Bait bikes

Officer Matt Friedman fights crime with modern tools: Twitter, which he uses to publicize pictures of suspects and convicted criminals, and a GPS device, which he uses to track down stolen property.

In both cases, his lure is stolen bicycles — including the “bait bikes” that have recently been seeded throughout the city to tempt potential thieves. Equipped with GPS technology, the bicycles, which exist to be stolen, can be tracked down in real time and the thieves can be arrested. Then their photographs are posted to Twitter from the handle @SFPDBikeTheft. The bait bikes are of high value, to ensure that people caught taking them are charged with a felony.

Recently, for example, a thief took a $1,500 bicycle from outside a train stop and pedaled off into the sunset. But 30 minutes later, Officer Friedman and his team, having tracked the bike, converged on the rider at a park.

“You should have seen his face — he thought he was in the clear,” said Officer Friedman, 41, who carries a .40-caliber Sig Sauer semiautomatic and an iPhone 5, which he used that day to take a picture of the severed bike lock. He then posted an image on Twitter with the message: Thank You 4 Taking Our Bait Bike.
 

I hadn't heard of this new tactic before. As someone who had three bikes stolen while an undergrad, my instinct is to embrace any and all measures to fight bike crime, including the public shaming. As noted in the article, the University of Wisconsin, Madison saw a 40% drop in reported bike thefts the first year they rolled out a bait bike program.

However, the social cost here is fuzzier. As educator Zeynep Tufekci writes:

If you are still fuming at the memory of a bike being stolen (I am, even now) and wondering why these thieves should not get charged with felonies, ponder for a moment. [Added: an add other minor or major infractions for the next example: it’s not a perfect example.] Have you ever rolled through a stop sign? Have you failed to perfectly stop, ever? Rolling through stop signs puts people’s lives at risk and is done just as intentionally as stealing a bike. It’s more dangerous and destructive than stealing a bike. [Though it’s been pointed out by people who understand the laws better than I do that our criminal code does not view that as the same kind of intention as bike stealing. I don’t claim to be making a legal argument, but just trying to push our imagination politically.]

Sure, there is a cost to bike theft, and it is a problem. But there is also cost to rendering large numbers of people unemployable through felony convictions.

Now imagine a city in which areas in which tech workers lives were equipped with cameras that caught everyone who ever rolled through a stop sign. You got a felony charge, since the evidence was indisputable. You lost your job, and could never work in the same sector again. You can’t vote either. Maybe you have probation. Your life is ruined, forever, and fairly irrecoverably.
 

Officer Friedman, mentioned in the excerpt above, responded to charges of the program being a form of entrapment by noting that bait bikes

...are not simply left out unlocked for opportunistic types. (Unlike SFPD's reality TV-ready Bait Car program that was quickly halted a few years back.) They are locked up and then swiped by thieves with the tools to do so and the know-how to unload them. Like this recidivist on the street with an angle grinder, or these guys running a chop shop on 13th Street, or a notorious bike thieves in the East Bay.
 

If my bike were recovered through such a program, I'd just be happy to get it back. Having the thief charged with a felony would be unnecessarily harsh.

Perhaps technology will offer alternative solutions in the future. The cost of small tracking devices is coming down. Many crowdfunding projects are for little tracking tags or gizmos that you can attach to or put in your valuables to be able to detect their location on your phone. The problem is that most operate on Bluetooth and have limited range and battery life, but perhaps those problems can be overcome. In that world, theft might be less prevalent because of the increased difficulty of hiding the object.

One might argue that a bike thief could come up with electronic countermeasures to combat tracking devices, but most bike thieves are looking to unload bikes as soon as possible and not seeking to maximize their cash return on each component or the entire bike itself. The cost of countermeasures might not be worth the investment given the low cash return on each stolen bike.

Miscellany

1. High frequency trading, betting on tennis edition. Given that in tennis the gap in the number of points won between the winner and the loser is often quite low, the difference of knowing who one a particular game can often swing the result expectations from one side to the other, opening up quick and short-lived arbitrage windows.
2. Lance Stephenson, basketball buffoon. “Back when he was in high school, Stephenson appeared in a documentary directed by Adam Yauch, of the Beastie Boys, which centered on a pickup game between eight young basketball phenoms at Rucker Park, in Harlem. Joshua Hersh wrote about Stephenson’s role in the film for The New Yorker: “Stephenson appears to be having a lot of fun, throwing down slam dunks, and even, at one point, dancing a little jig. In the fourth quarter, muscling his way to a rebound, he smacks Love”—Kevin Love, then a player for U.C.L.A.—“in the face with his forearm, busting open his lip.”” This was prescient given Stephenson's slap of Norris Cole in the Heat's series-clinching victory the other day. I like the term “basketball buffoon.”
3. The ideological Turing Test. “The Ideological Turing Test is a concept invented by American economist Bryan Caplan to test whether a political or ideological partisan correctly understands the arguments of his or her intellectual adversaries: the partisan is invited to answer questions or write an essay posing as his opposite number. If neutral judges cannot tell the difference between the partisan’s answers and the answers of the opposite number, the candidate is judged to correctly understand the opposing side.”
4. Is it time to abolish the 7-day week? It is somewhat arbitrary, but I think the author minimizes the value of coordination in the knowledge economy. The tech world has already hacked the 7-day work week quite a bit. Many developers are nocturnal and work on a different cycle than other job functions.
5. Selfish Play Increases during High-Stakes NBA Games and Is Rewarded with More Lucrative Contracts. This isn't meant to be another veiled reference to Lance Stephenson, though I wouldn't blame you for thinking it was. There's no “I” in “team,” but there is in “raise.” One of the reasons basketball is one of the hardest sports to quantitatively assess player value in is that an individual's statistical performance doesn't always correlate to the team's performance. That's much less true in a sport like baseball which is much more of a series of discrete individual confrontations.
6. Virgin Atlantic reaches deal with US FAA on launching flights into space from New Mexico; first flight expected by end of 2014. Let's hope the Virgin Atlantic website is better than the Virgin America website. I'm not sure I can deal with the first world privilege that will be tweets from gazillionaires complaining they couldn't log on to purchase a space flight.

A.I.

This might be a reach, but I’ve come to think of A.I. as Spielberg “getting rid of his toys.” The movie slips in sly visual and thematic references to past Spielberg blockbusters: There’s an E.T. moon hanging in the background of more than one scene, multiple Close Encounters silhouettes, and a Jurassic Park-like debate about the moral responsibilities of scientists. Also, at one point, David listens to Monica read a story to Martin while partially blocking a piece of art so only the words “because I could” are visible—another callback to Jurassic Park, perhaps. Spielberg made several “mature” films before A.I., but this one at times seems almost like a direct indictment of his earlier inclinations toward juvenilia.
 

Noel Murray with a lovely essay on A.I. 

A.I. in particular still strikes me as a masterpiece. I thought it might be back in 2001; now I’m certain of it. But it isn’t any easier to watch in 2014 than it was before my first child was born. Like a lot of Spielberg’s films—even the earlier crowd-pleasers—A.I. is a pointed critique of human selfishness, and our tendency to assert our will and make bold, world-changing moves, with only passing regard for the long-term consequences. Spielberg carries this theme of misguided self-absorption to child-rearing, implying that parents program their kids to be cute love machines, unable to cope with the harshness of the real world. He also questions whether humankind is nothing but flesh-based technology, which emerged from the primordial ooze (represented in the opening shot of A.I. by a roiling ocean), and has been trained over millennia to respond to stimuli in socially appropriate ways. A.I. blurs the lines between human and mecha frequently, from an early shot of Monica that makes her look exactly like one of Professor Hobby’s creations, to the way Martin walks, thanks to mechanical legs.

This notion of humans as machines resonates with me because my son is on the autistic spectrum. We had no idea back when we watched A.I.in 2001 that part of our parenting duties would one day involve making our child understand what certain facial expressions mean. Privately, my wife and I call our son “Robot Boy,” referencing both a Guided By Voices song and A.I. But I’m not sure that raising an autistic child makes us any more attuned than most mothers and fathers to how much parenting is like programming—and how inadequate that programming can be. It’s brutal to watch A.I. and see Monica feed fairy tales to David before cutting him loose with a feeble, “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about the world.” It’s even more painful to know that if David needs a model for what life might be like on his own, he can look to Teddy, who’s self-sufficient, but lonely. The harshest lesson of A.I.—and one Spielberg doesn’t flinch from—is that inevitably, the Davids and Teddys are left to fend for themselves, armed with whatever half-considered advice and parables adults have thrown at them over the years. And that’s the hell of it.

Economics of dystopian landscapes

In the budget of a video game or a movie, writing is a very small wedge of the pie. The money all goes into other wedges. In both games and movies the production of visuals is very expensive, and the people responsible for creating those visuals hold sway in proportion to their share of the budget.

I hope I won’t come off as unduly cynical if I say that such people (or, barring that, their paymasters) are looking for the biggest possible bang for the buck. And it is much easier and cheaper to take the existing visual environment and degrade it than it is to create a new vision of the future from whole cloth. That’s why New York keeps getting destroyed in movies: it’s relatively easy to take an iconic structure like the Empire State Building or the Statue of Liberty and knock it over than it is to design a future environment from scratch. A few weeks ago I think I actually groaned out loud when I was watching OBLIVION and saw the wrecked Statue of Liberty sticking out of the ground. The same movie makes repeated use of a degraded version of the Empire State Building’s observation deck. If you view that in strictly economic terms–which is how studio executives think–this is an example of leveraging a set of expensive and carefully thought-out design decisions that were made in 1930 by the ESB’s architects and using them to create a compelling visual environment, for minimal budget, of a future world.
 

From an interview with Neal Stephenson.

That's an interesting theory about why futuristic landscapes in sci-fi movies are so often degraded versions of existing landscapes, but I'm skeptical. It seems just as likely to me that showing the wreckage of a recognizable landmark like the Statue of Liberty gives the audience a faux-realistic through line from the contemporary age to the date the movie is set in. The aging of the shared cultural landmark serves as a form of visual carbon dating, removing the need to rely on showing a specific year in a text preamble or overlay.

Any visual effects folks out there who know if Stephenson's theory is true, feel free to leave a comment.

Piketty and his critics

Nate Silver explains why we should be skeptical of both Piketty and his skeptics.

Piketty’s data sets are very detailed, and they aggregate data from many original sources. For instance, the data Piketty and the economist Gabriel Zucman compiled on wealth inequality in the United Kingdom for their paper “Capital is Back: Wealth-Income Ratios in Rich Countries, 1700-2010″ contains about 220 data series for the U.K. alone which are hard-coded into their spreadsheet. These data series are compiled from a wide array of original sources, which are reasonably well documented in the spreadsheet.

This type of data-collection exercise — many different data series over many different years, compiled from many countries and many sources — offers many opportunities for error. Part of the reason Piketty’s efforts are potentially valuable is because data on wealth inequality is lacking. But that also means his numbers will not have received as much scrutiny as other data sets.

...

What error rate is acceptable? The right answer is probably not “zero.” If researchers kept scrubbing data until it were perfect, they’d never have time for analysis. There comes a point of diminishing returns; that Hack Wilson had 191 RBIs during the 1930 season rather than 190 ought not have a material impact on any analysis of baseball player performance. At other times, entire articles or analyses or theories or paradigms are developed on the basis of deeply flawed data.

I don’t know where Piketty sits on this spectrum. However, I think Giles (and some of the commentary surrounding his work) could do a better job of describing Piketty’s error rate relative to the overall volume of data that was examined. If Giles scrutinized all of Piketty’s data and found a handful of errors, that would be very different from taking a small subsample of that data and finding it rife with mistakes.
 

It's striking how much discussion of Piketty's book has happened already. As Silver notes, this is peer review happening live and in the open.

That makes the book itself, which sits in my Kindle, already somewhat dated. I'd love for the Kindle or some other ebook service to evolve to be a platform for living books. You could see the original text, but the book itself would accumulate references and edits and notes from both the author and readers.

When I think of books as a social platform, I don't think of Goodreads, I think of living texts. That would be truly exciting, and the first book platform to support that would achieve some serious network effects. It's odd that in the age of the ever-living web page that our e-books are still so static and rigid in form. I'm still not sure why I can't leave notes on passages in books for friends and followers to discover when they open the text in their e-reader.