May 2014

The Link Between STEM Training and Civil Rights

Securing America’s future in science, technology, engineering and math fields requires more than expanding opportunities for women. Promoting interest and opportunities for minorities also should be a national imperative, particularly as more than half of children born in the United States today are of minority descent.

That was the topic of a symposium at the National Academy of Sciences that sought to find solutions for providing minorities and women with proven pathways for obtaining good jobs and a higher standard of living through STEM education. The event, hosted by the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, highlighted that now, 60 years after the landmark Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, education in the United States remains separate and unequal for many minorities, children with disabilities and those living in high-poverty areas.

STEM is one area that has great potential to reverse that trend and help the United States maintain a competitive edge, experts noted.

The Constitution Project Calls for Strong Public Representative at Terror Court

A bipartisan group of national security and foreign intelligence experts, including a former judge who served on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, is urging the creation of a special advocate to protect the public's rights before the secretive terrorism review panel when the Senate takes up surveillance reform legislation.

A report released by The Constitution Project's Liberty and Security Committee calls on Congress to create "meaningful adversarial participation" before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, or FISC, including a security-cleared special advocate with a specific mandate to represent the public's privacy and civil liberties interests whenever the government seeks broad surveillance authority.

The new report suggests any effort by Congress to provide for more meaningful adversarial participation before the FISC should give the special advocate an unconditional right to participate in any case in which the FISC is asked to approve non-individual surveillance authorizations, including any production orders under section 215 of the USA Patriot Act or directives under section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act. The special advocate should also be empowered to represent all US persons who are subject to the broad surveillance orders, and should have the authority to litigate on their behalf.

The Comcast Way: First, Kill PEG Television

Simultaneous to projecting itself as a corporation that has the public’s best interest at heart in order to push through approval of the merger of Comcast with Time Warner, Comcast is waging war on Public, Educational and Government (PEG) access television in America’s heartland.

On February 13, 2014, Comcast announced its merger with Time Warner, assuring regulators and the public that ultimately they would deliver a new and improved product that benefits consumers while not harming competition and consumer choices. In that same announcement, Comcast states “In every transaction, we have over-delivered on our public interest commitments.”

Comcast states: “PEG channels would be protected from migration to digital in the acquired systems that are not yet all-digital (unless otherwise agreed by the LFA), and would be protected from material degradation.”

“Making a concession to a digital transition of PEG channels, does us no good if those channels are stripped of their funding or reduced in number,” said Rocco. “As usual, Comcast shows open hostility toward PEG access television and shows its true colors when it comes to meeting the public interest.”

There are over 40 PEG access operations in the state of Minnesota. American Community Television is monitoring the situation in Minnesota with interest.

VoIP Impairment, Failure, and Restrictions

A substantial portion of global voice communications are now carried over Internet Protocol (IP) and the Internet has become a fundamental medium supporting voice services.

Voice over IP (VoIP) services allow users to make calls between IP-based endpoints, and to interconnect with the traditional public switched telephone network. Impairment, failure, or restriction of VoIP services can create significant problems for users of those services, and can create problems for the operators of VoIP services, who may be required to troubleshoot or work around issues (where possible) to restore their users’ connectivity.

As VoIP services become more common around the world, incidences of VoIP impairment, failure, or restriction also have the potential to be construed as anti-competitive, discriminatory, or motivated by non-technical factors. With this report BITAG clarifies how VoIP may be impaired, fail, or be restricted in residential, mobile, application provider, and consumer networks and devices; the methods for mitigating VoIP impairments, failures, or restrictions; and recommendations concerning such. Among other things, the report recommends that:

Network operators should avoid impairing or restricting VoIP applications unless no reasonable alternatives are available to resolve technical issues.
VoIP-related Application Layer Gateways (ALGs) in operator-supplied home routers should minimize their impact on traffic other than the operator’s VoIP service where possible.
Manufacturers of home routers should disable VoIP-related ALGs by default.
Port blocking rules in consumer equipment should be user-configurable.
If network operators intentionally use network policies or practices that impair or restrict VoIP, they should provide disclosures about those policies and practices and provide communications channels for feedback.
Application developers should design VoIP applications to be port-agile where possible.

Research funding bill made less awful, but still guts social sciences

In 2013, the US House Science Committee was considering a bill that would force the National Science Foundation to reconsider its funding priorities.

The Foundation has been tasked with funding basic research, but the bill would have directed it to only fund science deemed to be in the national interest -- things like research with defense applications or with obvious economic outcomes. The committee just put the final touches on the 2014 version of the bill, and in a bit of good news, some of the more problematic language was gone.

Although the current bill still wants the Foundation to perform "investment in strategic areas vital to the national interest," the actual funding requirements it stipulates provide the NSF with a broad leeway in interpreting the national interests. Grants can go to programs that aid in the "development of a STEM [science, technology, engineering, and math] workforce and increased public scientific literacy" or the "promotion of the progress of science." But the Committee still wants to be able to blame someone if a grant it doesn't like gets funded, as it added a requirement that an NSF official provide "written justification" for any grants that are awarded.

Deutsche Telekom Willing to Keep Stake in T-Mobile-Sprint Tie-Up

Kyodo news agency reported that Deutsche Telekom had agreed to a Softbank plan to buy T-Mobile. But sources familiar with the talks told Reuters that while the two sides are keen to get a deal done, a transaction was complicated, including the issue of getting regulatory approval.

Germany’s Deutsche Telekom AG is willing to keep a minority stake in a deal to sell T-Mobile US to Japan’s Softbank, but other details such as price and financing remain to be worked out, according to sources familiar with the situation.

Softbank owns a majority of Sprint, the third largest US wireless carrier. Deutsche Telekom owns 67 percent of T-Mobile, which has a market value of $27.6 billion and is the fourth-largest US wireless carrier.

Artemis Makes Tiny Internet Cells to Dodge Interference

Startup Artemis Networks showed off a new technology called pCell (which stands for “personal cell”) that it claims deliver fast, unshared bandwidth to each smartphone, tablet or laptop, even in packed places like stadiums.

The pCells are generated by small transmitters that look sort of like a larger version of a home wireless router and can be placed all over a building or a city. If adopted, they could even one day replace cell towers, according to Artemis founder Steve Perlman, who formerly worked at Apple and Microsoft and helped invent products like QuickTime and WebTV.

The pCell system works with standard LTE phones, so no new handset technology is required. And they can coexist with the current cell phone transmission system. But there’s a catch: Deploying them will require the active cooperation of the major wireless carriers, who may be suspicious of relying on a radical new technology from a small startup.

The Future Of Online Ed Isn't Heading Where You Expect

A new pioneer has just planted its flag on the education-technology frontier: the country of Trinidad and Tobago. Its government announced the creation of a "national knowledge network" to promote free online learning in partnership with Khan Academy and Coursera.

The initiative is part of a broader national strategy of investment in education. The currently oil- and gas-dependent Caribbean nation is trying to transform itself into a knowledge economy. For observers of ed-tech, meanwhile, the news represents a possible future path for Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs -- not as a replacement for a college degree but as a resource for hybrid and lifelong learning, made in the USA and exported around the world.

So, what's really new here? Well, this Trinidad and Tobago effort takes the level of coordination up a notch. Their focus is on connecting MOOC-powered learning to jobs. Graduates from Learning Hub programs will receive a government-issued certificate of participation from knowledge.tt.

This edgy strategy is part of a larger trend of the nation investing hugely in education. Since 2010, education has received the highest budgetary allocation of all government ministries, representing 18 percent of the country's annual expenditure and six percent of GDP (above the US, at 5.4% of GDP). Trinidad and Tobago spent $250 million in 2013 on classroom laptops alone.

YouTube starts rating US ISPs, puts its weight behind settlement-free peering

Google released an US-focused version of its video quality report, which offers users a way to check which of their local Internet service providers (ISPs) deliver the best-looking YouTube streams.

The report is singling out some ISPs as “HD verified” which YouTube Product Manager Jay Akkad defined this way: “If your provider can consistently deliver HD video, a resolution of at least 720p, without buffering or interruptions -- it’s HD Verified.”

The report also shows which ISPs are capable of delivering SD quality video without buffering, and which ones deliver videos at a lower performance, or in other words will leave you completely frustrated. To get to these results, YouTube monitored streams over a 30-day period. Only ISPs that were capable of delivering HD at least 90 percent of the time are being called HD verified.

Hastings: Comcast wants to become the 'post office'

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings continued to stump against Comcast's proposed acquisition of Time Warner Cable in an appearance at the Code Conference. Hastings accused Comcast of wanting to become the post office, a big national monopoly.

Comcast CEO Brian Roberts took his own shots when he took the stage at the Code Conference, saying Netflix just does not want to bear the costs of the massive volume of Internet traffic that its subscribers generate. Netflix paid for postage to ship DVDs to subscribers, it should pay for traffic, Roberts said. "They used to spend three-quarters of a billion dollars for postage," Roberts said.

“It’s a general way of taxing the internet,” Hastings said. “They want the whole internet to pay them for when their subscribers use the internet.” Netflix felt it had no choice to sign a paid peering deal with Comcast earlier this year, holding its nose as it did so in order to ensure that Netflix performance wouldn’t get even worse for Comcast subscribers. Not a lot of money is changing hands right now, but now that the threshold has been crossed, Hastings thinks that the fees will grow over time. “The fundamental question is who’s going to pay for the network? And the answer is the ISP,” Hastings said. Netflix makes up roughly 30 percent of US internet traffic on a given evening, which has led Comcast to suggest that Netflix should bear 30 percent of its costs, he said. And when he suggested that if that’s the case, maybe Netflix should get 30 percent of Comcast’s broadband revenue, Comcast demurred.

Benton

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