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Linked List: February 13, 2007

Tuesday, 13 February 2007

One: A Space Odyssey 

2001: A Space Odyssey condensed into one minute, using Legos.

The Effect of File Sharing on Record Sales: An Empirical Analysis 

From the abstract for a paper by Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Koleman Strumpf, published in The University of Chicago’s Journal of Political Economy:

We match an extensive sample of downloads to U.S. sales data for a large number of albums. To establish causality, we instrument for downloads using data on international school holidays. Downloads have an effect on sales that is statistically indistinguishable from zero. Our estimates are inconsistent with claims that file sharing is the primary reason for the decline in music sales during our study period.

(Thanks to DF reader Carl Forde.)

Using Small Multiples to Get to ‘Aha!’ 

Matt Linderman has a neat Tufte-ian idea for how YouTube (or any other video site) could convey more information about a video clip before you play it: show multiple still frames.

Yahoo Taps Its Inner Startup 

BusinessWeek story on Yahoo’s new “Brickhouse” skunkworks division, which is headed by Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake. This is a great idea — maybe the best thing Yahoo could do.

Oceans 13 Teaser 

Sign me up for #14 too.

Russ Cox: ‘Regular Expression Matching Can Be Simple and Fast’ 

Interesting low-level white paper on the design of regular expression engines. The problem, as Cox sees it, is that most popular regex engines, while they run quickly in nearly all cases, are susceptible to certain patterns which can take extraordinarily long times to execute. (In practical terms, they never finish.)

However, there’s quite a bit of hand-waving in Cox’s proposed solution, which is a modified version of a regular expression engine devised by Unix co-creator Ken Thompson 40 years ago. Cox’s implementation doesn’t support backreferences or any modern regex syntax — I’d be a lot more intrigued if he hadn’t left these features as exercises for the reader. And I think Cox makes too much of the fact that what we now call “regular expressions” no longer fit the formal mathematical definition of regular expressions. I’m with Jeffrey Friedl here — this just means “regular expression” has taken on a new meaning, not that we should abandon the non-regular syntax.

(Thanks to Jim Correia.)

Yours Truly on The Hivelogic Radio Show 

I’m back for another guest spot on Dan Benjamin’s Hivelogic Radio Show podcast. Topics range from Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey to the iPhone and the idea of an embedded version of OS X. My guess is you’ll like it. Update: Now with comments enabled — Dan just added comments as a feature to his custom CMS.

(Dan’s previous episode, an interview with James Duncan Davidson, was really good, too.)