In the 1980s, before the dawn of the internet, France looked set to conquer the world of telecommunications writes Hugh Schofield. Highlights of his report include:

• In an attempt to establish its technological independence, France launched the Minitel system.
• These were beige boxed screens with keyboards and number pads attached.
• Users could punch in a few buttons and then connect to various services including banking, finance, weather prediction, and even sex phone lines.
• At its high-point – just before the internet became widespread – Minitel was present in 9 million households with 25 million users and 26,000 services.
• Part of the reason for its success is that it was given away for free by the telecom company to users.
• To set up a service businesses had to go through the telecom company, and get their approval. This bureaucracy might have been what killed it.
• In many ways the story of Minitel is the typical French story. Extraordinary innovation through government subsidized research which then slowly withers away due to the weight of bureaucracy.
• While Minitel will be ending this Saturday after exactly thirty years of service, it utilized a lot of the technologies familiar on the internet now, years before they were available in the United States.

To read much more including what exactly Minitel Rose was, what President Jacques Chirac boasted about it, what happened when they tried out the system in Ireland, why it failed to conquer the English-speaking world, which French President oversaw its creation, how the design of the system evolved over the years, and current technologies which owe something to it, click here.

Source: BBC News

The American Bureau of Labor Statistics compiles an annual time-use survey that takes a look at how Americans over the age of 15 spend their time. Using data from the survey we can see how the recession has changed how Americans spend their time:

• Americans work less. They worked 14.4 minutes a day more in 2007. This whole recession is about those 14 minutes.
• 11.4 minutes of those 14.4 have gone to sleep. Americans now sleep 8.42 hours a day.
• Americans also spent 7.8 more minutes a day watching television.
• The amount of time spent on household chores declined.

To read more including how this relates to GDP, what else has changed since 2007, what happened to the amount of volunteerism, and how men and women differ in how they spend their time, click here.

Source: EconoMonitor

The BBC took a look at the numbers behind the global sex trafficking industry. Details include:

• One Mexican town called Tenancingo is built upon sex trafficking. It has a population of 10,000 and 10% of them are thought to be traffickers. The men lure poor women into the town by promising them jobs or even marriage. They realize too late that they are to become sex slaves.
• A lot of the women are taken to New York and can only leave the building when their pimp transports them to a new location.
• The average victim is between the age of 14 and 19.
• The going rate is around $30 for 15 minutes. A girl will see 25-30 male clients in a shift, and the brothel will make $5,250 per girl per week.

The interactive infographic was produced by Laura Trevelyan, David Botti, Ignacio de los Reyes, Chuck Tayman, Nada Tawfik, Mark Bryson, Claire Shannon, and Luke Ward, and you can read more details including why law enforcement has been hampered, what New York is trying to do, and other information here.

Source: BBC News

On the 15^th anniversary of the launch of the once popular Winamp music player, Cyrus Farivar at Arstechnica took a look at how the software which was once poised to dominate the computer music industry lost its way. Highlights include:

• Winamp was developed by what became Nullsoft, a company run by Justin Frankel.
• The .mp3 player format had been developed by German scientists yet there was no good way to organize and play the music. Frankel’s Windows Advanced Multimedia Products (WinAMP) player was made to solve that problem.
• AOL acquired Winamp and a music streaming website called Spinner for $400 million in 1999. This was just before the disastrous merger between AOL and Time Warner in 2000.
• Winamp’s four person development team had a user base that was ten times the size of Spinner’s, and was showing much greater growth, yet Spinner was given control over the Winamp team, which had a very different culture.
• At the same time AOL was trying to convert users of Winamp into subscribers of its internet service. Yet by 2000 Winamp had more customers than AOL’s service subscribers – and Winamp’s customers were tech-savvy individuals who hated AOL. Winamp began to falter at the expense of attempts to broaden AOL’s subscriber base.
• The Winamp team created a music subscription service in 2000 but it didn’t come to market until 2003 – two years after Rhapsody launched its own service.
• Then the iPod and iTunes juggernaut crushed any hopes that Winamp had of dominating the music software space.
• Winamp is still surprisingly popular outside of the United States and there is some talk of a group of dedicated enthusiasts buying it from AOL with the hopes of reviving it.

To read many more details in an exhaustive, comprehensive, three page report that focuses on the history of the Winamp player, but also the wider development of the online music industry, where the executives who created Winamp work now, why Nullsoft was a maverich tech company, why Frankel resigned from the Winamp development team, how Winamp monetized its service, where Winamp’s users are now located, the recent interest that AOL has shown in reviving the player, and much more click here.

Source: Arstechnica

In The Net Delusion, Evgeny Morozov writes that digital technologies can suppress freedom, liberty and democracy rather than enhance it. Some of the fascinating technologies that Morozov describes being developed and used right now include:

• SAPIR : Search on Audio-visual content using Peer-to-peer Information Retrieval
  • An ambitious project funded by the European Union
  • Aims to create an audiovisual search engine that first automatically analyzes a photo, a video or sound recording; then extracts certain features to identify it; and finally uses these unique identifiers to search for similar content on the Internet.
  • For example: using SAPIR, an antigovernment chant from the streets of Tehran can be broken down into individual voices, which in turn, can then be compared to a universe of all possible voices that exist on amateur videos posted on YouTube.
• TOR : Anonymity Network.
  • Initially funded by the US Navy, but later became an independent project
  • Allows users to hide what they are browsing by first connecting to a random “proxy” node on the volunteer Tor network, and then using that node’s Internet connection to connect to the desired website
  • Guarantees the anonymity of its users: it’s like surfing on the Internet using many helpers who fetch all the websites you need, and thus make sure that you yourself are not directly exposed
• DDoS Attack: Distributed-Denial-of-Service attack.
  • It is becoming an increasingly popular way of silencing one’s opponents, by attacking the “target website” (e.g: has been used in Saudi Arabia to ban the philosophy-discussion-based website Tomaar)
  • All websites have occupancy limits. This attack takes advantage of resource constraints by sending fake visitors to the targeted websites. The fake visitors are generated by computers that have been infected with malware and viruses, thus allowing a third party to establish full control over them and use their resources in the way they choose
  • Today, the capacity to launch such attacks is frequently bought and sold on eBay for a few hundred dollars.

You can find this and much more in what is a fascinating book over here.

Source: The Net Delusion

Ethan Trex compiled a list of 10 individuals who switched careers after the age of 50, and did well; giving hope to senior citizens everywhere. Some notable examples include:

• Ronald Reagan. Perhaps the most fascinating success story of them all. He was an actor until he was first elected to public office at the age of 55.
• Colonel Sanders. The beloved KFC icon ran a motel and restaurant joint, until the construction of an interstate threatened business. That’s when he created the Kentucky Fried Chicken.
• Takichiro Mori was an economics professor until at 55 he became a real estate investor, putting his money into properties in Tokyo. He was the world’s richest man for a while although he never really got used to his fame.

To read more details about each of these individuals and to read the rest of the list which includes a man connected to decks of cards, a children books’ author, and a grandmother, click here.

Source: Mental Floss

Via: Newmark’s Door

Artnet has launched a set of indices which are meant to “measure price performance and other important market metrics for individual artists and artworks with the same rigorous standards used in financial indices” writes Felix Salmon. Some highlights of his report include:

• Artnet likes to claim that its index of contemporary art has outperformed the S&P 500 since 1988. The implication is that contemporary art is a better investment than the stock market.
• However this is misleading. Stocks can pay dividends, art doesn’t. If you take a look at the S&P 500’s returns with dividends reinvested, the gap is much smaller.
• Moreover you can’t just invest in contemporary art in the same way that you can invest in the shares of a company.
• The index suffers from survivorship bias – artists only get added to it after they’ve become popular. Without hindsight it’s impossible to know which ones would do well.
• This is unlike the S&P 500 which is meant to be a benchmark that tracks the overall performance of the market.
• It is fitting that Artnet has focused on contemporary art. This is the fastest growing market. But if you looked at ‘art’ as a whole things wouldn’t look as impressive.

To read many more details including the third type of survivorship bias, what the S&P 500 is meant to do, the limitations of the index, some of the big name contemporary artists of the past and present, the overall churn of the indices, the country that dominates contemporary art, as well as some clear and concise graphs that demonstrate the problem, click here.

Source: Reuters

Via: Marginal Revolution

American exports have been rising substantially, but where has the growth been coming from? Patrick went through the numbers:

• Parts for civilian aircrafts have become a substantial driver in the growth of American exports. Japan, France, China and the UAE are big buyers.
• America’s export of oil increased by 36% between March 2011 and March 2012. Netherlands, Mexico and Brazil topped the list of buyers.
• The sales of motor vehicles have more than doubled in the past year. Germany is by far the biggest buyer.

To see tables depicting who the buyers are, the precise dollar amounts being exported, and overall trade data for the United States read the entire post over here.

Source: Panjiva

Via: Marginal Revolution