For problems I've been thinking about that need better ideas. Your input is welcome.
What if you give somebody a disease that harms them? It is legal to sue over this, and to have wrongful death lawsuits by the survivors. Wrongful death lawsuits, according to one recent North Carolina study, fetched about $1.4M on average, though they are going to vary a lot. They combine lost income with pain and suffering by the survivors.
Student loan debt has become a hot election issue. It's immense, has ruined some lives (but also vastly improved others) and is connected to (and possibly even the cause of) the cost of education growing much faster than inflation.
The more you travel the less luggage you want to take. Our world where a laptop and phone can almost do it all, combined with the cloud, is helping. But sometimes you have to bring stuff in checked suitcases.
When you do road trips, especially outside the USA, you learn that most cars don't have the trunk space of North American cars, not even close. You're lucky to get two rigid body suitcases in the typical small car, 3 needs a car with special capacity.
I've ranted a few times about the flood of customer satisfaction surveys we get. It seems you can't buy a tube of toothpaste without being pushed to fill out a survey on it.
A huge opportunity awaits a young social media company that is poised to take advantage of the fall of Facebook (and Twitter). Is somebody out there ready to carry the ball and make it happen. It probably has to be somebody already with most of this done, or even operating.
So many of the world's great sites are made much worse by the presence of "touts" (also known as hawkers, souvenir sellers etc.) particularly the ones who are pushy, constantly talking to you to advertise their wares, or even getting in your way. They can range from those who just fill the site with cheap souvenirs to those that constantly try to start a conversation with you about something else as a way of catching you off guard.
Nobody wants to be the first person to do or say a risky thing. One recent example of this is the revelations that a number of powerful figures, like Harvey Weinstein, Roger Ailes, Bill O'Reilly and Bill Cosby, had a long pattern of sexual harassment and even assault, and many people were aware of it, but nobody came forward until much later.
People finally come forward when one brave person goes public, and then another, and finally people see they are not alone. They might be believed, and action might be done.
Eleven years ago, I proposed a system to test radical ideas, primarily aimed at voting in bodies like congress. The idea was to create a voting system where people could cast encrypted votes, with the voter's identity unrevealed. Once a majority of yes votes were cast, however, the fragments of the decoding key would assemble and the votes and the voter identities could be decoded.
This would allow, for example, a vote on issues where a majority of the members support something but few are willing to admit it. Once the total hit the majority, it would become a passed bill, with no fear in voting.
I still would like to see that happen, but I wonder if the approach could have more application. The cryptographic approach is doable when you have a fixed group of members voting who can even meet physically. It's much harder when you want to collect "votes" from the whole world.
You can easily build the system, though, if you have a well trusted agency. It must be extremely trusted, and even protected from court orders telling it to hand over its data. Let's discuss the logistics below, but first give a description of how it would work.
Say somebody wants to make an allegation, such as "I was raped by Bill Cosby" or "The Mayor insisted I pay a bribe" or "This bank cheated me." They would enter that allegation as some form of sworn legal statement, but additional details and their identity would be encrypted. Along with the allegation would be instructions, "Reveal my allegation once more than N people make the same allegation (at threshold N or less.)"
In effect, it would make saying "#metoo" have power, and even legal force. It also tries to balance the following important principles, which are very difficult to balance otherwise:
How well this work would depend on various forms of how public the information is:
There are trade-offs as can be shown above. If allegations are public, that can tell other victims they are not alone. However, it can also be a tool in gaming the system.
The allegation must be binding, in that there will be consequences for making a false allegation once the allegations are disclosed, especially if the number of existing allegations is public. We do not want to create a power to make false anonymous allegations. If it were public that "3 people allege rape by person X" that would still create a lot of public shame and questions for X, which is fine if the allegations are true, but terrible if they are not. If X is not a rapist, for example, and the threshold is high, it will never be reached, and those making the allegations would know that. Our system of justice is based important principles of presumption of innocence, and a right to confront your accusers and the evidence against you.
Update: More careful reading of United's Contract suggests both that this didn't fit the definition of an oversold flight, and that even if it did, they only have the power to "deny boarding" to a bumped passenger, not to remove them from an aircraft. If this is true, then this case is simple and much less interesting: UA/Republic should admit fault and compensate those involved and retrain staff. End of that part of the story. Later-update: This might might have involved a special "Must ride" classification put on the flight crew which changes the rule yet again.
I have a follow-on post on misconceptions and realities about these issues.
The viral video of the day is that of police pulling a main from a United Airlines flight. He doesn't want to go, and they pull him out, and bash his head on the armrest, then drag out his unconscious body. It's a nightmare for everybody, and the video sends clear chills into every viewer. (Once, after I changed my flight to fly home from Hawai`i with Kathryn, they involuntarily removed her from the plane for a crew member. I spent the flight next to an empty seat as the crew member went to the cockpit jumpseat, and she flew on a later flight that lost an engine. We've never flown on that airline again.)
In spite of that, I have some sympathy for both sides, and while clearly things went very wrong here, as even United will eventually admit, the more interesting question for me is "what should airlines do to make this work better"? I do believe that UA clearly didn't want this to happen, though their policies created a small risk that it would. I am sure they don't want it to happen again. So if you were the person writing the policy for these situations, what would you do?
The situation:
New information reveals that a whole bunch of things went wrong at once, which does not excuse police manhandling a passenger, but helps us understand why it went pear-shaped.
Most flights these days are oversold, because a lot of people don't show for their flights. The system of overselling, then calling for volunteers when too many show up makes the planes fly mostly full these days on many routes. It's a fact of flying and allowed in the law. It makes flight more efficient, perhaps 5-10% more. On competitive routes, that makes tickets cheaper for everybody. It has another benefit to the flying public -- more people get to fly on the flight they want, because the airline is willing to sell you a seat on a "full" flight, knowing that 99% of the time you and everybody else will actually get to fly. The alternative is that an empty seat flies, and you wastefully take another flight. Passengers really like more availability, though they don't directly see how it happens. The reality is many of the flights you see in your web search are technically oversold. If it is really sold out, it's actually oversold past their limit.
Airlines could elect to not oversell, or not oversell as much, but that comes with a cost. More people denied the flight they want. More expensive tickets. More emissions per passenger. The world doesn't want that, so the world allows and the law regulates, overselling.
Of course, there is a way to avoid ever being bumped. Pay more for your ticket, or be an elite flyer, as I am. (In fact, as an elite, they actually guarantee me a seat on "really, really sold out" flights 24 hours in advance, which really means they push their oversell percentage by plus-one for elites. If I do this -- I never have -- they just decide it is cheaper to pay a volunteer to get off the flight than to deny one of their elites the flight they need.)
So the most obvious solution, "Don't oversell," comes with a cost I don't think the airlines or flying public actually want. Consider it this way. A flight you need with 100 seats has had 100 bookings. The airline knows that on average 7 of them won't show up. Do you want the airline to let you "reserve" on that plane, or tell you "sorry, fly the next day?" Do you want them to only offer you a standby ticket because other people, who paid far less than you for their tickets and who barely fly on their airline, got there first? (And yes, those people who buy late pay a premium.) The airline hates taking off with an empty seat, but you hate being told you can't get on a flight that ended up with empty seats even more.
Airlines are getting quite good at it. In 2015, only .09% of passengers were bumped, and only .01% involuntarily.
Turns out, it's in the public interest that flight crew needed for another flight have higher priority than we do, even to the point of removing us from planes we already boarded. That may not be allowed, but one has to consider the difference between one person removed (voluntarily or not) with compensation and the very large group of people who will have their flight cancelled (sometimes with no compensation) if the flight crew doesn't get there, properly rested and ready. You don't want to be either, and utilitarianism is not always the right philosophy, but here the numbers are overwhelming. One guy doesn't fly or 70 people don't. So we want a system where that can happen, but smoothly and ideally voluntarily.
Usually, the system of offering fat compensation -- $800, a hotel and meals for a $180 flight is a pretty good deal -- works fine. There are people who actually relish it. I met one guy who says he deliberately tries to get bumped the day before Thanksgiving -- when the offers get very high. But nobody was taking it. Most would miss a day of work, which is not an easy thing to do.
The law then allows the airlines to do an involuntary bumping. They have an algorithm that picks people and they are "denied boarding." The law specifies compensation. In this case 4 times the ticket price and other compensations. And this is cash, not flight coupons. Cash is worth a lot more.
This law is one of the culprits here. The law effectively puts a cap on the offer you will get. The airlines, in a move they thought at first was rational, don't want to offer you a lot more than the price the law defines for an involuntary bump. Why give a passenger $2,000 when you can do it for $1,000 under the law. Well, one reason is bad PR -- which is true in spades here.
The airlines don't want to do this. About 1 in 1,000 passengers are bumped, and 1 in 10,000 are involuntarily bumped, and has been going down as they get better at working their systems. But it happens.
Without the involuntary rule, the airline might have considered the next solution...
This problem would have been defused if they had kept increasing the offer until somebody took it. (Those who took it early will of course be upset, but that's how it goes.) While there is a practical limit, a volunteer should be found long before it.
They could also consider other things that are not money. Often bump offers come with things like first class upgrades which can be cheap for the airline and very nice to the passenger. They could offer a very coveted thing to some passengers -- elite qualification. At the extreme, if they offered 20,000 elite qualification miles or a full-tier bump in elite status, I could see even elite passengers jumping up to volunteer. We don't usually. We know we will never get involuntarily bumped. We usually have places to go. But we crave that elite status so much that some people fly "mileage runs" -- flights to nowhere just to accumulate miles -- to keep and increment it. If UA said, "get off this plane and we'll make you 1K" they would have had a line out the door of volunteers.
While I'm very excited about the coming robocar world, there are still many unsolved problems. One I've been thinking about, particularly with my recent continued thinking on transit, is how to provide robotaxi service to the poor, which is to say people without much money and without credit and reputations.
In particular, we want to avoid situations where taxi fleet operators create major barriers to riding by the poor in the form of higher fees, special burdens, or simply not accepting the poor as customers. If you look at services like Uber today, they don't let you ride unless you have a credit card, though in some cases prepaid debit cards will work.
Today a taxi (or a bus or Uber style vehicle) has a person in it, primarily to drive, but they perform another role -- they constrain the behaviour of the rider or riders. They reduce the probability that somebody might trash the vehicle or harass or be violent to another passenger.
Of course, such things happen quite rarely, but that won't stop operators from asking, "What do we do when it does happen? How can we stop it or get the person who does it to pay for any damage?" And further they will say, "I need a way to know that in the rare event something goes wrong, you can and will pay for it." They do this in many similar situations. The problem is not that the poor will be judged dangerous or risky. The problem is that they will be judged less accountable for things that might go wrong. Rich people will throw up in the back of cars or damage them as much as the poor, perhaps more; the difference is there is a way to make them pay for it. So while I use the word poor here, I really mean "those it is hard to hold accountable" because there is a strong connection.
As I have outlined in one of my examinations of privacy a taxi can contain a camera with a physical shutter that is open only between riders. It can do a "before and after" photograph, mostly to spot if you left items behind, but also to spot if you've damaged or soiled the vehicle. Then the owner can have the vehicle go for cleaning, and send you the bill.
But they can only send you the bill if they know who you are and have a way to bill you. For the middle class and above, that's no problem. This is the way things like Uber work -- everybody is registered and has a credit card on file. This is not so easy for the poor. Many don't have credit cards, and more to the point, they can't show the resources to fix the damage they might do to a car, nor may they have whatever type of reputation is needed so fleet operators will trust them. The actions of a few damn the many.
The middle class don't even need credit cards. Those of us wishing to retain our privacy could post a bond through a privacy protecting intermediary. The robotaxi company would know me only as "PrivacyProxy 12323423" and I would have an independent relationship with PrivacyProxy Inc. which would accept responsibility for any damage I do to the car, and bill me for it or take money from my bond if I'm truly anonymous.
Without the proxy, robotaxi operators will want some sort of direct accountability from passengers for any problems they might cause. Even for the middle class, it mostly means being identified, so if damage is found, you can be tracked down and made to pay. The middle class have ability to pay, and credit. The poor don't, at least many of them don't.
People with some level of identity (an address, a job) have ways to be accountable. If the damage rises to the level where refusing to fix it is a crime at some level, fear of the justice system might work, but it's unlikely the police are going to knock on somebody's door for throwing up in a car.
In the future, I expect just about everybody of all income levels will have smartphones, and plans (though prepaid plans are more common at lower income levels.) One could volunteer to be accountable via the phone plan, losing your phone number if you aren't. Indeed, it's going to be hard to summon a car without a phone, though it will also be possible using internet terminals, kiosks and borrowing the phones of others.
A likely solution, seen already in the car rental industry, is to charge extra for insurance for those who can't prove accountability another way. Car rental company insurance is grossly overpriced, and I never buy it because I have personal insurance and credit cards to cover such issues. Those who don't often have to pay this higher price.
It's still a sad reality to imagine the poor having to pay more for rides than for the rich.
An option to mitigate this might be cars aimed at carrying those who are higher risk. These cars might be a bit more able to withstand wear and tear. Their interiors might be more like bus interiors, easily cleaned and harder to damage, rather than luxury leather which will probably be only for the wealthier. To get one, you might have to wait longer. While a middle-class customer ordering a cheap car might be sent a luxury car because that's what's spare at the time, it is less likely an untrusted and poor customer would get that.
Before we go do far, I predict the cost of robotaxi rides will get well below $1/mile, heading down to 30 cents/mile. Even with a 30% surcharge, that's still cheaper than what we have today, in fact it's cheaper than a bus ticket in many towns, certainly cheaper than an unsubsidized bus ticket which tends to run $5-$6. Still my hope for robotaxi service is that it makes good transportation more available to everybody, and having it cost more for the poor is a defect.
In addition, as long as damage levels remain low, as a comment points out, perhaps the added cost on every ride would be small enough that you don't need worry about this for poor or rich. (Though having no cost to doing so does mean more spilled food, drink and sadly, vomit.)
Over time, fortunately, poor riders could develop reputations for treating vehicles well. Build enough reputation and you might have access to the same fleet and prices that the middle class do, or at least much cheaper insurance. Cause a problem and you might lose the reputation. It would be possible to build such a reputation anonymously, though I suspect most people and companies would prefer to tie it to identity, erasing privacy. Anonymous reputations in particular can be sold or stolen which presents an issue. One option is to tie the reputation to a photo, but not a name. When you get in the car, it would confirm you match the photo, but would not immediately know your name. (In the future, though, police and database companies will be able to turn the photo into a name easily enough.)
Poor riders would still have to pay more to start, probably, or suffer the other indignities of the lower class ride. However, a poor rider who develops a sterling reservation might be able to get some of that early surcharge back later. (Not if it's insurance. You can't get insurance back if you don't use it, it doesn't work that way!)
It could also be possible for the poor to get friends to vouch for them and give them some starter reputation.
Unfortunately, poor who squander their reputation (or worse, just ride with friends who trash a car) could find themselves unable to travel except at high cost they can't afford. It could be like losing your car.
The government will have an interest in making sure the poor are not left out of this mobility revolution. As such, there might be some subsidy program to help people get going, and a safety net for loss of reputation. This of course comes with a cost. Taxes would pay for the insurance to fix cars that are damaged by riders unable to be held accountable.
The alternative, after all, is needing to continue otherwise unprofitable transit services with human drivers just for the sake of these people who can't get private robocar rides. Transit may continue (though without human drivers) at peak times, but it almost surely vanishes off-peak if not for this.
I'm doing a lot of flying these days for international speaking and consulting, and I try whenever possible to have 2 or more clients when I fly overseas, since the trips and time-changes can be draining.
Back in 2008, I proposed the idea of a scanner club which would share high-end scanning equipment to rid of houses of the glut of paper. It's a harder problem than it sounds. I bought a high-end Fujitsu office scanner (original price $5K, but I paid a lot less) and it's done some things for me, but it's still way too hard to use on general scanning problems.
You've probably noticed that with many of our portable devices, especially phones and tablets, a large fraction of the size and weight are the battery. Battery technology keeps improving, and costs go down, and there are dreams of fancy new chemistries and even ultracapacitors, but this has become a dominant issue.
Every device seems to have a different battery. Industrial designers work very hard on the design of their devices, and they don't want to be constrained by having to standardize the battery space. In many devices, they are even giving up the replaceable battery in the interests of good design. The existing standard battery sizes, such as the AA, AAA and even the AAAA and other less common sizes are just not suitable for a lot of our devices, and while cylindrical form factors make the most sense for many cell designs they don't fit well in the design of small devices.
So what's holding back a new generation of standardization in batteries? Is it the factors named above, the fact that tech is changing rapidly, or something else?
I would propose a small, thin modular battery that I would call the EStick, for energy stick. The smaller EStick sizes would be thin enough for cell phones. The goal would be to have more than one b-stick, or at least more than one battery in a typical device. Because of the packaging and connections, that would mean a modest reduction in battery capacity -- normally a horrible idea -- but some of the advantages might make it worth it.
There are several reasons to have multiple sticks or batteries in a device. In particular, you want the ability to quickly and easily swap at least one stick while the device is still operating, though it might switch to a lower power mode during the swap. The stick slot would have a spring loaded snap, as is common in many devices like cameras, though there may be desire for a door in addition.
Swapping presents the issue that not all the cells are at the same charge level and voltage. This is generally a bad thing, but modern voltage control electronics has reached the level where this should be possible with smaller and smaller electronics. It is possible with some devices to simply use one stick at a time, as long as that provides enough current. This uses up the battery lifetime faster, and means less capacity, but is simpler.
The quick hot swap offers the potential for indefinite battery life. In particular, it means that very small devices, such as wearable computers (watches, glasses and the like) could run a long time. They might run only 3-4 hours on a single stick, but a user could keep a supply of sticks in a pocket or bag to get arbitrary lifetime. Tiny devices that nobody would ever use because "that would only last 2 hours" could become practical.
While 2 or more sticks would be best for swap, a single stick and an internal battery or capacitor, combined with a sleep mode that can survive for 20-30 seconds without a battery could be OK.
This is a challenge to blog readers to come up with (or find examples in practice) of good systems to allocate students to parallel sessions based on their preferences. I've just concluded one round of this, and the bidding system I built worked OK, but is not perfect.
The problem: Around 80 students. On 10 days over 4 weeks they will be split into 3-5 different parallel sessions on those days. Many sessions have a cap on the number of students, and more students will have them as a 1st choice than can fit. Some sessions can take many students and won't fill up. The students can express their preference as ranking, or with numeric values.
This is known in the literature as the Allocation problem, and there are various approaches, though none I found seemed to fit just right, either being easy to code or having existing running code. But I am keen on pointers.
The goals:
This was used in the prior year. Much like a traditional sign-up sheet in some ways, students could indicate their choices in order. If more students had a session as 1st choice than would fit, the ones who filled out their form first got in. This gave priority over all 10 days and so it was changed to rotate each week to distribute who was first in line.
I have written before about letting passengers pay for an empty middle seat next to them and recently about ANZ's cuddle class and related programs which partially implement this.
While I believe airlines could sell the empty middle for somewhere in the range of 30-40% of a regular ticket, this still has issues. In particular, are they really going to bump a poor standby passenger who had a cancelled flight and make them stay another night so that people can get a more comfortable seat?
One idea is to allow the sale of empty middles by dutch auction. In effect this would say, "If there are going to be empty middles on this plane, those who bid the most will get to sit next to them." If this can be done, it's a goldmine of extra revenue for the airline. What they sell costs them nothing -- they are just selling the distribution of passengers on the plane. If the plane fills up, however, they sell it all and nobody is charged.
The dutch auction approach would let each passenger make an offer. If there are 5 empty middles, then the 10 people who sit next to them win, but they all pay the 10th highest bid price. If only 9 passengers bid, the 10th highest price is zero, and everybody pays zero -- which is what happens today, except it's semi-random. While this may seem like a loss for the airline, many game theory tests suggest that dutch auctions often bring the best result, as they make both sides happy, and people bid more, knowing they will actually pay the fair price if they win.
(On the other hand, airlines are masters at having two people pay vastly different prices for exactly the same thing and have managed to avoid too much resentment over it.)
There is one huge problem to solve: How do you arrange that matched bidders are sitting together to share the empty middle? Each empty middle benefits two passengers.
In 2004, I described a system that would allow secure voting over an insecure internet and PC. Of late, I have been pondering the question of how to build a "turn-key democracy kit" -- a suite of tools and services that could be used by a newly born democracy to smoothly create a new state. We've seen a surprising number of new states and revolutions in the last few years, and I expect we'll see more.
One likely goal after any revolution is to quickly hold some sort of meaningful election so that it's clear the new regime has popular support and is not just another autocracy replacing the old one. You don't have time to elect a full government (and may not want to due to passions) but at some point you need some sort of government that is accountable to the people to oversee the transition to a stable democracy.
This may create a need for a quick, cheap, simple and reliable election. Even though I am generally quite opposed to the use of voting machines, particularly voting machines which only record results in digital form, there are a number of advantages to digital voting over cell phones and PCs in a new country, at least in a country that has a digital or mobile phone infrastructure established enough so that everybody, even if they don't have a phone, knows someone who has one.
Consider:
It may be judged that the risks of corruption of a digital or partially digital election may be less than the risks of a traditional polling place election in a volatile area. It may also be hard to build and operate trustable polling places in remote locations, and do it quickly.
The big issue I see is maintaining secret ballot. It is difficult to protect secret ballot with remote voting, and much easier in polling-station voting. If secret ballot is not adequately protected, forces could use intimidation to make sure people vote the right way, or in some cases to buy votes. I am not sure I have a really good solution to this and welcome input; this is an idea in the making.
You're driving down the road. You see another car on the road with you that has a problem. The lights are off and it's dusk. There is something loose that may break off. There's something left on the roof or the trunk is not closed -- any number of things. How do you tell the driver that they need to stop and check? I've tried sometimes and they mostly think you are some sort of crazy, driving to close to them, waving at them, honking or shouting. Perhaps after a few people do it they figure it out.
For many years I have had a popular article on what lenses to buy for a Canon DSLR. I shoot with Canon, but much of the advice is universal, so I am translating the article into Nikon.
If you shoot Nikon and are familiar with a variety of lenses for them, I would appreciate your comments. At the start of the article I indicate the main questions I would like people's opinions on, such as moderately priced wide angle lenses, as well as regular zooms.
I have the photo archives of a theatre company I was involved with for 12 years. It is coming upon its 50th anniversary. I have a high speed automatic scanner, so I am going to generate scans of many of the photos -- that part is not too hard. Even easier for modern groups in the digital age, where the photos are already digital and date-tagged.
It's now becoming common to kludge a conference "backchannel" onto Twitter. I am quite ambivalent about this. I don't think Twitter works nearly as well as an internal backchannel, even though there are some very nice and fancy twitter clients to help make this look nicer.
But the real problem comes from the public/private confusion. Tweets are (generally) public, and even if tagged by a hashtag to be seen by those tracking an event, they are also seen by your regular followers. This has the following consequences, good and bad.
Dedicated backchannels are better, I think. They don't reach the outside world unless the outsiders decide to subscribe to them, but I think that's a plus. I think the right answer is a dedicated, internal-only backchannel, combined with a minimal amount of tweeting to the public (not the meeting audience) for those who want to give their followers some snippets of the conferences their friends are going to. The public tweets may not use a hashtag at all, or a different one from the "official" backchannel as they are not meant for people at the conference.
The most common dedicated backchannel tool is IRC. While IRC has its flaws, it is much better at many things than any of the web applications I have seen for backchannel. It's faster and has a wide variety of clients available to use with it. While this is rarely done, it is also possible for conferences to put an IRC server on their own LAN so the backchannel is entirely local, and even keeps working when the connection to the outside world gets congested, as is common on conference LANs. I'm not saying IRC is ideal, but until something better comes along, it works. Due to the speed, IRC backchannels tend to be much more rapid fire, with dialog, jokes, questions and answers. Some might view this as a bug, and there are arguments that slowing things down is good, but Twitter is not the way to attain that.
However, we won't stop those who like to do it via Twitter. As noted, conferences like it because it spams the tweetsphere with mentions of their event.
I would love to see an IRC Bot designed to gateway with the Twitter world. Here are some of the features it might have.