cheap physical distribution of video
Low-price rental of DVDs through kiosks is growing rapidly. Redstar, the industry leader, has grown from 6,700 video kiosks U.S-wide about January 2008 to more than 20,000 expected by year-end 2009. In early May of this year, Video Business reported that DVDPlay had 1,200 kiosks and NCR had 2,200 MovieCube kiosks, with plans to add [...]
Tagged: video
inertia in administratively determined prices
Because communication networks were being used in ways that undermined the rate structure established to recover interstate public telephone service costs, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) created a special access surcharge. This charge applied to interstate private lines that could connect with local public telephone service (“leaky PBX“). Such facilities allowed persons to make [...]
Tagged: telcos
COB-39: bureaucrats reduce waste
New activities often produce waste. If an activity is new, then you don’t know what result it will produce. If the new activity produces a result that you don’t want, then it was a waste. Bureaucrats avoid new activities. Thus bureaucrats avoid waste. Individual initiative often wastes resources. Consider, for example, a person who, on [...]
mass media in ancient Rome
In ancient Rome, chariot races, gladiator contests, staged animal hunts, and pantomime shows were mass media. A large share of Roman adults were attracted to watch. Advertising and highly paid celebrities arose. Elite men competed to sponsor and control the events shown. The shows had enormous influence on public conversation and high politics. Roman spectacles [...]
Tagged: antiquity
value of given name data
Given names are an important but under-appreciated type of data. Given names represent significant symbolic choices. Large populations of persons have been making this well-defined symbolic choice for millennia. Given names are thus useful data for studying symbolic choice, effects of communication technologies, and information economics. Given name frequency data are now also important to [...]
Tagged: given names
mysteries of telephone company tariff data
Southwestern Bell Telephone’s rate detail files include Self-Healing Transport Network (STN) elements from 1994 to 2009. A basic STN network consists of nodes and 44.736 Mbit Digital Transmission Links (DTLs) arranged in a ring configuration. In the event of a link failure, communication service across the nodes is engineered to be restored in 50 millisecond.[1] [...]
Tagged: telcos
universal social access to data and calculation
Imagine a cheap, mobile device with a notebook-sized screen that could form an ad hoc network with other such devices nearby. Imagine that the users of these devices had free spreadsheet software that would allow them to collaboratively share and analyze data across that network. With such hardware and software, persons could meet and [...]