Research

The Department of Commerce's Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) controls the export of dual-use and less sensitive military items through the Export Administration Regulations (EAR), including the Commerce Control List (CCL). As controls on exports of technology are a key component of the effort to protect sensitive U.S. technology, many sensitive technologies are listed on the CCL, often consistent with the lists maintained by the multilateral export control regimes of which the United States is a member.

This study draws on participant observation and interviews with low-income adults in Chicago to show how the poor stay connected to phone service and mobile Internet through the possession of multiple phones, including those subsidized by government aid. The “accumulation” of phones by individuals is widely observed, though underexplored in scholarship. Popular media coverage in the US frames the possession of multiple phones by people in poverty as criminal or excessive.

The 2018 edition of Global Information Society Watch (GISWatch) focuses on local access models, specifically, community networks as self-organised, self-managed or locally developed solutions for local access, based on the conviction that one of the keys to affordable access is giving local people the skills and tools to solve their own connectivity challenges. Instead of buying an access service from a large corporate entity, community networks allow community members to self-provide and share infrastructure.

Wall Street analysts are doing data differently. Banks for years have crunched data on company earnings, price targets and other mundane metrics for clients who might use the information to make investing and trading decisions. Now they are pulling data from social-media sentiment, geospatial mapping and other unorthodox sources. They are also increasingly making their data feeds available directly to clients, without the surrounding research notes that often go unread.

Many US voters in a recent Morning Consult/Politico poll, including pluralities of both Democrats and Republicans, said they’d like to see the next Congress make it a top priority to pass measures that better protect consumer data, outweighing other more partisan concerns such as efforts to codify network neutrality and addressing allegations of political bias and censorship on social media.

A majority of Americans across a wide range of demographic groups are YouTube adopters, with younger Americans standing out as especially avid users of the site. A new Pew Research Center survey of U.S. adults finds that these users are turning to YouTube for much more than entertainment. Roughly half of YouTube users say the platform is very important for helping them figure out how to do things they’ve never done before. That works out to 35% of all U.S. adults, once both users and non-users of the site are accounted for.

Why is there so often no overlap, no resemblance whatsoever between the news events reported in mainstream print and broadcast coverage, and even on liberal outlets like MSNBC, and the topics that get broadcast as news on the Fox network and its fellows on the right?

Pennsylvania State University researchers rounding the bend on a year-long study of broadband access in rural Pennsylvania are finding that speeds are even slower than previously thought. Bradford County, on the NY border in Northeastern PA, has slow connectivity speeds, but according to the most recent map available from the Penn State study, it's not among the worst.

Americans living in "news deserts" with few or no local news outlets may be in a bind now that it's time to vote in the midterm elections. Fewer and fewer reporters are employed by the papers that typically cover community and state-level races. More and more of the papers are going out of business altogether. As a result there is less vetting of candidates and more confusion about what's even on the ballot. Americans have new tools in their hands -- cell phones with access to Facebook and other websites -- but social networks don't fill the void left by local reporters.