Buying the Rights to Franchises

People are laughing at the SpiceDao for spending $3.8 million on a book. But one thing has shown is a group of fans of a story can get money together to spend on that story. And this can be organised in a decentralised way. We don't need Disney to buy franchises, fans can do that now. 

The stories that are most undervalued in monetary terms compared to how much fans value them are probably 

1. Young Adult stories as people who read these at a formative time find them really important but traditional publishers don't. 

2. Sci-fi and Fantasy books as these are generally seen as less prestigious than standard literature 

3. Non English Language stories.

4. Books that are out of print as that can change who owns the rights or at least makes them cheaper. 

5. One from a few decades ago so the fans are now old enough to have some spare money. 

6. Choose your own adventure and adventure games are eve further out of mainstream critical valuation. Comics have been mined for IP value but they are such a rich and diverse medium I am sure some areas have been ignored.

Fans of a non english language YA sci-fi/fantasy series could for much less than $3.8 million get the IP rights to a story like this. Frequently the author will have the IP rights themselves and they could well be easier to deal with than a publishing company. 

I would guess once you have the rights the order of things to get the story more popular are

1. Republish the story on kindle. Effectively free. Give the author a lot of any money this earns so it is in their interests to encourage the steps below and to sell you the IP rights cheaply.

2. Set up a fan site including forums and fan fiction. Not expensive but it would take up some time with moderation.

3. Create a prize for fan art including images, fashion designs and comics and for fan fiction stories. Again this is very cheap.

If the original language can create enough interest in the franchise to keep these busy

4. Publish special editions of the book. With a new introduction, cover based on a prize winner etc. 

5. Translate the story. A high quality book translation is pretty cheap. Especially if you are not under strict time pressure. Cost 5-15k per language.

6. Copy steps 1->4 in the newly translated language.

After the first franchise you carried this out on you can reuse the website software etc. I would guess each additional franchise would cost under 50k to buy and do these steps with. Even if it was 100k that would still be 38 different franchises resurrected for the price the spiceDAO paid for the physical copy of a book.

And if any one of them really succeeds and becomes popular enough to spawn a movie a large profit could be made. But thinking about the worlds of fans I think just seeing their favorite characters again either back in print for a new generation, back with new adventures in a new series of books is really what most fans want.

Fantasy Football Optimization 2

So it turns out I was thick last post about picking the fantasy football team. As my friend Bren explained to me "you choose 11 players to be "on the pitch" each week, plus a captain who scores double (and a vice captain in case the captain doesn't play). can only have 1 keeper in the first 11, can choose any formation with a minimum of 3 defenders, 3 midfielders and 1 forward."

So the problem is now pick 11 players that will actually play and some really cheap players that won't

So whats the cheapest of each player you could get?
The cheaperst players in each position are about 4 or 4.5 each. For example
Goalkeeper
Moreira SWA 4.0 0
Defenders
Whitbread NOR 4.0 0
Tate SWA 4.0 0
Midfield
Lappin NOR 4.5 0
Gecov FUL 4.5 0
Allen SWA 4.5 0
Strikers
Miller WBA 4.5 6
Hulse QPR 4.5 0
Agyemang QPR 4.5 0

So if you picked from this price of player knowing they would not play that would allow you to spend more money on those that were on the pitch. Now defenders score less points than midfielders and strikers so lets say we only want three of them. And we then buy two cheap ones that we dont play. 2 cheap defenders costs 8 and one goalie for 4 means we now have 88 to pick the remaining 12 players. The case whether you should have 5 midfielders or 3 strikers is less clear. I will try both and see which has a higher score.

Attempt 1. Cheap goalie and 2 defenders and 1 midfielder. Cost 16.5 on 4 non playing players. Trying to have 3 strikers. The constraints would now be

num_goalkeepers <- 1
num_defenders <- 3
num_midfielders <- 4
num_strikers <- 3
max_team_cost <- 835
max_player_from_a_team <- 3 

Gives a team of

1         Hart  MCI  GK    70 175
48    Ivanovic  CHE DEF    70 144
49        Huth  STO DEF    60 138
51      Hughes  FUL DEF    50 129
197       Adam  LIV MID    90 192
198    Malouda  CHE MID   105 186
200    Dempsey  FUL MID    85 168
201   N'Zogbia  WIG MID    75 167
210     Jarvis  WOL MID    60 133
386   Berbatov  MUN STR    95 176
388 Odemwingie  WBA STR    75 171

scoring 1779. You would make Adam your captain and he would have double points.

Attempt 2. Cheap non playing goalie and 2 defenders and 1 striker. Trying to have two strikers. Cost 16.5 on 4 non playing players.

num_goalkeepers <- 1
num_defenders <- 3
num_midfielders <- 5
num_strikers <- 2
max_team_cost <- 835
max_player_from_a_team <- 3 

1         Hart  MCI  GK    70 175
48    Ivanovic  CHE DEF    70 144
49        Huth  STO DEF    60 138
51      Hughes  FUL DEF    50 129
197       Adam  LIV MID    90 192
198    Malouda  CHE MID   105 186
200    Dempsey  FUL MID    85 168
201   N'Zogbia  WIG MID    75 167
210     Jarvis  WOL MID    60 133
386   Berbatov  MUN STR    95 176
388 Odemwingie  WBA STR    75 171

with a score of 1769. Again Adam would be your captain. It looks like three strikers is a better plan than 5 midfielders. But it is a close run thing.

Just to make things really complicated Bren explained that you should generally have one good player on the subs bench in case one of the rest of the team is injured. "it's quite common for one of the main team to miss a week so you may need to make 1 sub an excellent player (probably defender since they're cheaper)". Having a defender as your good sub has the advantage that you are allowed to play with one forward and three midfielders so if one of your three forwards, four midfielders or three playing defenders gets injured a defender can sub in for any of those.

So assuming we actually want four defenders. We would have one cheap goalie and one cheap defender and one cheap midfielder. At a cost of 12.5 for non playing players.

num_goalkeepers <- 1
num_defenders <- 4
num_midfielders <- 4
num_strikers <- 3
max_team_cost <- 875
max_player_from_a_team <- 3 

giving a team of

         Player Club Pos Price Pts
1         Hart  MCI  GK    70 175
46      Cole A  CHE DEF    75 150
49        Huth  STO DEF    60 138
51      Hughes  FUL DEF    50 129
54    Bardsley  SUN DEF    50 123
197       Adam  LIV MID    90 192
200    Dempsey  FUL MID    85 168
201   N'Zogbia  WIG MID    75 167
203    Downing  LIV MID    85 163
386   Berbatov  MUN STR    95 176
388 Odemwingie  WBA STR    75 171
393   Davies K  BOL STR    65 132

1884 points -123 as Bardley wont play = 1761. Basically Bardsley a Sunderland defender is really cheap at 5. This is one more than you pay for a player you don't want to play but if you do need to lay him he gets 123 points a season.
Davies looks a little low there with 132 points. The worst midfielder has 163 points. So what if we get rid of the third striker and try 5 midfielders?

num_goalkeepers <- 1
num_defenders <- 4
num_midfielders <- 5
num_strikers <- 2
max_team_cost <- 875
max_player_from_a_team <- 3 

   Player Club Pos Price Pts
1         Hart  MCI  GK    70 175
46      Cole A  CHE DEF    75 150
49        Huth  STO DEF    60 138
51      Hughes  FUL DEF    50 129
53      Distin  EVE DEF    55 124
197       Adam  LIV MID    90 192
200    Dempsey  FUL MID    85 168
201   N'Zogbia  WIG MID    75 167
203    Downing  LIV MID    85 163
210     Jarvis  WOL MID    60 133
386   Berbatov  MUN STR    95 176
388 Odemwingie  WBA STR    75 171

1886-124 for Distin who usually wont play = 1762. So this is my best single fantasy football team of last season.

The more I learn about this game the more nuances it has. Off the top of my head
1. Model that the captain gets double points. In this case Adam the highest scoring player is actually quite cheap. But in the case where he was really expensive you would want to take into account that he can earn double points.
2. Take into account who teams are playing. With a full game by game scoring dataset you can investigate really interesting patterns like if playing top five club means less points and bottom five more. And if so make transfers based on upcoming games. This seems to be where a huge amount of the skill in fantasy football is.
3. Change the code so you can have 3->5 defenders, 3-5 midfielders and 1-3 strikers but only 11 total players.
4. Just picking cheap non playing players is probably wrong. You at least want to pick the best cheap players you can. Which I have not. I am told Shane Ferguson is a good buy so I will probably make him one of the cheap players.

If any of the intuitions about having a good substitute or any of my other assumptions are wrong please correct me.
If you predict different points for players this season. If you want to try this method for next season but dont want to run the program linked to in part one


1. Copy the dataset I have here
2. Put this data into a new google docs spreadsheet.
3. Make your predictions on the number of points they will score. So if you think Berbatov won't score 176 points this season but only 160 change that points value. You can delete players you are not interested in as well.
4. Put your new spreadsheet URL in the comments
and I will run a optimization over your predictions for you.

Fantasy Football Optimisation

Some friends challenged me to a game called fantasy "football" where you pretend to be a Russian billionaire. Not the bit where you steal natural resources off the population but where you buy a bunch of poncy overpaid foreigners who flounce around and earn insane amounts of money.

While I'm ranting about "football". Why do football ads always say it has "the beauty of a dance". If you like dancing that much go to the ballet



Anyway So I have to pretend to know something about this "football" which I dont but I do know a bit about optimization and more about copying stuff. I remembered this old R package article about optimising for fantasy football. This was written by prasoonsharma and I have just reused his code.

I scraped last seasons scores off the fantasy premierleague website. Some parsing turned this into the correct format. You can download the cleaned up data here

The constraints for this version of the game are slightly different than the one prasoonsharma was playing. This means you need more goalies, have more money to spend on players and other such changes.

The best single team for last season would have been

        Player Club Pos Price Pts
1         Hart  MCI  GK    70 175
5     Al-Habsi  WIG  GK    45 125
48    Ivanovic  CHE DEF    70 144
49        Huth  STO DEF    60 138
51      Hughes  FUL DEF    50 129
54    Bardsley  SUN DEF    50 123
55     Johnson  WOL DEF    50 120
197       Adam  LIV MID    90 192
200    Dempsey  FUL MID    85 168
201   N'Zogbia  WIG MID    75 167
210     Jarvis  WOL MID    60 133
212     Barton  NEW MID    60 131
386   Berbatov  MUN STR    95 176
388 Odemwingie  WBA STR    75 171
393   Davies K  BOL STR    65 132

with a total score of 2224 points. You get to change the team every week in the real game. This optimisation is just if you got to pick one team and leave it.

Picking a fantasy football team involves
1. Predicting how many points each player will score that week
2. Optimising based on this prediction so you pick the team that covers all the rule constraints that scores the most points.

This code carries out the second part. If you have a prediction for how many points players will score that is better than
"exactly the same amount they scored last season" you can change the data with your new prediction and run it (or I can run it for you if you want). A web app that allowed you to enter your player score predictions and ran an optimisation so that the best team that could be picked based on your predictions was then created might be useful. If you save the data in a new google doc and change the Pts values to your player predictions. Then post a link to that google doc in the comments I will run the optimisation for you.

A no lose lottery would help Haiti

In this post I want to try and persuade you that there is a form of lottery the Prize Linked Savings scheme that would be popular and fairly cheap to run for the people in Haiti. In my next post I want to explain why such a scheme would actually be useful

"PLS is a kind of savings account that pools some of the interest from all depositors and pays out a big lottery prize every month or so. It combines the thrill of the lottery with the safety of a savings account. It’s sometimes called a “no-lose lottery,” since a depositor is automatically entered into the lottery but can’t lose the original money she deposits."

Lotteries are incredibly popular in Haiti. Probably due to the crushing poverty there the hope and 'chance to dream' lotteries provide is seen as vitally important

"the lottery system in which an astonishing number of Haitians invest their income and their dreams." "At the time of the last official count, in 2005, the streets of Port-au-Prince were home to nearly 2,000 of them" (borlettes lottery shops) "– more than double the number of schools and universities in the city"."All told, Haitians spend as much as $1.5 billion per year on the borlette – a staggering amount in a country whose gross domestic product last year was $6.9 billion"

"You can bet two balls to come up at once, and if that happens you make a ‘marriage’ and win 500 times your bet. If your married numbers are consecutive, you win 1,000 times your bet. The Haitian dream is a bet of US $1,000 that reaps US $10,000 on a consecutive marriage. Many a hopeful future has been built on less." Borlette lottery in Haiti is remarkably popular which is a good indication that a lottery that also acts as a savings scheme will be popular

The overhead cost of these Haitian lotteries is relatively low as they use the numbers and thus the security mechanisms of outside lotteries. These lotteries tend to use the numbers from other countries lotteries for example the New York State Lottery or the Santo Domingo State Lottery

Another expense is the prize won in the lottery. You want your prize to be equivalent to a million euro. This is an amazing life changing amount in Ireland where the average wage is 35K. So a million is about 30 times average income. For Haiti this would be $730 *30= 21 thousand dollars. A million Haitian gourde is about 25 thousand dollars.

If we had a monthly prize of this much that would cost 12*25k=300 thousand a year in prizes. Say you double that with some smaller prizes. 600 thousand which if you were earning 3% interest means you would have to take in 10,000000 dollars. This is a lot of money but in the context of $1.5 billion spent on lotteries in Haiti it is not that much.

If you could take in ten million dollars you could run a no lose lottery in Haiti and use the interest to pay for the prizes. But why would you want to? I will explain in the next post why PLS would be useful to the people of Haiti

Everything Tube

Youtube takes in videos, allows you to easily add them to your blog. There is some searching and idiotic comments on the site but the big deal is

1. Take in data
2. Store it forever
3. Make it easy to embed in another website

What other kinds of data can this be done with?
1. Chess viewer
2. Chemicals viewer
3. Music
4. Other games draughts, dice games etc
5. Sound
6. Knitting patterns
7. Aresti aerobatic symbols
8. Dances
9. Motion/gesture
10. CAD
11. Electronic design
12. Crystallography
13. Knot diagrams
14. All sorts of physics notations. None of which I understand
15. weather data
16. Molecular biology
17. Biomedical data, ecg’s stuff like that
18. Astronomy
19. Astrology, tarot cards, homeopath recipes, crap like that
20. Surveys. Caves, mountain routes etc
21. Graphs. Google Chart kind of does this already.
22. Maths functions
23. Knowledge representation. Take in a decision tree in Yaml format and turn it into a visual tree graph.
24. Seismology

The idea is to make a "tube" website that takes in some data and makes it easy to add visualisations of it to your website. The data is already online, or at least easily placed online what youtube did was make it easily viewable. Searching on your tube website is important but the first thing to do is get it so people can show their data on their website. So what other "tubes" would be interesting/useful? Please comment your thoughts

Ulysses Pact 2

The medical definition for this is

Ulysses Contract
Declarations by patients, made in advance of a situation in which they may be incompetent to decide about their own care, stating their treatment preferences or authorizing a third party to make decisions for them. (Bioethics Thesaurus)

This paper discusses the issue in relation to mental health.

How bound are you to your past self? Could you shoot the 50 year old conservative who as a tied dyed in the wool hippy 30 years previously wrote “If I ever vote republican please kill me”? If you are not bound to a contract by yourself of many years ago then how come there are 30 year mortgages?

There is a website here. Where people put quantifiable ambitions out in public. Keep wight below X, Make Y steps every day things like that. Are there common usages for Ulysses Contracts (not just the current cognitive health ones) that you could provide on another website? Is there a measurable way people change their thinking in response to an event that they could agree before the event to avoid?

Improving Books

One thing with books that most modern entertainment lacks is that you know when it will end. You can tell as you go through a book how much remains. This reduces the uncertainty present in the plot.

You could add empty pages to the end of the book. But these would be obvious. Adding complete gibberish would also be obvious even to someone flicking to find the last page number. You could generate more realistic text using a Markov model. Shannon generated fairly reasonable looking text with a simple algorithm. Markov models will create text that bears closer inspection though. It was used to generate postmodern critical analysis that got published without anyone realising it was nonsense.

So you train up your model on the rest of the book. Then get it to produce pages of text that without some study cannot be differentiated from the real books text. Then place these pages with the occasional *the end* in them after the book ending. The ending is marked with *the end*. Now the readers who do not go to a big effort cannot tell as they read the book how much remains.

Green Reaper

I talked here about my eco burial idea. Turn out the concept is really popular.
The Americans seem to have gone all high tech.

Whereas the Australians stick you in next to some koalas and give your family your gps cordinates. I wish I had thought of calling the service "The Green Reaper".

I think if you want to see the carbon sink that is Ireland's bogs preserved you should buy a few metres cubed of it for your burial patch. A burial plot in Dublin costs about five thousand euro which would buy you a fair amount of bog.

Mendelevium offset calculator

I have seen loads of books and websites on calculating how to become carbon neutral.
Why is the neutrality of only one element ever called into question? So why not set up a website to calculate your Mendelevium offset.

The questions will be
1. Do you work in the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory?
If yes then stop for a few days.


Actually if we really want to make cash we offer people a "Mendelevium offsetting program" it is like a carbon offsetting program where you buy carbon like a medieval sin indulgence and then some guy in Russia does not cut down a tree he was not going to cut down anyway. But in our version we just wait through a few of the elements 76 minutes half lifes and then declare you offset.

Ascii Art

Back to the future. You can set your gmail status message to a picture using ascii art. Unfotunately the formatiing in blogspot is weird so these images do not come up properly.

\ \ / \
\ \___/ /\\
| , , | ~
( =v= )
` ^ '
becomes
\ \___/ /\\ 28 spaces | , , | ~ 28 spaces ( =v= ) 28 spaces ` ^ '
With 35 characters per line.

This could be a whole new retro thing where people send each other ascii text message images. Another idea is small companies could pay artists to develop ascii logo’s and use these in their status message. A diamond supplier could have a status message of
__
/ \
\ /
\/
Or something actually good.
It might not sound like much of a business but crazy frog made millions from ring tones and that was completely inexplicable.

*edit it turns out the status message size changes with screen size so this idea will not work. It might work for google ads though
__
/ \
__O--O___
for a car company or something.

Spam Excuses

Why not use spam to help you? After years of penis enlargement emails and confidential business propositions from Nigeria you deserve some payback.
So why not use spam to cover your misdeeds? Send an email admitting to some heinous crime. But modify it so that the email gets sent to the spam folder and is ignored.
Then when your boss asks about the defrauded 5 billion or your wife finds you in bed with her sister you can say "But i sent you an email telling you" and that way lose some of the blame.
Think of it this way Spam filtering is an immune system that prevents useless emails from getting into your email body. What I am trying to do is create a false positive auto-immune email response.

Spam filters use a number of techniques to judge that an email is spam.
1. The user email. Someone who emails you all the time is unlikely to suddenly become a spammer. Because of this when sending your confession you need to use an email the recipient does not recognise. You can use an anonymous remailer or even just a web email account.
2. If you are sending to a web email if your email has sent spam previously your address is likely to be blacklisted. So before sending to recipient@mail from spammer@mail send some purely spam email from this address before you send the email with the confession you want to be junked.
3. The message content. Email filters generally use Bayesian filtering where words are ranked by their frequency.
You can take a collection of spam emails and extract random words out of them. This might fool a Bayesian filter but you could not later argue that you really meant for the email to be read.

A serious problem is one of trust. No one is going to accept "but I told you I was going to defraud the bank of billions" if you make such an obvious attempt to stop your mail getting seen no one will believe you made a sincere attempt to confess.

So rather then adding random spamy words altering your email to look spamy in a more natural way is preferable. Markov models are a good way of producing realistic text.

I gathered together some spams to train this ruby program on it on and the result is below.

"an alpha blocker (other than tamsulosin (Flomax) 0.4 mg once a day) such as doxazosin (Minipress),
TRY IS TODAY TO GAIN THE LONGEST AND LIVE LARGE TODAY! from 20$ 4 or more mood-killing premature ej@culation. Just try VPXL and more effective is an idea of the world is an idea of Feed Blaster is faster, easier to use,"

So how do you tell your boss that you are defrauding your bank out of a possible 5 billion euro? Say the message is
I am engaged in an illegal rogue trading activity.

Ok now give an explanation for the use of the weird email account. Make the explanation kind of spammy.

sorry for using this weird account I thought you might want to join me in this confidential business proposition.

add some more spam sounding text also

(I know this sounds like one of these confidential business propositions but do not worry i am not trying to Increase Your pen!s size.)
(If we join together in this we will Enjoy all the action of Las Vegas with 24 hour customer services,)

Now when you send this mail it will be cause a false positive be sent to the junk folder ignored and only brought up when you need to blame someone else during your trial.

Mii Bride and Groom

There are services that supply personalised brides and grooms for wedding cakes.

It would be more efficient to make these personalised models out of a template system that is widely used and available to everyone.
You can use mii avatar design programs to create both the bride and groom. This is the program used to create peoples likenesses in the Wii gaming system.



Mii design involves a huge number of choices. For example someone’s head can be any of 8 shapes with 6 ways to modify each. Each with 6 allowed colours. So there are 288 basic faces. When you combine these with the total number of choices in different areas it means that storing particular features to add to the face when needed could be inefficient.

A better way would be to store how to create each feature and create the physical piece when needed. Craftzine this issue has a piece on how to model using marzipan and food dye.

If you could copy this method using the reprap rabid prototyper you could have (near) automated personalised wedding cake decorations.

The reprap machine has already been modified to decorate cakes so such a usage is practical.WOW also has personalised avatars but they are more complicated making their real life production more difficult.

Bog Body Business

Everyone wants to sponsor carbon sinks, but why just sponsor the sexy rainforest ones and ignore the bog ones?
There are hippy schemes where you can donate money to help preserve bogs.

How about a capitalist way that you can ensure a piece of bog is preserved? I want to do this by setting up a business that relies upon the continued existence of the bog you purchase. I am of the belief that just because you are dead does not mean you are no longer useful.

So I want to set up a graveyard for bog bodies. Your burial provides for buying a bit of bog that is kept as bog from then on. This preserves a carbon sink as well as your corpse. You get to decide how you are buried, so you can be happy that you get to mess with the minds of archaeologists in the future. I think I would get buried in a wedding dress surrounded by statues of Jimmy Saville.


Being a bog body the choice of gingers for thousands of years.

Web 2.0 Laundry

Can we use the bleeding edge blue sky outside the box bullshit of Hype 2.0 in a real business? This is the Web 2.0 Laundry.
First thing is we do not charge for you to wash your clothes, that’s so last century. Instead when we wash your clothes we cover them in advertising. You get the free service you get the ads, bingo we have a business model.
Next we allow “donations” instead of expecting to get paid. This is the laundry’s almost traditional route of talking any money left in pants pockets. This donation is anonymous even to yourself so we advertise ourselves as cryptographically secure.
So far so good, but were lacking any “social network” buzzword bonus. Easy we give you someone else’s clothes. If you like these clothes the other persons karma is upped. In this way groups of people with similar interests cake, coke, and programming will form a unit and others with other similar interests bulimia, clenbuterol, and death will form another group.
Now we need to do something that works perfectly well at home and move it over to an unnatural habitat. Now clothes washing already qualifies for that but to make it really nonsensical like a chocolate kettle or an online isolation tank( actually forget I told you that I could get funding for that last one) we need to send the clothes on a really narrow network, pigeons trained to carry clothes is a good first start. Particularly as the pigeons shitting everywhere can only increase our profits.

So we guarantee to AJAX all your clothes send them off to random people who will using the hive mind form a social network , as soon as this reaches the tipping point our advertising revenue will 100% guarantee* that Google will wet themselves, then require our cleaning service and we will clean up.

*not a guarantee