Author Archives: Stefan Geens

The end of TV as we know it

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My new apartment will not contain a television. My TV viewing habits have dwindled to nearly nothing over the past few years as I find more and more active pursuits to add to a typical day. When I do watch TV, it’s been in response to a newsworthy event, such as last year’s tsunami. I regard watching movies as an active pursuit, but I do that via my computer, aided by a 20 inch LCD monitor that is every bit as a good as the latest generation television.

Lately, news video has been increasingly accessible online and on demand. CNN’s video is now free. BBC content is also increasingly accessible. Swedish news is especially easy to view. The reason I kept a television has thus been preëmpted by the onward march of broadband internet.

For many, an additional reason to keep a TV might be regular sitcom shows, some of which are rather quite good. But Apple is now leading the charge in making these available on demand as well, with yesterday’s launch of iTunes 6. Just as the internet has spelled the end of telephony as we know it, it will do the same to network television and how video is consumed in the home. Give it a few years more.

In Sweden and elsewhere, iTunes’ video offerings will have an additional, as yet unheralded effect: Swedish television buys America’s best TV shows, but broadcasts them with a delay of a season or more. This has meant that many Swedes already download pirated versions of shows in the current US season for viewing on their computer. Now these shows will be downloadable legally and affordably, en masse, by people for whom bit-torrents are one technological hurdle too far. The upshot is that these shows will either have to be shown simultaneously on Swedish and US networks, or not at all on Swedish TV, as otherwise too few people will bother to tune in to justify their price. The effect is similar to how DVD sales of US film releases have compressed the release schedule of US films in European cinemas — if a movie is released on DVD in the US before it hits European cinemas, market mechanics ensure that Europeans have slaked their desire to see it by the time it arrives in their local cinema.

Apple’s new software offering, Front Row, coupled to the new Apple remote, together preëmpt the criticism that finding video via a computer is too active a pursuit for it to ever be attractive to a couch potato. Using one-click shopping in iTunes, you will soon be able to breeze through iTunes’ offerings from afar and choose and consume episodes (and later films) with a better user experience than current cable or satellite menus, on demand, with a copy saved to your hard drive, much like how Tivo does it.

I fully expect Sweden to be the early adopter par exellence when it comes to dumping broadcast-based TV viewing, though not just because Swedes tend to embrace new technology: In this particular case, a stupid and senseless tax on the ownership of television tuner mechanisms will nudge Swedes in the right direction, as the tax does not apply to computers. Soon, I and plenty of Swedes will be able to look a Radiotjänst taxman in the eye and say, in all honesty and with a badly concealed smirk, that there is no TV in the house.

Bad UPC

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It’s time to move again, this time to the burbs, to Telefonplan, “a stone’s throw from trendy restaurant“By way of context, the link refers to an article (in Swedish) that has real estate agents advertising homes in the area thusly. and club Landet, which won a Gulddraken award off Dagens Nyheter this yearThis is what restaurants and bars aspire to do in Stockholm..

Konstfack, Sweden’s best art school (or so I’m told), has just moved nextdoor, into the old Ericsson headquarters, whose architectural style is a very clean modernism that nevertheless affords some subtle flourishes.I really like it, and might have to illustrate what I mean with a photo essay, soon.

Artists repopulating old industrial landscapes, cool new restaurants and clubs, design exhibitions at my doorstep — does that sound familiar? Indeed, I am moving to the Williamsburg of Stockholm. In fact, I ran into some of my hipper workmates while exploring the neighborhood by bike today — they were househunting.

Sorry, your browser doesn’t support iframes.

My apartment, my eighth in three years, will be available on Oct 15. Before then I am spending a week at a friend’s place, then a week in New York, attending Felix and Michelle’s wedding.Take that as a forecast for further sporadic posting in the coming weeks. As with my last post about moving, this post is actually about how atrocious the UPC cable company is. I won’t need UPC in my new place, so I called them up today to cancel the service. Fine, the UPC man tells me, we can do that at the end of November. WTF? I moved out 2 days ago, I tell him, I don’t need it anymore, and certainly not until December. And besides, I know they can turn service on and off within minutes, as I’ve seen them do it while on the phone with them trying to help them restore one of their numerous service outages.

There was no budging him. All he did was refer to the avtal, the “agreement” that I signed with them: They require a calendar month to turn off the service. As today is October 3, the calendar month becomes November.

I can see two reasons why they might do this: Until recently, they were the only provider of cable and broadband internet services to many places in Stockholm, and as is the case with any monopoly, they can and therefore will screw the customer. Second, it is in UPC’s interest to extend the revenue stream from departing customers for as long as possible, especially if they are losing market share to a newcomer.

None of this makes it right. I’d recommend the newcomer, Bredbandsbolaget, as they offer faster service at lower prices, but in fact most of Bredbandsbolaget’s terms of service require a three-month warning before cancelling the avtal.

Which goes to show that a duopoly is often just as bad as a monopoly. This market is ripe for an upstart that positions itself as a rebel, on the side of the customer, with an avtal that does not lock them in.

I’m beginning to instinctively recoil from that word, avtal. Like with kollektivavtalcollective bargaining, it is beginning to be a synonym in my mind for things you agree to against your best interests, or things you only pretend to agree to when in fact you have no choice. It’s newspeak, what it is.

Judging wines by their labels

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It’s Friday after work in Kungsholmen, and once again I find myself standing in line to take the numbered ticket that saves a spot in the queue for the right to buy booze from the state alcohol dispensing monopoly, SystembolagetPreviously blogged here and here..

The only reason this situation is not outwardly ridiculous is because the numbered ticket obviates the need to stand in an actual, physical alcohol dispensing line, which would just look Soviet and sadWhy didn’t the Russians ever use numbered ticket dispensers in their times of scarcity (which were plentiful)? They certainly weren’t using it in 1993, when I lived in Moskva. I suspect it is because had there been such a system, it would just have created a black market in numbered tickets, where, interestingly, the price would go up as the time to execution diminished, but would then crash if there were no takers by the time the number was called.. Fifteen minutes separate my entering the shop from being called to a counter to declare the particulars of my alcohol dependency. That’s plenty of time to ruminate, as was no doubt the intention, on whether I really should be drinking (and I must, it’s my money). Instead, what actually happens is that I get to seethe silently at the fact that the nearest specialist shop with a proper selection of real (Belgian) beer and more than a smattering of good cheap South African wines is probably in Estonia, where queues are considered a problem, not a solution.

As it is, the 15-minute wait for my turn leaves plenty of time to peruse the glass cabinets, where alcohol is exhibited like exotic insects, tagged with ID number, defining characteristics and native habitat (by way of a flag). I’ve tried to take advantage of this objective approach to displaying merchandise by making my own scientific investigations, and can now announce with some certainty a startling fact about red wine in general:

Cheap to mid-range red wines with sans serif labels have a much higher quality to price ratio, on average.

First, some evidence:

wines.jpg

For only one krona above the default SEK 69 price ($9), Albak de Elviwines 2003 (nr 99564) is a delicious Spanish wine that leaves a far more complex aftertaste than its price promises. And South Africa’s Man Vintners has some lovely pinotages (nr 16016, nr 99408). Compared to these, most of the the serifed wines just taste flat and unadventurous.

Therein lies the secret as to why you really can judge wine by its label: Companies where the management has an atrocious taste in labels tend to be the old-school type, uncertain about innovation, parochial about marketing and under the impression that serifs imply prestige. Anyone relying on serifs to get a leg up in the wine stakes is suspect, methinks. A surfeit of colors or an overly florid arrangement of castles and gold leaf also bodes ill for the wine, much like a painter who prefers his works in elaborate gilded frames. Instead, extensive testing confirms that a sans serif font and white space on a wine label constitute a secret sign, a wink by the vintner that their approach to winemaking matches your approach to typography and graphic design. Use this knowledge as a shortcut to good wine.

The point of property

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The following was written in an attempt to clarify my own position on copyright, patents, etc. — topics I’ve willfully neglected for too long. I’m not sure how much use this is to everyone else, though.Anyone who has observed a two-year old with toys knows that toddlers have no problem with the concept “mine”. Possession, and the advantages it brings, are something we instinctively grasp at an early age. Parents constantly need to plead with their children to share toys with siblings, and it’s clear from personal observation that such attempts at socialization are, kindly put, an uphill battle. We are born to possess.

And yet it is also clear that ownership and property are purely human constructs. Structured collections of atoms and volumes of space do not objectively exhibit ownership qualities that scientists can discover. It’s amazing, then, that modern society is nothing if not the result of an ownership layer placed seamlessly on top of a physical, objective reality.To be clear, communism does not represent the antithesis to a will to ownership. Communism does not question the existence of the notion of property. Its quibble with capitalism is about ownership structures — who (or what) should do the owning. For our everyday social interactions we all don ownership-tinted glasses, so that we automatically know which atoms belong to which, and behave accordingly. Without the glasses, we’d run afoul of the law within minutes.

One way to explain the existence of property is through social contract theory — property becomes the result of a pact individuals have made with society; it is a useful fiction whose precepts we willingly obey because it provides a robust mechanism for regulating access to scarce resources, which is necessary for the proper functioning of large and complex civilizations.

While this explanation might work as a utilitarian justification for the need for property as a legal concept in society, the origin of property is more likely explained along sociobiological lines. We have always vied to possess scarce resources, as do animals, often at great cost to ourselves. But prehistoric clans that developed and enforced social behavior that ensured predictable access to resources for its members were able to reduce these costs, creating the kinds of surpluses that allowed them to form cities (or kill less evolved clans for fun and profit). The journey from possession to property is a prerequisite for civilization.

I don’t believe most people ever see property in this light, however — as a useful social adaptation forged from evolutionary pressures. To many, property is as tangible and unquestioned a notion as God, that other idea without an objective basis in reality which nevertheless regulates daily life for a great many.

Can property become a more explicit choice for people? In some ways, it already has. Because the things that we produce and consume are now so diversified, different mechanisms for mediating compensation between producers and consumers have evolved: from purchasing outright to also renting, licensing, leasing, mortgaging, coöperative ownership, shareware and the Creative Commons movement. Ownership is no longer a monolithic given, but something whose precise terms we negotiate.

What needs to evolve, however, is a broader awareness of the functionalist role property plays in society. It is only then that both producers and consumers will be informed enough to improve on the current mechanism with something that has the potential for even greater equity and/or utility. There is some urgency in the matter when it comes to intellectual property, because technology recently abolished the problem of scarcity when distributing music, text or film. With many consumers finding it extremely easy to “rip, mix and burn”, producer interest groups are reacting by trying to narrow the definition of ownership to something akin to passive enjoyment, while simultaneously looking for encryption schemes that work.

Both extremes — unfettered appropriation/copying on one end, a clampdown on options on the other — undermine the role property has played in society — as a legal guarantor that effort begets reward. Both extremes stifle creativity. A new middle ground is needed, and this is precisely what the Creative Commons is trying to provide: a spectrum of rights that a producer can choose from to offer the consumer.

Is there room for improvement? The main problem any new compensation scheme faces is robustness. If it is possible to replicate information with impunity, then the incentive to become the parasite in a positive sum game might prove too strong. Since encryption won’t ever work properly (because consumers will always be able to record what our senses are meant to perceive), I suspect the only long-term solution is education about the benefits of equitable compensation. This in turn implies the need for an active appreciation of why the notion of property exists, as opposed to an inherited, unquestioned predisposition for it.

Some concrete proposals, then, bearing in mind the above:

— Clamp down on the absurdly prolific levels of patents being granted, many of them uncritically. Also, the rights of patent holders are too strong when viewed from the perspective of their intended aim, which is to maximize creativity and hence social utility. Perhaps these rights could be reined in, for example by compelling patent holders to licence the patent to all comers, and capping the fees to a percentage of revenue. This way, standing on the shoulders of giants becomes affordable and legal again.

— Restrict the terms of copyright for intellectual property to at most the life of the author. Not 95 years, not life + 70 years. There should be no author estates — they prevent society from benefitting freely from the works when the author has no possible further use for compensation, seeing as the author is dead.

— By the same token, abolish inheritance. If you’re married and you die, then your property belongs to your spouse until he/she dies, but offspring really need to get their own life. This should be the basis for all meritocratic liberal societies.

All three proposals stem from a desire to maximize the incentive to innovate in society. All tweaks to the notion of property should be judged on their likelihood to achieve this.

Abortion in Sweden and the US

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In the middle of a long thread on abortion currently raging on MemeFirst, Jame asked:

I would be curious if there have been any studies done that compare abortion rates in the US with those in Europe, particularly in those countries (such as the Scandinavians) with a good record of supporting child care and motherhood. The implication being that other, less intrusive public policies may be effective at convincing wavering mothers to keep the baby.

I thought I might try to figure that out myself, or at least begin by tabulating the Swedish data, which exists in abundanceIt may not be socialism at its best, but Swedish socialized medicine does produce statistical data that are the envy of th world. Case in point: The unrivalled Swedish twin registry. .

Using birth statistics and abortion numbers broken down by week from the National Board of Health and Welfare, I was able to produce some very interesting graphs charting abortion trends in Sweden over the past 20 yearsHere is the data I collected, in an Excel spreadsheet..

This first chart shows cumulative figures for how pregnancies end in Sweden each year, in absolute terms. The second chart takes this data and normalises it, allowing us to make percentage comparisons across years. This makes the second chart more interesting for our purposes.

The number of stillborn is below 0.4% of total births. I’ve included them with live births to show total births in the graphs, because what we are trying to track here is a mother-to-be’s intentions.abortabsolute.gif

abortpercent.gif

The data presented thus shows that most pregnancies end in birth (green), but that a near-constant 25% end in abortion. This is Sweden’s “abortion ratio”. The ratio has been hovering near this level since 1975, when abortion was legalized.Abortion in Sweden is legal until the 18th week, after which it is only permitted “in cases of severe indications.” A synopsis in English (PDF, on page 8)

Two things are immediately obvious from looking a the data: First, there is a definite trend towards having abortions earlier. In 1985, less than 43% of abortions were performed by the end of the 8th week of pregnancy. In 2004, that figured had climbed to nearly 71%. The percentage of total abortions performed by the end of the 6th week climbed from 3.2% in 1985 to 24.5% in 2004.

Second, the proportion of abortions performed in the second and third trimester stayed near-constant between 1985-2004, at around 3.5%I suspect this is because the majority of these abortions are performed for medical reasons, and that figure tends to remain constant..

How does this stack up to the US? Data is a bit lacking (and lagging), but this document by The Alan Guttmacher Institute (AGI) (PDF) from May 2005 (PDF) calculates the abortion ratio in the US at 24.3% in 2002, having dropped gradually from 29.7% in 1985. (1983 was the all-time high, at 30.4%). By comparison, Sweden’s was 25.7% in 2002.

pie2.gifAbortions in the US, 2001. figures by The Alan Guttmacher Institute

Elsewhere, AGI post a pie chart showing when abortions are performed. In 2001, 59.1% of abortions in the US were performed before the end of week 8, vs 66.7% in Sweden (in 2001, for comparison purposes). In the US, 11.9% of abortions were performed after the end of week 12; the equivalent number for Sweden was 4.8%.

The upshot? The US has recently dipped below Sweden in its abortion ratio, but Swedes have moved towards having their abortions much earlier. Stringent pro-lifers tend to focus on absolute numbers of abortions, and tend to discount when an abortion is performed. For those who are pro-choice to some extent, however, when an abortion is performed makes a significant ethical difference, and a trend towards earlier abortions in Sweden is definitely welcome.

I have not yet been able to find abortion figures for the US comparable to those for Sweden — broken down by week across the years. If they are available, an interesting comparison to make would be to calculate the weeks spent in the womb by aborted foetuses as a proportion of total foetus-weeks for all pregnancies. This would present a more nuanced view of progress towards reducing late abortions.

Borges and the Eternal Orangutans

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Coincidence is destiny. Had I not forgotten my security card as I left the office early on Friday, I would never have been back on Stureplan in the late afternoon, facing Hedengrens, where I noticed I very much wanted to read fiction.

Inside, I headed for the English-language titles. I passed over the newest Umberto EcoEco is no longer translated by William Weaver, I noticed. It turns out he is ailing, sadly. and the latest Julian Barnes, and then my gaze locked onto a sprite of a book half-hidden behind much thicker tomes — it was called Borges and the Eternal Orangutans. There was only one copy.0099461676.jpg

WaPo review
Guardian review

I immediately suspected foul play. If it were anyone’s intention to subvert my free will, compelling me to buy a particular book, they’d do so by titling it Borges and the Eternal Orangutans. And they’d make it short, just like the book in my hands. They know I hate long books.That’s because they’ll have read this post.

Had it been placed there specifically for me? Was this the beginning of a plot, with me as its unwitting protagonist? In any case, no other book in the store could compete. I made my purchase, and had finished the first chapter by the time I stepped out of the Tunnelbana on my way home. I would end up reading the book in one sitting, in the dying light at the water’s edge on Norr Mälarstrand, amid the joggers and the couples.

Borges features prominently in Borges and the Eternal Orangutans, a Holmes to the narrator’s Watson in a succinct detective story. I was delighted to see various orangutans discussed — including the one that types out all possible literary works, prompting Borges to note that it would leave The Swedish Academy no choice but to award that orangutan the Nobel Prize in literature.This is ironic of him to say so, of course, though I don’t think the narrator noticed.

I encountered more references to Stockholm as I read on, amid a dawning realization that I was indeed being manipulated — that I was the target of hidden purposes.

By then I didn’t mind. This novel is an autological marvel — superficially a detective story, it is also an homage to Edgar Allan Poe, and yet a parody of the genre he inventedSorry to be so vague, but I don’t want to give anything away..

Borges and the narrator also theorize at length about H. P. Lovecraft and his Necronomicon, and how the location of Stockholm matters crucially in this regard. Quite by coincidence, MiskatoniCon, the first-ever Scandinavian H. P. Lovecraft convention, will be held in Stockholm this coming November. And as coincidence is destiny, I now know precisely what Borges and his eternal orangutans are instructing me to do.

Bloggträff

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Därför att måndag, 8 augusti är månadens första måndag, kommer Erik och jag att träffa varannan och dem bloggare som vill/kan på Storstad, som jag misstänker är väldigt nära Eriks bostad. Kl. 19.00. Det finns mycket att prata om.