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 When I was researching the article One Billion Americans?, I got thinking about the implications of the wildly conservative Census Bureau projections of US population, and the embarrassing drastic upward revisions that have been made to them, for global population projections. What made the US projections so wrong (US population peaking at 295 million was predicted as recently as fifteen years ago) was the compound error of underestimating the extent of immigration and overestimating the rate at which immigrants adjust their family size to the average of their new country, or the global average. It's an understandable error -- there's lots of evidence that population growth rates in the developing world are falling quickly. But that's not because third world countries are evolving to two-child-or-less families as infant mortality drops. Rather, it's because those countries are simply unable to sustain more children, so parents are reluctantly, temporarily reducing family size as a result. Give them the option to emigrate to a developed country, and cultural preference, religious dictates, and improved health care will jump their family size (and life expectancy) back up again. And as inevitable ecological and humanitarian catastrophes arise in the 21st century in dozens of third world countries, compounded by the scourges of new diseases, horrendous shortages of clean water, and desertification and crop flooding due to global warming, the pressure to increase immigration quotas by orders of magnitude will be fierce. Back in 1990 when the pundits were predicting US population would peak at 295 million (it passed that level last year and is now expected to peak at between 550 million and 1.2 billion, if it peaks at all), they were saying global population would peak at around 9-11 billion in 2100. But for that to happen with a US population of, say, 900 million instead of 300 million, would mean average third world family size would be much smaller than average US family size. The UN projections, for example, assume annual average growth rate for Africa, Asia and Latin America of 0.5% in the latter half of this century, compared to a current growth rate in those areas (even including China with its already-low birth rate) of 2.1%, and compared to a current US growth rate of 0.9%, which is trending back up to a projected 1.3% rate for most of the current century, thanks to immigration. So the 9-11 billion global peak population just doesn't add up. While it doesn't make sense to get Malthusian and project population will grow indefinitely at current rates (1.3%, i.e. a doubling every 50 years to 24 billion by 2100), it's equally illogical and irresponsible to suggest that the whole world will start immediately radically reducing its fertility rate to achieve in just two generations the low fertility rate that Europe took one hundred generations to reach. If you assume that the levels of immigration now projected by the US Census Bureau will prevail throughout the developed world, that first- and second-generation citizens of developed countries will continue to have considerably larger-than-replacement level families in their new adopted countries, that the prevailing pro-fertility population dogmas of organized world religions will not suddenly be changed, that population pressure in the third world will be eased somewhat by immigration and that modest drops in family size in those countries will be largely offset by longer life expectancy, as has been observably the case in almost every third world country except China, then instead of the 9-11 billion peak the UN is currently talking about, you end up with population soaring past 14 billion in 2100, with no end in sight (left chart above). The curved red line shows the carrying capacity of Earth, assuming a modest annual increase in productivity from the current 30 billion acres (productive-capacity adjusted), assuming average footprint per capita continues to increase by a modest 1% per year, and assuming no land on the planet is reserved for wilderness or natural space for the rest of Earth's creatures. It shows in 2000 that the world could sustain 5 billion humans at the then-prevailing level of consumption. That's a billion humans less than actually inhabited the planet then, possible only by depriving much of the world of a subsistence level of resources, and by taking more from the Earth (in non-renewable resources) than we replaced, essentially stealing the excess from future generations. At the expected global level of per-capita consumption in 2100 (still well below today's North American consumption levels), carrying capacity drops to 2 billion humans. That number is substantiated by a recent C ornell study that says the choice in 2100 is between 2 billion people living a comfortable but not lavish life (achieved by a drastic population reduction) or 12 billion "struggling in misery". And if you want to allow 50% of the planet's surface for other life forms, you need to achieve double that reduction (green line), to one billion people, the level both Jim Merkel and Bill McKibben think we should strive for. That's only achievable, short of coercion, by an average one child family worldwide for the next century. The right chart shows that the increasing average footprint, driven both by North American excess and the surging resource use of China's billion plus people, will drive the aggregate human footprint up even more sharply than aggregate population, from 37 billion acres today (20% more than Earth's carrying capacity) to 210 billion acres in 2100 (six times Earth's carrying capacity). Now remember, these assumptions are much closer to the wildly optimistic assumptions of population levelling that the UN and other global agencies optimistically hope for, than to the Malthusian no-change projections that would see nearly double these numbers. Nevertheless, train wreck ahead. We simply have no choice. We must immediately and aggressively reduce our family sizes worldwide, and we must immediately and aggressively reduce per-capita resource consumption, waste and footprint. That means we must confront religions that don't actively encourage birth control and small families, and show those religions to be socially irresponsible. That means, too, we need to introduce ecological taxation measures to make excessive resource consumption and waste prohibitively expensive, and reward those who tread lightly on the Earth. |
Mr Idris described how he had heard of children dying after using counterfeit baby shampoo and warned of the potentially disastrous consequences of relying on machines that had been made using an illicitly duplicated model.LinkExcuse me, but those aren't intellectual property/piracy problems. False advertising is a consumer protection issue and a problem that everyone supports eradicating...
However, there have been several documented instances where WIPO's own high protectionist patent and data registration policies are actively hurting patient access to AIDS-related drugs and other essential medicines in the third world, Africa in particular...
Annalee Newitz has a great article in Alternet about Mash-ups, going over the copyright laws involved and how the laws are viewed in the mash-up scene. It's an interested clash, where restrictive laws loom over digital musicians armed with low-cost computers and software that makes mixing easy. In this realm, Newitz sees mash-ups as a form of protest, where DJs knowingly violate laws in order to spread their art in the world.
As a masher on [Get Your Bootleg On] recently posted, "Everything is illegal." Under an I.P. regime where artists feel like nothing goes, it seems that everything could. The infringement generation aims to mash up copyright law in pursuit of better music. But it also has a chance to challenge social divisions more profound than the distinctions between hip-hop, rock and electroclash.
On first read of this proposed legislation I thought it was a parody and someone was pulling a sick joke. But unfortunately a clueless legislators who has gotten some serious campain donations from the sponsors.
I get tired of having to get up on my soap box but I must and will until this madness is brought to a halt. Dan Gillmor sums it up perfectly:
"This bill, the stated purpose of which is to criminalize actions that might "induce" copyright infringement, doesn't just overrule the Sony Betamax case, which gave us the right to tape TV shows to watch later. It would turn people offering totally legitimate technology into criminals, if what they offered could also be used for infringing purposes."
The EFF has written up an example complaint that is on Gillmor's site that could be submitted if this legislation makes it to the floor of congress. I encourage your to read Dan Gillmor's article he has links to the Elected Officials we need to write to this time.
Folks won't be long before we will have to swipe our debit cards thru our multi-media devices to listen to music we have paid for or to watch TV thru the set we purchased along with the monster cable bill we have to pay every month. Think I'm joking don't you know their are associations out their that want just that. [Dan Gillmor]
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In this scare story in today's Guardian, the movie industry claims one of
every four Internet users has downloaded movies, and says, "The MPAA's
findings are backed by a report from the Organisation for Economic
Cooperation and Development (OECD), which says more movies were
illegally downloaded last year than music tracks."
Given that the average movie -- even after being heavily compressed --
is still not much less than a gigabyte in size, and that the average
song is a couple of megabytes, this OECD assertion seems ridiculous on
its face.
The American Ninth Circuit court has been listening to arguments about copyright infrigement and liability for filesharing applications, notably Grokster and Morpheus . A decision could shape the legal status of peer-to-peer tools for the near future.
The discussion has largely been framed in terms of the landmark 1984 Sony v Betamax case . This is an appeal for an earlier decision, where Grokster was found not liable for users' infrigements. Counsel for copyright holders argued that Betamax could be read to allow blame to be assigned to devices, and ended up considering Xerox liable for bad copying. Their opponents argued for substantial noninfringing usage, as per the Betamax decision.
I just noticed something about Google Adsense. First, there are suddenly more "o"'s in "Google." Look ot the right. It used to be spelled normally.
Second, click on the "Ads by Goooooogle" link and you'll be taken to a page where:
Google would like to know what you think of these ads. Please provide your feedback by filling out this form
Did it always do that?
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As someone who was heavily involved in introducing the theory of CPM (Cost Per Thousand Impressions) to Japanese ad agencies, I've been spending a lot of time recently thinking about what comes next after Google AdSense. Ross tried CPI (Cost Per Influence), trying to come up with an index that included the influence of the blogger or site where the ad was placed. This reminded me of the "branding value" or cluster value argument. Also, the idea would be that an influential blog would trigger a word of mouth diffusion. Anyway, inspired by Ross, John Batelle came up with a really cool idea. He writes about sell side ads where bloggers could copy ads that they saw into their blogs if they liked them. The ads would have information about what sorts of sites they could be posted on and other instructions. They would "phone home" to the advertiser who would pay the blogger for the impressions or clickthrus or whatever. The idea is that it would be viral and publisher driven, rather than advertiser driven. It would be set up so that the advertiser could track which site a blogger copied the ad from so that that they could track the diffusion pattern as well.
Anyway, awesome idea. Lets build it!
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Talk about kismet - here's John Battelle on Ross Mayfield's ideas.....
John calls it 'Sell Side advertising' - Ross calls it 'transitive advertising' in his 'Cost per Influence' post - I call it OpenListings......
A while ago I read Ross Mayfield's post on
"Cost Per Influence" advertising and thought to myself
"That feels important, but I don't get it." Something was missing, or,
put another way, I was missing something. So I gave Ross a call last
week and we hashed through it. What I realized during our talk was
that the premise for how he got to the idea of CPI was, to my mind,
far more interesting than CPI itself, at least in the near term.
Allow me to explain. Ross's musings on CPI turn on the concept of "transitive advertising" - a very interesting idea that flips current advertising models upside down. In essence, this new model for online ads reverses the relationship between publishers and advertisers.
In traditional advertising models, the advertiser holds all the cards. They decide what they want to spend, and most importantly, where they want to spend it. But the rise of pay-for-performance networks like Overture and AdWords/AdSense has changed this relationship in significant ways. First, advertisers are only paying when their ad performs - this alone is a huge shift in media. But as I've pointed out repeatedly, these networks also disaggregate advertisers from publishers. The advertisers are no longer choosing the publisher with whom they are doing business, they are instead choosing keywords, concepts, context. OK, but not very good for publishers nor for audiences, in my opinion.
But here's the heart of Ross's transitive advertising model, or what I'd like to call Sell Side Advertising. Instead of advertisers buying either PPC networks or specific publishers/sites, they simply release their ads to the net, perhaps on specified servers where they can easily be found, or on their own sites, and/or through seed buys on one or two exemplar sites. These ads are tagged with information supplied by the advertiser, for example, who they are attempting to reach, what kind of environments they want to be in (and environments they expressly forbid, like porn sites or affiliate sites), and how much money they are willing to spend on the ad.
Once the ads are let loose, here's the cool catch - ANYONE who sees those ads can cut and paste them, just like a link, into their own sites (providing their sites conform to the guidelines the ad explicates in its tags). The ads track their own progress, and through feeds they "talk" to their "owner" - the advertiser (or their agent/agency). These feeds report back on who has pasted the ad into what sites, how many clicks that publisher has delivered, and how much juice is left in the ad's bank account. The ad propagates until it runs out of money, then it... disappears! If the ad is working, the advertiser can fill up the tank with more money and let it ride.
I love this model because it's viral and it's publisher driven - it lets the publishers decide which ads fit on their sites. Publishers won't put ads on their site that don't perform, and they'll compete to put up ads that do. Now when I say "publisher" what I really mean is "blogger" - in particular the kind of blogger that uses AdSense - or would if it worked well enough. Bloggers like, well, me, and Rafat, and Om, and loads of others who provide a service that readers appreciate. This allows us to proactively vote for ads we think fit our site, that we think work for our readers. It's also a big win for advertisers, as their downside is protected by pay for performance, and upside is that the market is optimizing the ads through both the network effect, as with AdSense, as well as honoring the crucial endemic relationship between publisher/author/blogger and reader. Publishers are, in a very real sense, endorsing the advertiser, and that publisher's endorsement carries weight with the reader. (Publishers who endorse lame ads, or ads that take advantage of the reader, will be punished by the readers voting with their feet...)
Now, here's how CPI comes into play. The ad tracks not only where it is at any given time, but where it came from. So when I copy an ad from, say, Om's site to my site, Om gets a piece of the action for being the referring site. The ad reports that I got the ad from Om, and then if the ad performs on my site, he gets a bit of the juice for that. Presto - you are getting remunerated for your network of influence.
Certainly there are any number of major issues and problems with
this model, and I Iook forward to hearing what you think they are. But
in the end, this idea is no crazier than the PPC model itself, and, to
my mind, worth figuring out how to implement. Thanks Ross, for
propagating this neat meme. What do you all think?
[John Battelle
searchblog]
Direct and Related Links for 'Google headed the way of the dark side'
Fagoogle.com, a search engine tool oriented towards homosexual concerns (What? Really? Whoa!) has been taken offline by the big bad boys at Google. The site used Google’s search engine and the results thrown up were the same, but with a twist: they had ads. Revenue from these ads was supposed to be diverted to the ‘gay community’ for whatever charitable purpose….
View: Google Ads
Screenshot: The incriminating ad | Discussion Screenshot: Neowin not the only one? - Amazon Shotserversideguy.blogspot.com/2004/12/google-suggest-dissecte
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Nothing like a good side by side comparison to separate the men from the boys when it comes to the next gen gaming consoles. True, not much is known at this time, but then again, for anyone seriously mulling this over and hankering for a good solid spec mash-up, you’ve come to the right place. In fact, we feel this is the longest, most massively detailed side-by-side ever built on the topic. Here we go……..
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