Arnold Kling links to this article at the American about the large drop in computer science majors and the concurrent surge in economics majors over the last seven years. It’s an interesting trend, but I don’t think it’s something to be worried about. I think aptitude for computer programming is pretty close to a congenital condition. The most talented programmers are the ones who really enjoy it, and often they’re the ones who have been tinkering with computers since they were 8 years old. Most of them will choose computer science as a major regardless of whether it’s considered trendy or lucrative.
On the other hand, when I was in school in the late 1990s, there were a ton of people in the computer science program who really didn’t belong there. The tech bubble had inflated the demand for programmers and so lots of people who didn’t really know what to do with their lives chose computer science more or less by default. Some of them switched majors or dropped out before they graduated. Others stuck it out but had trouble finding jobs when they graduated.
I think a lot of them ended up in mid-range tech support jobs that really don’t require a computer science degree. Although those workers are obviously an important part of the economy, they’re not likely to be a major driver of economic growth, and I doubt there are many people out there who find them particularly more enjoyable than being accountants, A/V technicians, or other jobs that require a similar skillset. They could just as easily have majored in something else and gotten a student job in an IT department–or for that matter gotten a 2-year degree in IT.
So if I had to guess, most of the 50 percent of students who have apparently switched from CS to other majors like economics are probably people who probably didn’t belong in a computer science program in the first place and probably will be just as happy with an econ degree. On the other hand, the 50 percent who are continuing to major in computer science probably includes the vast majority of the people who would have gone on to produce groundbreaking technologies in any event.
It will be fascinating to see how well this works. Mozilla has created a for-profit subsidiary that will work on improving Mozilla’s Thunderbird mail client.
The danger, it seems to me, is that once you’ve got $3 million burning a hole in your pocket, there’s a serious danger that the characteristics that make the free software model viable in the first place—lack of bureaucracy, community enthusiasm, relentless focus on users—will be undermined. The paid employees can begin to see themselves as “running” the project, as opposed to facilitating the collaborative efforts of community members. In a traditional open source project, the only things that get done are the things that somebody is passionate enough to do themselves. On the other hand, in a traditional for-profit company, the product gets the features the CEO thinks the product should have, whether or not anyone else wants those features. Trying to mix the two approaches could be poisonous in an effort in which the bulk of the manpower is still provided by volunteers.
Still, it’s a worthy experiment. And the guy they picked to run it seems like a smart guy who may have the combination of good judgment and humility to pull it off. With the Mozilla Foundation sitting on tens of millions of dollars, they can certainly afford to experiment. Free software is a new enough phenomenon that there’s still a lot to be learned about when and how it can be combined with more traditional top-down management styles.
Over at Techdirt, I’ve been discussing a great paper on how the magic industry thrives without patent or trade secret protection. The paper is similar to Raustiala and Sprigman’s widely discussed “piracy paradox” paper, which sought to explain how the fashion industry thrives without copyright.
Jacob Grier, a friend and sometime professional magician, had a great post last week on the paper that I thought was worth highlighting:
My impression is that the most creative magicians invent because they love the art, want to improve their acts, and seek acclaim from other magicians. Copying is a problem, but not, as far as I know, one that’s significantly driving out innovators.
An ongoing and bitter dispute between two high profile gaff makers provides a telling example of how creative magicians deal with theft. The props in question are difficult and expensive to create, but once developed they can be reverse engineered. The more established of the two craftsmen has alleged that the other has copied many of his original designs. But he’s not giving up. This is what he had to say about the conflict on a magicians’ forum:
“Now some good things have come out of all this. I think that the feud/competition has actually increased my business by a rather large margin. And the competition has certainly been a catalyst for me to improve my products. That is good for the consumer, and also I have developed more pride in my work over the course. However, I really have to shake my head when I see these blatant copies of nearly everything I do. Not only that, [his] prices are substantially higher than mine, and I feel that I can safely say that I am putting a lot more time into making stuff than he is. Now I am getting advice to increase my prices to match his. Some think that higher prices mean better product, at least to those that aren’t in the know.”
This strikes me as the typical response of a truly creative individual for whom making money off of his ideas is just one of many motivations.
Read the whole thing.
The New York Times paywall is officially coming down:
The Times said the project had met expectations, drawing 227,000 paying subscribers — out of 787,000 over all — and generating about $10 million a year in revenue.
“But our projections for growth on that paid subscriber base were low, compared to the growth of online advertising,” said Vivian L. Schiller, senior vice president and general manager of the site, NYTimes.com.
What changed, The Times said, was that many more readers started coming to the site from search engines and links on other sites instead of coming directly to NYTimes.com. These indirect readers, unable to get access to articles behind the pay wall and less likely to pay subscription fees than the more loyal direct users, were seen as opportunities for more page views and increased advertising revenue.
Or as I put it last year:
The columnists of the New York Times got a lot more attention from the blogosphere before they went behind the Times Select paywall. In the long run, the Times will have to either tear down their paywall, or their columnists will fade into obscurity. Why should people pay to read the Times’s anointed pundits when there are as good (or at least nearly as good) pundits whose work is available for free?
I think it’s only a matter of time before the Journal crunches the numbers and reaches the same conclusion.
Julian has a great write-up of the push to extend copyright protection to the fashion industry:
Even when the ubiquity of a style harms the sales of particular garments by widely-copied designers, however, it need not lower sales for high-end fashion as a whole. Instead, it may cause lateral displacement, as the fashion elite seek out less common looks. That could yield what legal scholars Kal Raustiala and Christopher Sprigman have dubbed “The Piracy Paradox”: Copying that harms individual designers may be a boon to the industry as a whole, as it popularizes trends and then burns them out, speeding up the fashion cycle and spurring demand for new styles. “When a successful restaurant opens up on a street that’s never had a restaurant before, there’s a way in which the second business is parasitic on the first,” says Raustiala. “But in the United States, we call that capitalism and competition.”
As the copyright office’s own analysis noted, there’s no data showing that knockoffs have done any net harm to high fashion, and the explosive growth of fast fashion has coexisted with a massive luxury boom. Betsy Fisher, who owns an eponymous clothing boutique in Washington D.C., suggests this may be because knockoffs create “fashion groupies,” serving as a kind of gateway drug to couture for the teens who are flocking to fast fashion.
And be sure to tune in for this week’s podcast, which will feature an in-depth discussion with Julian and Prof. Sprigman about this issue, as well as Sprigman’s recent victory in the Golan decision.
Adam’s been generating a lot of debate with his recent posts questioning the propriety of sharing your wireless broadband connections and urging telecom companies to experiment with metered broadband access.
Seeking to continue the discussion, Adam asked Ben Worthen, the Wall Street Journal reporter who kicked off the latest discussion of wi-fi piggybacking, and Mike Masnick, who’s been on issue for years, to join myself and TLFer James Gattuso for an in-depth discussion of the economics and ethics of piggybacking.
There are several ways to listen to the TLF Podcast. You can press play on the player below to listen right now, or download the MP3 file. You can also subscribe to the podcast by clicking on the button for your preferred service. And do us a favor, Digg this podcast!
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I suppose it should warm my heart when interest groups deploy libertarian rhetoric. At the very least it’s a sign that libertarian themes resonate with policymakers, which is a hopeful sign. But despite their best efforts to sell the issue in libertarian terms, I didn’t find this very persuasive:
Recent initiatives have been floated that would expropriate from nonprofit and commercial journals results of their work in conducting peer review of authors submissions — if the authors’ research was funded by the government. The government would then post these articles for free use on the Internet and in direct competition with the journals from which the articles are taken. The expropriation of the journals’ contribution is being proposed in spite of the fact it is the publisher and not the government who conducts the peer review.
This issue seems very simple to me: if I’m going to be forced as a taxpayer to fund a given scientist’s research, I shouldn’t have to pay a second time to see the results of that research. The effect of such a policy on the publishing industry is really beside the point. Nobody is forcing scientific journals to accept papers based on government-funded research. If they accept only privately-funded research, then they can set any policies they like regarding public access. But if a journal is going to publish research funded with my tax dollars, I shouldn’t have to pay a second time to read the results.
Things get even more specious here (PDF), where John Conyers charges that mandating public disclosure of research results “would send a mixed message to our trading partners about the importance of intellectual property rights.” The “intellectual property rights” in question belong to the researchers, at least until they sign contracts assigning rights to the publishers. Researchers are entitled to assign or not assign those “intellectual property rights” to whomever they want, and it strikes me as perfectly reasonable and appropriate for the government to make it a condition of receiving federal funding that the researchers not sign any contracts giving exclusive rights to another private party.
I’m a little behind the curve, but Chris Anderson has an interesting post in which he expresses ambivalence about a 17-year-old Iranian who’s seeking help with building a small Unmanned Aerial Vehicle—one of Anderson’s favorite hobbies.
Part of me says “Bravo Amir! Excellent work on the airframe, and thanks for posting.” And part of me says “Yikes. We’re helping Iranians make UAVs draped in nationalistic colors. This isn’t going to help us in our efforts to destigmitize drones.”
Obviously Iranian != terrorist/bad guy/anti-Israeli zealot. And needless to say, most of the terrorist/bad guy/anti-Israeli zealots out there who are building UAVs aren’t posting on RC Groups. But what should I do if Amir or someone like him from a country associated with Bad Stuff posts on our own forums looking for technical advice? My instinct is to treat everyone alike and help anybody who asks, regardless of where they’re from (odds are Amir is just a geek like the rest of us, no matter where he lives). But how does this look to someone in Washington? We’re just a pen stroke away from being regulated out of existence, and in this climate it’s politically unwise to discount the Homeland Security card (my own feelings about that notwithstanding).
I think this is pretty much spot on. One thing that’s worth emphasizing is how perverse it is to treat the kid’s use of the Iranian flag as evidence that he’s associated with “Bad Stuff.” A quick comparison with the American flag should make it clear how silly this is. American flags are flown by Americans of all political stripes. Flying an American flag is not a symbol that you support the Bush administration, the Republican Party, or the war in Iraq. It simply means “I’m proud to be an American.”
The same is doubtless true of the Iranian flag. This kid is doubtless not trying to say “I support the Iranian nuclear program” or “I support Ahmadinejad and the Mullahs.” Rather, it simply means “I’m proud to be an Iranian.”
Unfortunately, human nature being what it is, that’s not the gut reaction most people have. Our flag is an innocuous symbol of unity and patriotism. But when you’re talking about an Islamic country with an unsavory government (but no history of terrorism against the US; there has never been an Al Qaeda terrorist from Iran) the other guy’s flag takes on a sinister tinge.
I’ve not seen much mention of the fact that libertarian journalist extraordinaire Declan McCullough has joined the blogosphere. His most interesting post to date was this one, in which he revealed that the White House has been using its robots.txt file to prevent search engines from indexing or archiving potentially embarrassing information:
Whitehouse.gov was programmed to block search engines from indexing a photo gallery of President Bush in a flight suit standing in front of that famous Iraq “Mission Accomplished” banner in May 2003.
What’s odd is that the gallery, which has since been moved, was the only one on the entire Whitehouse.gov site listed as off-limits. To be fair, though, the current location is not off-limits.
By way of background, there was a flap in late 2003 about the White House using robots.txt to tell search engine bots to stay away from “/iraq” pages because the same file was posted in the main section and duplicated in the “/iraq” section. It’s the same logic as blocking text-only pages; here’s an example of the same text appearing in three different templates: normal, text-only, and printer-friendly. The White House seems to have subsequently discontinued the Iraq template.
That explains the “/nsc/iraq” directory being marked as off-limits to search engines. But out of 767 mentions of “/iraq” in the robots.txt file from 2003, the sole Iraq press release or gallery listed as blocked this week (a) represents a uniquely embarrassing moment for the Bush administration and (b) has been the subject of revisionism.
Don’t believe me? Bush’s carrier speech originally was titled, according to the Internet Archive, “President Bush Announces Combat Operations in Iraq Have Ended” and featured photographs of smiling Iraqi children. At some point the children vanished and the speech was quietly renamed: “President Bush Announces Major Combat Operations in Iraq Have Ended.” Another USS Abraham Lincoln-related switch: before and after.
It looks like it’ll be a great blog!
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.