Baseball & Innovation

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Bob Sutton:

Jeff Angus over at Management by Baseball sent me an intriguing update about Billy Bean’s approach to Moneyball. Bean is famous in the baseball world for developing quantitative techniques to help identify players that are underpaid by market standards and for developing a system that enables such “bargain” players to contribute to overall team performance. There are many signs that the system works, for example, Oakland’s cost per win in 2005 was $450,000 in salary, while the New York Yankees paid 1.4 million. The 2006 payrolls (when Oakland had a better season than the Yankees) were about 60 million for the A’s and about 200 million for the Yankees. Bean and his staff do impressive analysis to make decisions that gain them cost advantages and increase their odds of success. For example, they stay away for star players that are coming out of high school and prefer college graduates because only 5% of baseball players drafted straight out of high school are in the major leagues in three years, while 17% of college graduates that are drafted make it to the majors.

Beane watching is worthwhile…

Udell Chat with U of Michigan’s Wilkin regarding the Google Scanning Deal

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Jon Udell:

My guest for this week’s podcast is John Wilkin. He’s the director of the University of Michigan Library’s technology department, and coordinator of the library’s joint digitization project with Google. It’s been two years since Google began partnering with the University of Michigan and with other libraries, including Harvard and the New York Public Library. In this conversation we talk about the UM’s earlier (and still-ongoing) efforts to digitize its 7-million-volume library, about how the partnership with Google has radically accelerated that process, and about what this is all going to mean for libraries, for publishers, for Google, and for all of us. …

The Google Library deals have been controversial (rightly so). The UW-Madison also has a deal with Google.

Cringely on VOIP Privacy

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Robert X. Cringely:


The Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA — I’ve written about this one before) requires “managed” VoIP operators to provide law enforcement agencies a point of interception so they can tap your VoIP calls. What’s a “managed” VoIP service? Packet8, Vonage, Comcast, and AT&T all certainly qualify, but does Skype? Yes, if you think of billing as management, now that there is SkypeOut and SkypeIn. And given the current management at the U.S. Department of Justice, “managed” could mean pretty much anything.

VoIP interception is usually done at the SBC/proxy. The network operator’s SBCs perform decryption/encryption on the “secure” packets as they go through the node. It is a matter of “trust,” as they say in the industry. If you want to encrypt you must also be willing to trust an SBC/proxy in China, Russia, wherever. That’s the attack point.

Top 10 2006 Books via the NYT Book Review

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NY Times:

Fiction & Non-Fiction. The list includes Rory Stewart’s excellent: The Places in Between:

You are the first tourist in Afghanistan,” Stewart, a young Scotsman, was warned by an Afghan official before commencing the journey recounted in this splendid book. “It is mid-winter – there are three meters of snow on the high passes, there are wolves, and this is a war. You will die, I can guarantee.” Stewart, thankfully, did not die, and his report on his adventures – walking across Afghanistan in January of 2002, shortly after the fall of the Taliban – belongs with the masterpieces of the travel genre. Stewart may be foolhardy, but on the page he is a terrific companion: smart, compassionate and human. His book cracks open a fascinating, blasted world miles away from the newspaper headlines.

Our Lobbyist Friends, the MPAA

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TechDirt:

A few months back, of course, you’ll recall the big scandal over HP’s use of “pretexting” to spy on various people to figure out who leaked some information from the board of directors. Pretexting is a nice way of describing a basic form of social engineering identity theft. Basically, you call up a company pretending to be someone in order to get their information. It seems pretty clear it should be illegal, and while Patricia Dunn was eventually charged with crimes over the practice, there were plenty of questions as to whether or not California laws actually made pretexting illegal. This surprised many people, who then started trying to push through such laws, which haven’t really gone very far. In fact, there were similar laws that politicians had tried to put in place earlier that had failed as well.

A bunch of folks have submitted this morning that a Wired News investigation found out that the California law to make pretexting illegal had strong (nearly unanimous) support… until the MPAA killed it. Apparently, MPAA lobbyists explained to California politicians that they need to use this identity theft method to spy on file sharers. This isn’t an idle threat either.

Air Travel Liberalization

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Randy @ Boeing:

Earlier this year an important study came out, taking a look at the economic impact of liberalization. And I’ve been meaning to share it with you and talk a bit about what it means for our business.

Over the past 25 years, three main forces have radically changed the airline industry: the regulatory environment, airplane/aerospace capabilities, and airline strategies/business models.

First, changes to government regulations have been critical in shaping the airline industry. Since the deregulation of the U.S. market in 1978, we’ve seen a dramatic shift in domestic and international markets. And we’ve also seen increased liberalization – even “open skies” – in international markets. This freer market access has had the effect of intensifying airline competition and causing airlines to focus more on what passengers want.

Tesla Road Test

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Dan Neil:

But I can tell you, even from my brief spin in this dog-eared prototype, the Tesla Roadster delivers on its promise, which might be summarized as “stupid fun for smart people.” I think the Latin translation of same should appear on the company crest.


It takes a slight leg hoist and wriggle to get into the car and strap yourself into the thin carbon shell of a seat — a holdover from the Lotus Elise on which the car is based. The seat will change in the production car since its narrow width doesn’t exactly accommodate “American butts,” according Mike Harrigan, Tesla vice president of marketing.

Revive Care Packages?

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Lessig:

I may spend too much time thinking about this, but how is it one reverses the hatred of a people after war? WWII was no doubt very different. But interestingly, Germans talk about this a lot — about the brilliance in the American strategy after the war to rebuild (what we weirdly call) “friendship” between the German and American people.

That strategy had a government component (2% of the GDP spent on the Marshall Plan) and a private component. The private component came largely through the delivery of “CARE Packages.” As described on CARE’s website, these packages were originally surplus food packs initially prepared to support a US invasion of Japan. Americans were invited to send these packages to victims of the War. Eventually, over 100,000,000 packages were sent by Americans over the next two decades, first in Europe, then throughout the world.

A German friend this afternoon was recounting this story to me — he too is obsessed with how to reduce Iraqi anger. But the part he emphasized that I had missed originally was how significant it was to Germans to know that these packages were sent by ordinary Americans. It wasn’t the government sending government aid; it was American volunteers taking time to personalize an act of giving.

A good idea.

The End of Risk Pooling

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John Robb:

Another sign that we are increasingly on our own. The insurance industry is rapidly (and inexorably) eliminating the idea of risk pooling:

As insurers use the new techniques to get ever-more-refined estimates of what individual policyholders are likely to cost in the future, they may be tempted to charge people closer and closer to full freight for treating an illness or rebuilding a fire-damaged home. Then even those who benefited from the end of cross-subsidies could see their rates go up as they effectively are asked to pay their own way, rather than share the cost by pooling with others.

The Economist has more.

Two Senators Stop Late 2006 Earmark Stuffed Spending Bills

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John Fund:

Sens. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma and Jim DeMint of South Carolina have decided to take a stand against overspending by objecting to the nearly 10,000 earmarks, or member-sponsored pork projects, larded throughout the spending bills Congress is currently considering.

Their obstinacy has convinced the leadership of the departing Republican Congress that they probably won’t be able to pass spending bills in next month’s short lame-duck session. Instead, they are likely to pass a stopgap “continuing resolution,” which will continue funding all programs at last year’s level until the new Democratic Congress passes its own versions of the funding bills.

ass earmark-stuffed catchall spending bills could save taxpayers a cool $17 billion. All 10,000 earmarks in the pending bills will expire if they aren’t passed by the end of the year.


Overall federal spending has gone up by 49% since 2001, but you wouldn’t know it from the anguished cries of those who regard ever-higher spending as some sort of birthright.

Useful timing, given the upcoming Treasury/Fed trip to China to talk about exchange rates and China’s extensive dollar reserves (movement away from dollar reserves could be a real problem for the United States). Much more on earmarks, including local commentary.