Tag: economist

Equine transport: A fun jump

Akshat RathiLeave a comment

Britain has won its first Olympic gold medal in show jumping in 60 years. But that isn’t the only thing that British horse movers are celebrating. Their business is booming, too. Hundreds of horses have been brought to London for the Olympics, many from thousands of miles away. In such elite competitions, horses need to perform at their peak. So every care is taken to help them not fall sick from the travelling.

A round trip from America to Britain can cost anywhere from £8,000 ($12,500) to £14,000 for a single horse. But that’s not all that it takes. A horse needs a passport, too: one that lacks a photo, but has vaccination details and identification marks, such as a white spot on the left ear. Owners must also get health certificates and export licences for the horse, which can take months.

Falling costs of air transport have meant that horses rarely get sent on ships anymore. Air travel makes the horses’ lives easier, and keeps their owners and jockeys happy. When the cargo is a horse, pilots take extra precaution such as taking off at a lower angle and taxiing gently, to ensure that the horse doesn’t topple off.

But such air freight carriers don’t operate at all terminals. An American horse coming to London flies in from New York to Amsterdam first. There she takes an overnight halt in a stable, because a well-rested horse is less likely to fall sick, says John Parker, the owner of a British equine transport firm. The next day, she gets a ride on a plush lorry, which either crosses the English Channel on a ferry, or goes through the Eurotunnel. The tunnel cuts down the crossing time by an hour, for which most customers happily shell out extra money. All through the journey, the horses have grooms to take care of them. The carriers are kept extremely clean to minimise travel sickness. Water and hay is kept in plentiful supply.

From the likes of this, it may seem that horses are getting better treatment than many Olympic athletes—at least on their way to Britain and back.

Also published on economist.com.

Image from here.

The physics of sand castles: Just add water

Akshat RathiLeave a comment

A day out on the beach would be incomplete without a sand castle. The mightier the castle, the better. But sand is next to useless as a building material. Without water it simply spreads out as wide as possible. So in search of a good recipe Daniel Bonn, a physicist at the University of Amsterdam, and colleagues have stumbled upon a formula for making the perfect sandy redoubt.

As they reveal in a paper published this week in Scientific Reports the key is to use sand with only 1% water by volume. Wet sand has grains coated with a thin layer of water. Owing to water’s surface tension this thin coat acts like skin stretched over many grains, holding them together by creating bridges between the grains. The strength of these bridges is enough to fight Earth’s gravity and prevent the structures from buckling under their own weight.

An easy way to achieve the right amount of water, Dr Bonn suggests, is to tamp wet sand in a mould (open at the top and the bottom) with a thumper at least 70 times, as he did in his experiments.

As for the design itself, unsurprisingly, the wider the base the taller the castle. According to calculations, using ideally moist sand, a column with a three inch diameter could rise as high as two metres. At 12 metres, the current world record for the tallest sandcastle, set by Ed Jarrett in 2011, used a base of roughly 11 metres. If Dr Bonn is right, sand engineers could in principle beat that with a castle thrice the height upon the same foundation.

First published in The Economist.

Image from here.

Online software piracy: Head in the clouds

Akshat Rathi1 Comment

As more people use “cloud computing” services like webmail and do word-processing via a browser, software makers fret that today’s software piracy will migrate to the cloud too. The Business Software Alliance (BSA), a trade group, this month released a survey that emphasises that 30% of users in rich countries and 45% in poor ones have a “likelihood of sharing log-in credentials for paid services.” It is “a worrisome new avenue for software licence abuse,” says the BSA’s boss, Robert Holleyman.

Yet the closer one looks at the BSA’s study, the murkier such conclusions become.

Take the dramatic figures above. It is not quite so bad. The percentages come from a question in which people were asked if they had ever shared their log-in details for paid services. Some 15% of people in rich countries and 34% in poor countries said they had for personal use. For business use, it was 30% and 45% respectively. The larger figures amplify the BSA’s point, but they are not necessarily the most accurate.

Moreover the respondents were only those who had paid for cloud services, which was a fraction of users. Cloud services are generally based on a “freemium” model, whereby basic use costs nothing and a premium version is paid for. According to the BSA’s own data, only half of computer users tap cloud services, of which only one-third use it for business, of which two-thirds pay. Of the small subset that remain, the minority share log-ins.

This changes things considerably. If the BSA figures were adjusted for all this, the potential piracy figures could be as low as between 2% and 6% of users—as much as 20 times less than the group claims. (The BSA’s data is online here.)

Worse, the BSA and Ipsos Public Affairs, who conducted the survey, didn’t think to ask or examine whether sharing log-in details violated the terms of service. It may very well be the contrary: that the service had communal uses as a feature. Mr Holleyman bends over backwards to acknowledge as much on a blog post. Yet the overall impression that the BSA gives is that cloud users are poised to rob firms of their rightful revenue.

There are other anomalies. The BSA only considered PC use, when many people use cloud services over tablets and mobile phones, especially in poor places. And the survey, of 14,702 people in 33 countries, presumes to speak with confidence about the “developing” world but not a single African country is represented—an odd omission, since it is a fast growing market.

The annual BSA piracy study released this year in May estimated losses to the PC software industry in 2011 of $63 billion. That princely sum would make software piracy the 66th largest economy in the world, worth more than Syria and Croatia. The BSA reaches that amount by multiplying the estimated number of computers containing pirated software with the retail price of the software.

It is a specious way of calculating piracy (as we explored in an article in 2005 entitled “BSA or just BS?”). Many people would not buy the product at the expensive retail price. That’s why they steal it, after all. Still, the BSA’s dubious figures influence public policy. Mr Holleyman was invited to testify at a congressional hearing on July 25th on cloud computing, where his prepared remarks specifically cited “credential sharing” as a piracy challenge.

Be it in the cloud or back down on Earth, software piracy is theft and is wrong. The crime should be prosecuted and technically prevented as much as possible. But the way we think about the extent of the problem must be grounded in reality. Anything less is wrong too.

Written with Kenn Cukier. Also published on economist.com.

Image from here.