A couple years ago, the Australian quiz show "Spicks & Specs" asked its panelists to name the Australian folksong that could be heard in a popular hit single that was first released in 1979. The answer: "Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree," in the flute riff of the Grammy-winning band Men At Work's hit single, "Down Under."

Despite what some breathless news reports are claiming, damages will likely be limited — as CNN reports, the Larrikin is only claiming a percentage of revenues on Australian sales from the past six years, and the judge has already noted that he has not found that the flute riff is "a substantial part of Down Under or that it is the 'hook' of that song." Still, it's gotten me thinking about how many other copyright land mines might be out there, just waiting for someone (or some thing) to uncover the similarity between some riff and some other previous melody.

Musicians are always borrowing riffs and melodies from previous songs, from little riffs jazz musicians throw in as shout out to other songs to wholesale note-for-note copying. A few well-known examples include The Beach Boys hit "Surfin' USA," a note-for-note copy of Chuck Berry's "Sweet Little Sixteen." (Berry was granted writing credits to the former after a successful lawsuit.) The tune to the 1953 song Istanbul (Not Constantinople) is extremely similar to Irving Berlin's Puttin' On The Ritz. And the chorus to the 1923 hit "Yes! We Have No Bananas" is almost entirely made up of riffs from other songs.

That's just a few examples that have come to people's attention, but how many are out there that borrow from less obvious sources? How many are just waiting for a game show (or a new search engine) to copyright holders to a potential opportunity for some quick royalties? In the past few years it has become possible to search a music database for a recording by playing a snippit of a song or in some cases just by humming a melody. What is not yet possible is to automatically process an audio stream, tease out individual riffs and melody lines, and then find other earlier pieces that contain similar riffs and melody lines. But that kind of research is ongoing, and I have no doubt that it will be solved at some point. When that day comes, we will in essence be able to map out the genome of every music recording ever made, and from that we can lay bare the lineage of every song in history.

When that happens, how many other Kookaburras will we find?

Two of my coworkers, David Stork and Jorge Moraleda, have recently worked out the mathematics for what they call Lake Wobegon Dice. According to their paper (currently submitted for publication), Lake Wobegon Dice are

a set of n non-standard dice that have the following paradoxical property: on every (random) roll of a set, each die is more likely to roll greater than the set average than less than the set average; in a specific statistical sense, then, each die is "better than the set average."

The name, of course, comes from Garrison Keillor's famous tag-line about his fictional boyhood town where "all of the women are strong, all of the men are good looking, and all of the children are above average."

As an example, say I offered to play you in a game using three six-sided dice that have been specially manufactured to have the following number of pips on their faces:

The rules of the game are as follows: you pick one die which I must roll, and you roll the other two. If my die rolls higher than the average of your two dice (or equivalently, if my die rolls higher than the average of all three dice) then I win. Otherwise, you win.

With the faces chosen as above, there are only four unique ways the dice can fall:

As should be clear from the table, I have a two-in-three chance of winning the game, regardless of which die you make me roll.

Their paper presents a proof that there exist such a set of dice for every n ≥ 3, so long as you are free to choose the number of sides on each die and the number of pips on each side, and also provide a method for finding the optimal set. They also show that for any set of n dice it is possible to choose a number of faces and pips for each die such that only one die will ever roll below the mean on any given roll, and each die is equally likely to be the low die. This means in the game described above, for any set of n dice I have a probability of (n-1)/n of winning.

If you want to use similarly-sided dice then for more than three dice the number of sides required gets large very quickly. The optimal set for n=4 requires 12 sides per die, but for n=5 and n=6 you need 60 sides. That's because their construction method splits each die two groups, each group having a probability of 1-in-1, 1-in-2, 1-in-3, etc. up to 1-in-n. It's much easier if you allow heterogeneous dice, e.g. for n=6 you could use a combination of six-sided dice and a ten-sided die — a good excuse to break out your old collection of D&D dice.

Last week California State Assembly member Michael Duvall (R-Orange County) was caught bragging to a colleague about having an extra-marital affair — next to a live mike. Along with his rather graphic descriptions he happened to mentioned his paramour's age and birthday, and from this information OC Weekly was able to identify the woman:

"And so her birthday was Monday," he said at the Wednesday, July 8 committee hearing. "I was 54 on June 14, so for a month, she was 19 years younger than me...

According to voter-registration records reviewed by the Weekly, veteran Sacramento-based lobbyist Heidi DeJong Barsuglia turned 36 years old on Monday, July 6.

In this case there were other sources who also identified Ms. Barsuglia, and it's not clear from the story whether OC Weekly actually arrived at her name through voter-registration records or simply used them for corroboration. However, EFF's Deep Links reports that it's actually not that hard to identify someone based on a few pieces of seemingly innocuous information like birthday, gender and zip-code:

Gender, ZIP code, and birth date feel anonymous, but Prof. Sweeney was able to identify Governor Weld through them for two reasons. First, each of these facts about an individual (or other kinds of facts we might not usually think of as identifying) independently narrows down the population, so much so that the combination of (gender, ZIP code, birthdate) was unique for about 87% of the U.S. population.

The linked-to abstract also mentions that about half the U.S. population are likely to be uniquely identifiable by only place, gender and date of birth, where place is basically the city, town or municipality where the person resides. And even if a search in a city as big as Sacramento came up with several potential matches, the hit that also happens to be a lobbyist working in an industry under Duvall's committee would be easy to spot.

My wife and I tried attending Rep. Pete Stark's town hall meeting on health care, but the room had filled to capacity long before we arrived. The crowd was *overwhelmingly* in favor of health care reform and our representative's support for it. Of the well several hundred people that couldn't get in, I saw exactly two signs opposing reform (far fewer than were pushing for more reform, e.g. promoting a single-payer plan). The mood was friendly and non-confrontational, and I had lots of good conversations and discussions with my fellow citizens out on the lawn in spite of not getting into the meeting itself.

Here are some of my photos from the event, and the rally was also diary'd over at the Daily Kos.

Back in 2005 I posted about Zubbles — colored soap bubbles that don't stain your clothing. Well, three and a half years later they're finally shipping product! (Currently available as a two-pack of Presto Pink and Blazing Blue.)

The right to enforce patents is one of the powers specifically spelled out in the U.S. Constitution, which states that Congress shall have the power

To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;

A new study published in The Columbia Science and Technology Law Review suggests that, in fact, patents deter innovation. The authors (one of whom, coincidentally, was my old roommate in grad school) created a patent simulation game that allows players to "invent" new products by arranging a sequence of widgets. These products can be sold to consumers, and the value of a sequence in the marketplace is related to its subsequence, so it makes sense for players to try to build off of particularly valuable sub-sequences.

Once a player has invented a previously undiscovered sequence, he may choose to open source the discovery or to pay a fee and patent it. Open sourcing a sequence simply prevents anyone from patenting any sequence based on it, while patenting a sequence allows the patent holder to license the sequence to other players and to sue anyone who infringes on the patent. If a patent holder decides to enforce his patent against an infringer, both players decide how many lawyers they wish to hire (again for a fee), and the case is decided by (virtual) die roll. Patent holders may also sell a patent outright to another player.

The researchers ran subjects in either a pure-patent version of the game that did not allow open source, a mixed version that allowed both patent and open source options, and a pure-commons version where patents were not allowed at all. Players were recruited from the incoming law school class, and were told that the player with the most money at the end of a trial would be given a prize. Their results show that players in the pure commons version produced more innovation (number of inventions), more productivity (number of inventions made) and higher social utility (amount of money each player ended with) than either of the other two variations. (The amount of innovations was not statistically significant, the other two metrics were very significant). Interestingly enough, they found no significant difference between the pure patent system and the mixed system for any of the three metrics.

It's easy to nit-pick these kinds of simulation-based experiments, both in terms of how parameters are set and more generally whether the simulation captures enough of the real-world dynamics to be useful. One nit I have is that (near as I can tell) the market value of a product is the same regardless of how many competitors are selling the same product, which would eliminate one of the primary purposes of gaining patent protection. I also wonder whether the stated goal of making more money than your fellow players discouraged strategies that help everyone equally (a rising tide raising all ships), and in particular whether it might have discouraged use of the "open source" option in the mixed variation.

That said, it's an interesting study, and in their discussion the authors cite many empirical and theoretical studies in the past few decades that have also brought into question whether patents actually promote innovation in the real world. The authors also suggest the possibility of more studies using their PatentSim game, and possibly even creating an online massive multiplayer version, which would presumably allow players to develop their strategy and experience with the game over longer periods of time.

(Via RiteReadWeb)

My email to Senator Feinstein, asking her to support a public option for healthcare. (Links added for this post.)

Senator Feinstein,

I was dismayed to hear your name being lumped together with Republicans and a handful of Democrats who are trying to scuttle any health care bill that includes a viable public option. As you are no doubt aware, the recent high price tags cited by the CBO do not take into account any price savings that a public option would generate by negotiating lower drug prices, doctor fees, and hospital costs, and forcing private insurers to be more competitive. As former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich recently put it, "projecting the future costs of universal health care without including the public option is like predicting the number of people who will get sunburns this summer if nobody is allowed to buy sun lotion." I also believe, as do many experts, that a strong public option, unhampered by restrictions inserted at the behest of the insurance industry, is the surest way to bring down the spiraling costs that are eating up the budget of every family, every business and every state in The Union.

I understand how comments can be misinterpreted, and how often nuanced positions can be blown into a for-or-against bullet point, and so I hope you can set the record straight on your position by answering a simple question: Do you support immediate implementation of a public health-care option, undiluted by being broken into co-operatives and unfettered by restrictions as to its ability to negotiate for lower prices from drug companies and health-care providers? If not, what are your reasons for withholding your support?

Thank you, and I look forward to your response.

Sincerely,
Dr. Bradley Rhodes
Alameda, CA 94501

Update 6/24/2009: TPM just received a clarification from Feinstein's office on her position.

Update 7/21/2009: Here are the responses from Senators Feinstein and Boxer. The key paragraphs from Sen. Feinstein:

The key paragraph from Sen. Boxer:

I was pleased to be an original co-sponsor of S.Res.156, a resolution expressing the sense of the Senate that health care reform legislation should include the establishment of a federally backed insurance pool.

Introduced by Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH), S.Res.156 says that any reform of the nation's health care system should give consumers a choice of an affordable, federally backed option to introduce competition in the health insurance market and contain health care costs. I support this approach.

Reporting on Kodak's retiring of their famed Kodachrome film, NPR's All Things Considered, Melissa Block interviewed photographer Steve McCurry (emphasis mine):

I'm looking at one of your most iconic images, this is the photo of a young Afghan girl... she's wearing a brick-red head scarf and there's a green background and her eyes are just popping off the screen...

I think that just about says it all. You can also view an online gallery of what some of the great photos taken with Kodachrome look like after they've been scanned, digitized, and re-rendered on whatever computer monitor you happen to have. Such vivid colors!

Taiwanese display company Prime View International announced today it will be purchasing E Ink for about $215. PVI has been a long-time partner of E Ink, and supplies the backplane for the Amazon Kindle and Sony's eReader, which use E Ink's ink technology.

TechCrunch has a nice video showing off Plastic Logic's new prototype e-reader based on E Ink. Plastic Logic's main advantage is their plastic backplane (rather than glass) which is lighter and less fragile. They're also pitching their interface to focus more on business use — in particular the ability to annotate documents (using a touchscreen) and a sidebar that allows them jump to different pages more quickly.

This is just a prototype and so probably an unfair criticism, but I do note that when the demonstrator selects a different document and says "we are able to quickly move from any of the last five documents you've been reading" there is an 8.5 second delay before the new document comes up.