Interesting Links for 24-05-2012

[andrewducker]

• Russia and Japan aim to build moonbases
  (tags: )
• Phthalates in PVC floors taken up by the body in infants - suspected to cause asthma and disrupt hormones
  (tags: asthma pthalates hormones pvc children )
• No, Facebook did not make Bono world's richest musician
  (tags: investment u2 facebook )
• Where all the money goes when you pay for something on Kickstarter
  And you can easily see how if you haven't thought it through you could take in a million dollars and then end up taking a loss on it.
  (tags: business music kickstarter AmandaPalmer )
• Greg Rucka: Why I Write Strong Female Characters
  (tags: GregRucka comics women writing )
• 5 Internet Annoyances That Are Way Older Than the Internet
  (tags: spam internet )
• Gay marriage: Conservative MPs to get free vote
  Not unexpected. I am hoping that sufficient Labour support is there to carry the motion.
  (tags: lgbt uk politics Conservatives )
• Free banking in the UK is a dangerous myth
  (tags: uk free banking )
• Caesarean section delivery may double risk of childhood obesity: May be due to different gut bacteria
  (tags: bacteria obesity caesarians )
• Elephant mourns the dog she loved for eight years. Warning: Video will make you cry.
  (tags: viaSkreidle viask friendship video elephants dog )
• A Rant: Enough Of Single-Player MMOs
  (tags: gaming rpg mmorpg )
• Peace talks between Apple and Samsung fail - the final line made my drink come out of my nose.
  (tags: apple samsung technology patents )
• The behaviour around the Olympics seems to be turning Britain into something out of 1984.
  (tags: britain cornwall olympics )
• Mad Men Style: a nice analysis of what the clothing in the most recent episode of Mad Men was being used to show.
  (tags: MadMen clothing design )
• The average medical device has a clock running 24 minutes out.
  (tags: medicine technology time EpicFail viaFanf )

Comments

[steer.livejournal.com]

From that "medical devices" article.

Of over 1,700 devices checked, only 3% were found to be accurate to within three seconds. One in five were off by more than 30 minutes; one ultrasound machine was running 42 years (and some minutes) early. The average error was a staggering 24 minutes.

Ahem... If *only* the ultrasound machine was wrong and every other machine was exactly correct the average error is already 12,985 minutes. I think the article has missed out some details. I guess the "average" is not the best measure here.

[andrewducker]

Median and Mode are almost certainly more useful here.

[steer.livejournal.com]

Heh... you'd imagine the "mode" would be "exactly on time".

[andrewducker]

Maybe there was another machine running 17 years slow, counterbalancing the one running 24 years fast?

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

Nah - the obvious measure is rms error. Only bozos use abs/modulus. :-)

[andrewducker]

That may well be what the original people did.

I'm not an expert in that kind of thing, and nowadays remembering the difference between median and mode is enough to have me reaching for wikipedia.

[naath.livejournal.com]

Unless by "average" they mean "median" rather than "mean".

[steer.livejournal.com]

That is possible but not the usual usage. I would always make it clear if that is what I meant.

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

I can reproduce your calculation.

However, you're assuming that there weren't, say, two machines running 21 years fast, and they did the averaging in a particularly stupid (but obvious-looking) way.

Admittedly there's an obvious and simple single explanation for a machine running '42 years (and some minutes)' slow, which there isn't for two running 21 years fast.

[steer.livejournal.com]

That's true! Maybe this is what happened!

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

It is, after all, a universal law that any piece of work (comment, blog post, journal article) criticising mistakes made by others must contain at least one mostake itself,

[steer.livejournal.com]

Maybe I should put in one known deliberate mostake into all my work as a kind of lightning conductor?

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

It's worth a try if you're feeling brave, but I doubt the error gods would be impressed (at least, not the standard error gods) and would be likely to strike you anyway, and extra hard for hubris. The gourds are not mocked!

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

I believe introducing an error is what the weavers of Persian carpets used to do to ensure they never produced anything perfect.

[andrewducker]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnFQkB0D0ww

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

Kickstarter is not different from any any other form of raising finance or getting paid. Not in terms of the potential to lose money as a project sponsor or backer.

It’s all around asymetrical risk or the lack of it.

If your kickstarter is to raise $25k and in exchange you’ll spend a year writing a book, then no one can lose. If the deal is that you finish the book, you might lose and have to hand back the money or trash your reputation so much that you can’t ever raise finance this way again.

For something more complicated, if the obligations that you as an artist enter into don’t match the financing, then you have a potential problem. The most obvious example being that you are using the Kickstater finance to pay deposits for services like studio rental or backing musicians and hope to settle the balance of the bills from record sales and you either don’t finish the album or it doesn’t sell then you’re in trouble.

I think in Palmer’s case the exposure to unmatched risk is that servicing the mulititude of slightly open ended commitments might, or might not be covered by the $1m funding.

So all good fun and games.

But fundamentally no different in some ways than traditional project funding. You put some money in, you might get the project completed. You complete the project it might work. It works, you might be able to sell it. What feels different is that each art project doesn’t sit within a portfolio of other projects. There’s no cross subsidy of the Michael Jackson back catalogue for potentially break through artists.

I think the difference is the disintermediation of the financing model. The internets allows artists to connect with lots of small scale patrons.

I’m fascinated and very excited by the whole Kickstarter thing. It’s like Jeff Bezos happened to capitalism.

[bracknellexile.livejournal.com]

Amanda Palmer's kickstarter confuses me. If she'd already shelled out $250K before it even started and is expecting, after raising $1M, to have a few tens of thousands to put in the bank (if she's lucky) then why was the original Kickstarter target only $100K? I appreciate that the more backers then the more her costs go up but presumably the costs scale with the number of backers and the tier prices are enough to cover the costs plus a little bit of profit. The $100K target seems infeasibly low and she, by the look of it, got lucky that she'll get about 10x that and it might, in the end, pay for itself.

[andrewducker]

I assume that it was set at $100k to make people think it was possible. And also that she's not _just_ dependent on Kickstarter to make this all work - she's also going to sell the album in shops.

So $100k would have made her enough money that it would be worthwhile, but more is better. Less than $100k and the costs would outweigh the benefits.

[cyprinella]

Sounds right to me. Often at auctions I attend, an item might be started at $7 and get no bids. The auctioneer will then drop the starting bid to $3 and and the crowd ends up bidding the price up to $10.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Also, a lot of the *costs* are dependent on people pledging more.

[cairmen.livejournal.com]

Follow-up on single-player MMOs:

http://inanage.com/2012/05/23/revisiting-single-player-mmos/

[andrewducker]

Interesting, but I found the other piece more convincing.