Thursday, April 18, 2002

Note to self: read this carefully, and follow all its links.  s l a m has done a nice job of complementing Russ Lipton's documentation work with a short "what you should know" piece. 11:32:35 PM

Thanks to Will Cox for providing the link to this tutorial on elasticity.  Part II tells us how Zimran calculated a quantity for the price elasticity of CD sales. 10:00:51 PM

blogaritaville 1, Wall Street Journal...er...1. bringing the total to blogaritaville: 2, lumbering dead-tree-pushers: 2 [blogaritaville@scriban.com] Scriban points out (with appropriate glee) that the chart of CD price and sales against time that he posted on April 12 made it into a Wall Street Journal article on April 18. But it's not quite the same chart.  It differs from the analysis we posted on April 15 in that it doesn't take into account either inflation or demographics.  Worse, since the Journal's chart only includes the RIAA's sales and pricing data back to 1997, it doesn't show the key piece of information that both Scriban's and our charts did: namely, that the behavior of CD prices over time changed sharply in the 1995-97 time frame, coincident with the aggressive Minimum Advertised Price collusion practiced by the industry in 1995 and 1996. Scriban's chart, which plots CD (list) prices in current dollars, shows that current-dollar prices were level or gently declining from 1989 through the beginning of 1996, but turned sharply upward thereafter.  Our chart, which does the correction for increases in Consumer Price Index, shows that constant-dollar CD prices declined steeply through 1996, but have since then held level.  Combine this with the (subjective) impression that the overall quality of the product has declined, and with Scriban's observations about the consequences of the industry's failure to move aggressively into CD-single sales, and there are only three possible conclusions we can draw about the RIAA's complaints of declining CD sales: They have only themselves to blame. They have only themselves to blame. They have only themselves to blame. 6:11:45 PM

From The Social Life of Paper,  Malcom Gladwell's New Yorker review of The Myth of the Paperless Office by Abigail Sellen and Richard Harper: Paper enables a certain kind of thinking. Picture, for instance, the top of your desk. Chances are that you have a keyboard and a computer screen off to one side, and a clear space roughly eighteen inches square in front of your chair. What covers the rest of the desktop is probably piles of papers, journals, magazines, binders, postcards, videotapes, and all the other artifacts of the knowledge economy. The piles look like a mess, but they aren't. When a group at Apple Computer studied piling behavior several years ago, they found that even the most disorderly piles usually make perfect sense to the piler, and that office workers could hold forth in great detail about the precise history and meaning of their piles. The pile closest to the cleared, eighteen-inch-square working area, for example, generally represents the most urgent business, and within that pile the most important document of all is likely to be at the top. Piles are living, breathing archives. Over time, they get broken down and resorted, sometimes chronologically and sometimes thematically and sometimes chronologically and thematically; clues about certain documents may be physically embedded in the file by, say, stacking a certain piece of paper at an angle or inserting dividers into the stack. But why do we pile documents instead of filing them? Because piles represent the process of active, ongoing thinking. The psychologist Alison Kidd, whose research Sellen and Harper refer to extensively, argues that "knowledge workers" use the physical space of the desktop to hold "ideas which they cannot yet categorize or even decide how they might use." The messy desk is not necessarily a sign of disorganization. It may be a sign of complexity: those who deal with many unresolved ideas simultaneously cannot sort and file the papers on their desks, because they haven't yet sorted and filed the ideas in their head. Kidd writes that many of the people she talked to use the papers on their desks as contextual cues to "recover a complex set of threads without difficulty and delay" when they come in on a Monday morning, or after their work has been interrupted by a phone call. What we see when we look at the piles on our desks is, in a sense, the contents of our brains. We hope our employer reads the New Yorker.  [link via PressFlex] 12:09:13 PM

[Macro error: Can't call the script because the name "amazon" hasn't been defined.] 'Nuff said.  Maybe it isn't such a discouraging time to be an American after all. 8:49:32 AM

Our faithful reader (hi, Mom!) has asked us what this nonsense about "Doctor Bonzo" and "The Boulder Inquisition" is all about.  She wasn't particularly mollified when our response was, "Heretic! If we told you what it meant we'd have to burn you," and perhaps you aren't, either.  So, we've posted an "About" story.  [read more] 3:00:26 AM

NY Times: "The record industry's legal victory over Napster last year has neither stopped the trading of free music online nor halted a slide in music sales."  [via Scripting News - link] Hmm, we seem to remember having heard something about that in a couple of other places. 12:55:43 AM

Over at Winterspeak, Zimran Ahmed pushes back at our back-and-forth with George Scriban and Jenny, the Shifted Librarian on the economic relationship between the RIAA's cry of declining CD sales and Big Content's alleged collusion to fix CD prices.  Zimran writes: What the charts actually show is that the elasticity of demand for CDs is about -1.5, which seems reasonable. The price fixing charge is better supported by all the labels having the same suggested retail price. Remember, the RIAA, operating as a cartel, offers CDs to (commodity) retailers at about $10 each. Anti-"red lining" laws enforce the cartel's agreement not to cheat in their collusive practices, so none of them give retailers price breaks. Retailers sell at marginal cost to consumers. Zimran, would you be willing to remind us what elasticity of demand and marginal cost mean?  We're intrigued that you've assigned a number (-1.5) to something that we here at the Inquisition can't quite remember how to define. Also, note that (I think) we and George both were not asserting that the plot of price against time demonstrated, or even suggested, the price-fixing charge.  Rather, taking the FTC's word for the existence, "between late 1995 and 1996," of especially aggressive price-fixing collusion (in the form of "Minimum Advertised Price" policies) on the part of the cartel, we tried to show a correlative relationship between the consequent change in price trends and the reported levelling-off (and decline) in sales. Or, in other words, that it's not the Internet's fault their sales have slipped: it's their own damn fault for selling dilute crap at artificially elevated prices. Is there more formal economic language for that assertion that we should be using? 12:36:16 AM