An optical transmission line under the Atlantic at 100 Gbps – that sounds pretty cool, doesn’t it? Hibernia Atlantic, a network operator and Chinese hardware maker Huawei did just that and conducted the first 100 Gigabit transmission across the Atlantic. The test was conducted over 5,570 kilometers between Halifax, Nova Scotia and Southport, England.
We've all heard tests of the Emergency Alert System. They occur all the time at the local level, but on Wednesday, at 2:00 ET, the federal government will conduct the first-ever nationwide evaluation of the system. The test will last about 30 seconds and be broadcast on television and radio stations across the country. It will allow emergency personnel to assess and improve our alerting capabilities in the event of a crisis.
Motorola Mobility won a preliminary injunction on Nov 4, forbidding Apple from selling any mobile devices in Germany that infringe on two Motorola patents related to wireless technology.
The district court in Mannheim, Germany, made a default judgment in Motorola's favor after Apple failed to turn up in court, a spokesman at the Landgericht Mannheim said. The verdict didn't mention any Apple products by name, but said that the company can't offer any mobile devices that infringe on two Motorola patents related to wireless technology, which makes the iPhone and iPad the most likely to be affected. If Apple does not respect the judgment, it may have to pay a 250,000, the court ruled. Apple is not worried by the decision: "This is a procedural issue and has nothing to do with the merits of the case. It does not affect our ability to sell products or do business in Germany at this time," a company spokesman said.
The Yale Global Health Leadership Institute has partnered with Management Sciences for Health on a five-year, technology-focused project to strengthen health systems worldwide. Enacted as part of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID)-funded Leadership, Management and Governance Project, one of the initiative's key prongs will be to increase the availability of health technologies in the developing world.
Project goals include:
Google has performed another major tweak to its search algorithm, and this time analysts predict that some government agency websites might be among the losers.
Google announced it had implemented the “freshness” algorithm update on Nov. 3, which analysts say is expected to affect about 35 percent of all Google searches. A number of federal websites may fall into that category, especially those that appear to be updated less frequently. The goal of Google’s change was to highlight the top search results with the most recent information. Winners can expect their websites to rank higher in Google search. They include many brand and news sites, as well as Twitter messages, blog postings and other websites in which content is updated frequently. Websites with infrequently updated content are likely to be lower down the list in search results. That may include some federal government websites which, in the past, may have been updated weekly or less frequently.
Warren Littlefield was NBC's entertainment chief during the network's long run as the home of Must See TV comedy on Thursday nights. But he doesn't think there will ever be another Must See TV night for his struggling former network -- or any of its rivals.
For one thing, the TV landscape has become increasingly segmented. "I think there's a lot of outstanding television out there today," Littlefield told TheWrap. "It's just (that) the average household has 200 channel choices and it's spread around," he said, noting that "at the height of Must See TV, a third of the country was watching NBC on Thursday night. That's just never going to happen again." He said that he doesn't envy current NBC entertainment president Bob Greenblatt or his rivals, as the "competition for eyeballs" is only going to get tougher for broadcast networks. The former network exec said that it's an easier task for niche cable channels to bring audiences what they want.
The US Departments of Education and Defense announced the launch of “Learning Registry,” an open source community and technology designed to improve the quality and availability of learning resources in education. The launch is an important milestone in the effort to more effectively share information about learning resources among a broad set of stakeholders in the education community.
The project was made possible by a $2.6 million investment, with the Departments of Education and Defense contributing $1.3 million each to the effort. Rather than creating an alternative destination to existing websites, Learning Registry is a communication system that allows existing educational portals and online systems to publish, consume and share important information about learning resources with each other and the public, while respecting the privacy of individual users. Basic data about resources -- grade level, subject area and author -- can be shared through Learning Registry, as well as more complex data such as curricular standards alignment information. This platform for innovative data sharing also allows user activities to be shared anonymously, such as the types of educators who find a specific resource particularly useful (e.g., elementary teachers, or those focused on working with migrant students, etc.). The Learning Registry community and technology are intended to create opportunities for future innovation in areas that are just now starting to be explored. The project is an open, community -- supported activity -- any organization or individual can contribute to or use the technology. Learning Registry technology's open source license permits integration into other open projects, and in commercial applications. The project is a voluntary collaboration among many organizations that want to share more and new types of information about learning resources with one another and the public.
Federal agencies participating in the Learning Registry community, in addition to U.S. Departments of Education and Defense, include National Archives and Records Administration, Library of Congress and the Smithsonian Institution. Private sector organizations collaborating on the project include PBS, National Science Digital Library, Agilix, Institute for Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME), BetterLesson, Benetech, Booz Allen Hamilton, JISC UK, European Schoolnet, Achieve, and JES & Co. State and local governments involved in the project include the Florida Department of Education's CPALMS project and the California Department of Education's CTE Online and Brokers of Expertise projects supported by the Butte County Office of Education/CADRE in California.
Using more spectrum and advanced antennas, cellular network vendors and operators plan to increase 4G mobile speeds as that technology rolls out over the next several years. But cellular technology has hit a fundamental wall in the physics of what the radio signals themselves can carry, so researchers are looking at other ways to increase speed and capacity of 4G networks, nearly all of which will use a standard called LTE.
The keys to increasing speeds as researchers look at future networks are to shorten the distance between users and base stations and allowing them to automatically be reconfigured. Historically, a new mobile generation has included two basic components: a mobile standard and spectrum allocation, says Håkan Djuphamma , vice president of architecture and portfolio at radio equipment maker Ericsson. Because LTE is at the limit of what is physically possible, it now makes less sense to develop another standard from the ground up, Djuphammar says, as a new standard couldn't change laws of physics. Another issue that a new technology standard can't really address is that the allocation of spectrum has become increasingly fragmented because the airwaves are so crowded.
Industrial-age journalism has failed, we are told, and even if it hasn’t failed, it is over. Newspaper company stocks are trading for less than $1 a share. Great newsrooms have been cut down like so many sheaves of wheat. Where quasi-monopolies once reigned over whole metropolitan areas, we have conversation and communities, but also chaos and confusion.
A vanguard of journalism thinkers steps forward to explain things, and we should be grateful that they are here. If they weren’t, we’d have to invent them. Someone has to help us figure this out. Most prominent are Jeff Jarvis, Clay Shirky, and Jay Rosen, whose ideas we’ll focus on here, along with Dan Gillmor, John Paton, and others. Together their ideas form what I will call the future-of-news (FON) consensus. According to this consensus, the future points toward a network-driven system of journalism in which news organizations will play a decreasingly important role. News won’t be collected and delivered in the traditional sense. It will be assembled, shared, and to an increasing degree, even gathered, by a sophisticated readership, one that is so active that the word “readership” will no longer apply. Let’s call it a user-ship or, better, a community. This is an interconnected world in which boundaries between storyteller and audience dissolve into a conversation between equal parties, the implication being that the conversation between reporter and reader was a hierarchical relationship, as opposed to, say, a simple division of labor. At its heart, the FON consensus is anti-institutional. It believes that old institutions must wither to make way for the networked future. “The hallmark of revolution is that the goals of the revolutionaries cannot be contained by the institutional structure of the existing society,” Shirky wrote in Here Comes Everybody, his 2008 popularization of network theory. “As a result, either the revolutionaries are put down, or some of those institutions are altered, replaced or destroyed.” If this vision of the future does not square with your particular news preferences, well, as they might say on Twitter, #youmaybeSOL. And let’s face it, in the debate over journalism’s future, the FON crowd has had the upper hand. The establishment is gloomy and old; the FON consensus is hopeful and young (or purports to represent youth). The establishment has no plan. The FON consensus says no plan is the plan. The establishment drones on about rules and standards; the FON thinkers talk about freedom and informality. FON says “cheap” and “free”; the establishment asks for your credit card number. FON talks about “networks,” “communities,” and “love”; the establishment mutters about “institutions,” like The New York Times or mental hospitals.
The Apple iPhone 4S is among the recommended models in our newly updated Ratings of smart phones.
Apple’s newest smart phone performed very well in our tests, and while it closely resembles the iPhone 4 in appearance, it doesn’t suffer the reception problem we found in its predecessor in special tests in our labs. In special reception tests of the iPhone 4S that duplicated those we did on the iPhone 4, the newer phone did not display the same reception flaw, which involves a loss of signal strength when you touch a spot on the phone’s lower left side while you’re in an area with a weak signal. The Apple iPhone 4S did very well in our standard tests of battery life; like the iPhone 4, it scores Very Good overall on that attribute. And the iPhone 4S and new samples of the iPhone 4 have displayed no notable battery problems in additional special tests we carried out, after some owners complained on user forums of short run times with some samples of both phones. Apple has said the culprit is “a few bugs” in its latest mobile operating system, iOS 5, and promised a software update to address the problem later this month. We plan to retest both phones with the software update when it is available, just in case the fix itself affects battery performance in any way. Overall, the new iPhone 4S scores higher in the Ratings than the iPhone 4, thanks to such enhancements as an upgraded camera, a faster "dual-core" processor, and the addition of the intriguing Siri voice-activated feature, which accepts and responds to verbal commands in a conversational manner, using a synthetic-sounding female voice.
These pluses were not enough, however, to allow the iPhone 4S to outscore the best new Android-based phones in our Ratings. Those top scorers included the Samsung Galaxy S II phones, the Motorola Droid Bionic, and several other phones that boast larger displays than the iPhone 4S and run on faster 4G networks.
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