Ellie Asks Why Annex

Mild science, tech news, stories, reviews, opinion, maps, and humor

14 February 2024

Decline of Web 2.0

As I wrote in a prior post, about an 1870s cartographic depiction of America as a young hog, I wish the University of Michigan Map Library blog hadn't been discontinued. It isn't surprising, as Web 2.0, i.e. user contributed web content, has been in decline for years. It's difficult to believe that Technorati, once the authority for blog activity, tracked millions of blogs at one time.

Blog growth outpaces Moore's Law?


Technorati sounded great! It was a blog search engine that was superior to Google's Blog Search. (Google Blog Search vanished years ago, like many Google services.) 

The BBC seemed VERY excited about Technorati, and blogging in general: A new blog created every second: In August 2005, Technorati was tracking 14.2 million blogs, up from 7.8 million in March of the same year, according to the BBC. Blog count was doubling every five months! Maybe.


screen shot of technorati website
Look familiar? 
This was the Technorati landing page

Even though the dot com bubble was years earlier, there was an awful lot of Internet hype. 

With such amazing growth, it would seem that there would be more blogs than the entire adult population of the planet! I found a very good summary of the hype timeline from this Fail-0-Pages post, Abandoned Blogs and Life Spans

In May 2004 Technorati claimed to track 2.4 million blogs, increasing to 11.7 million blogs in June 2005. The Technorati figure was assailed as simply a count of blogs registered: it did not identify blogs in regular use and did not differentiate between genuine blogs and splogs (spam blogs).

Concern over U.S. vs Korea "blog gap"

I found this especially amusing, also from the same 2011 post via Fail-0-Pages, which seems mostly dormant as well:

In January 2005 the blogosphere was abuzz with claims that around 25% of all South Koreans have a blog, some US pundits lamenting a ‘blog gap’. That supposedly included 90% of those in their 20s and 79% of those under 40. In fact, the figures were for basic homepages – often little more than an email address – with the nation’s service providers, rather than blogs.

Much woo

ZDNet reported this news story in 2007, Technorati makes first major acquisition:

"Blog search site plans to use technology behind news aggregator Personal Bee to add new 'social publishing' features". This is the first major acquisition for San Francisco-based Technorati, which says it tracks more than 72 million blogs... "We are adding flexible publishing capabilities, so that everyone can find conversations, track up-and-coming ideas and stories, and customize the 'Live Web' in any way they like..."

By December 2008, Technorati reported that only 7.4 million (5%) of tracked blogs had been updated once in the prior 120 days. According to a June 2009 Slashdot post, Most Blogs Now Abandoned:

Technorati said that at any given time there are 7 million to 10 million active blogs on the Internet, but 50,000 to 100,000 blogs generate most of the page views.

I recall the three most memorable terms being social, democratize, and world-class. The latter appeared a bit later, around 2012, often in the context of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) such as Stanford University's Andrew Ng and his 2010 machine learning class and Sebastian Thrun's Coursera.


State of Blogosphere not so good

Technorati also produced an annual "State of the Blogosphere" report that received a lot of attention from Web 2.0 luminaries such as Robert Scoble aka The ScobleizerLeo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis (he live tweeted his prostate cancer surgery), Jay Rosen (journalism school professor who was a journalist for all of nine months, 30 years ago), Chris Messina (inventor of the hashtag as seen on Twitter), and Michael Arrington the TechCrunch guy.


Technorati was acquired by a programmatic advertising company in 2013. Without any prior notice, they deleted their entire blog directory. The only remnant is this sad little image. 

unhappy line drawing face

How do blogging platforms such as Moveable Type, TypePad, Medium, and Automattic survive with presumably lower revenues? 

Automattic is the owner of WordPress, Akismet, and tumblr. There is still work to be found in developing plugins for WordPress dot org sites. Some high-traffic publications use WordPress VIP as a content management system. The New York Post's online version is one example.

A few bloggers made money from the 2005 to 2010 time period. If they were paid by page views, I doubt they are now!

Who clicks on online ads?

Again, via Slashdot, Blogs Falling in an Empty Forest:

People who think blogging is a fast path to financial independence also find themselves discouraged... an advertising executive in Atlanta had no trouble attracting an audience to his site, Things My Dog Ate. “I did Craigslist postings to advertise it, and I very quickly got an audience of about 50,000 viewers a month,” he said. That led to some small advertising deals, including one with PetSmart. "I think I made about $20 from readers clicking on the ads."

Do any website owners earn a living income or even hefty supplement from banner advertising? Some YouTube influencers do, but they are few. About 85% of Google's revenue comes from AdWords / AdSense according to their annual reports, so I guess the business model still works on the other side, so to speak.

Addendum One

Technorati continued to evolve. It seems to have been repurposed, replete with original logo, as a news aggregator. There isn't much advertising, and there aren't many text articles. There ARE a preponderance of grim catastrophe news videos. This was the first that I saw.

screen shot of Technorati website 2023
Technorati transformed - December 2023

The sources include Newser, Canadian state media CBC, and Qatari sponsored media website, Al Jazeera.

If I were even more cynical, I would assume that Technorati was a public relations organ of the Office of the President of Ukraine, given the content in the images above and below.




Lackadaisical website interest algorithms are more likely than the SBU or GRU (Ukrainian intelligence agencies). 

Addendum Two


The Fail-0-blog is a strange place. There is a good post about schadenfreude and also links to the amusing Anger Central and its more modern follow-on Musings of the Angry Webmaster.

28 July 2023

Make America Porcine Again

Years ago, I found a post on the University of Michigan's Map Library blog. I consider it evergreen, as it is about two of my favorite things: Piggies and cartography! 

It seems like a good time to blog about it. After all, maps were the safest way to travel during the COVID19 pandemic. Old maps even allow one to travel in time, with sufficient imagination.

The UMich Map Library blog has been retired, sadly, although its archives are still accessible. In lieu of the Map Library blog, I turned to Big Think's Strange Maps. I located this excellent post, National Porcineographic: Portrait of America as a Young Hog.

Helping humans by helping pigs


William E. Baker was a 19th century tailor. He made his fortune thanks to a strategic alliance with what became the Grover & Baker Sewing Machine Company. (It was later acquired by Singer Sewing Machines.) Baker's philanthropy was extensive, but centered on his Hygienic Farming and Sanitary Cookery initiative. He wanted to improve human health by helping pigs.

Unvirtuous circle: Boston was a cesspool


New England rapidly industrialized, and the population grew along with it. An ecosystem evolved but it was of a distinctly pragmatic sort. The City of Boston instituted a garbage pick-up service but then disposed of the garbage anywhere and everywhere possible. Typical locations for garbage dumping were on the outskirts of the city or in neighboring communities. It was NOT environmentally friendly! Town and nearby country dwellers developed a recycling response: They fed the garbage to pigs.

W.E. Baker believed that this practice was the cause of much disease, in both swine and the people who consumed unwholesome pork. In 1875, he introduced a 'Sanitary Piggery' in rural Massachusetts. It was the cornerstone of Baker's contribution to the pure food movement.
"Baker’s Sanitary Piggery involved a clean environment and wholesome food for its porcine residents - it was even rumored they had individual beds, and slept under sheets. That may have been hyperbole, but it underscores Baker’s belief that public health depended greatly on sanitary food production."
He didn't blame pigs for the filth and squalor in which they, um, wallowed.

The world’s finest example of porcineography


The United States of Pig map commemorated the opening of W.E. Baker's Sanitary Piggery. 2500 copies of the map were produced as numbered lithographs. Few still exist. Most were given away as party favors to guests attending the event, i.e. as a Good-Cheer Souvenir. 

The map is reproduced below, in a smaller size than its original glory. I will try to remember how to make the image clickable, so that it may be enlarged for better viewing. My html is getting rusty from disuse.


map of the USA
The Porcineograph 


27 September 2022

Haiku spam and double digit sigma events

Haiku Schmaiku

Howdy Ma'am, just spam

I am

Five syllables short

-- Bloggerel Doggerel blog, 2007

Verse is courtesy of The Climateer, who doesn't write about climate too often, thankfully! He has a great blog description which is perpetually relevant: "In war, everything not censored is a lie."

The Climateer DOES write about investment bankers who blame statistics for their poor trading decisions... or possibly, outright deceptive practices. There was a lot of that going on in 2008. I finally hoisted some posts about double-digit standard deviations from my bookmarks and read them.

25 Sigma Event Very Unlucky 

From Climateer Investor and others along the way, it seems like a 25 sigma event is impossible. "How unlucky is 25 sigma?" (2011): When Goldman Sachs was Really, Really Unlucky
 "One of the more memorable moments of last summer’s credit crunch came when the CFO of Goldman Sachs, David Viniar, announced in August that Goldman’s flagship GEO hedge fund had lost 27% of its value since the start of the year. 

As Mr. Viniar explained, “We were seeing things that were 25-standard deviation moves, several days in a row.” 

One commentator wryly noted: 
"That Viniar. What a comic. According to Goldman’s mathematical models, August, Year of Our Lord 2007, was a very special month. Things were happening that were only supposed to happen once in every 100,000 years. Either that … or Goldman’s models were wrong." 

See too the follow-up post a few months later in December 2011, "Barclays Hit With "Immense" Copper Trading Loss; 50 Sigma Move In Cancelled Aluminum Warrants. 50 sigma events don't happen.

David Viniar has quite a colorful past regarding accuracy and math. The Wall Street Journal wrote this fun, very brief article about him in 2012, Goldman Sachs CFO To Moody's: You Make No Sense. There's no paywall for you my loyal readers, because I get special links as a subscriber. Choice excerpts:
Goldman Sach's CFO David Viniar was asked on the bank's conference call about a possible downgrade by Moody's to Goldman and other investment banks. He responded with a sharp critique of Moody's ability to analyse. 

"We are as you know, we are quite analytical and when we do all of the analysis we cannot figure out why they are where they are," Viniar said. He added coyly "And so I just wanted to tell you that."

But Moody's isn't alone in having its math questioned by Viniar. Viniar also seemed perplexed by the Federal Reserve's arithmetic...

Viniar began extreme outlier exaggerating back in 2009, when he gave journalists a ridiculous accounting of the AIG scandal, which was more like the AIG Horror for the American public. This was the shameful incident where taxpayers were forced to pay the bonuses of investment bankers whom they had already paid to bail out. There was a legal rationale for it, but I don't know that public confidence in regulatory authorities and the U.S. government will ever recover.

Really bad Goldman Sachs in the limelight

You can watch good Senator Carl Levin (may he rest in peace) do his best for us in this video. Goldman Sachs was then under investigation for fraud. The Goldman mortgage bankers being questioned are Dan Sparks, the later infamous Fabrice Tourre, Mike Swenson, and Joshua Birnbaum. The setting is a 2010 Congressional hearing following the financial crisis. Senator Levin questions Goldman Sachs bankers about their well-known practice of exploiting their own customers as well as the investing public.

"That Timberwolf was one shitty deal."


David Vinier was there.

Climateer blog hasn't been updated since 2007, but it is a great read too.
 

31 May 2022

April was the month of mathematics

April 2020 was the scheduled date for the most recent Mathematics and Statistics Awareness Month. It is a biannual event, i.e. held once every two years. Sadly, it was uniquely ill-timed to coincide with the arrival of the full-force of the COVID-19 global pandemic. A lot of recurring events have fallen by the wayside. 

ceramic tea set in 8 colors
Tea for 8 by S. Goldstine
Possibly even worse is the fact that I see no mention of
any activities for 2022. I noticed this while browsing through the pages of the online Mathematical Imagery SIG (special interest group) of the American Mathematical Society (AMS). I encourage readers to visit! Included here are two scaled-down examples that I liked. 

The Four-Color Theorem works for any map on a plane or a sphere, i.e. four colors are sufficient to color every neighboring region with a different color. For other shapes, say this toroidal tea set, eight colors were necessary. 

math art
Polar coordinates
by D.A. Lakew
 

The shape on the left is a group of super-imposed polar surfaces. There is much more, along with detailed explanations, equations, etc. 

 You will also find pleasing drawing such as those I shared in my Cornucopia of Mathematics post, dating back to the turn of the century, uh, this century. Although I didn't hot link to the images (well, maybe one), and gave full credit to the source, a 2003 academic event at a university in New England, I noticed a few months later that the source web pages had gone 404 error not found.


On the origins of Mathematics Awareness Month


As any blog reader of mine knows, I strive to find surprising information. The origin of AMS's Mathematics and Statistics Awareness Month can be traced back to none other than... Ronald Reagan?  

01 April 2021

Bard of the Deep State: Brookings not to merge with Heritage

The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) is the central bank of central banks. Think Tank Watch is similar to BIS, except it is for think tanks. Both are meta organizations although only BIS has global gravitas. Also, I suspect that Think Tank Watch lacks any governance role for think tanks, unlike the mild governance authority of BIS over central banks.

Think Tank Watch's editor-in-chief seems rather pleased with himself. There's nothing wrong with taking pride in good work.


Think Tank Watch saw something and said something


Brookings Institute to merge with the Heritage Foundation:
Think Tank Watch has learned that the center-left Brookings Institution is in the late stages of a merger deal with the conservative Heritage Foundation to form a new think tank behemoth called "Brookitage."

The news comes via unnamed sources. Is there any other way to get information in Washington D.C. than 'unnamed sources'? Of course not!

Making policy not shaping or influencing

"We cannot afford to be just a liberal think tank in today's polarized political atmosphere," said a senior level Brookings official. "Bringing the most well-known liberal think tank together with the most well-known conservative think tank would send a huge message to Capitol Hill. Things need to change."

It is unusual for think tanks to take such an active political role. Also, think tanks tend to be hothouses of similar ideologies. Brookings and Heritage are not similar, so merging will no doubt be uncomfortable for all involved. Also, Heritage is likely none too happy with that portmanteau of a name, Brookitage.

24 June 2020

Why hasn't the growth rate of real potential US GDP recovered?

Missionary Work Among Savages aka 2slugbait wrote about whether President Reagan's 1981 tax cuts performed as advertised. I think his motivation was to determine if a similar supply side approach could have been a better alternative than the actual mild fiscal stimulus measures implemented by Bernanke and Obama, immediately following the 2008-2010 financial collapse. In other words, would a Reagan-type tax cut in 2008 have driven a stronger recovery.

Supply side economics maybe not so great


2slugbaits demonstrates empirically why supply side economics was only mildly effective. Specifically, none of the following worked quite as well as Arthur Laffer's forecast:
  1. cutting the top marginal tax rate would encourage greater labor effort 
  2. supply side structured tax cuts would encourage greater personal saving 
  3. the tax cuts would pay for themselves
Skepticism about David Stockman and Laffer's economic policy recommendations during the Reagan Administration is only mildly interesting to me. The correct sort of tax cuts (cuts that include middle- and lower-income wage earners, not solely high net worth "job creators" 😕😦😡) CAN provide a modicum of supply side stimulus. That was apparent from 2017 to March 2020.

Something else is much more interesting to me: the long-term decline in real potential US GDP.

Real Potential Gross Domestic Product


2slugbaits elaborates on item 3 above, noting that:
"If the Reagan tax cuts actually affected the supply side of the macro economy... then we should have observed an unparalleled increase in the growth rate of real potential GDP... Yes, real potential GDP did grow at a pretty good clip immediately after the Reagan recession, but it quickly faded...  even at its peak it was only barely above the growth rates during the Nixon, Ford and Carter years and well below rates enjoyed during the LBJ and Clinton years."

Real Potential Gross Domestic Product is defined by the St. Louis Federal Reserve (FRED) as "the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimate of the output the economy would produce with a high rate of use of capital and labor resources." The data is adjusted to remove effects of inflation. CBO measures real potential GDP in non-seasonally adjusted billions of chained 2012 dollars. Frequency is quarterly.

Reagan era tax cuts were somewhat helpful. They resulted in temporary growth in real potential GDP as the US economy lurched out of the late 1970s oil supply shock and stagflation. We recovered in the 1990s.

Why was GDP growth so lackluster then, and now?


The rate of growth of real potential GDP stalled after the dot com bubble burst though. It never returned to the historical growth levels of most of the prior 50 years. That is even apparent in the single chart featured in the 25 Years of FRED blog post in 2016 (as well as 2Slugbait's graphs of the year-on-year rate of change).

time series line graph
Over 25 years of FRED and declining GDP

I wanted to extend the time interval, in both directions. I went to the source, the St. Louis Federal Reserve's FRED data for historical Real Potential GDP, the GDPPOT data series.


Next, I took the rate of change of the series, but on a quarterly basis.


My assumptions are slightly different than 2Slugbaits's. He used year-over-year,  seasonally adjusted rates. I used quarterly, non-seasonally adjusted rates. My assumptions more closely correspond to those of the FRED GDPPOT data. I was curious if that would make any difference.

It didn't. Our results are substantially the same.

Where did our real potential GDP go?


I don't know. It should have recovered during the economic expansion of 2001 to 2008. We even had a war as fiscal stimulus! Real potential GDP should have grown from 2012 to 2020.

09 January 2020

Gold Star of Texas

The state capitol building in Austin, Texas (21 October 2008)


Cupola TX
Cupola of the state capitol at Austin

Photograph by TedLandphair via Picasa

21 May 2018

Credibility and the Internet: Queuing Theory

Don't believe everything you read on the Internet!

This was old news about queues back in 1985. Yet it was written up as a journal article, and received coverage as though a new finding in the June 2010 issue of ScienceDaily, an online publication owned by Reuters.

M/M/1 queues, Kendall notation, and models of balking behavior are certainly useful. However, the concepts, and their accuracy as models, were well-established for at least forty years. This is true whether applying queueing theory to modelling the performance of computer hard-drives e.g. random arrival times for seek requests, or to consumer behavior when switching lanes because of long lines at the supermarket checkout.

The Wiley text book, Fundamentals of Queueing Theory, was published in 1998.



Earlier editions were published in 1983, and explain in detail the theory and application of the concepts presented in the journal article reviewed by ScienceDaily.

A little more about M/G/1


On Math StackExchange, I noticed a rare inquiry. If you're curious for more about queues, go read my answer to this question, Kendall notation's “General distribution”, what does that mean?

I found this comment endearing:

Oh I thought that this stuff wasn't even used in real life jobs... I thought it was merely theoretical, but seems that I'm wrong!
I'm okay with the G general theory [G as the general case when you just don't know what sort of service time distribution to expect] since I'm not required to study it for now (I'm following an academic course), I just wanted to understand what the G meant and you helped me in that. Do you have any experience with multi-class queues too?

Journal Reference
  1. Liao et al. "Optimal staffing policy for queueing systems with cyclic demands." International Journal of Services and Operations Management, 2010; 7: 317-332.

20 May 2018

Chemical Heritage

This aluminum necklace was on display at the Chemical Heritage Foundation (CHF) in 2010. A description of the exhibit is still available in a mostly image-free post about Atomic Age jewelry. Peruse additional wonders from the Chemistry and Fashion: Making Modernity exhibit.

Aluminum Necklace circa 1950
 0.75 in x 6.25 in.


No Moore Chemical Heritage


Sadly, CHF was absorbed by the Science History Institute in 2018. The collections can still be viewed in person, at the former location of the CHF Museum on 315 Chestnut Street in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. You can still read about the illustrious past of the Chemical Heritage Foundation here. I have (mostly) found new source links for the in line URLs below.

magazine cover
The former CHF publication,
Periodic Tabloid: 
Musings on the Molecular

Interested in the legacy of Gordon E. Moore and his famous observation about the growth of technology? Read the original publication that introduced Moore's Law, Understanding Moore's Law: Four Decades of Innovation, that includes the original article written by Moore in 1966, and observations by Moore and others in 2006 when the book was published by (the now defunct) Chemical Heritage Foundation Press, to commemorate 40 years of Moore's law. The Science History Institute kindly keeps an electronic version of the full text (PDF) available for online readers.


IgNoble to Nobel pipeline?


I first wrote this post in 2010. Andre Geim won the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics. (Geim is actually a chemist, not a physicist, thus the relevancy here, if one wishes to be fussy; I do.) In the span of ten years, Geim went from winning an IgNoble prize for levitating frogs with magnets to the Nobel Prize for introduction of an extraordinary carbonate, graphene.

During the 2000 IgNoble Prize ceremony, Harvard physics researcher and teacher Roy Glauber was present on the stage with Geim, as a long-time member of the IgNoble committee. Just a few years later, Glauber won the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physics! It is hardly enough to establish any sort of trend or correlation, but if this sort of overlap continues to occur, it might be something to look into.

21 January 2015

Cartography of Second Life

Surprise! Cartography enthusiast and mapping patron David Rumsey was there too: Viewing Second Life.

Ellie with radio in SL
Me
I am Ellie Heartsdale. I owned a small corner plot of land on an island sim in the west. I built a little house there, for me and the piggies. I went to the Second Life synagogue, in Nessus, on Friday nights.

Second Life animals
Piggies


My father was still alive then. I was working for the State of Arizona, Department of Health Services, Office for Children with Special Health Care Needs, as chief research statistician. That was my title, "Research Statistician, chief".

I was happy, but as usual, didn't realize it at the time.

Maps