relatively slow reduction in bandwidth prices

Quality-adjusted average U.S. residential broadband service prices have fallen no more than an estimated 10% from 2004 to 2009.[1] The consumer price index for personal computers and peripheral equipment fell 50% across that period.[2] The price-performance frontier for communications technology is advancing as fast or faster than that for personal computers and peripherals.  The difference in realized price trends reflects much different structures of investments, transactions, and business competition.

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Notes:

[1] See Greenstein, Shane M. and McDevitt, Ryan C., Evidence of a Modest Price Decline in US Broadband Services. Center for the Study of Industrial Organization, Northwestern University, Working Paper #0102 (January 2010).  The bandwidth figures in this paper are mistakenly labeled “bps” (bits per second).  They actually are in “kbps” (kilobits per second).  I found that average wholesale local bandwidth prices fell about 20% from 1990 to 1995, and remained roughly constant from 1995 to 2000.  See Galbi (2000), “U.S. Bandwidth Price Trends in the 1990s,” Table P4.  For related discussion, see Galbi (2000), “Growth in the ‘New Economy’: U.S. Bandwidth Use and Pricing Across the 1990s.”  All these reported figures are nominal, i.e. not adjusted for general price inflation.

[2] U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Consumer Price Index Detailed Report, Aug. 2010, Table 21.

print disintermediation

business-sponsored magazines

While independent newspapers and magazines are in deep distress, business-sponsored print publications seem to be flourishing.  Costco Connection, for example, is a monthly lifestyle magazine for Costco members. The Sept. 2010 issue offers 72 pages chock-full of advertisements.  Its masthead shows a large, traditional print organization (managing editor, associate editors, assistant editors, copy editor, production managers, assistant production manager, etc.).  In the column “from the editor’s desk” in the Sept. 2010 issue, the editor describes himself as “trained in the age-old tenets of journalism.”  True to that heritage, Costco Connection online looks just like the print product.  Costco Connection claims “the largest audience of small-business readers of any magazine in the United States.”  While Costco Connection has no subscriber revenue, I would guess that it’s a more valuable magazine than Newsweek.

Related post:  whither telephone companies?

the fine art of coloring

two versions of Edward Munch's Sin

Could a green light signal stop? Could a red light signal continue naturally?  Perhaps, but the colors used for traffic lights seem to have deeper psychological significance than merely a social convention.[1]

From early mass market prints to modern display devices, the details of coloring do not greatly affect the strong human preference for colored images.  Moreover, humans’ electroencephalographic responses to emotionally differentiated pictorial stimuli don’t vary with formal pictorial properties such as color.[2]  Such evidence suggests that color contributes mainly to sensory efficiency, not sensory semantics.[3]

The U.S. National Gallery of Art’s exhibition, Edvard Munch: Master Prints, shows an artist acutely concerned with the emotional significance of color variations.  The exhibition places side-by-side Munch’s multiple variations on a single composition.  Many of these variations involve changes in coloring.  An image in black and white that might be seen as a woman consoling a broken man becomes with some red and yellow coloring a woman biting a man’s neck and sucking out his life (Vampire II, 1895/1896-1902).  The acuteness of a sick child’s suffering seems to vary with the intensity and contrast in red across the composition.  A dramatic change in the coloring shifts a naked woman from repulsive to alluring.  Both images are appropriately entitled Sin and were made in the same year (1902).  An important part of Munch’s art seems to be creating images that not only powerfully express emotion, but also have considerable emotional complexity.  Munch’s iconic Scream isn’t a good representative of his emotional art.

Mundane life is complex only to those who aren’t experiencing it.  Color variations can occur from no more than changes in lighting.  They typically have little significance. Edvard Munch’s art, in contrast, is far from the ordinary. See Edvard Munch: Master Prints, now at the National Gallery of Art.

Edvard Munch: Master Prints is at the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, from July 31 through October 31, 2010.

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Notes:

[1] I was told that in a certain country, everyone runs red lights.  So drivers stop at green lights to make sure than no one is coming through the red.

[2] See Junghöfer, M., Bradley, M. M., Elbert, T. R. and Lang, P. J. (2001), Fleeting images: A new look at early emotion discrimination. Psychophysiology, 38: 175–178. doi: 10.1111/1469-8986.3820175

[3] Being color-blind affects how one interacts with the world much less than does being blind.

Image credits:

Edvard Munch; Sin, 1902; lithograph in black on heavy polished white wove paper; The Epstein Family Collection; © Copyright Munch Museum/Munch Ellingsen Group/ARS, NY 2009

Edvard Munch; Sin, 1902; color lithograph, from two stones in red and beige with blue applied à la poupée on very thin Japanese tissue; The Epstein Family Collection; © Copyright Munch Museum/Munch Ellingsen Group/ARS, NY 2009

the moment you need yellow pages

distribution of yellowbook through on-street box

Yellowbook, a Yellow Pages telephone directory, is now being offered in Arlington, Virginia, through on-street print distribution boxes.   The boxes offer the 2010 yellowbook that was distributed to area apartments about nine months ago.  At least in one apartment complex, most of those books were not picked up.  The books in the boxes weigh 3.1 pounds each.  The prospects for them being picked up on the street and carried home seems worse. But perhaps when the books are placed on the street they are counted as “distributed.”

Yellowbook join a wide array of publications offered through on-street print distribution boxes.  Most of the publications, such as the Apartment Guide and Rentals publications with which yellowbook shares a box, are not large or noteworthy businesses.  Among them, the Washington Post grasps for respect by securing its box to a pole with a thin metal wire.  The other boxes are unsecured.

Total U.S. Yellow Pages revenue in 2007 was $14.3 billion.   The collapse of this business isn’t pretty.