my descendants have a right to the profit from perfume based on my DNA? How many changes would need to be made to a DNA string to make it legally ‘different’ to the originating source?

And most importantly, what the hell does Eau de Michael Jackson smell like?

[ * Hey, this is a speculative website, okay? ]

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Tax ’em back into town?

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The UK iteration of Wired is doing a themed issue entitled “Rebooting Britain”, kicking around ideas for changing the face of an already-changing nation for the better. Many of them could be more broadly applied to any Western/developed nation, but a few of them address issues that are somewhat more unique to the UK. For example, Britain is apparently one of the very few nations where the percentage of people living in cities is not increasing; this doubtless has a lot to do with deep-rooted notions of the romance and allure of country living that inform the English psyche, though the increasing proliferation of surveillance and petty bureaucracy in urban areas may well be a contributing factor too.

But the rural lifestyle is disproportionately expensive from an environmental perspective; people who live in the country need to drive further and more often, they need to use more energy for heating their homes, and so on. So, P D Smith suggests, why don’t we tax the rural lifestyle heavily to encourage people back into more efficient city living?

To create a low-carbon economy we need to become a nation of city dwellers. We tax cigarettes to reflect the harm they do to our health: we need to tax lifestyles that are damaging the health of the planet – and that means targeting people who choose to live in the countryside. We need a Rural Living Tax. Agricultural workers and others whose jobs require them to live outside cities would be exempt. The revenue raised could be used to build new, well-planned cities and to radically upgrade the infrastructure of existing cities.

We have an opportunity to create an urban renaissance, to make cities attractive places to live again – not just for young adults, but for families and retired people, the groups most likely to leave the city.  Turning our old cities into “smart cities” won’t be easy or cheap, but in a recession this investment in infrastructure will boost the economy. We need to learn to love our cities again, because they will help us to save the planet.

It’s a nice idea and well-meant, but there are some pretty obvious flaws to the suggestion. First and foremost, Smith seems to have overlooked the fact that the affluent middle classes who are at the centre of the migration into the countryside are the most politically active slice of the UK population, and no government in its right mind (if such a thing exists) is going to risk alienating them by crushing their dreams of “getting away from it all” with their hard-earned money.

Another problem is the assumption that country living is necessarily less energy efficient. As the months pass, more and more middle-class jobs will fall into the sphere of knowledge work, making them ideally suited for telecommuting… which is something that businesses looking to save on their payroll overheads are starting to wake up to. Offer the chance to work from home in exchange for a smaller pay-packet, and there’ll be a significant take-up.

Plus country houses – while usually bigger and less efficient than city dwellings – are more easily retrofitted for energy efficiency, and more likely to have that money spent on them by their owners rather than by government grants – if there’s a clear economic benefit to investing in a “greener” household, you can bet your life the middle class will be all over it like a rash, especially once a few trendsetters start doing it and trumpeting the benefits.

And let’s not forget that homes in the countryside are theoretically closer to domestic sources of food; with a little logistical planning and some smart entrepreneurship, even small villages could become efficient nexuses for local produce distribution. Hell, they could even start aiming for self-sufficiency and community agriculture, like the Pennines town of Todmorden, which is showing signs of successfully shifting toward community farming and a “locavore” lifestyle [via Global Guerrillas, of all places].

In short, there are definite downsides to the British rural exodus, but using the blunt instrument of tax to reverse it is bound to fail. Better still, surely, to embrace the rural shift and let economics do the hard work for you?

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Software that learns to recognise faces and voices like a child

camera-head stencilsA computer scientist at the University of Pennsylvania has decided to mimic the way children learn to recognise faces and voices in order to speed up the artificial learning curve of intelligent systems:

Using novel learning algorithms that combine audio, video, and text streams, Taskar and his research team are teaching computers to recognize faces and voices in videos. Their system recognizes when someone in the video or audio mentions a name, whether he or she is talking about himself or herself, or whether he or she is talking about someone in the third person. It then maps that correspondence between names and faces and names and voices.

“An intelligent system needs to understand more than just visual input, and more than just language input or audio or speech. It needs to integrate everything in order to really make any progress,” Taskar says.

The information Taskar’s team feeds into the system is free training data harvested from the Internet. Attempts to teach computers visual recognition in the pre-Internet age were hampered in large part by a lack of training content. Today, Taskar says, the Internet provides a “massive digitization of knowledge.” People post videos, comments, blogs, music, and critiques about their favorite things and interests.

Hah! And they said YouTube would never do any real good! Taskar’s computer seems destined for a life of increasing frustration with irresolvable plot lines, though, as they’re training it by showing it episodes of Lost:

As Tasker’s team feeds more data about Lost into the computer—such as video clips, scripts, or blogs—the system improves at identifying people in the video. If, for example, a clip contains footage of characters Kate and Anna Lucia, after being taught, the computer will recognize their faces.

“The alogorithm is learning this from what people say, or from screenplays as well,” Taskar adds. “The screenplay doesn’t tell you who is who, but it tells you there’s a scene with [two characters] talking to each other.”

Taskar says the information the research has produced can be helpful in many ways, particularly in searching videos for content. Currently, if a father is searching for a photo of his daughter playing with the family dog in his gigabytes of photos and videos on his hard drive, unless the photo is tagged “daughter playing with dog,” chances are he isn’t going to be able to find it.

Well, that’s your consumer-level pitch, sure, but the system will be too large and ungainly (and expensive) for Joe Average for a long time. Tasker should probably talk to the UK government… that panoply of CCTV cameras keeps growing, and it costs big money to hire people to watch their output. And what could possibly go wrong with putting an automated recognition system in charge of crime prevention? [image by bixentro]