June 2009

Congress pressed to act on Google book settlement

The world's largest university press has called for immediate action by the US Congress to prevent Google gaining exclusive rights to exploit the "orphan works" made available through its book search initiative. Tim Barton, president of the US arm of Oxford University Press, said students' tendency to overlook books they could not find online made the settlement Google struck last October with publishers that had accused it of copyright infringement "a remarkable and remarkably ambitious achievement." However, he said there was no "public good" in the settlement's proposal to grant Google a monopoly over "orphan" titles, whose copyright holders cannot been found. "If the parties to the settlement cannot themselves solve this major problem, then at a minimum Congress should pass orphan-works legislation that gives others the same rights as Google," Mr Barton wrote in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Internet service providers not keeping up with user trends

[Commentary] There's a revolution happening on the Internet — though broadband providers have not seemed to notice. Thanks to new gadgets, programs and Web services, consumers are sending, sharing and swapping more data than ever over the global network. Yet many are stuck with Internet connections that give them upload speeds much slower than download speeds. What that means is that it takes a lot longer to send a movie or picture out to the Internet than it takes to download the same file. Uploading a video, a roll of pictures or a backup of key files on your hard drive can take hours, or even days. But broadband companies seem oblivious to this trend. Here's hoping broadband providers join the revolution and make faster upload speeds an option soon.

Let's Leave Wireless Broadband to Wireless Devices

[Commentary] The reality of today's technology is that wireless is having enough trouble trying to keep up with the increasing demands of mobile applications and devices. It is a myth that some day we'll live in a world without wires, that all of our broadband connectivity will eventually be delivered over the air. The simple, undeniable reality of wireless is that its capacity constraints are due to clear technological limitations. For one, wireless spectrum is artificially limited, which restricts the throughput and overall capacity that you can get wirelessly. If we were able to get lots more spectrum that would relieve some of these issues but not all. Fiber, on the other hand, can always have enough capacity and can easily be upgraded to meet any level of demand whenever its needed. It's the only broadband technology that can do this, too. So let's stop trying to lump wireless and wireline broadband together and start realizing that they're complementary not competitive.

Survey says FTTH sells homes

A new survey, commissioned by the FTTH Council, shows fiber-to-the-home-based Internet service is considered the most important amenity for a future home purchase, among home buyers who have had FTTH previously and those who haven't. The national survey by RVA LLC Market Research and Consulting, released this week, shows that 82% percent of those buyers who have had broadband service over FTTH rank it as the leading amenity in a future home, and nearly 70% of those who hadn't had FTTH say it's the amenity they want most in a future home.

The End of Spectrum Scarcity: Building on the TV Bands Database to Access Unused Public Airwaves

Wireless is the most cost-effective and rapid means to bring broadband access to under-served rural and urban residents. Even after high-capacity Internet access becomes universal, wireless remains as the complementary infrastructure needed to achieve the larger goal of pervasive connectivity. Within a few short years, most Americans are likely to spend more hours each week on mobile than on wired Internet connections. This paper recommends that the Obama administration and the Federal Communications Commission make mapping and actively facilitating opportunistic access to unused and underutilized frequency bands a priority as part of any national broadband policy.

Unlocking the "vast wasteland" of unused spectrum capacity can be achieved through three overlapping steps:

1) Under a White House-led initiative, the NTIA and FCC should conduct an Inventory of the Airwaves that maps how our public spectrum resource is being utilized or underutilized in various bands, by both commercial and government users.

2) The process of unlocking unused spectrum capacity should begin immediately on a band-by-band basis.

3) NTIA and FCC should commence a set of inquiries into the technologies, incentives, institutional arrangements and "rules of the road" that can best facilitate a future of more open, intensive and opportunistic sharing of the nation's spectrum resource.

Cautionary Stories of the State of Broadband Mapping - Texas and Tennessee

With up to $350 million in federal stimulus funds allocated for broadband mapping, an organization called Connected Nation is racking up the frequent flying miles in an effort to capture the lion's share of the money. From Austin to Boise, Honolulu, Oklahoma City and even up to Wail, Alaska, and many points in between, Connected Nation has pitched its services to state governments, with impressive results in either setting up the contracting process to obtain contracts, or obtaining contracts outright. At the same time, those results provide cautionary tales for Federal policymakers who would delegate mapping projects to state governments. One story involves the intricacies of the bidding process. The other involves how to do away with a bidding process. In one case, Connected Nation was the winner. In the other, its chances of winning are extremely favorable.

A Green Way to Dump Low-Tech Electronics

Since 2004, 18 states and New York City have approved laws that make manufacturers responsible for recycling electronics, and similar statutes were introduced in 13 other states this year. The laws are intended to prevent a torrent of toxic and outdated electronic equipment — television sets, computers, monitors, printers, fax machines — from ending up in landfills where they can leach chemicals into groundwater and potentially pose a danger to public health. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates 99.1 million televisions sit unused in closets and basements across the country. Consumer response to recycling has been enormous in states where the laws have taken effect. Collection points in Washington State, for example, have been swamped.

Rural South Koreans' Global Links Grow, Nourished by a Satellite Crop

A look at how satellite dishes are changing life in rural South Korea. In recent years, the South Korean countryside has had an influx of brides from poorer countries like Vietnam, China and the Philippines. Like Ms. Bui, they marry South Korean farmers who have difficulty finding a spouse because so many young Korean women have rejected rural life and migrated to cities. In towns like Yeongju, these young foreign brides have become a bedrock of the local economy. They work alongside their husbands in the fields and have brought back a sound that was fast becoming a distant memory among the aging farm population here: crying babies. In South Korea, which had once prided itself on being a homogeneous society, 4 out of 10 women who married in rural communities last year were foreign born. In Yeongju alone, the number of foreign wives increased by 28 percent in the past year and a half, to 250, half of them from Vietnam.

Iran and the Death of Michael Jackson

Last week the news narrative careened through three distinct, often dramatic phases, and ended overwhelmed by a celebrity story that echoed coverage from more than a decade ago. As the week began, the continuing protests in Iran, now into their third week, dominated the media. But as the Iranian government began to drive the protests underground, coverage began to recede—even if the tensions in the country had not—a sign that street protests may be easier to cover than political maneuvering behind closed doors. By Wednesday afternoon, media attention was already shifting from protest to disgrace when South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford made a stunning admission of having an extra-marital affair after having gone missing for several days. Then, late Thursday afternoon, the reports ricocheted across Twitter, celebrity gossip Web sites and mainstream media alerts that Michael Jackson, the self-described "King of Pop," had been rushed to the hospital in cardiac arrest. The tabloid celebrity Web site TMZ.com was the first to report that he had been pronounced dead. The Los Angeles Times soon confirmed, and within a few hours, Jackson's demise proved to be the biggest celebrity story in perhaps a decade, something akin to the death of John F. Kennedy, Jr. in 1999 and perhaps even that of Princess Diana in 1997.

Project seeks to measure ed tech's value

An ambitious new research project aims to revolutionize education by showing that well-implemented technology initiatives can save states money after an initial investment. Project RED (for Revolutionizing EDucation) will examine the outcomes of educational technology initiatives using a cost-benefit analysis to determine which ed-tech programs and devices are having the most cost-effective impact for schools, parents, and states. The project "seeks to define technology models that lead to improvements in student achievement when well implemented," according to its summary. Project RED is led by ed-tech consulting firms the Hayes Connection and the Greaves Group, as well as the One-To-One Institute. "The goal is a national study [to] ... create a model detailing the technologies that contribute to improved learning [as well as] cost savings," said Jeanne Hayes of the Hayes Connection.