Category Archives: Blog

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The mould, the map and the mass transit system

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slime mould "transit network" (credit: Science/AAAS)There’s still much we can learn from the natural world – and not just the simple things. Nature has a way of solving complex problems without the need for cognition and abstract thought… or even sentience, in many cases. I remember being impressed as a child by the incredible power of tropisms in plants; the simple behaviour of growing toward a light source, for example, can make dumb vegetable matter seem tenacious, determined, relentless.

Well, it turns out that tropism can be pretty efficient, too, as discovered by a research team based in Tokyo. Having already discovered that slime mould can find the shortest route through a maze (provided there’s a food source to entice it), they made a simple map of Japan which used oat flakes to represent major population centres, and let the mould loose on it. End result: the networks of mould connecting the oat flakes closely resembled the country’s existing mass transit networks, or alternative layouts that were theoretically just as efficient. [via BoingBoing; image borrowed from linked article, credit Science/AAAS]

This reminds me of a (possibly apocryphal) story I read a long time ago about some architect employed to lay out a new section of campus for a college or business or something similar. Having set aside a large green space between a bunch of buildings, he was asked where the paths across it should go; his response was that the best way to make an efficient network of paths was to not lay any at all, and to let people walk as they wished across the green space for the first term. By the end of that time, the paths worn into the grass by pedestrians could be used as a map for the asphalters, showing not only the routes required but the comparative traffic densities thereof.

I’m not sure quite where I’m going with this, but I think it has something to do with dethroning rational planning processes in favour of waiting for the best methods or systems to emerge from the chaos of real life. For all our research, for all our academic disciplines and best practices, sometimes just letting things happen as naturally leads to the most efficient solution. I guess the trick is to recognise which problems are best solved in such a way, and which ones aren’t…

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Silvia Moreno-Garcia explains the origins of “Biting the Snake’s Tail”

Mexico City skylineSo, did you read Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s latest Futurismic story, “Biting the Snake’s Tail”, published here yesterday? Well, you should – go do it now.

One of the great joys of author blogs, for me at least, is getting an insight into how stories came to be – to find out what inspired them, how they progressed from initial idea to finished work. Silvia has written a post that opens a door on “Biting the Snake’s Tail”, which takes place in a near-future iteration of Mexico City:

It was two years in the making. I wrote the first half of it after dreaming two parts of it: the detective walking through the rainy streets with the dog and the murder. In the original, the murder took place at a public bath house and the victim was a gay man.

When I was a kid and there was no water (yep, this was a problem in Mexico City even years ago) for the day, we sometimes went to the public bath house in Santa Julia. This meant paying a few pesos and you got a bit of soap, some shampoo and access to a shower area. I remember we took our own towels, but towels might have been supplied at a cost. Last year, when I was in Mexico City, water issues were pretty bad. About 5 million people (a quarter of the city) was suffering from a drought and predictions for 2010 were that even the ritzy neighbourhoods would be affected. Think a third of the city without water this year, taps running dry for many days at times.

Having been lucky enough to visit Mexico City, I know it’s the sort of place where stories wait for you around every street corner. Ludicrous wealth and grinding poverty live cheek by jowl, and history howls hungrily from beneath layered and crumbling facades of modernity… much like any big city, I suppose, but they don’t come much bigger than El D. F., and that history is marbled with conflict and the struggle to survive for as long as records have been kept. [image by alex-s]

For a privileged Euro like myself, Mexico City was a real eye-opener; I’ve been fortunate enough to have travelled a fair amount in my life, but few places have affected me quite so deeply. Travel is fatal to prejudice, as Mark Twain once said… I wonder if visiting new places in fiction can have the same effect? I certainly hope so – after all, as energy costs continue to increase, it’s going to be the only form of long-distance travel available to the vast majority of us… and there’s more than enough prejudice to go round.

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How publishers can exploit “virtual currencies”

Given that publishing economics are pretty topical at the moment, this video embedded in this post from GalleyCat last Thursday seems either alarmingly prescient or laughably silly, depending on your viewpoint.

Here’s the thesis in a nutshell: those mind-numbingly infuriating and spammy Farmville games your friends play on Facebook are surprisingly good at generating income for their creators, so publishers should take a leaf from the same book to spice up their own online offerings. The theory does come from the president of a company called Orca which specialises in developing virtual currencies for corporations, so a certain bias in favour of the idea is to be expected…

Here’s an excerpt (which I’ve excerpted in turn from GalleyCat’s post – yay, lazyweb!):

“They convert [virtual currencies] at prices that are not easily divided–one dollar gives you 33 credits [for example] … People don’t necessarily think, ‘it cost me 42-cents to send my friend a virtual beer.’ I think when the publishing industry starts thinking about how they chunk up content–whether it be articles or chapters–it shouldn’t be a debate of whether an article is worth one dollar or three dollars. An article should cost 43 credits.”

My immediate instinct is that this idea stinks, though that’s probably due to my kneejerk loathing of Farmville, Mafia Wars et al; maybe there’ll be a way to graft virtual currencies onto the publishing ecosystem without introducing the intrusive “social” aspects (read as “spamming”) and underhand pricing structures that seem to inform such games, which I suspect wouldn’t gel well with the book-buying demographic. But then again, if you get rid of those aspects of the system, you’ll probably never make a dime with it… so it’s back to the drawing board, I guess.

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Amazon vs. Macmillan: ebook armageddon!

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Unless you’ve been sleeping under a large rock that blocks wi-fi and cellphone signals for the last three days, you’re probably already aware of the Amazon/Macmillan ebook pricing spat that kicked off late last week. We’re hearing a lot about it in the sf-nal blogosphere, what with Tor Books being a Macmillan subsidiary as well as one of the biggest genre fiction publishers around. [image by tvol]

But just to bring you up to speed, here’s a few bits of commentary from the author’s side. First, Cory Doctorow points out that the war between these two businesses will end up harming writers and readers most of all:

If true, Macmillan demanding a $15 pricetag for its ebooks is just plain farcical. Although there are sunk costs in book production, including the considerable cost of talented editors, copy-editors, typesetters, PR people, marketers, and designers, the incremental cost of selling an ebook is zero. And audiences have noticed this. $15 is comparable to the discounted price for a new hardcover in a chain bookstore, and it costs more than zero to sell that book. Demanding parity pricing suggests that paper, logistics, warehousing, printing, returns and inventory control cost nothing. This is untrue on its face, and readers are aware of this fact.

If true, Amazon draping itself in the consumer-rights flag in demanding a fair price is even more farcical. Though Amazon’s physical-goods sales business is the best in the world when it comes to giving buyers a fair shake, this is materially untrue when it comes to electronic book sales, a sector that it dominates. As mentioned above, Amazon’s DRM and license terms on its Kindle (as well as on its Audible audiobooks division, which controls the major share of the world’s audiobook sales) are markedly unfair to readers. Amazon’s ebooks are locked (by contract and by DRM) to the Kindle (this is even true of the “DRM-free” Kindle books, which still have license terms that prohibit moving the books). This is not due to rightsholder-demands, either: as I discovered when I approached Amazon about selling my books without DRM and without a bad license agreement for Kindle and Audible, they will not allow copyright owners to modify their terms, nor to include text in the body of the work releasing readers from those terms.

Next up, a pretty good economic deconstruction of the situation from Charlie Stross:

From the point of view of Jeff Bezos’ bank account, Amazon is the entire supply chain and should take that share of the cake that formerly went to both wholesalers and booksellers. They do this by buying wholesale and selling retail, taking up to a 70% discount from the publishers and selling for whatever they can get. Their stalking horse for this is the Kindle publishing platform; they’re trying to in-source the publisher by asserting contractual terms that mean the publisher isn’t merely selling them books wholesale, but is sublicencing the works to be republished via the Kindle publishing platform. Publishers sublicensing rights is SOP in the industry, but not normally handled this way — and it allows Amazon to grab another chunk of the supply chain if they get away with it, turning the traditional publishers into vestigial editing/marketing appendages.

The agency model Apple proposed — and that publishers like Macmillan enthusiastically endorse — collapses the supply chain in a different direction, so it looks like: author -> publisher -> fixed-price distributor -> reader. In this model Amazon is shoved back into the box labelled ‘fixed-price distributor’ and get to take the retail cut only. Meanwhile: fewer supply chain links mean lower overheads and, ultimately, cheaper books without cutting into the authors or publishers profits.

Amazon are going to fight this one ruthlessly because if the publishers win, it destroys the profitability of their business and pushes prices down.

And here’s Tobias Buckell trying to explain the situation to people who think authors are being greedy by having ebook versions of their books available at high price points (as if they had the choice). It’s a lengthy post that goes into considerable detail about the costs of publishing ebooks, and takes on the perspective of both readers and writers in a down-to-earth way, so do go and read the whole thing.

… price fixing is not the answer to the eBook dilemma. Letting volume grow from the single digit percentages it is, while giving publishers the flexibility to experiment and play is not the end of the world some claim it to be.

So Amazon has the right to pull the list. It’s part of the negotiating game. They did this to Hachette UK earlier this year in the same manner to force Hachette to play the game according to Amazon’s rules, as it set them up when Amazon first started selling Kindle books. Hachette folded, Amazon views this as a way to get publishers to do what they want.

The reason Macmillan is asking for a change in the way things are done, is because Apple has released an new program, and it offers publishers a program more in line with what they think will work: including some flexibility in early release prices. This now means Kindle is not the big kid anymore, as many are assuming Apple will pull a repeat iTunes store.

Whether or not that happens, I don’t know. But Amazon seems to find the nuclear option okay, and after years of working to send them a lot of business, this is a reverse blow. Because of my online presence, over half of all my print and eBooks are sold via them. Just as they have the right to do this, I have the right to be pretty friggin’ pissed that they think this is the way to negotiate, or build good will in any way.

And here’s some high-snark disparagement from John Scalzi, who points out that – regardless of economics, fairness or anything else – Amazon’s poor handling of the whole fracas is a public relations SNAFU of massive proportions that may well end up doing exactly what they didn’t want it to:

Amazon apparently forgot that when it moved against Macmillan, it also moved against Macmillan’s authors. Macmillan may be a faceless, soulless baby-consuming corporate entity with no feelings or emotions, but authors have both of those, and are also twitchy neurotic messes who obsess about their sales, a fact which Amazon should be well aware of because we check our Amazon numbers four hundred times a day, and a one-star Amazon review causes us to crush up six Zoloft and snort them into our nasal cavities, because waiting for the pills to digest would just take too long.

These are the people Amazon pissed off. Which was not a smart thing, because as we all know, the salient feature of writers is that they write. And they did, about this, all weekend long. And not just Macmillan’s authors, but other authors as well, who reasonably feared that their corporate parent might be the next victim of Amazon’s foot-stompery.

[…]

And all of this is why a final, ironic bit of Amazon fail will come to pass:

7. Because Of the Idiotic Events of This Weekend, People Will Just Want an iPad Even More.

Again, Amazon: Well played. Well played indeed.

I’ve no idea how soon this matter will be settled, but the economics behind the situation aren’t going to go away, and ripples from this particular rock-in-the-lake will be washing ashore for some time to come. Personally, I want a fair deal for the authors first and foremost… and as much as I’ve long been an advocate of the free-to-read and freemium business models for publishing, I find myself worrying for the first time as to whether or not there’s enough expendable money in the system to support the literary ecosystem as it exists today. Here’s hoping.

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Econopocalypse scenario #3654: the Fat-finger Collapse

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Ars Technica has an interesting article about a couple of recent stock-market glitches caused by high-frequency trading algorithms run amok. Long story short: a screw-up at Credit Suisse was caused by “a trader who accidentally double-clicked an icon in a trading program’s interface, when he should’ve single-clicked“.Yipes.

OK, so it’s not quite the same as a tired technician leaning on the nuclear launch button by accident, but given the utter dependence we have on the instruments of high-speed high finance, similar mistakes could cause global catastrophes. [image by Coffee Maker]

The problem is connected to so-called “day-traders”, computer-assisted stock deals that occur in the blink of an eye, often without much human interaction, and minor errors are amplified at the speed of light (or at least the speed of data in optical fibers) by the networks, causing fluxes that folk like you and I never notice, but which cost bankers and investors thousands of dollars in losses and fines…

Of course, the fact that such computer-driven volatility hurts day traders matters little to long-term investors. But the fear is that these glitches are fleeting indications that the system as a whole is vulnerable and unstable, and that the right combination of circumstances could cause what happend to RMBS to happen on a wider scale. This is especially true as even more of the trading activity, even among individual traders, shifts to automated platforms.

However, it’s not all doom and gloom; the last few years have seen a sharp increase in small trading firms of the two-guys-and-a-fast-computer type, small independent operators using the same techniques as the big banks to trade automatically through the blind of commercially-available trading software.

The Obama administration’s efforts to rein in high-frequency trading by eliminating flash orders and banning proprietary trading (much of which is HFT-based) from large banks will probably have the effect of leveling the playing field a bit for these smaller algo shops. As Matthew Goldstein at points out in his Reuters article on the topic, the prop desks may disappear, but the software and expertise will not. Instead of being concentrated at a few large banks, algo trading will just spread, as the talent behind it either jumps to new funds or goes solo.

Once again, the network corrodes hegemony… but whether a world where anyone and his dog can engage in automated high-frequency wheeler-dealing will be a safer, better and richer one remains to be seen.