// Infographic: Invasion of the Drones//

In early 2012, the United States Congress called upon the Federal Aviation Administration to develop a plan to integrate drones—civil unmanned aircraft systems—into the domestic airspace by the target date of September 30, 2015. How do Americans feel about the issue, and what does this news mean for international opinion surrounding the nation’s continuing drone-controlled air strikes against militants in Middle Eastern countries?

// Cindy Hoffman strikes again! //

Cindy Hoffman strikes again! 

// Really love how this photo shoot came out with Meagan…//

Really love how this photo shoot came out with Meagan Ziegler-Haynes! I hope to do more graphic collaborations with photography rather than just drawing all over them.

-jd

// FRACKING vs ICE-CREAM.  Graphic by Ritchie S. King//

FRACKING vs ICE-CREAM. 

Graphic by Ritchie S. King

// This week: where to get a wifi connection in midtown other than…//

This week: where to get a wifi connection in midtown other than Starbucks.

// Head in the clouds//

AS MORE people use “cloud computing” services like webmail and 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.

// Mapping Judaism//

Mapping the world’s Jewish population and migration patterns

JUDAISM is enjoying an unexpected revival, according to a special report to be published in this week’s Economist. The map and chart below show where the biggest Jewish populations live and how this has changed over the past century. In 1939, Jews numbered 16.5m people, up from 10.6m in 1900. By the end of the second world war, the Nazis had wiped out one-third of them, sweeping away a thousand years of Jewish civilisation in central and eastern Europe. The death toll might have been even higher, but a flurry of pogroms that started 60 years earlier across the then-tsarist empire had sent waves of Jewish emigrants westward. By the time Hitler struck, some 6m Jews were safe in North and South America and in Britain, with 3m more living in the Soviet Union. From 1948, most of the Jews of north Africa and the Levant emigrated. The break-up of the Soviet Union brought the latest big wave of Jewish migration to Israel in the early 1990s.

// Expatriate costs and assignments//

NON-MUSLIM expatriates in Saudi Arabia were recently warned to observe Ramadan, the month-long fast that started last week, or face being deported. The Islamic country is “home” to some 8m foreign workers, who make up a third of the total population. Adapting to the local culture is one of the main challenges expatriates around the world say they face while on assignment, according to a report by Towers Watson, a consultancy. For firms, the biggest challenge is the cost of the assignment, which often includes taxation, housing, cost-of-living and education allowances. Over three-quarters of companies report spending around two to three times an expat’s annual salary on a “traditional” assignment (which typically involves relocating the expatriate and their family for three to five years). Despite these expenses, the study found that 45% of companies expect an increase the number of traditional assignments through 2014. But alternative types of assignments are also becoming more popular. They often emphasise the benefits of knowledge and skills transfers, but are cheaper.

// The pain in Spain//

A look at government bond yields since 1860

ALTHOUGH government bonds are usually regarded as a “safe asset”, they have been highly volatile over the long term. Spanish yields may just have reached a high for the euro-area period, over 7.5% on July 24th, but they have been higher in the past—during the revolutionary period of the 1870s, the loss of colonies like Cuba and the Philippines in the 1890s, the civil war of the 1930s and, of course, the inflationary period of the 1970s. During the latter era all bond yields rose sharply, creating a fantastic buying opportunity in the early 1980s. For the last 30 years, the trend in American and German bond yields has been relentlessly downward, creating the current historic lows. No doubt some of the buyers of German and American bonds are Italian and Spanish investors fleeing their domestic markets. While such yields look a terrible bargain by historic standards, it is worth noting that low American yields persisted for a long time in the late 1940s and early 1950s before inflation started to take its toll.

// Antique cabinets//

How old is your government?

PRANAB MUKHERJEE (aged 76) beat Purno Sangma (aged 65) to the presidency of India on July 22nd. The office is largely a ceremonial one and, like Italy’s presidency, is traditionally held by someone who could politely be described as distinguished. In India’s case, the politicians who sit in the prime minister’s cabinet are also strikingly older than the people they govern. Looked at like this, Russia is the only BRIC that is not a gerontocracy. Such arrangements are fine when all is going well. But, as our shoe-thrower’s index on unrest in the Arab world suggested, a big age gap between the rulers and the ruled can be a source of instability. It is striking that there is a divide between the rich world, with its young leaders, and the emerging one, with its legions of greybeards. America, though, is an outlier: viewed this way its model is more Chinese than European.