You may have heard that Apple announced a new iPad this week and that they released a version of iPhoto that runs on iPads and iPhones. Most folks seem to like it quite a bit, while a few people have complained that it’s unintuitive with all its mysterious icons and gestures. The problems with Apple’s “system” for managing and editing photos go much deeper and I find it incredibly frustrating because Apple has all the pieces for something truly fantastic.

What’s Crappy About the Current System:

1. The new iPhoto doesn’t run on the original iPad. I get it that I’m in the minority of people who like to buy a product and run into into the ground before upgrading. And I get it that it that some of the filters might be a little slow. But Adobe Photoshop Express runs well. I think their public reasoning is that the experience on my iPad would be sub-par. And it conveniently gives me another reason to upgrade. Fine. I’ll give Apple a pass on this one.

2. Why are Photos and iPhoto separate apps? I would understand if iPhoto had a superset of Photos’ features, but it doesn’t. Photos allows me to move photos between albums, create new albums, and do some minor editing. iPhoto has more powerful editing tools and lets me share photos with friends in different ways, but it doesn’t manage albums.

3. Any album management you do with Photos doesn’t get sync’ed back to the desktop version of iPhoto. So why would I possibly go to the trouble of organizing my photos on the phone itself? I would say this was a bug, but it’s been there since iOS 5 was released in October.

4. Photo Stream is a feature that doesn’t fit into my work flow. I can easily access all the photos I’ve taken over the last 30 days on any of my devices. If I want a photo that I took earlier than that, I must have moved it someplace more permanent during that 30 day window or I have to go back to the device where I took the picture.

5. I can’t easily share photos between my Mac and my wife’s PC. While Apple might think this increases the chance that she will upgrade to a Mac one of the days, this sort of thing just makes her dig her feet in and resent the “Apple’s walled garden” even more than she already does.

What Would Be a Lot Better:

It doesn’t have to be this way. My perfect world looks more like this:

1. iPhoto stores all my photos (and albums and events) in iCloud and replicates them on my Mac. Besides giving me a central repository that I can access from anywhere, it’s also my off-site backup.

2. iPhoto gets merged with the Photos app and it also accesses my photos in iCloud. This means any organization I do (e.g., moving photos between albums) happens in one place: iCloud. It also means that I don’t have to actually store all the photos (and home video clips) on the device itself—it can stream them as needed and manage a cache of them so it seems fast.

3. Apple provides a web app for browsing and organizing photos that could be used from a PC. Even better, they would open up the iCloud API so someone could write a version of iPhoto for the PC that used the same iCloud photo store, but that seems unlikely to happen.

4. Photostream gets replaced by something simpler that just dumps all photos taken by my devices into my iCloud photo store. If they get grouped as events (ala desktop iPhoto import) they’ll be easy to find when I want to organize them.

This dream system isn’t easy to build, but it’s not impossible either. I just hope that Apple isn’t sitting there thinking their current system is good enough or that it just needs a few minor tweeks. And I really hope that some improvements are in the pipeline. If iOS 6 isn’t a lot better, I might just have to switch my photo management to Google Picasa. And this Apple fan-boi certainly doesn’t want to do that.

The Beatles played mostly sugary upbeat pop songs. They have at least three songs about good mornings¹. They sang that “All You Need is Love” and “Octopus’s Garden” and “Yellow Submarine”. The whole band spent time in India getting in tune with their spiritual sides. John went on to “imagine all the people living life in peace” while Paul sang “Ebony and Ivory” with Stevie Wonder.

All that’s true. And so is the fact that they had a creepy obsession with violence against women and serial killers. It all started in 1965 with Rubber Soul’s final track: “Run for Your Life”. I’ll lyrics speak for themselves:

Well I'd rather see you dead, little girl
Than to be with another man
You better keep your head, little girl
Or I won't know where I am

You better run for your life if you can, little girl
Hide your head in the sand little girl
Catch you with another man 
That's the end'a little girl

They followed this in 1967 with Sgt. Pepper’s “Getting Better”. I loved this song when I was a kid and thought nothing of these lines:

I used to be cruel to my woman
I beat her and kept her apart 
  from the things that she loved
Man, I was mean but I'm changing my scene
And I'm doing the best that I can (ooh)

Unfortunately, things were not getting better. In 1968 the Beatles released the White Album which was full of songs that went on to inspire renowned serial killer Charles Manson. The lyrics to Manson’s favorite song (“Helter Skelter”) are a little opaque (e.g., “When I get to the bottom I go back to the top of the slide”) but Manson sure knew what they meant.

And finally, on the last album they recorded together (Abbey Road), the Beatles transparently glamourized a serial killer named Maxwell Edison who by the end of the song bludgeons to death two women and a male magistrate:

Bang, bang, Maxwell's silver hammer
Came down upon his head
Bang, bang, Maxwell's silver hammer
Made sure that he was dead

The Beatles were an incredibly talented and versatile band. They’ve inspired countless musicians over the years. Perhaps it’s time to give them credit for inspiring some 1990’s sicko metal (and nü-metal) bands like Slayer and Korn too.

This post has moved to Teach Better.

I’m a little embarrassed to say there were three important omissions from my monster book review article. So without further ado:

1. Jillian Jiggs to the Rescue: Jillian’s little sister is afraid of a monster so Jillian and her friends build a monster machine to shrink it and smash it into meatloaf. It’s a little violent for my taste, but R loves it and there is a good twist at the end.

2. That’s Not My Monster: My 10-month-old loves this book with all it’s textures and cuteness though I think it does run a close second to That’s Not My Lion in the series.

3. There’s a Monster at the End of This Book!: I absolutely loved this book when I was a kid and R definitely enjoys laughing at Grover at the end. Just don’t get me started on the iPhone App version

Sometimes I write because I’ve learned or created something interesting that I want to share. Sometimes I write because I’m so appalled by something I need to get it off my chest. But rarely is it both. About a week ago I was ready to write a scathing post describing my really great but really unstable home music system. Things are a lot better now, but I still wanted to share.

The hardware is a combination of old Apple parts and stereo equipment:

• An Airport Express that I bought on eBay for $55 connected to an old Bose Acoustic Wave (also bought on eBay) in the kitchen
• An iMac in the office with my entire 76 GB music collection stored in mp3’s and de-drm’ed AAC files
• A 1.0 AppleTV connected to a traditional stereo system in the living room

With this set up, I run iTunes on the Mac and can have it play in any or all of the three locations at any time. With the Remote iPhone app, I can control it from anywhere in the house. Sounds nice, right? Unfortunately, I would have to reboot my wireless router (a 2wire from Uverse) a couple times a day because the Remote app would spontaneously stop talking to the Mac. And then a few times a week I would have to reboot the Mac because it would stop talking to the kitchen Airport Express and the living room AppleTV. Grr….

I had no idea what was going on until I stopped using the Parallels virtual machine software on the Mac. I had been running MS Office in a Windows 7 vm, but finally got sick of the quirks and just installed the Mac native version of Office. It took me a couple weeks to notice that I never had to reboot the router again. Damn you Parallels! I don’t know how you messed up the network, but you did! Then I noticed that the Mac only stopped talking to the other devices when I used the Yale VPN. And when I got off and even quit out of the Cisco VPN app, it still couldn’t connect until I rebooted. Two applications messing up the network? Hmm….makes me wonder if maybe a bug in the OS is to blame.

So as of today, I still don’t know why those two apps were causing problems, but I don’t have any more surprises. I don’t use Parallels and I always reboot after using the VPN. This keeps the 80’s music flowing. The system still isn’t perfect. I want to add another output node in the basement. I want to install Airfoil and stream Spotify throughout the house. And the Remote app takes way longer than it should to connect when it starts. But for the most part, I can listen to whatever I want wherever I want and that makes me happy.

In Jared Diamond’s Guns Germs and Steel, he asserts that zebras cause more injuries to zoo keepers than any other animal. At least that’s how I remember it–I gave my copy away years ago and never replaced it. In any event, it’s common knowledge that zebras are mean and you can’t really tame them. Horses on the other hand are every little girl’s best friend and they are happy to wear garlands of flowers and nibble apples out of your hand. Why such a difference when on the surface zebras just seem like striped horses?

Before I go any further I should say that the rest of this post is a pure mixture of Wikipedia and armchair theorizing. You have been warned.

The answer has to be geography. The savanna is a tough place. It’s got cheetahs, hyenas, wild dogs (that also make terrible pets), crocodiles (near the water anyway) and of course lions. Friendly and laid back on the savanna equals dead. You have to be fierce (zebras/meerkats), big (elephants/hippos/rhinos/giraffes) or fast and high strung (impalas and ostriches) to survive. But what about those friendly monkeys that like to sit on shoulders in the bazaar? Don’t they live on the savanna? Well they can watch the action from the tops of trees and eat their bananas in peace. Zebras don’t have that option.

The temperate grasslands where horses evolved are a whole different story. A lot more empty space and a lot fewer predators mean horses could afford to just horse around all day before humans came along and domesticated them. Even the temperate grassland predators are basically wild house pets. Wolves are genetically identical to dogs and nothing else is big enough to give a horse more than a kick in the shin.

Of course this very reasonable explanation doesn’t change the fact that it’s grossly unfair that we can’t ride zebras around for fun–I mean that would be so cool! Maybe someday someone will splice nice genes into the zebra (or striped genes into the horse) and I’ll get to live the dream. Until then I’ll stick to the mountain bike for my riding adventures. Oh well.

Update: This is wild speculation by someone who doesn’t know jack about zebras. If you want an expert’s opinion, based on real knowledge, check out Rory Young’s post on quora.com.

My three-year old daughter (R) is afraid of a variety of unusual things (like vacuum cleaners, our old housekeeper, Mango the stuffed monkey, and toy drills) and a few usual things (like the doctor) but for the most part she’s pretty brave. She loves all animals and creepy crawlies, and neither the dark nor heights phase her. Halloween is her favorite holiday and she still likes when we joke about all the vampires, mummies, and witches that live in the cemetary we drive by on our way to school. And some of her favorite books are about monsters. Most of these books seem to be written to help kids get over fears of monsters, but R just thinks they are hilarious. We recently came back from the library with a whole stack of monster books and it got me thinking about our all-time favorites.

1. The Monster Bed: A monster named Dennis is afraid of humans. We still call all monsters the monsters in our house Dennis. The art and rhymes are both great.

2. There’s a Nightmare in My Closet: Mercer Mayer wrote this long before he achieved fame and fortune with his Critter books and it has a little bit of an edge. Like many other books on this list, it starts with a kid afraid of monsters and ends with the monster being pretty nice. In the middle, the kid fires his gun at the monster. The monster cries, the kid feels bad, and next thing you know they are cuddled up in bed together.

3. Mrs. Muffley’s Monster: The art is kind of crazy and the story is goofy, but R loves it. And I do too.

4. The Patterson Puppies and the Midnight Monster Party: A puppy named Petra is scared of a monster that roams the house at night and neither her parents nor her three siblings can help her feel safe. But then they make a bunch of cookies and have a big party! A good time is had by all (including the monster) until mom and dad show up and send them back to bed. My daughter has this book at school and was so excited when she found it at the library. Our own copy from Amazon is on its way now.

5. Over in the Hollow: The old song “Over in the Meadow” has been remade to death by children’s book authors, but this version never gets old. We’re so lucky the vampires haven’t turned R into a biter.

6. The Goblin and the Empty Chair: Lots of kids books have two sets of jokes: one for the kids and one for the grown-ups that are along for the ride. This book has two stories. My daughter thinks it’s about a goblin who thinks he is ugly, helps some people, and then joins them for dinner. She has no idea that the family that the goblin helps is mourning the death of their son. Seriously, this is the Ordinary People picture book. It sounds crazy, but it works. And the art is awesome.

7. Birthday Monsters!: This board book is geared toward a younger audience, but I still laugh when I see the monsters raid the fridge during a game of hide-and-seek. Sandra Boynton has so many good books, but this might be my favorite.

Believe it or not, new wave isn’t dead. It may not be popular anymore, but several bands that haven’t had a hit in the US since the eighties are still producing great music. And I mean new music—they aren’t just not milking their catalog for “new” remixes and playing the state fair circuit in the summer.

While not all this new music is any good, you will be happy to know that I’ve done the hard work of listening to it over the last couple weeks to separate the wheat from the crap.

The Human League are (is?) absolutely the most under-rated new wave band of the eighties. About ten years ago I saw an eighties triple bill headlined by Boy George. He was good, but the Human League were totally unexpectedly fantastic. They nailed their old stuff (like (I’m Only) “Human”, “Fascination”, and “Don’t You Want Me”) and their then new stuff (from Secrets 2001) was just as good. It totally holds up today and I even love their 2011 album Credo. Except for the more contemporary dance beat on the lead track (Never Let Me Go) it could have been released in 1983.

The Pet Shop Boys disappeared from the US music scene at the end of the eighties, but, just like Kylie Minogue, they have continued putting out hit album after hit album in the UK. They’re still sensitive and synthy but their music has matured with them in a really good way. My favorite of their recent work is Release (2002), but the dance remixes of Fundamental (2006) are a lot of fun.

Morrissey: I loved the Smiths and would have cried when they broke up if I hadn’t discovered them long after the break-up had already happened. Morrissey has amazingly just continued to put out solid albums in the years since and thoroughly proven that he was the talented one and that Johnny Marr (like Wham’s Andrew Ridgely) was just along for the ride.

Depeche Mode I’ll be honest–I’m not one of those totally nutty Depeche Mode fans who believe Dave Gahan is God. And I left them behind after Violator (1989) even though “Policy of Truth” is one of my all time favorite songs. But they do continue to produce music and I did take a chance on Playing the Angel (2005). It has one good track (“Precious”) and the rest is crap. Am I still bitter about that? Yes.

The Cure The Cure are an amazing band and certainly Robert Smith is closer to God than Dave Gahan. Their range, from minimalist early new wave to syrupy pop to wall of sound, is impressive. When I saw them in 2003, I was blown away by Smith’s guitar playing of all things. That said, I’m not a huge fan of their recent stuff.

Tears for Fears Their first two albums (The Hurting and Songs from the Big Chair) hold up surprisingly well, but Seeds of Love was a little goofy even for me. They broke up in 1991 and Roland Orzabal released two kind of lousy albums still using the band’s name. They got back together and released Everyone Loves a Happy Ending in 2004 and I’ve tried to like it over the past few days. It sounds just like Seeds of Love and I’ll let you decide if that’s good or bad.

Howard Jones opened the same triple bill I mentioned above and I had such high hopes since I absolutely played Dream Into Action into the ground when I was in high school. Shoot, I still listen to it all the time! Unfortunately, the show was a big let down and everything he’s recorded since In the Running (1992) is in my opinion unlistenable.

A-ha! Most American’s think of A-ha as that one-hit wonder with the fun cartoony music video, but they happen to be the biggest band ever out of Norway and just broke up in 2010. It’s kind of hard to find their albums (read: they aren’t in the iTunes Store), but they do have a greatest hits (The Singles: 1984-2004)) that I’ve been enjoying.

Alphaville Released in 1984, “Big in Japan” and “Forever Young” are absolutely quintessential eighties new wave songs. I have a soft spot for their second (less successful) album, Afternoons in Utopia (1986) since I wore out the the cassette I copied from my freshman dorm roommate. But I just can’t listen to anything they’ve released since. And I’ve tried.

If you’ve managed to read to the bottom of this too-long post, you probably you loved the work of these guys (and girls) back in the day. I strongly recommend giving some of their newer stuff a listen. If you’re pleasantly surprised, keep an eye out for an upcoming post about newer bands that emulate this style even though it guarantees they’ll never get rich or even played on the radio. Hint: it’s now called SynthPop–maybe the world’s dorkiest musical genre.

Last week I saw Charles Courtemanche present an interesting paper about how people react to changes in food prices. Turns out the impatient people and those who might have trouble with commitment (to diets for example) are quicker to buy more food when the prices drop. The paper had some issues so I wouldn’t immediately go betting the farm on the results, but it used some measures of how people think about time that got me thinking.

The National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (1979 cohort) interviewed individuals age 14-22 in 1979 and continued to interview them every year until 1994 and every two years after that. It includes great data on schooling, employment, income, fertility, marriage, and cognitive skills. In 2006, they added two particularly interesting questions. First, they asked about trade-offs between getting money today versus one year later:

Suppose you have won a prize of $1000, which you can claim immediately. How- ever, you have the alternative of waiting one year to claim the prize. If you do wait, you will receive more than $1000. What is the smallest amount of money in addition to the $1000 you would have to receive one year from now to convince you to wait rather than claim the prize now?

Based on this question, it’s easy to compute an annual discount rate; i.e., how much an individual values the present over the past. If someone says they would be indifferent between $1000 today and $1100 a year from now, then their discount rate would be 1100/1000, or about 0.91. That is, a dollar today is only worth 91 cents a year from now.

In Courtemanche’s paper, they report that the average discount factor of respondents based on the first question is 0.59. That is, on average, people report indifference between $1000 today and $1684 a year from now. This is far far lower than any revealed preference measure I’ve ever seen. For example, in Keane and Wolpin’s classic 1997 paper, they estimate that the discount factor is 0.9367, based on career choices of young men in the same data set. Rust and Phelan’s 1997 paper reports an estimate of the discount factor of 0.98 based on retirement decisions of low income older men in another data set. And then there’s the fact that if people really did discount the future at a really high rate, why would they ever invest their money in assets that return 5-10%? Strange.

It turns out people sometimes report different annual discount rates depending on how long they have to wait–that is, they are inconsistent about how much they discount the future. You can get at the extent of this inconsistency by looking at answers to a second (very similar) question that was added to the NLSY in 2006:

Suppose you have won a prize of $1000, which you can claim immediately. How- ever, you can choose to wait one month to claim the prize. If you do wait, you will receive more than $1000. What is the smallest amount of money in addition to the $1000 you would have to receive one month from now to convince you to wait rather than claim the prize now?

You could compute an annual discount rate from this question too, and for many (most?) people it will be lower, because we think that people are “present-biased.” That is, as soon as they have to wait at all, there is a penalty. The average discount rate in the data based on this question is indeed lower: 0.28. Quasi-hyperbolic discounting formalizes the idea of present bias by saying that individuals discount future payments that are t periods away by β δ^t where β is the measure of present bias and δ is the “pure” measure of time preference.

The average estimates reported in the Courtemanche paper are 0.80 for β and 0.75 for δ. I don’t have much intuition for what these numbers should be, but Fang and Sliverman’s 2009 paper (published in International Economic Review) uses the NLSY 1979 to estimate them based on labor supply and welfare take-up decisions of single mothers. They get a very different number for β (0.34) and a kind of close one for δ (0.88). You can look at the glass as half-empty or half-full.

Personally, I find this inconsistency in estimates of people’s time inconsistency somewhat disturbing. It makes me wonder what would happen if the NLSY added a third question where the time people had to wait was even shorter. Like a day instead of month. This would give us another estimate of β. If it was very close to 0.28, I’d feel better about the theory of hyperbolic discounting. Perhaps these experiments have already been done in the lab? We’ve now reached the limits of my knowledge of this area.

In my house we read a lot of books to our kids. We read after school, on weekends, while traveling, during meals and (of course) right before bed. I was a voracious reader as a kid and I hope to impart this habit and pure love of reading to my kids. There’s something about reading a book and visualizing the scenes and action in your mind that expands your imagination much more than watching a movie ever could. Reading with your kids is also a just high quality parent-child time. You never have to press pause to stop and talk about issues raised in the story.

We also run a fairly gadget-friendly household. My wife and I often work at our computers, we both have iPhones, and our iPad is pretty much our living room computer. My three-year old has almost as many apps as I do. You would think we would be actively transitioning all our reading to e-books, but we’re not.

The Good

E-books have a lot of advantages over physical books. I love that you can load up an iPad with a few hundred and it weighs no more than a couple paperbacks. While picture books look like junk (if they are available at all) on the Kindle, they look fine on the iPad. Some e-books have a “read aloud” option and will repeat words and sentences with a touch. We don’t use these features much as a parent is usually the one reading, but it’s nice to have the option.

Pricing of e-books is generally higher than the used physical book price, but I think (hope?) it’s only a matter of time before that changes. I especially hope that the publishers realize that parents would love to buy “boxed sets” for a reasonable price. If I could buy all 26 of the Curious George books in the iBooks store for $52 (that’s $2 each) I’d jump on it. Instead, they charge between $3.99 and $8.99 each and I end up spending a total of $3.99 on George. We all lose out.

Availability is a similar story–it’s lousy now but I have high hopes it will get better. The great thing will be that once a book is in digital format, there’s no reason it should ever go out of print. So when I want a mint condition copy of Amy Tan’s Sagwa, The Chinese Siamese Cat I don’t have to wait a single minute. And if libraries can get in on the action, their catalogs will be amazing.

The Bad

As I’ve already mentioned, the current pricing and availability situation is atrocious for kids’ books. But these aren’t the only problems.

My iPad has a 9.7 inch display. The vast majority of the kids’ books in our house are a lot bigger. That means you either see a small version of the page or you’re constantly panning and zooming. Graeme Bass’ Legend of the Golden Snail is 12 inches by 22 inches open. That’s 25 inches diagonal (according to Pythagoras) and it’s going to be a long time before tablet displays get that big. The resolution on a printed page is a lot better than my iPad today, but that could presumably change in the next month or so. And you can completely forget about duplicating the Richard Scarry’s Biggest Word Book Ever! experience–it opens to 32 inches by 24 inches.

Even if I’m willing to give in on all this stuff for my three-year-old, there’s no way an e-book works for a one-year-old. We have close to 100 board books, touch and feel books, and cloth books that can withstand constant mouthing and provide good tactile feedback.

The Worrying

I’m mostly optimistic about the future of e-books for kids, but there is a trend that worries me. The kids’ e-books that get the most praise from critics and the highest ratings in the iOS app store tend to be the flashiest and most movie-like. Sesame Street’s The Monster at the End of This Book is a perfect example. It lasted about 5 minutes on my iPad before I saw my daughter’s eyes glaze over and I deleted it. The Critter books (e.g., Just Me and My Dad) aren’t much better. They at least let you read the story while you click around the page trying to make animals do funny things.

It’s not that I think interactive features are a bad thing in e-books, but I think they are a lot more appropriate in books for adults like The Elements: A Visual Exploration and Al Gore’s Our Choice. Even textbooks has a lot to gain from embedded movie clips, social network integration, and dynamic graphs. And I’m excited about the new iBooks Author software enabling a whole new wave of these kinds of books.

But God help us if children’s book publishers suddenly think they have tart up old content to get us to buy it electronically. Let my daughters and I imagine George riding his bike in the circus without turning it into mini-game. Let us laugh about Franklin’s messy closet without having to interactively explore it. And let us imagine the old lady whispering “hush” without having to hear it out loud.