So the site may be disrupted for a few days.
More important, I’m going to add material about my primary research on Art and Science.
Roger Bohn – Google Scholar Citations
Roger Bohn – Google Scholar Citations.
Google does its usual amazing job of organizing information. They have a “scholar” page for every academic, with their best guess of all the papers written, and how many times they were cited. In some cases, they found web-accessible versions of academic articles that I was not aware of.
Rather than trying to keep my own list up to date, I may come to rely on Google to do it for me.
Classic definition of recession no longer useful
We now need 2 separate concepts of recession. 
“Total GDP recession” is the conventional one. “Actual people recession” is the one that matters to almost everyone. The rationale is that all of the “growth” after the 2001 recession, and this one as well, is in the upper few percent of the income distribution, or in corporate profits. Median income, for example, has been approximately stagnant or declining for a decade. Much more important to “the 99%” is what happens to their share of national income – which is much slower to recover. (If you adjust for increasing health care costs, then median income is doing even worse – but that’s another story.)
(This interpretation is my own. I got the graph link from Andy McAfee
Fiscal FactCheck: payroll tax = income tax!
Astonishing fact is buried here: Payroll taxes (social security, medicare etc) have almost caught up with federal income tax. Payroll taxes are 40% of federal receipts in 2010, while personal income tax was 41.5%.
Payroll taxes tend to be quite regressive — they start at about 10% of ALL payroll income for your first dollar, and fall to about 2.3% above $100,000 or so. So this means we have a bizarre combination of progressive and regressive tax rates. And it’s more evidence of how high health care costs are dragging everything down (in this case, via Medicare costs).
By the way, many “conservatives” have suggested a “flat income tax” e.g. 17%. As far as I can tell, this does NOT include payroll taxes. So it would not be flat at all – it would be highly regressive. Another factor is that richer people earn more from capital gains and other sources not counted as income. I’d love to see someone lay out the numbers carefully on this. Some information is in this report by Congressional Research Services.
Short-attention spans; does anyone still THINK?
I spoke yesterday at The Economist conference, Information: Making Sense of the Deluge. Very interesting speakers, I was excited to go. The stated and sincere intent was to get a discussion going, including the audience. But the format was like watching TV news (and I don’t mean PBS): toss someone on stage, let them roll a 6 minute video, answer a few questions, and on to the next. This format was good for Twitter-bytes, but not for thinking or reflecting or building ideas.
One of the topics was Nick Carr on how “pseudo-multitasking” is hurting our brains. The conference itself seemed to follow the same format. This morning, for example, the schedule for the first 50 minutes has 7 different people on stage, in four sessions:
Act II: Bottom up: Information for people8.35 amFlash of genius: How to translate the internetLuis von Ahn, A. Nico Habermann, Associate Professor, Carnegie Mellon University8.45 amFlash of genius: Turning information into knowledgeAmit Singhal, Engineer, Google8.55 amData exhaustThe intersection of search and big dataLuc Barthelet, Executive Director, Wolfram AlphaArkady Borkovsky, Chief Technology Officer, Yandex LabsModerator: Kenneth Cukier, Business Correspondent, The Economist9.15 amFlash of genius: The information entrepreneurScott Yara,Vice-president, Products and Co-founder, Greenplum
The audience is finding plenty to Twitter about. But 10 minutes is only time for a sales pitch; it is not enough time to discuss the weaknesses as well as the strengths of an idea.
On the plus side, this means there’s still a need for academics who can sit in an empty room and work on one thing for an hour. Of course to accomplish that I have to discipline myself not to check email…..
A friend who was there told me he “never follows Twitter.” It turns out that he means he keeps a Twitter feed in the corner of his screen 100% of the time; he just does not explicitly devote time to reading it! Talk about distractions…
The world’s servers processed 9570000000000000000000 bytes in 2008
We recently completed another major “How Much Information?” report. This one measures how much information servers processed, worldwide. Answer: we estimated 9.57 ZB in 2008. The coverage was broad, although not as much general press as our previous report on information consumption. I was impressed to see us reach 130,000 Google hits in a few days (try searching on the string 9570000000000000000000 ), until I realized that most of them are spam sites – they just duplicate hot items in hopes that Google will point to them, instead of the original.
As always, we had to make a lot of judgment calls in deciding what to measure and how. See the report, and the forthcoming technical appendix.
The report is available here.
Researchers Study the World’s Information Explosion – The Numbers Guy – WSJ
Arguments over what information to measure, and how are fundamentally irresolvable. There are too many good answers, and for most purposes measurement problems make it impossible to measure exactly what we want, in any case. The WSJ’s “numbers guy” collects some views on this, related to the new USC/Science article on the world’s computation.
My print column this week examines a recent paper in Science and other research efforts that attempt to quantify the world’s information. The studies generally compile dozens of pieces of data, such as hard-drive production and sales, and put all information into a single unit, such as bytes or words. “We can say things like ‘a 6 square-cm newspaper image is worth a 1000 words,’ ” the Science study’s authors, Martin Hilbert and Priscila López, wrote.
via Researchers Study the World’s Information Explosion – The Numbers Guy – WSJ.
