Category: I don’t do Windows

Wealth and Our Commonwealth, William H. Gates, Sr. and Chuck Collins, 080704718X, Fall 2002, Beacon Press

. . . . individual wealth is a product not only of hard work and smart choices but of the society that provides the fertile soil for success. They don’t subscribe to the “Great Man” theory of wealth creation but contend that society’s investments, such as economic development, education, health care, and property rights protection, all contribute to any individual’s good fortune. With the repeal proposed by the Bush administration, we might be facing the future that Teddy Roosevelt feared—where huge fortunes amassed and untaxed would evolve into a dangerous and permanent aristocracy. Repeal would drop federal revenues $294 billion in the first 10 years; some $750 billion would be lost in the second decade, not to mention that the U.S. Treasury estimates that charitable contributions would drop by $6 billion a year.

Another one for my reading list. Looks like I need to follow Frank’s lead and learn more about Teddy: his name is all over stuff here in Seattle, so it’s crossed my mind before.

Shirky: Customer-owned Networks and ZapMail

According to Metcalfe’s Law, the value of an internet connection rises with the number of users on the network. However, the phone companies do not get to raise their prices in return for that increase in value. This is a matter of considerable frustration to them.

The economic logic of the market suggests that capital should be invested by whoever captures the value of the investment. The telephone companies are using that argument to suggest that they should either be given monopoly pricing power over the last mile, or that they should be allowed to vertically integrate content with conduit. Either strategy would allow them to raise prices by locking out the competition, thus restoring their coercive power over the customer and helping them extract new revenues from their internet subscribers.

However, a second possibility has appeared. If the economics of internet connectivity lets the user rather than the network operator capture the residual value of the network, the economics likewise suggest that the user should be the builder and owner of the network infrastructure.

The creation of the fax network was the first time this happened, but it won’t be the last. WiFi hubs and VoIP adapters allow the users to build out the edges of the network without needing to ask the phone companies for either help or permission. Thanks to the move from analog to digital networks, the telephone companies’ most significant competition is now their customers, because if the customer can buy a simple device that makes wireless connectivity or IP phone calls possible, then anything the phone companies offer by way of competition is nothing more than the latest version of ZapMail.

A Plan for Spam

One of the things you learn when you analyze spam texts is how narrow a subset of the language spammers operate in. It’s that fact, together with the equally characteristic vocabulary of any individual user’s mail, that makes Bayesian filtering a good bet.

This whole article is a great read, even if you don’t understand the code fragments (I don’t but the text makes it clear enough). Mozilla 1.3 now has a Bayesian filter, based on Graham’s ideas.

What struck me about this was the notion of vocabulary shallowness as a filtering strategy. I was catching up on my reading last week (doctors offices are great for that) and these was an article about the genesis of the Cat in the Hat and simultaneous demise of Dick and Jane. The problem with Dick and Jane, as explained by Rudolph Flesch was that those books introduced words as words, rather than phonemes or sounds: the expectation was that children would learn to recognize words without knowing the sounds that comprised them. The success of this approach is illustrated by the title of Flesch’s book: Why Johnny Can’t Read.

(Flesch is also know for the “Fog Index,” a measure of the comprehensibility of a document, based on word lengths and frequencies.)

Dr. Suess was commissioned to write a book using some of the simple lists of words Flesch determined contained the core phonemes: took him a year and 222 words. Not only were the Cat in the Hat and its successor monstrous successes, but a whole line of books — Beginner Books — was created to keep ’em coming.

This idea of being able to filter out junk email based on the message’s lack of vocabulary, either inherent or driven by formula, is fascinating. I’ll be testing this to see how it works.

I know Apple’s Mail.app has a teachable filter in it but it doesn’t seem to work all that well: we’ll have to examine Mozilla’s take on it.