Wednesday, July 30, 2003 Bomber bingo! Okay, Scott Rosenberg says it far better (or at least far more coherently amd/or with less spittle) than I could: The news that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) -- the agency whose predecessors were responsible for the primordial development of the Internet -- has planned to open an anonymous global futures market or gambling parlor in which participants can bet on future terrorist acts has elicited understandable perplexity and consternation. Sen. Byron Dorgan tells the New York Times he has had trouble persuading people it's not a hoax. But the project does not seem quite so outlandish if you are versed in the latest trendy theories of the market and emergent behavior. The Web is full of these operations, play markets in celebrity and reputation, most of them relatively frivolous or fun, like blogshares or the Hollywood Stock Exchange. Why not harness the collective wisdom of the market to save terror victims' lives? Why not let the invisible hand stop the terrorist's hand? Here's why. Markets depend on good information. The DARPA plan is based on the theory that an open market will draw out the best information from multiple sources. That's fine if, in fact, the incentive of making money in the market is strong enough to overcome other motivations of participants. If you were a terrorist planning an attack, would you try to make a little money on the side by using your insider knowledge to place a winning bet? Or would you allocate a little extra money in your operating budget to placing decoy bets to delude those who you knew were turning to the U.S. military-funded terror market for intelligence? Or would you simply stay away, distrusting the market's anonymity mechanism on the assumption that its American designers will have built in some sort of back door? It's nearly impossible to imagine any set of circumstances in which this market would provide untainted information. Which leads us to the other problem, which just exploded in the face of the Bush administration: How could the folks at DARPA not understand that they had created an unbelievable PR gaffe? What tone-deaf idiot there couldn't see that the relatives of victims of terror attacks or the families of soldiers risking their lives ostensibly to fight terrorism might find it a wee bit disturbing that the government was funding an operation which, if it worked properly, would allow terrorists to profit from their knowledge of their plans? Here it is useful to remember that today's version of DARPA is the same outfit that brought us the infamous Total Information Awareness program. And all these brilliant efforts have been spearheaded by Admiral John Poindexter-- who apparently learned nothing from his years fending off conspiracy charges relating to his last bout of foreign policy innovation in the Iran-Contra scandal. If there were a futures market in Poindexter's career it would just have cratered. POSTCRIPT Apparently this project has already met a swift end. Think of it as a sort of anaerobic-bacteria idea -- hatched in the darkness of an agency, unable to survive once exposed to the oxygen of public awareness. [Scott Rosenberg's Links & Comment] I would merely add this: didn't the disaster of the easily-gamed deregulated electricity market in California teach them anything? 11:18:34 PM    Comment on this post! [] Tokyo-area buses, private railways to adopt Suica card. Daily Yomiuri July 28, 2003 [Moreover - Japan news] East Japan Railway Co. Suica commuter passes will also be used by many metropolitan area private railways, subways and buses from fiscal 2006 under a new name, JR East, private railway, subway and bus firms announced Monday. Suica is a commuter pass with a built-in integrated circuit. Suica users touch the pass to a designated spot on an automatic wicket to pass through it. Based on the Suica design, other companies will standardize their IC prepaid cards to develop a new common commuter pass/prepaid card, officials of the firms said. The firms plan to issue 15 million new Suica-type cards, one of the world's largest issuances of such IC passenger cards, they said. While this is a minor bit of news (and way in the future, to boot), it's still a welcome bit of simplification in my life. Tokyo is a spaghetti bowl of train and subway lines: start with the Japan Rail's Yamanote Line as a geographically defining loop around the central core of the city, with two companies running over a dozen subway lines inside, and JR and several private railways radiating out into the suburbs and further out. Close to 90% of Tokyo's approximately 1.6 million workers use the rail system. In total, the system consists of 299 km of JR lines, 225 km of subway lines, 333 km of private lines, and 47 km of new traffic lines. The subway handles 7.8 million passengers a year, while JR lines handle 14.6 million and private lines 13.9 million.   - from The Mega-Cities Project website Until a few years ago, each system was ticketed separately, which meant either buying individual tickets for each journey, or carrying a bunch of different train system fare cards. But the Tokyo-area subway lines (Eidan and Toei companies), private commuter railways* (Keio, Odakyu, Tobu, Seibu, Tokyu, and maybe a few others I missed) and 2 monorail lines (3, if you count the one at Tokyo Disneyland) got together, and now a single farecard works on all of them. Even the Tokyo Disneyland monorail. So now I only have to carry two separate farecards, including my Suica card. But there's still some overlap, since, weirdly enough, some JR trains and subways run on the same tracks sometimes. In my case, both the JR Chuo train line and the Eidan Tozaisubway line run east out of Mitaka until Nakano. On Mondays I have to enter through the JR gates at Musashi-Sakai and leave through the Tozai gates at Nihombashi. Which is fine if I buy a single journey ticket that I give up at the end. If I forget and use my JR farecard to enter, I have to stand in line at the ticket agent's desk at the other end and present my farecard. The agent uses a reader to figure out where I started, collects the required fare in cash from me, and gives me a little note to present to a JR ticket agent who will clear my farecard and make it usable again. Basically, a pain in the ass, and a less than seemless journey. Truth to tell, I think there's a larger implication here about the technology, which I'll have to pull together later. *Still called private, to distinguish them from the formerly government-owned Japan Rail system. 9:56:51 PM    Comment on this post! []