This Tuesday, I had the chance to take a tour of the Kamaka ukulele factory guided by Fred Kamaka Sr., whose father Samuel Kamaka founded the company in 1916. As a ukulele enthusiast, it was a real blast: Kamakas are some of the best in the world and have been the weapon of choice for, among others, Jake Shimabukuro and George Harrison. Even better than the factory and showroom, though, was getting a chance to hear Fred Kamaka tell all kinds of stories about growing up making ukes.
Fred is now 86, and he has been working for the company alongside his older brother Samuel Jr. since about 1930, when he was 5 years old. (On the tour, Fred shows a picture from that era featuring him at 5, working in a store full of ukuleles selling for $5.) It was common practice then, in Hawaii and throughout the country, that sons were workers. Before they started in school, they’d be expected to work all day for their fathers. Fred says he and his brother Samuel considered themselves lucky not to be the sons of bakers, who’d have to be up at 4 each morning to start baking!
Samuel Kamaka Sr., by his son’s description, was an exacting craftsman and didn’t accept cut corners. When the young Fred would make a mistake in the workshop, the botched ukulele would always be called “junk”, and would be thrown out. Fred describes hearing his father use that word “junk” throughout his life — from his deathbed, Samuel Kamaka Sr. insisted that his sons never use the family name on any junk.
Before that meeting, Fred and his brother had served in the military in World War II and were entitled to attend college on the G.I. Bill. They each decided to do that, much to their father’s disappointment: he was counting on them as workers! He cut them off, and they found themselves living on a $25/month allotment from the government, until they found another way to pull in some money.
Kamaka Ukulele continues to be a family business, but Fred and Samuel Jr.’s sons weren’t required to work in the factory growing up. Nevertheless, as ukulele playing became more popular among their friends, they found themselves attracted to the family business:
That generation is now grown, and have children of their own. All told, there are eight children in the next generation of Kamakas, the great-grandchildren of Samuel Kamaka Sr. Fred’s hoping at least four of them will come to work for the family business, now coming up on its 100th anniversary.
The Kamaka factory is a relatively small place, occupying two floors of a medium-sized building for the showroom, office, storage, and factory space. They sell instruments as quickly as they can make them, and new orders take about a month to fulfill. Each ukulele is made of the beautiful and uniquely Hawaiian koa wood, which can only legally be harvested from naturally fallen trees and is accordingly expensive.
Altogether, the Kamaka factory tour is a great one, and I recommend it highly. It’s so great to get to meet guys like Fred Kamaka, who are really living history. He runs the tour just about every Tuesday-Friday at 10:30 am — so if you find yourself around Honolulu then, go! Note that they don’t normally sell ukes from the showroom, and don’t sell factory seconds at all. I happened to luck out, and they had a couple for sale on orders that had dropped out, so my father and I each picked up an HF-2. I’ll be writing more about that soon…
Inspired by a handfulof sites that have popped up in the last few weeks to mock a design change made in the official Twitter app for iPhone, my buddies Robb and Johnny and I have put together a project called the Dickens Bar. The idea is simple — enter the URL of any website, and see it immediately enhanced by the “trending topics” of one of the most popular English novelists of the Victorian Era. See, for example, this very site with Dickens Bar addition.
I actually don’t identify that situation as a problem. For one, Arlene’s measured 27% follower attrition rate could very well be standard throughout Twitter,1 and because Klout scores are basically numbered arbitrarily, “inflation” or “deflation” in this sense doesn’t matter. Put another way, Klout scores are no less useful for being absolutely lower, as long as the same factors are skewing everybody’s profile in the same direction. Of course, Klout may also identify the “bug” Arlene describes as a feature. After all, if 27% of your followers aren’t likely seeing your updates, shouldn’t that be reflected in a measure of your influence?
As I see it, though, a real problem could arise based on the way Klout weighs the different factors that they measure against each other. Enough experimentation could tell you whether removing those 27% of followers would move the Klout score up or down. If the percentage of active followers is weighed more heavily than the absolute number of followers, then running an automated process to remove inactive followers could bump the score up a bit.
Right now, little rides on a person’s Klout, so there probably aren’t yet widespread efforts to subvert their ratings through tricks like that. But if we were to start seeing jobs, sponsorships, speaking engagements, or book deals offered on the basis of Klout scores, that could change — and when it changes, Goodhart’s law starts to kick in.2 According to that law, the “statistical regularity” of the behaviors Klout measures “will tend to collapse” under corrupting forces once “pressure is placed on it for control purposes.” In other words, users begin to game the scores and the numbers begin to lose their utility.
If that situation should arise, Klout could be compelled to respond by changing their algorithm to something more arcane, in order to be less readily reverse-engineered. I’m afraid that could be a problem for them. The more abstracted and convoluted the algorithm that produces Klout scores gets, the more likely it is to produce seemingly arbitrary results. Users whose natural influence profiles resemble the artificial ones of Klout-manipulators could see their scores adjusted downward, while other users whose profiles matched an increasingly complicated pattern might experience the opposite effect. If enough of these cases show up, Klout scores cease to be a meaningful proxy for influence.
The statistician George Box is famously quoted as saying “Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful.” The Klout conundrum I see is not that any particular factor is incorrectly considered — after all, the algorithm can be adjusted — but that they may be forced into deciding between making their model more wrong through action, or less useful through inaction.
A widely discussed Nielsen article from a few years back pegged sitewide retention rate among new users at 40%, but there are lots of reasons to think that number could be higher today and that Arlene’s followers wouldn’t be quite so fickle. ↩
I debated for a long time whether it’s Goodhart’s or Campbell’s law that is most appropriate here. I decided Goodhart’s was better, on the presumption that it’s the presumed constants of things like follower attrition rate that break down, and not actual following behavior that changes. ↩
I put together some mosaics of common images using dice faces as tiles. So far they only exist in computerized form, but the hope is to buy some dice wholesale and actually arrange some of these on a board. I’m still experimenting with what kinds of source images make for good output, but for now I’ve stuck to simple black-and-white symbols and line drawings. I’d like to start using more grayscale and complex shapes, but the challenge is keeping the image clear at a resolution low enough that the dice are still discernible and reasonable to arrange. (Some of these contain thousands of dice, which is a bit impractical.)
I’ll make a how-to in a future post, and after that I hope to document the actual construction of one or a few of these. Also, I relied heavily on, and am very thankful for, an excellent free software tool called Metapixel.
This post is cross-posted from the Students for Free Culture blog. I’ve also submitted a shorter version to the Crimson as a letter to the editor.
“A Sensible Compromise,” an editorial published in the Harvard Crimson last week, described the actions of the MPAA in urging universities like Harvard to develop a “written plan to effectively combat the unauthorized distribution of copyright material by users” of the university network in compliance with the Higher Education Opportunity Act of 2008. The Crimson’s take, as suggested by the title, is that these actions and the law that supports them are reasonable and justified.
The evidence for the Crimson’s claim is shaky, based largely on two sweeping claims about intellectual property. The Crimson states as common sense that without an effective intellectual property regime, there will be no incentive for innovation.
But around the world there are well documented examples of innovation and creativity that function in the absence of strong copyright protection: the world’s second largest movie industry, in Nigeria, and the booming “techno brega” scene in Brazil were both documented in the documentary “Good Copy Bad Copy,” which is available for free online. And that’s to say nothing of all of the innovations that took place before the mid-1700s, the works of Mozart, Shakespeare, Michelangelo, and all the others that lived before modern copyright was developed. Lastly, enormous areas of creativity like fashion, cooking, comedy, and even magic tricks operate without copyright protection. Closer to home, the entire academic publishing system functions without authors retaining copyright for their works, instead exchanging their monopoly for the opportunity to publish. Copyright can certainly provide a motivation for entrepreneurs to create, but in light of these examples, The Crimson’s statement that the absence of IP laws would eliminate innovation seems unjustifiable.
The second overbroad claim in the editorial pertains to a concept called “moral rights.” “Intellectual property rights are important,” according to the Crimson, “because each person has a fundamental right to enjoy the fruits of his or her mental labor.” The fact is that that justification is not uncommon in parts of the world, but has no basis in American law. The Constitutional “copyright clause,” in fact, is the only right enumerated in the Constitution with an explicit purpose, and that purpose is incentivization: Congress may secure monopolies for creators in order “to promote the progress of science and the useful arts.” No less than Thomas Jefferson was uncomfortable with the “embarrassment” of monopolies, but conceded that as an incentive, they might be worthwhile. As a fundamental moral right? He never even considered it.
Finally, the editorial talks about the concept of “balance,” and then gets into a discussion of business models, debating whether the ones that exist today are convenient enough to remove the justification for piracy. This discussion is an interesting one, and has a place elsewhere, but let’s not confuse an economic argument with an ideological one. In the world’s premiere institution of higher learning—and truly, in any institution of higher learning—the balance isn’t a question of business models. Should Harvard University, at the urging of a media industry that presumes the students to be criminals, reduce the flow of information available to them?
The MPAA and similar organizations are comfortable to disregard the educational benefits that technology has brought us and to see the Harvard student body as a group of potential criminal freeloaders. One can sympathize with members of the movie industry which, in spite of consistently breaking annual box office records, purports to be having a hard time. And it’s certainly reasonable for a university to discuss what the legal and technical guidelines of its network ought to be. But it’s wrong to kowtow to the demands of a media industry at the cost of Harvard students’ technological autonomy.
This Tuesday, I had the chance to take a tour of the Kamaka ukulele factory guided by Fred Kamaka Sr., whose father Samuel Kamaka founded the company in 1916. As a ukulele enthusiast, it was a real blast: Kamakas are some of the best in the world and have been the weapon of choice for, among others, Jake Shimabukuro and George Harrison. Even better than the factory and showroom, though, was getting a chance to hear Fred Kamaka tell all kinds of stories about growing up making ukes.