Month: November 2008
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Economic Growth, Censorship, and Search Engines
Economic growth depends on an ability to access relevant information. Although censorship prevents access to certain information, the direct consequences of censorship are well-known and somewhat predictable. For example, blocking access to Falun Gong literature is unlikely to harm a country’s consumer electronics industry. On the web, however, information of all types is interconnected. Blocking…
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Does Your House Need a Tail?
Thus far, the debate over broadband deployment has generally been between those who believe that private telecom incumbents should be in charge of planning, financing and building next-generation broadband infrastructure, and those who advocate a larger role for government in the deployment of broadband infrastructure. These proposals include municipal-owned networks and a variety of subsidies…
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Discerning Voter Intent in the Minnesota Recount
Minnesota election officials are hand-counting millions of ballots, as they perform a full recount in the ultra-close Senate race between Norm Coleman and Al Franken. Minnesota Public Radio offers a fascinating gallery of ballots that generated disputes about voter intent. A good example is this one: A scanning machine would see the Coleman and Franken…
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Low Hit Rate Isn't the Problem with TSA Screening
The TSA, which oversees U.S. airport security, comes in for a lot of criticism — much of it deserved. But sometimes commentators let their dislike for the TSA get the better of them, and they offer critiques that don’t stand up logically. A good example is yesterday’s USA Today article on TSA’s behavioral screening program,…
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Can Google Flu Trends Be Manipulated?
Last week researchers from Google and the Centers for Disease Control unveiled a cool new research result, showing that they could gauge the level of influenza infections in a region of the U.S. by seeing how often people in those regions did Google searches for certain terms related to the flu and flu symptoms. The…
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The future of photography
Several interesting things are happening in the wild world of digital photography as it’s colliding with digital video. Most notably, the new Canon 5D Mark II (roughly $2700) can record 1080p video and the new Nikon D90 (roughly $1000) can record 720p video. At the higher end, Red just announced some cameras that will ship…
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Total Election Awareness
Ed recently made a number of predictions about election day (“Election 2008: What Might Go Wrong”). In terms of long lines and voting machine problems, his predictions were pretty spot on. On election day, I was one of a number of volunteers for the Election Protection Coalition at one of 25 call centers around the…
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How Fragile Is the Internet?
With Barack Obama’s election, we’re likely to see a revival of the network neutrality debate. Thus far the popular debate over the issue has produced more heat than light. On one side have been people who scoff at the very idea of network neutrality, arguing either that network neutrality is a myth or that we’d…
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Innovation vs. Safety in Self-driving Technologies
Over at Ars Technica, the final installment of my series on self-driving cars is up. In this installment I focus on the policy implications of self-driving technologies, asking about regulation, liability, and civil liberties. Regulators will face a difficult trade-off between safety and innovation. One of the most important reasons for the IT industry’s impressive…
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Bandwidth Needs and Engineering Tradeoffs
Tom Lee wonders about a question that Ed has pondered in the past: how much bandwidth does one human being need? I’m suspicious of estimates of exploding per capita bandwidth consumption. Yes, our bandwidth needs will continue to increase. But the human nervous system has its own bandwidth limits, too. Maybe there’ll be one more…