January 2009

Up to 10 million young Europeans are in danger of damaging their hearing by playing their MP3 personal music players too loud, a European Union body on health risks told a conference on Tuesday. Listening to MP3 players and other personal music players at high volumes for long periods of time can cause loss of hearing and tinnitus, a ringing sensation in the ears, the EU Scientific Committee on Emerging and Newly Identified Health Risks said. It found that 5-10 percent of MP3 users risk permanent hearing loss if they listen to a personal music player for more than one hour per day, each week at high volume settings for a period of at least 5 years. No cure is currently known for hearing loss or tinnitus, the committee noted in its report.

Why did broadband get slighted in the economic stimulus bill? Will the technology get more government funding in the future? And does the debate over broadband foreshadow how the technology community will be treated in the future by the Obama Administration? Blair Levin, a former senior official at the Federal Communications Commission, was a top technology policy adviser on the Obama transition team said, "Did we leave the door open to additional money? I think the answer is the door is open and should be open." Levin and other technology leaders say there are several reasons that broadband got less money than expected in the stimulus bill. For starters, there is no track record of the federal government funding broadband networks. That made it harder to garner support for a larger subsidy in a Congress trying to accommodate numerous claims from more established constituencies. "When it comes to building roads, that is a clear government project," says Levin. "Building rural broadband is clear, too. But with other parts of broadband there is not a consensus." There's also an information gap. There are no clear, comprehensive data on which regions need broadband investment, which fueled concerns that it would be difficult to spend money quickly and wisely. "We were concerned that the money would be used effectively and appropriately," says Levin. "You have to have the strategy before you determine where the money is sent." Then there were economic questions. While most economists acknowledge that communications boosts the productivity of the economy over time, there are concerns about the job-creation potential of broadband investment in the near term—the primary objective of the stimulus package.

Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA) President Grant Seiffert wrote to Acting Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Michael Copps and his fellow Commissioners asking the FCC to expand and make permanent the Rural Health Care Pilot Program (RHCPP), currently set to expire in mid-2010. Seiffert urged "swift action by the FCC to inject much-needed capital into the flagging economy, promote the deployment of critical communications infrastructure, and facilitate more efficient and effective delivery of health-care services to Americans living in rural areas." The action sought by TIA would expand investment in rural broadband and health-care infrastructure by hundreds of millions of dollars per year, and would require no new Congressional authorization.

Leading US newspaper Web sites are getting more visitors, and those visitors are coming more often, in what might be a small bright spot for an industry struggling with declining revenue. However, those visitors aren't spending much time on the newspaper Web sites. They averaged slightly more than a half-hour at the top 10 sites during all of December. The latest figures from Nielsen Online underscore the struggles that newspapers still face with how to translate their audiences into revenue. So far, online ads aren't generating enough dollars to offset losses from print, where ad sales worsened last year because of the recession.