INNOVATION: Augmented reality lifts awareness of nature preservation

Via UCDenver.edu:

Imagine strolling along a wildlife refuge trail and finding a marker with a symbol of a bison. Pull out your smartphone or iPad and hold it up to the picture. Now look at the screen and see a 3-D bison roam across the landscape.

Through the magic of digital technology, visitors to the Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge (RMA) could click an app and enjoy sightings of rare or endangered animals - albeit virtual ones - in a pristine setting. Augmented reality, as it's known, is gaining popularity as a way to enhance natural excursions - dinosaurs popping up in a forest, for example - or to teach engine repair, surgical procedures and other technical lessons.

ECONOMICS: Why are Indian restaurants in the United States better than Pakistani restaurants?

I had a short email exchange last week with the eminent economist Tyler Cowen. According to Prof. Cowen, Pakistani restaurants in the United States are better than Indian restaurants. He says as much in his book "An Economist Gets Lunch". Which, by the way, made for a very interesting read - the parts that I read, at least [1].

His goal now is to provide a guide to dining well anywhere, while minimizing risk of the Cowen nightmare, a meal that is an expensive bore. His commandments fall into two categories. The first is variations on a general mantra derived from the law of supply and demand. Eat, he urges, where "the supplies are fresh, the suppliers are creative, and the demanders are informed." An ideal restaurant would be a sushi bar near Tsukiji fish market in Tokyo, where fresh fish and discerning diners make selling bad sushi unviable as a business. The height of folly, perhaps, would be my own gastroenterologically fateful decision to visit what was then the only sushi restaurant in Villahermosa, Mexico (an unforced error, I must admit). 

The second category is classic Cowen advice—heterodox, clever and preposterously, sometimes uselessly, specific. He advises, for example, looking for Thai restaurants attached to motels (more likely to be family-run and not desperate to make rent). For authenticity, he awards points to Pakistani restaurants that feature pictures of Mecca, since they're more likely to cater to Pakistani clientele. ("The more aggressively religious the décor, the better it will be for the food.") Find restaurants where diners are "screaming at each other" or "pursuing blood feuds," he says—indications that people feel comfortable there and return frequently with their familiars. 

As to whether Indian restaurants are better than Pakistani restaurants, I beg to differ with Prof. Cowen. I think Indian restaurants in the United States are better. 

My thoughts on why this is so and what the underlying factors might be to follow. In the meantime, follow the link here to access my post on Quora which asks the same question of a wider audience.

[1] Update of May 31, 2014: The intention of that statement was just to clarify that I haven't read the whole book. I have been dipping into a bit here and a bit there of Tyler Cowen's book at the local library because I have been too busy the past few weeks to actually read it in full. Anyway, it looks like a very interesting read, but I wouldn't want Indian readers to get too disappointed with this 'conclusion' on Indian restaurants. I brought up the point with him via email that Indian restaurants in the Bay Area are actually really quite good. Tyler Cower concurred in his email reply. There is enough of a market size in the Bay Area that "authenticity" in terms of Indian cooking preparation techniques is incentivized.

[2] Update of June 4, 2014: The word 'conclusion' is interesting in this context in that there is a flavor of 'concluding' in the word as in ending, as well as a flavor of 'concluding' as in arriving at a final result. Much of economic analysis is not so much about producing a final result as much as about pointing a way forward and talking about "the 80% case" compactly (and, of course, this assumes the 80-20 rule which can, in itself, be an assumption). This is one of the reasons I love to point out Prof. Cowen's ideas even when I have certain disagreements with them because they do point to a way forward. Onward!

MISCELLANEOUS: Re: Your critique of my poems, saikus and a critique of Thomas Piketty

My email to Rakesh Bhandari this morning.

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Hi Rakesh,

I want to respond more fully to your mini-poem critiquing/criticizing my poetry.

First, my poetry is akin to the songs of struggle that are found in social movements across the world. Nobody parses the songs sung by the dispossessed Narmada Valley people to see if it meets the standards of the poetry sections of "The American Reader" or the New York Times. I don't know if you know this but the book "The Essence of Leadership"  (reviewed very positively by Stanford's founding father of OB, James March) which I contributed to, develops leadership ideas based on readings from literature.

Second, I have been developing a new type of poetry that I like to call "saiku". It stands for "satirical haiku". Saiku captures in three or four lines the essence of a criticism/critique. I don't know if you were basing your critique/criticism on said poems. They are all over the South Asian Journalists Association's website.

Third, these saikus are enormously effective in that they capture a lot of wisdom in three lines (or less). I could convey my critique of Thomas Piketty (he is the latest fad these days, isn't he?) in three lines. In fact, your own critique of my poetic efforts is an instance of the effectiveness of this compressed criticism technique. It is devastatingly effective at times.

Best wishes,

Anand

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"Capital in the 21st Century"

Ho hum, what shall we say about this latest fad?

      The emphasis on inequality is misplaced - 

capital has raised more people out of poverty in India and China 

in the last 35 years 

than in the previous 70. 

      The idea of a world tax is unworkable -

The problems facing each country/region have always been particular to that country/region.

They may have roots in particular sectors

e.g. financial sector (Japan), the automobile sector (Detroit),

et cetera.

So only a sectoral analysis would provide any means of a solution.

      What could be done? -

certainly, not a world tax.

Other ideas and proposals must first be explored

      (Read- would each one of us say- those would be my own ideas? :) Say, Digital Green for me? :))

Sorry, "Occupy" people.

"Capital"

has a counterpart.

In an earlier era,

it was

Das Kapital.

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Update (11:53 a.m.): To be perfectly clear, what I am saying is not that Thomas Piketty is wrong to focus on inequality (please be careful when I use poetry - I don't intend for it to be read literally). Piketty is good in his descriptive analysis from what I have read so far. Also, from what I understand, his empirical work is very sound and quite good. It is not his descriptive analysis that I fault but rather his prescriptive analysis.

First, the world tax concept proposed by Piketty is not a workable one. I don't see how the mandate for something like that could be obtained. Second, we must keep inequality in perspective. The fact is that the poor in America live much better lives than even the upper class did 200 years ago. They typically own one or two cars, have at least one TV, possess at least one cellphone, and live in a reasonably sized home. In fact, the house of the average poor person in America is larger than the house of the average European. This is not to say that being poor in America is easy. It is just to say that we must keep things in perspective given the economic history of the United States over the past 200 years. Third, taxes are opposed by a significant cross section of American society - even taxes for other Americans. This is a matter of conflicting economic viewpoints or philosophies. If your viewpoint is that the government's role is to provide equal opportunity for all, then you would come to one conclusion regarding the proposals in the book. If you think - as Obama and most liberals do - that the government is within its rights to tax more (or, as some would put it, to engage in 'forced redistribution of wealth' or, again to put it less gently, to seize even more wealth than it already does), then you would come to a very different conclusion regarding the prescriptive proposals in the book. Given what we know about the distribution of political opinion within America, it is highly unlikely that many will take kindly to the concept of a world tax - if at all, they would be for more tax revenues to help other Americans. The fact that so many are opposed to taxes (one of the many of the ideas expounded in the book) simply indicates their political viewpoints on forced wealth redistribution. No matter how you phrase it, everybody knows that means. Nobody is getting fooled.

INNOVATION: Crowdsourced RNA Designs Outperform Computer Algorithms, Carnegie Mellon and Stanford Researchers Report

From CMU.edu:

An enthusiastic group of non-experts, working through an online interface and receiving feedback from lab experiments, has produced designs for RNA molecules that are consistently more successful than those generated by the best computerized design algorithms, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and Stanford University report.

Moreover, the researchers gathered some of the best design rules and practices generated by players of the online EteRNA design challenge and, using machine learning principles, generated their own automated design algorithm, EteRNABot, which also bested prior design algorithms. Though this improved computer design tool is faster than humans, the designs it generates still don't match the quality of those of the online community, which now has more than 130,000 members.

The research will be published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Online Early Edition.

INNOVATION: FAQ on Bitcoin

For those new to Bitcoin, here is a FAQ on Bitcoins. It answers some of the basic questions that people have on Bitcoins.

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General

What is Bitcoin?

Bitcoin is a consensus network that enables a new payment system and a completely digital money. It is the first decentralized peer-to-peer payment network that is powered by its users with no central authority or middlemen. From a user perspective, Bitcoin is pretty much like cash for the Internet. Bitcoin can also be seen as the most prominenttriple entry bookkeeping system in existence.

Who created Bitcoin?

Bitcoin is the first implementation of a concept called "crypto-currency", which was first described in 1998 by Wei Dai on the cypherpunks mailing list, suggesting the idea of a new form of money that uses cryptography to control its creation and transactions, rather than a central authority. The first Bitcoin specification and proof of concept was published in 2009 in a cryptography mailing list by Satoshi Nakamoto. Satoshi left the project in late 2010 without revealing much about himself. The community has since grown exponentially with many developers working on Bitcoin.

Satoshi's anonymity often raised unjustified concerns, many of which are linked to misunderstanding of the open-source nature of Bitcoin. The Bitcoin protocol and software are published openly and any developer around the world can review the code or make their own modified version of the Bitcoin software. Just like current developers, Satoshi's influence was limited to the changes he made being adopted by others and therefore he did not control Bitcoin. As such, the identity of Bitcoin's inventor is probably as relevant today as the identity of the person who invented paper.

Who controls the Bitcoin network?

Nobody owns the Bitcoin network much like no one owns the technology behind email. Bitcoin is controlled by all Bitcoin users around the world. While developers are improving the software, they can't force a change in the Bitcoin protocol because all users are free to choose what software and version they use. In order to stay compatible with each other, all users need to use software complying with the same rules. Bitcoin can only work correctly with a complete consensus among all users. Therefore, all users and developers have a strong incentive to protect this consensus.

How does Bitcoin work?

From a user perspective, Bitcoin is nothing more than a mobile app or computer program that provides a personal Bitcoin wallet and allows a user to send and receive bitcoins with them. This is how Bitcoin works for most users.

Behind the scenes, the Bitcoin network is sharing a public ledger called the "block chain". This ledger contains every transaction ever processed, allowing a user's computer to verify the validity of each transaction. The authenticity of each transaction is protected by digital signatures corresponding to the sending addresses, allowing all users to have full control over sending bitcoins from their own Bitcoin addresses. In addition, anyone can process transactions using the computing power of specialized hardware and earn a reward in bitcoins for this service. This is often called "mining". To learn more about Bitcoin, you can consult the dedicated page and the original paper.

Is Bitcoin really used by people?

Yes. There is a growing number of businesses and individuals using Bitcoin. This includes brick and mortar businesses like restaurants, apartments, law firms, and popular online services such as Namecheap, WordPress, Reddit and Flattr. While Bitcoin remains a relatively new phenomenon, it is growing fast. At the end of August 2013, the value of all bitcoins in circulation exceeded US$ 1.5 billion with millions of dollars worth of bitcoins exchanged daily.

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TECHNOLOGY: We the Internet: Bitcoin developers' idea for Bitcloud

Via Phys.org:

A developer group is seeding a project that would behave as a decentralized Internet, in a departure from the present model. Posting their intentions recently on Reddit, they said "We will have to start by decentralizing the current Internet, and then we can create a new Internet to replace it." Called Bitcloud, they propose a peer to peer system for sharing bandwidth. Individual users would complete computing tasks such as routing, storing, or computing in exchange for cash. As the BBC explained, "Just as Bitcoin miners provide computing power and are rewarded for solving complex mathematical equations with the virtual currency, so individual net users would be rewarded based on how much bandwidth they contrib ute to the Bitcloud network."

Elaborating on Reddit about this cash model, the developers said this about payments: "One of the many problems of certain free and open source projects in the past has been the lack of a profit incentive. With Bitcloud, nodes on a mesh network can be rewarded financially for routing traffic in a brand new mesh network. This removes the need for Internet Service Providers."

INNOVATION: The 'holodeck'

From New York Times' Bits blog:

Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking are playing poker together. No, this isn’t a bad physics joke.  

It’s a scene from “Star Trek: The Next Generation.” It takes place in a holodeck, a simulated-reality room in the fictional Star Trek universe. The three scientists — or at least computer-generated versions of them — have been transported to the 2300s to play cards with Lt. Cmdr. Data. 

“I don’t even know why I’m here in the first place,” Newton says. 

While the show is set in the future, some scientists and researchers say we could have something like holodecks by 2024. If you have enough money, you could even buy one today, though it would be crude compared to the holodecks on Star Trek.