Telephones and telephone operators, as telephone exchanges became automated

 Earlier experiences in automation may be helpful in thinking about current technologies. Here's a paper about automation that replaced telephone operators, largely in the early 20th Century.  (But in 1980, when I lived in Farmer City Illinois, our telephone provider was GTE (General Telephone & Electronics Corporation), not AT&T, and they still relied in part on human operators.)

Answering the Call of Automation: How the Labor Market Adjusted to Mechanizing Telephone Operation by James Feigenbaum and Daniel P Gross, The Quarterly Journal of Economics, forthcoming

Abstract: In the early 1900s, telephone operation was among the most common jobs for American women, and telephone operators were ubiquitous. Between 1920 and 1940, AT&T undertook one of the largest automation investments in modern history, replacing operators with mechanical switching technology in over half of the U.S. telephone network. Using variation across U.S. cities in the timing of adoption, we study how this wave of automation affected the labor market for young women. Although automation eliminated most of these jobs, it did not reduce future cohorts’ overall employment: the decline in operators was counteracted by employment growth in middle-skill clerical jobs and lower-skill service jobs, including in new categories of work. Using a new genealogy-based census-linking method, we show that incumbent telephone operators were most impacted, and a decade later more likely to be in lower-paying occupations or no longer working.

Digital data yields suspect in Idaho murders (NYT)

 The NYT has the story of how a wide ranging search of a large variety of digital data  led to an arrest of a suspect (whose trial hasn't yet begun):

“Inside the Hunt for the Idaho Killer,” by Mike Baker, New York Times, June 10, 2023

"“Online shopping, car sales, carrying a cellphone, drives along city streets and amateur genealogy all played roles in an investigation that was solved, in the end, as much through technology as traditional sleuthing.

...

"A week after the killings, records show, investigators were on the lookout for a certain type of vehicle: Nissan Sentras from the model years 2019 to 2023. Quietly, they ran down details on thousands of such vehicles, including the owners’ addresses, license plate numbers and the color of each sedan.

"But further scrutiny of the video footage produced more clarity, and on Nov. 25 the police in Moscow asked law enforcement agencies to look for a different type of car with a similar shape: white Hyundai Elantras from the model years 2011 to 2013.

"Just across the state border, at Washington State University, campus police officers began looking through their records for Elantras registered there. 

...

"The hunt broadened as investigators vacuumed up more records and data. They had already sought cellphone data for all phones that pinged cell towers within a half-mile of the victims’ house from 3 a.m. to 5 a.m., according to search warrant filings. 

...

"after getting back data on [one of the victim]’s account on the Tinder dating app, detectives asked for details on 19 specific account-holders, including their locations, credit card information and any “private images, pictures or videos” associated with the accounts.

...

"Investigators were also working with a key piece of evidence: a Ka-Bar knife sheath, branded with a U.S. Marine Corps logo, that had been found next to two of the victims. They initially began looking for local stores that may have sold the weapon, and then fanned out.

"A request to Amazon sought the order histories of account holders who had purchased such knives. A follow-up request to eBay focused on a series of specific users, seeking their purchase histories. Some had connections to the area — including one in Idaho and two in Washington State...

...

"Forensic teams had examined the knife sheath and found DNA that did not belong to any of the inhabitants of the house. They ran the sample through the F.B.I.’s database, which contains millions of DNA profiles of past criminal offenders, but according to three people briefed on the case, they did not get a match.

"At that point, investigators decided to try genetic genealogy, a method that until now has been used primarily to solve cold cases, not active murder investigations.

...

"F.B.I. personnel ...{spent] days building out a family tree that began with a distant relative.

"By the morning of Dec. 19, records show, investigators had a name: Bryan Kohberger. He had a white Elantra. He was a student at a university eight miles from the murder scene.

...

"On Dec. 23, investigators sought and received Mr. Kohberger’s cellphone records. The results added more to their suspicions: His phone was moving around in the early morning hours of Nov. 13, but was disconnected from cell networks — perhaps turned off — in the two hours around when the killings occurred.

"Four days later, agents in Pennsylvania managed to retrieve some trash from Mr. Kohberger’s family residence, sending the material to the Idaho State Police forensic lab. Checking it against their original DNA profile, the lab was able to reach a game-changing conclusion: The DNA in the trash belonged to a close relative of whoever had left DNA on the knife sheath.

"Mr. Kohberger was arrested on Dec. 30."

Snowden and state surveillance: the view from The Guardian, ten years later

 Here's a look back at the Snowden affair (publication of documents about government surveillance) by the then editor in chief of the Guardian, one of the newspapers that took the lead.

Ten years ago, Edward Snowden warned us about state spying. Spare a thought for him, and worry about the future by Alan Rusbridger

"one story the Guardian published 10 years ago today exploded with the force of an earthquake.

"The article revealed that the US National Security Agency (NSA) was collecting the phone records of millions of Verizon customers. In case anyone doubted the veracity of the claims, we were able to publish the top secret court order handed down by the foreign intelligence surveillance court (Fisa), which granted the US government the right to hold and scrutinise the metadata of millions of phone calls by American citizens.

...this was but the tip of a very large and ominous iceberg.

...

"the Guardian (joined by the Washington Post, New York Times and ProPublica) led the way in publishing dozens more documents disclosing the extent to which US, UK, Australian and other allied governments were building the apparatus for a system of mass surveillance

...

"It led to multiple court actions in which governments were found to have been in breach of their constitutional and/or legal obligations. It led to a scramble by governments to retrospectively pass legislation sanctioning the activities they had been covertly undertaking. And it has led to a number of stable-door attempts to make sure journalists could never again do what the Guardian and others did 10 years ago.

"Even now the British government, in hastily revising the laws around official secrecy, is trying to ensure that any editor who behaved as I did 10 years ago would face up to 14 years in prison.

...

"The British government believed that, by ordering the destruction of the Guardian computers, they would effectively silence us. In fact, we simply transferred the centre of publications to New York, under ​the paper’s then US editor, Janine Gibson.

...

"The notion that the state has no right to enter a home and seize papers was established in English law in the famous case of Entick v Carrington (1765), which later became the basis for the US fourth amendment. In a famous passage, Lord Camden declared: “By the laws of England, every invasion of private property, be it ever so minute, is a trespass.”

"When I went out to talk about the Snowden case to assorted audiences (including, after a suitable gap, at MI5 itself), I would begin by asking who in the audience would be happy to hand over all their papers to a police officer knocking on their front door, even if they assured them they would only examine them if there was sufficient cause.

"Never, in any of these talks, did a single member of any audience raise a hand. Yes, people valued their security and were open to persuasion that, with due process and proper oversight, there would be occasions when the state and its agencies should be granted intrusive powers​ in specific circumstances​. But the idea of blanket, suspicionless surveillance – give us the entire haystack and we’ll search for the needle if and when it suits us – was repellent to most people."

CHOICE SCREEN AUCTIONS by Michael Ostrovsky

 Mike Ostrovsky points out that small design decisions can have big consequences, and considers how European regulations have caused search engines to be allocated on Android phones.

CHOICE SCREEN AUCTIONS by Michael Ostrovsky, NBER Working Paper http://www.nber.org/papers/  (a less gated version is here)

"ABSTRACT: Choice screen auctions have been recently deployed in 31 European countries, allowing consumers to choose their preferred search engine on Google's Android platform instead of being automatically defaulted to Google's own search engine. I show that a seemingly minor detail in the design of these auctions—whether they are conducted on a “per appearance” or a “per install” basis—plays a major role in the mix and characteristics of auction winners, and, consequently, in their expected overall market share. I also show that “per install” auctions distort the incentives of alternative search engines toward extracting as much revenue as possible from each user who installs them, at the expense of lowering the expected number of such users. The distortion becomes worse as the auction gets more competitive and the number of bidders increases. Empirical evidence from Android choice screen auctions conducted in 2020 is consistent with my theoretical results."

The auction rules: "In each country auction, search providers will state the price that they are willing to pay each time a user selects them from the choice screen in the given country. The three highest bidders will appear in the choice screen for that country. The provider that is selected by the user will pay the amount of the fourth-highest bid."

...

"In this paper, I show that a seemingly minor detail of the implementation of choice screen auctions plays a major role in their outcomes—and thus in the overall effectiveness of the antitrust remedy. Specifically, while the answer in the Q&A section of the document states that an auction “allows search providers to decide what value they place on appearing in the choice screen and to bid accordingly,” the auction, as implemented, charges these providers not for appearing in the choice screen but for being chosen by a user. 

"While the difference may seem to be just a matter of language, it is not. To see the intuition for the difference, consider a version of the auction with just one available spot and two bidders. Bidder A gets revenue $10 from each user who installs its search engine, and if it is shown as an option in the choice screen, then the probability that a user will choose it is 10%. Bidder B gets revenue $20 from each user who installs its search engine, but the probability that a user will choose it (if it is shown as an option in the choice screen) is only 1%. The value that bidder A has for appearing on the screen is therefore $1, and the value that bidder B has for appearing on the screen is $0.20. Thus, if the auction is conducted on the “per appearance” basis, then bidder A will win, will pay $0.20 per appearance, and will have its search engine chosen by users 10% of the time, while the dominant platform’s own search engine will be chosen 90% of the time. If, instead, the auction is conducted as implemented, with bidding and payment on the “per install” basis, then bidder B will win and will pay $10 every time its search engine is chosen (corresponding to $0.10 per appearance). The winner’s search engine will be chosen only 1% of the time, and the dominant platform’s one will be chosen the remaining 99% of the time. Thus, relative to the per appearance auction, the per install auction results in a lower likelihood that an alternative search engine will be chosen by the user (making it correspondingly more attractive to the dominant platform) and gives advantage to search engines that generate higher revenue per user vs. those that are more popular but generate less revenue on a per-user basis. I

The wholesale market for iPhone Apps

Joshua Gans reports: The Wholesale App Market opens.

Industry standards: cell phone chargers

One way to increase the market for a technology is to make it more commodity like, by adopting an industry standard. So it is very welcome news that Universal cell phone chargers are coming 'soon'.

"On Tuesday, the GSMA trade association announced at its 2009 Mobile World Congress here that it has brokered a deal with the world's leading handset makers to come up with a standard for charging cell phones.
All the major handset makers, including, LG, Motorola, Nokia, Samsung, and Sony Ericsson, have agreed to use the Micro-USB technology as the common universal charging interface, Rob Conway, GSMA CEO, said during the opening keynote speech Tuesday. By 2012, the GSMA promises, most cell phones will use the same kind of connector to charge their batteries.
Seventeen mobile operators, including Vodafone, Orange, and Telofonic, announced they are committed to implementing the standard for the universal mobile phone charger. "

Telephone call pricing between telephone companies

Ever wonder how payments are regulated/arranged between phone companies when you call someone who is a customer of a different company?
FCC Scraps Vote on Controversial Phone-Rate Plan

"Mr. Martin had proposed to lower the rates phone carriers pay each other to transfer calls to almost nothing and allow companies that would lose money from the change to raise their monthly subscriber rates by as much as $1.50 for residential phone lines. Business increases would have gone as high as $2.50 per month.
The current phone-exchange payment system, which dates back to the breakup of the Bell system in 1984, is widely divergent, with some carriers charging a fraction of a penny per minute for outside calls to their customers and others charging hundreds of times that much for the same service.
The FCC has for years tried to reform the payment system, but policy makers and industry sectors can't agree on a solution."