October 2009

[Commentary] The Web and social networking tools such as Facebook and Twitter have elevated individuals' influence and transformed word-of-mouth into a global force. Recognizing the shift, some marketers have tried to insinuate their pitches into the grass-roots commentary, often by rewarding the people who sing their products' praises. Under new Federal Trade Commission guidelines, wherever an advertiser sponsors a message, its involvement has to be disclosed. But the FTC's examples of what constitutes sponsorship set an unreasonably low threshold for blog posts to be treated as ads, potentially turning ethical lapses into violations of federal law. Merely receiving review copies of games, gadgets or discs for free -- as critics in traditional media routinely do -- could bring bloggers under the FTC's purview. The commission argues that the guidelines probably wouldn't apply to professional journalists, and that amateur bloggers would just have to disclose the freebies. Yet the risk of $11,000 penalties could easily discourage some would-be reviewers and harm sites that rely on amateurs to rate products and services. There's also a practical problem. E-commerce sites and social networks are generating an overwhelming amount of information about products and services, only some of which is genuine. Yet the best thing about the Internet is that the masses do a remarkable job of calling out fakery and unethical behavior. Many websites help in this process by giving users effective tools for rating a reviewer's credibility. The result is a wealth of feedback that provides great insights for consumers. As it tries to crack down on deceptive practices online, the FTC should take care not to cut off that flow of information.

The United States is lagging in technology innovation, thanks to a federal policy that has not kept up to pace with the speed of innovation changes, panelists said at an Information Technology and Innovation Foundation event on Tuesday. Unlike in the days when federal funding was used to fund research projects, innovation changed over the past 30 years. According to Howard Wial of Brookings Institution, large firms which were making initially investing in research have been doing less risky business investments, leaving innovation less funded. There needs to be a national innovation foundation which can advocate for funding which will be used for directing innovation ventures, he said. Such a foundation would also give grants to research, funding for economic based developments and support technology diffusion. It would also fund actors in technology-based institutions in order to provide trainings for the public.

For 2009, the Nobel Prize in Physics will be shared by Charles Kao, who works at the UK's Standard Telecommunication Laboratories, for his key contribution to the development of fiber optics. The basic concept behind fiber optics is simple: light traveling down a medium can be propagated indefinitely if it's surrounded by a material that has a slightly lower refractive index, allowing it to be reflected internally. The material that describes the award notes that scientists were demonstrating that light could be guided down water jets back in the 1850s, and glass-based devices were on the market roughly a century later. The problem was that the losses were too large for applications that transmitted light more than a few meters. The first glass fibers had lost 99 percent of the initial light within 20 meters, ruling them out as a medium for long distance communications. As the development of lasers made optical communications look inevitable, a variety of ways to improve the performance of transmission media were being explored. The Nobel cites Kao for avoiding the approach taken by others in the field, which involved looking at ways to improve the reflectance of the light. Instead, Kao focused on the material properties of the glass itself, figuring out why the light was actually being lost in the first place. Kao identified the impurities in glass that were causing problems, and calculated that, if they were eliminated, there would be a sweet spot of wavelengths between absorption in the infrared and Rayleigh scattering at shorter wavelengths. The right combination of materials and wavelength should drop the losses more than a thousand-fold compared to the current state of the art.

Nishi and John Windhausen -- Coordinator of the Schools, Health and Libraries Broadband Coalition -- met with members of the Federal Communications Commission's National Broadband Plan team to discuss cost estimates for providing fiber optic connectivity to anchor institutions. Installing fiber to all community anchor institutions may cost $5-$10 billion with installation costs per site ranging from $10k-$200k depending on deployment technique and investment shared with other buildings.