Milbong Lutheran cemetery, near Boonah

Well, what do you do on a hot summer's day? Stay home and lounge in the pool. No, off to photograph Milbong St Luke's Lutheran cemetery about 10 kms from Boonah.

I need to create a ratings system for cemeteries, just so I can give Milbong Lutheran 1 star out of 5. No shade, lots of prickly weeds around the graves, and abundant insect life. Remind me not to be buried there. Indeed, there aren't a lot of recent graves there. My guess is that it would only appeal to someone with family already buried in the cemetery. It's not very picturesque or pleasant otherwise.

Now one of the things I have learnt from our everquest for little old cemeteries is to look at fences and gates. A paddock with a fence or gate that is fancier than you'd need to keep the cows inside is a prime candidate for an abandoned cemetery and well worth a walk around to see what's there. Now this is were Milbong Lutheran is a bit mysterious. Across the road from the cemetery is a house that looks like a converted church, which I had presumed was St Luke's (many of these country churches having been closed and sold off). However, I noticed today that the cemetery has a slightly fancy wooden front fence (admittedly largely in disrepair now) which extends beyond the cemetery and across the front of an adjacent paddock, suggesting that the site was once larger and may perhaps have had a church next door. OK, not a big mystery and probably not one to be a storyline for CSI, but one for me to solve ... where was St Luke's?

Aside from the condition of the cemetery, the headstones were the usual Lutheran mixture with a few older ones in German, a couple of eroded sandstone ones and a few impossible-to-read granite ones. Please put in your will that you want a white marble headstone -- it is far and away the best choice for long-term legibility. While nobody would use sandstone any more, granite is still a popular choice because it looks really good when new but doesn't wear well. Granite also attracts lichens (no idea why, but trust me, I've seen plenty of lichen-covered granite headstones).

Anyhow, to restore ourselves afterwards, we had lunch and coffee at the Art & Soul Cafe (and Art Gallery) in Boonah.

Book review: "The Long Tail" by Chris Anderson

I just finished reading "The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More" by Chris Anderson. As is so often the case with these kinds of books, the idea is interesting (compelling even) but frankly you don't need to read all 200+ pages to get the message.

The point is that once upon a time, there were lots of bottlenecks between producers and consumers due to:

* the effort for the producer to produce something
* the effort to make the consumers aware that the product might meet their needs
* the effort of distributing the product to the customer

all of which combine to create a small set of products which each get a large marketshare ("hits")

but with the power of computers and the internet, we can now:

* lower the production costs of making something
* provide more effective tools for consumers to be aware of products that meet their individualistic needs
* lower the cost of inventory and distribution

all of which combine to allow a far larger set of products, many of which will only get a small marketshare but enough to be profitable to the producer and the consumer gets a more "right for me" product.

And because there are more "niche" products often with small revenues, the producers are now not just the "professional" producers but now there is scope for the more "amateur" producer.

Examples (illustrating these points to varying degrees) are Amazon, Netfliks, Ebay, iTunes, etc.

Anyway, the idea is good and every modern person should understand it and think about how they might apply this new way of looking at business to their own endeavours. Personally I think having my Lego parts shop ABStralia is pretty much proof that I've grasped the idea. My little shop may not rival K-Mart say in the sale of Lego and it won't ever make me rich, but it helps me offload surplus parts for a few dollars and makes some other person happy because now they have more of those parts they so desired and couldn't get from Lego.

Interestingly, Lego is mentioned in the book as being innovative in a Long Tail way. As someone in the adult Lego community, I would have to say "umm, yes, but only because their adult market yelled and screamed until they company heard them, ignored them, heard them, ignored them and then finally experimented a little". To begin with, Lego didn't even believe that they had an adult market whose demands for more specialised sets and parts were not compatible with their traditional mass market of children. It was the adult community that established the Long Tail business model for Lego. You only have to look at the 1000s of ebay auctions and bricklink sales that take place every day to see that the traditional Lego retail business wasn't meeting a lot of people's needs. Yes, Lego have moved to online distribution of more niche products for the adult market, they have finally moved a little way down the long tail, but frankly the level of ebay/bricklink activity hasn't diminished so I think Lego have still got a long way to go. You would think that, as the only people who can actually produce the product, the Lego company would be able to market and distribute their products in a way that must ultimately drive every other reseller out of business, but so far they don't seem to have achieved it!

Anyhow the book "The Long Tail" is worth reading and it's not hard reading, but don't worry if you are too busy to finish it.

CRC success!

After the sad demise of DSTC in 2005 following the failure of our Cooperative Research Centre bid in 2004, I am very pleased to report that we had success with 2 CRCs bids in this 2006 round:

* Smart Services CRC (a rebid of Smart Internet CRC)
* Spatial Information CRC extension bid

Of course, I am not so naive to think this means either the resurrection of DSTC (as a specific organisation) nor of an organisation like DSTC. Alas, the model of research funding for universities laid down by DEST makes it virtually impossible to have such an organisational model for a new CRC. The funding must flow through the universities and the staff be employed by the universities, which brings with it various advantages and disadvantages. But whatever the structure I am still very pleased to be able to say ...

Game on!

scalping - why do we care?

Lately there has been a lot of fuss about scalpers selling tickets to things like the cricket and Big Day Out on ebay. The promoters are trying to declare that tickets sold through ebay are invalid etc.

Now, maybe I'm missing something, but what is all the fuss about?

As I see it, an event has N tickets being sold at $M each. If the event is sold out, then the promoter gets $N*M from the ticket sales and N fans of whatever it is attend the event and scream their lungs out with happiness. So, if some of those N tickets get sold for more than $M by scalpers, so what? The promoter hasn't lost a dollar and there are still N fans turning up to the event. Indeed, one might argue that someone prepared to pay a lot more than $M to buy a ticket from a scalper is more of a fan than someone prepared to pay $M. So in fact, these purchasers are not just fans, but uber-fans. Who better to attend?

So who gets harmed by scalping? Well, I guess the uber-fans paying the mega-dollars are harmed because they are paying more than they "should", but since they freely and willingly purchase the tickets at those prices, it's hard to see them as victims here.

Who else? Well, the person who missed out on a ticket from the normal ticket sales because "their" ticket was snapped up by the scalper has been harmed. But of course the number of people who actually missed out in this way is quite small (exactly equal to the number of scalped tickets). But of course there is a difference between perception and reality. Everyone who missed out on a ticket may think they missed out on a ticket because of scalpers, when of course most of them actually missed out because supply was less than demand. Even in the absence of scalpers, lots of people miss out on tickets to a sold-out event. So I think a lot of people think they are harmed by scalpers when statistically speaking they probably weren't.

When all is said and done, if there are N tickets available, then there will be N happy people with tickets and everyone else who wanted tickets is unhappy, regardless of scalpers. So, it really comes down to how those N people are chosen from the pool of potential attendees.

Current methods of selling tickets are pretty much first-come first-served, so it is the first N people that get the tickets. Is that fair? Well, if you are someone who can camp out overnight in the queue or spend all morning on the phone or WWW trying to get the tickets, you have the advantage over those who aren't free to do so, so it probably sounds fair to you. But what if you are the ambulance driver who spent the 2 hours in which the tickets sold out getting someone out of a car wreck? First come first served doesn't sound very fair to the ambulance driver. Indeed FCFS could be argued to favour the idle and the drones of our society over those making productive contribution. Surely that's not very fair?

So if our ambulance driver spends the extra bucks to buy a ticket from a scalper, taking the place at the event of one of those idle drones who might otherwise have got the ticket, isn't this a better outcome? Maybe we should allocate the tickets in the first place according to "contribution to society", but that's a bit hard to implement, at least until we achieve a reputation-based economy (see Cory Doctorow "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom").

Why not just auction off all the tickets to begin with? Then if they sell for more than $M, then the event gets the extra cash. After all, if they put on a good event, don't they deserve to get more cash? Oh, it's not fair to the poor you say? True, but we auction houses all the time. Surely poor people should have the same right to live in riverside mansions as rich people? No? So why should tickets to Big Day Out be any different? We deal with supply-and-demand problems all the time by letting the rich have the rare things while the poor miss out.

Should we do it by lottery like the Olympic tickets and Commonwealth Games tickets? That sounds fair. Well, a lot of athlete's parents and spouses missed out on tickets in those lotteries and didn't get to see their child/spouse win their gold medal or whatever. What about the person who has supported their team in every competition all season? Don't some people have more right to attend than some random lucky ticket winner?

I guess the point I am making is that someone is always going to miss out and sometimes it won't be fair (by whatever definition you give to it), so why not accept it and move on? Maybe the people buying the scalper's tickets are the ambulance drivers and the athlete's parents? All the scalper is doing is changing the basis for choosing some of the lucky N people. So what if they make a few bucks from doing so? They are supplying a service that is clearly in demand. They take the risk of buying the tickets in the hope of reselling them. What makes them any different to a retail store or any other middleman?

So while I continue to have a vague unease about scalping, whenever I think about it, I find it hard to justify my concern. Maybe by blogging about it, I will be able to accept it as simply as a niche economic phenomenon and move on.