This paper undertakes an econometric investigation of the impact of radio play on sales of sound recordings using a sample of American cities.

The results indicate that radio play does not have the positive impact on record sales normally attributed to it and instead appears to have an economically important negative impact, implying that overall radio listening is more of a substitute for the purchase of sound recordings than it is a complement.

This finding indicates that creating a set of property rights to allow this market to function properly is different than has been suggested by prior research. This research also exposes a fallacy of composition in applying to an entire market a generally accepted positive relationship that holds for individual units.

New technologies changing the nature of radio broadcasts are likely to make this topic increasingly important in the coming years.

Interesting. SoundExchange wants to keep radio alive, although it may be in the financial interest of artists to let it go.

Don't Play it Again Sam: Radio Play, Record Sales, and Property Rights

Inventec [is] one of five companies based in Taiwan that together produce the vast majority of laptop and notebook computers sold under any brand anywhere in the world.

Everyone in America has heard of Dell, Sony, Compaq, HP, Lenovo-IBM ThinkPad, Apple, NEC, Gateway, Toshiba.

Almost no one has heard of Quanta, Compal, Inventec, Wistron, Asustek.

Yet nearly 90 percent of laptops and notebooks sold under the famous brand names are actually made by one of these five companies in their factories in mainland China.

I have seen a factory with three "competing" brand names coming off the same line.

See also a slideshow that accompanies the article.

(See also this thread, which links directly to the slide show.)

China Makes, The World Takes

This week, some big thinkers about biotechnology came to Washington for a "progressive bioethics summit." They invited me to go and talk to them.

At most liberal bioethics conferences, the main question in dispute, in one form or another, is whether to be more afraid of capitalism or religion.

For the past several days, while eating lunch at my desk, I've been watching video of the liberals at a conference they held last year. I know, I need to get a life. But the video is kind of poignant. It shows a bunch of nerds commiserating about being beaten up by a gang of bullies. The bullies, according to the nerd movie, are Bush-appointed neoconservative bioethicists who do the bidding of the Christian right.

I like having the freedom to soak my head in a new topic and come out saying the opposite of what I expected. Committing to a political identity would just get in the way.

Not everything that's legal is moral. The most interesting moral questions aren't the ones you can settle with simple rules. They're the subtle ones you find in literature and real life.

Liberals, progressives, and biotechnology

You, too, can learn to fight terror without getting out of bed or missing an episode of Desperate Housewives.

Western governments lag behind in Internet cyber-warfare with Al-Qaeda. If they do not catch up, they will not gain the upper hand in the war on terror.

A brief memoir of the trials and tribulations of an amateur counterterrorism expert.

I created my first terrorist cover identity on the Internet on March 13, 2002.

Plunging in, I started making headway into the world of counterterrorism.

On May 12, 2003, four days after I had tipped off the FBI, Al-Qaeda carried out its attacks.

My Cyber Counter-jihad

Is there a zero-day gap?

In preparation for a Cyber War, ammo supply is critical. Put simply, whoever has the largest number of vulnerabilities (unpatched, of course), and has turned them into exploits, will win. There's a lot of evidence that the United States and China have both compiled large arsenals, and tested a lot of their stuff. Other countries are players as well, but the US and China appear to be the superpowers of Cyber War.

In the United States, some police agencies have been known to at least open up communications channels with Internet criminals. If only for intelligence purposes. But in wartime, offers of employment might be made as well.

Raiders of the Lost Exploit

It seems there's nothing like natural beauty to bring out the best in high-definition technology. The BBC's Planet Earth: The Complete Series has been wowing high-definition audiences in the States where it's been pronounced as the biggest money-spinner to ever hit the HD-DVD and Blu-ray disc market.

Great! So maybe people really do want to know more about science ...

"This series was made for high definition," Sanders says. "Its success points to consumers wanting to see and hear high-definition content, and there isn't a huge amount of true content available from broadcast or cable or satellite."

Oh, I guess not. It's just about pretty pictures and high-tech bling.

BBC's Planet Earth is highest grossing HD disc in US

Although the number of students enrolled in science and engineering graduate programs in the United States has increased by 25 percent from 1994 to 2001, the number of U.S. citizens enrolled in these programs has declined by 10 percent during that period.

In the same week as the Time/People/Fortune group of magazines laid off their three science writers they paid $4.1 million for the pictures of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie’s baby.

Are American Scientists an Endangered Species?

Witness the bluntness of John Brockman.

This idea -- that science is something for kids -- still pervades much of our thinking, and characterizes the presentation of science in culture. Part of it is the notion that argues science is just a bunch of facts with no overarching coherence. Just as bad are the media ...

"Science is a state of mind. It is a way of viewing the world, of facing reality square on but taking nothing for granted." It would be hard to argue that this state of mind was advancing across the globe. We no longer make and mend, so we no longer know how anything works.

This persistent apathy in matters of science in America and Britain comes in part from a lack of interest in what the future might hold.

... The universe may be infinite, but John Brockman takes 15 per cent of it ... "Since when have the masses of people had any ideas anyway?" Brockman asks. "It is always a certain percentage of people who do the thinking for everybody else."

James Watson:

"I recently went to my staircase at Clare College, Cambridge and there were women there! There have been a lot of convincing studies recently about the loss of productivity in the Western male. It may be that entertainment culture now is so engaging that it keeps people satisfied. We didn't have that. Science was much more fun than listening to the radio. When you are 16 or 17 and in that inherently semi-lonely period when you are deciding whether to be an intellectual, many now don't bother."

Perhaps one day there will be a market for "scientific Viagra."

The new age of ignorance

Across the board, political decision making increasingly depends upon highly technical information. So science itself is being drawn into ever more political contexts in which it is covered by media, spun by advocates, and misused by politicians. This won't happen on every research subject, but it will surely happen on the high-profile, controversial ones. We've already seen the same pattern on climate change, embryonic stem cell research, reproductive health, evolution, and many other topics. And I suspect we will see it with future issues on the horizon like genetic engineering and nanotechnology ...

Scientists who try to communicate on these subjects often feel as if they're howling into a maelstrom ...

Endeavor to find out what the public thinks before trying to change its mind or sway its opinion. Try to learn which messages will resonate, and which ones will not.

Or, just contact the General Memetics Corporation.

Seed: Emotional Rescue

Does anyone know anything about the Capitol IP network infrastructure?

Use this site to search the publicly released phone records of Deborah Jeane Palfrey, proprietor of Pamela Martin and Associates in Washington, DC.

dcphonelist.com