“OutLaw Yard”

The Entrepreneurial Outlaw

Outlaw Community Innovations

Recent studies of outlaw communities provide qualitative evidence of their existence and the organisation of the underlying innovation processes. We provide descriptive results from a large scale survey of two online outlaw communities focussing on Microsoft’s XBox. In line with previous findings, we identify two types of participants in outlaw communities user innovators and adopters. Based on...

Outlaw. The Autobiography of a Soviet Waif

Harvill Press. 16/'. This is a terrible book, illuminating in its psychological aspects and the light it throws upon the workings of the immature mind when all external moral motives have been removed or profoundly inhibited. The author was a Soviet waif in the years between 1930 and the outbreak of the Second World War, motherless from infancy but gently and carefully nurtured by a kindly nurs...

Outlaw Distributions and Locally Decodable Codes

Locally decodable codes (LDCs) are error correcting codes that allow for decoding of a single message bit using a small number of queries to a corrupted encoding. Despite decades of study, the optimal trade-off between query complexity and codeword length is far from understood. In this work, we give a new characterization of LDCs using distributions over Boolean functions whose expectation is ...

Illegal Drugs and the Outlaw Hero Mythology

"Felix Mitchell is the biggest drug dealer ever here. He made history in Oakland, Calif.," Owen said. "He's a hero..." He is accused of masterminding the distribution of millions of dollars in heroin and ordering the deaths of five rivals during Oakland's 1980 drug war. But to Owen and scores of kids growing up, as Mitchell did, in East Oakland's bleak 69th Avenue housing projects, Felix Mitche...