Penetration of Internet in the Wealthiest County

From the Herndon Patch post on the Fairfax County Schools moving more to textbooks online:

FCPS discovered through the pilot that 92 percent of middle school students have computer access at home, .3 percent have no access and 73 percent say they can have access whenever they want it. For high school, the results are 88 percent with access at home, 1.5 percent have no access and 82 percent have access whenever they want it.

I assume there are a few Luddites in this county, but most of the missing 8 percent are children of immigrants who basically rely on the library system.

Bureaucracy at CitiBank

This Technology Review post blames bureaucracy at CitiBank for permitting a breach of security which exposed customer data.  It's so simple anyone could do it.

Different Ways to Skin the Cat--Bus Arrivals

Metro has signs showing when the next subway trains will arrive.  That's new since I stopped riding regularly (meaning about 13 years ago, so not exactly a recent development).  It's very nice, though people now will take it for granted.  There's been efforts over the years to do the same for urban bus systems: have the stop display when the next bus is due.  I think there've been a few implementations of this.

A different approach than displaying the arrival time at the stop is probably better; after all, once you arrive at the stop unless it's very late you're pretty well committed to taking that bus. So this approach of Google's seems a lot better: display the real arrival times on your cellphone.  Presumably there's the same logic behind the scenes as when the display is at the stop, but putting it on the Internet and available to cellphones is so much better.

New USDA Website

USDA has redesigned their main website.  I had some criticisms in the comments, but my opinion is probably idiosyncratic.  [Updated:  here's the link to the comments.]

Are You Allowed To? The Growth of Freedom

That's what I was asked by a person of a certain age (i.e., older than I) recently. I was offering advice on beginning a blog containing posts about a historical personage. The question, as I recall it, was whether you could address the reader directly in such posts. For example, "dear reader, Jane Doe III was the most important person in Anytown during 1840-1860.  You need to understand her life  because it offers an example of how leaders today should act."

My response was, of course: in the blogging world there are no rules. You can do anything and everything.  Given the person to whom I was responding, mentioning the End User Licensing Agreement Google has us agree to seemed superfluous.

This question measures the gap between the world in which I and the person were raised and the world today.  I can't imagine people in their teens and twenties today asking the same question.  Their world is much fuller of opportunities, of possibilities, and much emptier of rules governing personal behavior with others, whether on the Internet or in person.

I Never Cease to be Amazed

Matt Uebel shares a video from 1994 showing the Today Show rather clueless at the Internet and email. That's just 17 years ago, hardly a generation.   Now, today, it seems a player in world politics, as witness Tunisia and Egypt.

The World Ends in Seven Days

At least the world of new Internet addresses, according to this Technology Review post.  We've exhausted the universe of valid unique IP addresses (using IPv4) and we haven't converted to IPv6.  So the doomsday we dodged with Y2K is about to occur.

How Time Flies

"Twenty years ago this month, Tim Berners-Lee published his proposal for the World Wide Web."

I can't believe that.  

On Not Knowing the Negative

One frustration of an RSS reader (I assume it applies to all, not just Google) is you never know when the feed stops working.  Is it that the blogger got tired, switched to Facebook or Twitter, lost his ISP, or maybe died?  Or did the feed stop working?  Or, worst of fates for a blogger, does one never wonder about them.

Anyhow, I've discovered my Berry Deep France feed wasn't working, so belatedly found some of Dirk Beauregarde's posts, including this moving one on the death of his mother.

Plain English

I remember when we had to certify each regulation published in the Federal Register was in "plain English".  This was back in the days of Jimmy Carter.  It was a pro forma requirement then; I don't expect much different from the new law.  It includes a requirement to change agency websites and to permit public input on compliance.  Problem is: while everyone complains about jargon, there's no one with the motivation to play policeman.  At best it will be providing another cudgel to be used by opponents of a program; they'll mock the regulations for not being clear. 

Must Reading for Those Discouraged by the State of Dialog on the Web

See this post of Dan Drezner's.

15 Minutes of Fame, Zero to a Million Hits

Andy Warhol famously said everyone had 15 minutes of fame.  Somewhat along the same lines, is anyone keeping records on how fast people get their fame--I'm thinking of the skyrocketing number of hits for "Shirley Sherrod"?   Now it takes about 15 minutes for people to get their 15 minutes.

How Fast Is the Internet?

I googled Shirley Sherrod this morning about 8:30 and got about 880,000 hits. Did it again a few minutes ago and got 1,330,000 hits. Such is the pace of the Internet.

[Updated: at 9:23 am, 7/21/2010 it was 1,610,000 hits.  Granted I didn't put the name in quotes, so it's not all that Shirley Sherrod, but it's an impressive jump.]

[Updated at 4:29 pm 7/22/2010 shows 158,000,000 hits. Guess that reflects all the tweets and blog post comments.]

Cost Per Visit

Federal Computer Week has an article on the United Kingdom's effort to reduce the number of web sites the government supports. perhaps 75 percent of the 820 sites. They've also come up with a metric the US government should use: the cost per visit to the site. (The priciest was $17+ per visit.)  Although, on second thought maybe the metric should be the cost per minute of visit.  I've proposed before each government website should have a link to a set of metrics describing usage of the website.  I repeat the suggestion.

The Age of Blogging: Bellesiles

The American Historical Association included a link to a piece by Michael Bellesiles on teaching military history in time of war.  It's well-written, with the key being the serious injury to the brother of one of the class.  It got a good reaction in the comments, until one commenter asked why Bellesiles was only an adjunct at Central Connecticut.  Other commenters jumped in, recalling the scandal over his sourcing of Arming America, and loss of his Emory U job and his Bancroft Prize.

Moral?  These days it's hard to escape your past

Nostalgia for the Good Old Days of Early PC's

Via the American Historical Association blog, here's a link to James Fallows in the Atlantic in 1982.He describes his experiences with a $4,000 PC: 48K RAM, 2 tape drives, Selectric printer, etc.  But there's a sentence there which foreshadows the future, as described in today's NYTimes, in an article on a family that's consumed by its devices, and always on line:

Fallows writes:

"CAN HARDLY BRING myself to mention the true disadvantage of computers, which is that I have become hopelessly addicted to them. To the outside world, I present myself as a man with a business need for a word-processing machine. Sure, I have a computer: I'd have a drill press if I were in the machine-tool business. This is the argument I make frequently to my wife. The truth, which she has no doubt guessed, is that I love to see them work [sic: "love to make them work" would be more accurate.].

The Campbells in the Times article love to be online, checking their email, playing games, etc.  The $4000 PC has transformed in a bunch of network devices, laptops, IPads, Iphones, etc., linked to communications networks, but the addiction continues. And they are really really addicted.

Maybe that's one definition of human progress: we keep creating new ways to become addicted.

Government and Wikipedia (Warning: Off-Color Word)

This New York Times article describes a deal between the British Museum  and Wikipedia.  It seems the Museum has realized that people go to Wikipedia to look up information on the Museum, much more than they go to the museum's web site.  So the museum decided: if you can't fight them, join them (or something like that). By cooperating with Wikipedia, they can get more info and more accurate info into the browsers of the users, which presumably in the long run benefits the museum.

The lead guy says: "“Ten years ago we were equal, and we were all fighting for position,” Mr. Cock said. Now, he added, “people are gravitating to fewer and fewer sites. We have to shift with how we deal with the Web.”

I don't know why the same logic doesn't work for all official sites which try to push information--put a good deal of effort into upgrading the Wikipedia pages and, in a pet peeve of mine, making your pages accessible to Google.  Of course, Wikipedia is skeptical of having bureaucrats updating pages on their own bureaucracy, but this is, I think, the wave of the future.

What's Hot? What's Not? (Bureaucracy)

Via Chris Blattman, the lexicalist site allows you to search the Internet stream (hey, I sound as if I know what I'm doing) and maps the results.  I searched for "bureaucracy" and got this:

"People are talking about this 27% less today than they were a month ago (on average, once every 1,678,795 words)."

Virginia and Iowa are the hottest venues.

{Updated: Meanwhile those stoic Down-easters in Maine have "love" on their mind.  And maybe Rep. Souder can blame his fellow citizens for his troubles, because Indiana is second.]

Fact of the Day: Indonesians on Facebook

The third leading nation in use of Facebook is Indonesia, with 22.7 million account. From NYTimes article

Feds Need Their Cookies

Apparently a number of Federal agencies have gotten around the OMB ban on using cookies on their websites. I may be wrong but it seems to me in the early days of browsers (say 1995-2000) there was lots of concern over cookies.  Since then I believe the concern has subsided, which fits my general preconception that new things cause anxiety and the media tends to exaggerate such concerns (at least when they aren't failing to notice the new).  Cookies seem so yesterday, given today's Facebook and similar Web 2.0 stuff.