December 2014

More than 100 Bold New STEM Commitments as Part of the White House College Opportunity Day of Action

President Barack Obama, Vice President Biden, and the First Lady joined college presidents and other education leaders from around the nation at the second White House College Opportunity Day of Action, where organizations announced over 500 new actions to help more students prepare for and graduate from college. As part of this convening, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy worked with college and university presidents, leaders of philanthropy and non-profit organizations, and CEOs of private sector companies to generate 110 bold new commitments to increase STEM degree access, preparation, and completion for more students from low income and underserved backgrounds in addition to women and minorities currently underrepresented in STEM fields.

Among the 110 new initiatives and actions to improve STEM college completion being announced are efforts to: increase STEM graduation rates at college and universities up to 35 percent over the next 5 to 10 years -- producing thousands of more students that help us reach the Administration’s goal of 1 million additional STEM graduates by 2022, expand mentoring, financial aid, tutoring, and internships for women and minorities pursuing STEM fields, move away from traditional lecture-based courses to more active classrooms that encourage students to solve problems in small groups and hands-on experiments and modeling- methods that both increase student learning and student retention in STEM majors, and make progress on the Administration’s goal to prepare more excellent K-12 teachers with expertise in STEM areas.

Verizon's battle with New Jersey town shows strong thirst for rural wireline broadband

Verizon's ongoing war of words with Hopewell Township’s (NJ) officials over telephone service quality and lack of fruitful broadband service shows that consumers' desire for high speed wireline broadband is just as prevalent in rural markets as it is in large cities.

The township's grievance with Verizon is part of an agreement New Jersey made with the telecommunications company over 20 years ago that's now apparently gone unfulfilled. Residents want the company to deliver on the “45 Mbps of symmetrical broadband service to every state resident by 2010 in exchange for tax breaks and other incentives” the company promised under the "Opportunity New Jersey" program. Despite the fact that local consumers paid nearly $13 billion in surcharges with the hope of getting high-speed Internet service, they have yet to see anything four years following the original deadline.

FCC Commissioner Clyburn: Telehealth has great potential

Federal Communications Commissioner Mignon Clyburn says Mississippi can vastly improve its healthcare through greater broadband connectivity.

Commissioner Clyburn said that large hospitals and small clinics alike throughout the state are tapping into the online world's potential to improve healthcare in a region often worst or among the worst in the country for a slew of serious illnesses. "We're moving the needle in terms of healthcare delivery, even if the system isn't perfect as it is today," she said. "Connectivity is critical to healthcare."

Financial incentives and ability to exchange clinical information found to be top reasons for Electronic Health Records adoption

The need to share patient information with other providers and the use of financial incentives are key drivers in why many providers adopt and use health information technology tools like electronic health records (EHRs), according a data brief released from the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC). The data brief details why physicians decided to adopt -- or not adopt -- EHRs, and it helps to explain how financial incentives drive EHR adoption. The data, from the 2013 National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey, also highlights the high level of importance providers put on health information exchange.

At least 1 in every 10 robberies involves the theft of a phone, FCC Requests Action

A Federal Communications Commission study concluded that thieves steal more than a million phones a year. Of all robberies committed annually in the United States, about one in 10 involves the theft of a mobile device.

Many phones come with remote wiping or locking features, so that if the unthinkable happens you can keep prying eyes from accessing your files. The largest cellular networks in the country have also voluntarily agreed to add such features in all new smartphones made after July 2015. But now the FCC wants to cement that agreement -- and on a much faster timetable. In letters sent to Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, Sprint and U.S. Cellular, Chairman Wheeler asked the companies to make "'lock/wipe/restore" functionality operational by default on all devices … by the end of the first quarter of 2015." Unsurprisingly, wireless lobbyists are pushing back against what it calls the "artificial deadline" set by the FCC.

Journalism Partnerships: A New Era of Interest

A new report from the Pew Research Center's Journalism Project emphasizes a recurring theme of their journalism research over the last two years: newsroom collaborations, meaning news providers teaming up in new ways.

What these collaborations mean for the public -- at least in theory -- is broader and deeper news coverage, more easily accessed or discovered. What they mean for news organizations is -- depending on one’s place at the table -- a more diverse mix of content to offer, broader reach and more scalable reporting.

A few of the major takeaways from the report include:
1) Economics were and still are the driver for these partnerships
2) Paradoxically, often little if any money changes hands
3) Things can easily go wrong
4) Imaginative ad hoc partnering may be the next wave
5) Oddly, though digital disruption and competition is the change agent, digital partnering may be secondary
6) Quality counts; quality plus engagement is even better.

22 people had to approve Romney tweets

Aides to Mitt Romney’s presidential team in 2012 are alleging that tweets had to be approved by nearly two dozen people by the end of the race.

Former Romney staffers said they were stymied by bureaucracy, even when they had the resources to produce original digital content. Press releases became the basis for online content simply because they had already been approved by campaign leadership.

"But We're Not the Broadband Foundation": The critical role of philanthropy in increasing Internet access and use

[Commentary] At Blandin Foundation, we have come to understand that Internet access -- and the skills to use it -- are fundamental to everything we care about as a foundation. If you are persuaded , as we are, that social justice and economic prosperity require redressing our nation’s growing digital divide, know that other foundations are stepping on this path as well. And, while there never will be a single roadmap, we can help point out some of the short-cuts.

Top 5 Lessons Learned:
1) It all comes down to community leadership
2) Have patience
3) Broadband is not an end in itself
4) Engage tomorrow's leaders today
5) Peers make great teachers

[Bernadine Joselyn is Director, Public Policy & Engagement, at Blandin Foundation]

Inside Facebook's Plan to Wire the World: Mark Zuckerberg's Crusade to Put Every Single Human Being Online

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has been thinking about Facebook’s long-term future at least since the site exceeded a billion users in 2012. One answer was to put down bets on emerging platforms and distribution channels, in the form of some big-ticket acquisitions. But fulfilling the actual mission, connecting the entire world, wouldn’t actually, literally be possible unless everybody in the world were on the Internet.

So Zuckerberg has decided to make sure everybody is. There’s something distasteful about the whole business: a global campaign by a bunch of Silicon Valley jillionaires to convert literally everybody into data consumers, to make sure no eyeballs anywhere go unexposed to their ads. The other way of looking at Internet.org is the way Internet.org wants to be looked at: it’s spreading Internet access because the Internet makes people’s lives better.

Fixed Fortunes: Biggest corporate political interests spend billions, get trillions

Between 2007 and 2012, 200 of America’s most politically active corporations spent a combined $5.8 billion on federal lobbying and campaign contributions. A year-long analysis by the Sunlight Foundation suggests, however, that what they gave pales compared to what those same corporations got: $4.4 trillion in federal business and support.

After examining 14 million records, including data on campaign contributions, lobbying expenditures, federal budget allocations and spending, we found that, on average, for every dollar spent on influencing politics, the nation’s most politically active corporations received $760 from the government. The $4.4 trillion total represents two-thirds of the $6.5 trillion that individual taxpayers paid into the federal treasury.

[I believe that's a 75,900% ROI....]

Benton

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