Before the Twitter revolutions, there was the Usenet revolution

Polina Antonova and Eugene Peskin operating Kremvax, the link between
Relcom and the West

The first example of relatively large-scale citizen journalism online was during the August 1991 coup attempt by eight high-level Soviet officials. There were two days of confrontation between demonstrators and troops, during which all Russian media except Usenet news groups were shut down by the authorities. Usenet, a precursor of today's Internet discussion forums, carried traffic into, out of and within Russia (70 cities) during the days of the coup attempt.

One of the quotes from that time foreshadows subsequent attempts to shut the Internet down. Polina Antonova of RELCOM, the Unix distributor that operated the network wrote:

They try to close all mass media, they stopped CNN an hour ago, and Soviet TV transmits opera and old movies. But, thank Heaven, they don't consider RELCOM mass media or they simply forgot about it. Now we transmit information enough to put us in prison for the rest of our life.

After two tense days, the coup failed and president Mikhail Gorbachev was restored to power. For more on the role of the network during the coup attempt, see:

• The role of the network during the coup attempt (Internet Society)
• Description of RELCOM (CACM)
• Archive of all network traffic and other material (David Bozak, SUNY)
• List of quotes from the network traffic (ACM Risks Forum)
• More quotes (EFF)

The following video clip (3:13) was part of a documentary on the Internet. (It includes a short interview of me at the time -- no white hair :-).



Usenet played a relatively significant role during the Soviet coup attempt, but there was also some Usenet traffic during the 1989 Tienanmen Square protests. Everyone is familiar with the heroic image of the unidentified man stopping a column of tanks on June 6 1989 -- the day after troops had opened fire on protesters.

But, there was some Usenet traffic as well. Olivier Crepin-Leblond has saved a description of the situation that was posted by a Sun Microsystems employee on May 23. It describes the optimistic time before the storm, beginning with:

The situation here seems getting better and better. All army members are blocked outside Beijing city. The people’s life in the city looks as normal as usual.

Here is a movie clip of the tank man at Tiananmen Square:



This clip was not on the Internet at the time, but it is today -- providing a dramatic view of a heroic act and illustrating the futility of China's attempt to erase the memory of the event.

-----
Update 8/20/2016

Slate has published a relatively long post entitled "An act of courage on the Soviet Internet" on RELCOM's role during the Soviet Coup attempt of 1991. The article describes my involvement at the time, but fails to link to the archive of the network traffic and other material, which is available to historians and others interested in the event.

I believe this was the first example of active citizen journalism involving the Internet. The Internet has given us a means of documenting historical events in detail -- "big data" for historians. We need a mechanism for discovering and preserving such archives.

-----
Update 1/12/2017

Mark Graham, who relayed news over the Sovam Teleport link during the Soviet coup attempt, just sent me an article on their activity at the time. Unfortunately, the data they transmitted and received has been lost. Our archive is still online at the State University of New York site mentioned above and, even better, it is online at the Internet Archive.

-----
Update 7/7/2018

For an excellent article on the role of RELCOM in the Soviet Coup attempt, click here.

Tablet PCs will impact education, but it will take time.

Many new tablet computers were announced at the Consumer Electronics Show last week.  Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal predicted that they will flood college campuses.

I agree that we will soon see students and professors carrying iPads and other tablets on campus, and, in the long run, I think we will view, annotate, discuss and share most of our teaching material on tablet-like devices.

But that is the long run -- they will not be part of mainstream education for many years.

Mainstream impact requires ubiquity.  Today, chalk and white-boards are ubiquitous.  We take them for granted and use them in every class.  Internet-connected computers with overhead displays are becoming widespread, and will also be taken for granted in the classroom.

Ubiquitous hardware is necessary, but not sufficient to drive major educational impact.  Standards are also needed.  The chalkboard works because we assume everyone speaks English or another language, and PowerPoint and Flash video are widely accepted standards for the classroom PC with a projector.

It will be some time before we can assume that nearly everyone has a tablet computer with a fairly standard hardware configuration.  It will take even longer to settle on standard formats for storing, annotating, and sharing teaching material.

Once the machines and standards are in place, we will see a significant impact on mainstream education, but that will not happen over night.

In general, we underestimate the time for a promising new technology to be adopted, but we also underestimate the extent of its impact on our lives, organizations and society when it is finally applied. I think this will hold true for tablet PCs in education.

(For an 18-year old article along these lines, see http://som.csudh.edu/fac/lpress/articles/uart.htm -- you can see what I got right and what I got wrong :-).

The 2010 Sloan online teaching survey

I recently summarized the 2009 Sloan online teaching survey. Now lets take a quick look at the 2010 survey.

Among other things, the survey found that online instruction is growning fast, federal regulation aimed at curbing financial aid abuse at for profit schools would impact other schools, but to a lesser degree, the market is competitive, and most academic leaders think online instruction is as good as face-to-face. Here are a few sample results:

• Sixty-three percent of all reporting institutions said that online learning was a critical part of their institution’s long term strategy, a small increase from fifty-nine percent in 2009.
• Over 5.6 million students (nearly thirty percent) were taking at least one online course during the fall 2009 term -- an increase of nearly one million students over the number reported the previous year.
• The twenty-one percent growth rate for online enrollments far exceeds the less than two percent growth of the overall higher education student population.
• Over three-quarters of academic leaders at public institutions report that online is as good as or better than face-to-face instruction (compared to only 55.4% of private nonprofits and 67.0% of for-profits).
• Nearly one-half the institutions report that the economic downturn has increased demand for face-to-face courses and programs while three-quarters report that it has increased demand for online courses and programs.
• The economic impact on institutional budgets has been mixed; forty-seven percent have seen their budgets decrease, but twenty-seven percent have experienced an increase.
• For-profit institutions report a potential negative impact from proposed Federal rules on financial aid on their enrollments at more than twice the rate of other types of institutions (33.9% compared to 12.2% for public institutions and 10.1% for private nonprofit institutions).
• A majority of institutions continue to report that there is increasing competition for online students.
• Public institutions report more pressure from the for-profit sector than do the private nonprofit institutions.
• Reported year-to-year enrollment changes for fully online programs by discipline show most growing, but with a sizable portion seeing steady enrollments.
• Virtually all recent growth in online enrollments has come from the growth of existing offerings, not from institutions new to online starting new programs.

It's noteworthy that public school leaders are most likely to consider online as good as or better than face-to-face instruction and they are also most likely to offer online courses. This raises the causality question -- are they more likely to offer online classes because they feel they are effective or vice versa? Regardless, will the growing proportion of online courses come to further differentiate public and private education?

It also makes one wonder how to judge the effectivness of a course. Is it scores on an objective exam, student satisfaction levels on a survey, the quality of interaction with fellow students, experience of the values and enthusiasm of a teacher, etc.? As stated in our review of the previous Sloan survey, hyrbid courses, which can offer some of the advantages of both modes of instruction, seem to be the best solution for some schools and some classes.

Immigration and future technology

Last Sunday, the LA Times had an article about a high school science project competition sponsored by Siemens. High school juniors were competing for scholarships and a chance to progress to the national competition.

The article described several projects and gave the student's names: Akash Krishnan, Matthew Fernandez, Ryan Chow, Eric Huang, Eric Wu, Hanna Lee, Angela Zhang, Jacqueline Wang, Lesley Chan, Edward Huang, Bonnie Lei, Sean Wang, Scott Zhuge, Abhishek Venkataramana, and Andrew Liu.

The names made me smile and feel optimistic about the US. It also reminded me of my father, who was the second of six kids born to immigrant parents in a three room house with no plumbing or electricity.

The entries focused mainly in biology and IT, and the contest winners demonstrated (and patented) a technique for classifying emotion in voice recordings. Being relatively open to immigration has its costs, but we should not overlook the benefits to our economy and culture.

Online classes -- hybrids? Large lectures? A growing elite education gap?

An article in today's New York Times looks at online university classes. The article presents a number of anecdotes and examples -- some supporting and some criticizing online undergraduate teaching.

Students like the convenience of online classes and universities hope they will save money (though not all do). On the other hand, some students and parents want contact with faculty in relatively small classes. The Times gave the example of Ilan Shrira, who teaches developmental psychology to 300 students. He said he chose his field because of the passion of a professor who taught him as an undergraduate, but he thought it unlikely that anyone could be so inspired by an online course.

Good or bad, online classes are taking off. The Sloan Survey of Online Learning reported that 4.6 million students took a college-level online course during fall 2008, up 17 percent from a year earlier. More than one in four higher education students took at least one course online.

The article and report reminded me of the tension between classes in large lecture halls with teaching assistants and those in classrooms with a professor. Many online classes are replacing large lectures, and we need to differentiate between that and replacing small classes.

I was taken by professor Shrira's comment. I believe that in my small classes I connect with and make a difference to one or two students a semester. Since students take many classes, the odds of one or two such connections during their time in school are good. I would hate to see that dimension of education eliminated, so:

Perhaps we should be focusing our online efforts on the lecture hall, not the classroom.

Another finding from the Sloan Survey caught my eye. Jeff Seaman, co-director of the survey, said that a large majority, about three million of the 4.7 million online students, were simultaneously enrolled in face-to-face courses, many in community colleges. That indicates that we are not doing as much "distant education" as we might think -- most of our online students are local, which leads me to wonder:

Should we be leaning more toward hybrid than pure online classes?

Finally, the Sloan survey showed that students at large, public universities are more likely to take online classes than those at small, private (expensive) universities. With steadily growing income inequality in the United States, the move to online classes may widen the gap between mass and elite education.

The Internet in K-12 schools, an Educause presentation

I recently attended the Educause conference. (Educause is a professional society focused on educational technology).

One of the more interesting presentations was by Julie Evens, CEO of Project Tomorrow. She reported the results of their survey of over 300,000 K-12 students, parents, teachers, administrators, and teachers in training.  The survey sheds some light on the preparation and proclivities of our future students.

Evans began with the student vision -- what students want and envision for themselves in their future education. The essential elements of their vision are that education should be socially based, untethered and digitally rich.

1. Socially based

Students want to use communication and collaboration tools to create personal networks of collaborators and helpers. They want to teach each other and learn from outside experts, online tutors and their teachers.

2. Untethered

Students envision technology-enabled learning that goes beyond classroom walls. They already have smart phones, tablets and laptops and want to use them in school. They want to take online classes and learn at their own pace.

3. Digitally rich

They want relevant, interactive teaching materials and self-administered tests -- for their eyes only. They also want digital tools so they can be content developers as well as consumers.

Evans says many students are "free agent learners." The survey profiled a typical middle school student as follows:

• 37% have searched online for self-directed learning
• 23% have found podcasts/videos to learn about something
• 18% took an online test or assessment on their own (my italics)
• 17% used cell phone apps to self organize
• 14% used online writing tools to improve writing skills
• 12% found experts online to answer questions

The survey also compares the views of students and administrators with those of teachers in training, concluding that teacher training needs to move beyond Microsoft Office:

While these future teachers have a desire to integrate the technology to support socially-­-based, digitally rich curriculum in their classroom, they are primarily being taught to use technology for word processing, spreadsheet, database tools or multi-­-media presentations. Less than 25 percent of these future teachers are being taught core skills which will enable them to leverage the power of technology for student achievement with online assessments, the use of student achievement data to inform instruction, or facilitate collaboration amongst students using Internet-­-based tools (such as blogs, wikis or social networking tools). Even fewer are learning how to teach online classes (4 percent).

You can read or download the slides from Evan's talk or a copy of the survey report.  The survey is done annually, and the 2010 version is online now.

Disclaimer

While these results are thought provoking, they are biased. Survey participants are self-selecting so they are already online and clearly interested in the topic. The work is funded by Blackboard, which has a clear interest in online education, but I have no reason to think they influenced the results in any way. Finally, Project Tomorrow grew out of the Net Day organization so they are probably fans of the Net -- that may have shaped the survey wording a bit.

In spite of the disclaimer, the survey results shed light on the future, and educators and prospective employers of today's kids should keep them in mind.

Follow this link for more on the preparation and expectation of today's university students.

An example of collaborative writing at Educause 2010

We frequently write collaboratively on the Internet.  Writing a composite document, where each co-author is responsible for his or her own section, is relatively simple to organize, but finding a way for many people to collaborate on a more integrated document is difficult.

The organizers of last week's Educause educational technology conference were faced with a large collaborative writing challenge.  They wanted to create a white paper synthesizing the presentation highlights from the sessions concerned with research on teaching and learning. The problem they faced was that there were 23 50-minute sessions spread over three days. One person could not have attended, let alone documented every session.

Their solution was to seek collaborators among the three to four thousand attendees, many of whom would attend one or more of the 23 presentations.  They created a simple survey form (using Google Docs) and asked those who attended the sessions to answer four open-ended questions. The report will be written by an Educause staff member using the results of the survey.  We will follow up when that report is published.

Related links to:

• Posts on Internet writing
• Teaching modules on Internet writing

Student skills at Arizona State University -- create content and collaborate

Arizona State was a pioneer in "cloud computing" by and for students. They were early adopters of Google Apps and cloud computing.

That was four years ago, and they are now graduating their first "cloud class."

They consider the move a success.

Sam DiGangi, ASU's associate vice president of university technology and an associate professor of education says:

I think this is the first generation that will graduate with a foundation not only in knowledge and expertise of a specific content area, but also in tool skills--the ability to collaborate, to edit, to revise one's work, to dynamically incorporate input in writing and in designing.

.

Own your connection infrastructure, use netBlazr

A while back I wrote an article and blog post stating:

The question is not whether we are going to deploy new infrastructure; the question is “who will own it?”

The article discusses several alternatives to ownership by the current telephone and cable companies: local governments, cooperatives, small ISPs, and home and building owners.

I know of two trials in which home owners purchase their own links to a backhaul point -- similar to what we now do with our sewer and gas lines, and one wireless access company called Fon.

Fon claims 1,726,336 "members." Members purchase an 802.11n base station that is augmented with several application-layer programs for $99 or €79 and share bandwidth with other members. There are eight Fon installations in my zip code, but only two have been active during the last hour. After several years, Fon deployment is not dense enough to provide a viable alternative to the cable and telephone ISPs in my area, and I don't expect it ever will be.

But, technology and business models improve, and a new company, netBlazr, hopes to sell small business owners equipment for forming a network. The $299 equipment package contains three 802.11n radios and a fast router. Fiber backhaul is supplied by netBlazr. The basic service is free, but they also offer a premium service and dedicated circuit plans with guaranteed speed for small businesses.

NetBlazr's technology and business model are different than Fon's. The extra radios and faster router should improve performance in densely populated areas -- the extra routers let netBlazr change the network architecture on the fly if something goes wrong. The network architecture and backhaul provisioning lead them to deploy in highly local areas. They pick a backhaul point then sign up customers they can reach from that location. They started in a small area within Boston, and will expand from there as demand and density allow. If things go well, they will expand to service office buildings in other cities.

Will netBlazr catch on and scale up to provide a viable alternative to the incumbents? It may be a long shot, but companies like Google or Craig's List seemed like long shots at one point. You never know -- improving technology is on their side and their competitors are not used to competition.

Appended link:

Here are the slides from netBlazr founder Brough Turner giving a talk on the advantages of WiFi over Wimax and LTE and introducing netBlazr.

-----
Update 6/12/2015

Fon announced today that they have over 15 million people sharing Internet access over their personally owned open hotspots. Since WiFi range is limited, the value of a Fon membership increases with dense coverage, and as shown here, most of the "Fonistas" are in Western Europe.

In addition to signing up individual users, Fon is making deals with Internet service providers. In the US, cable companies are rolling out their own versions of shared access as is Google Fiber.

ICT energy consumption -- in the data center and at home

We usually think of IT as saving energy, as being green. For example, we speak of the substitution of communication for transportation -- teleconferences replacing airplane trips. IT would save energy if all we used IT for was teleconferences, but our appetite for IT is growing rapidly.

This slide was taken from a Network World IT Roadmap talk by Frederic Chanfraou, Senior VP of IT at Schneider Electric.  (Schneider is an energy management company).

As you see, the production of data is growing rapidly and the cost of computing is falling rapidly. That leads to increased data center demand, and data centers consume a lot of energy. Chanfraou estimates that IT consumes 4% of our electricity today, and, if we do not increase efficiency, it would be 40% by the year 2030.

The problem goes beyond the data center. How about your home? What percent of your electric bill goes to information processing devices like TV sets, radios, computers, set-top boxes, DVRs, and chargers, as opposed to appliances, heating, lighting, and other uses?

Excellent customer support from SurveyGizmo

From time to time, I encounter noteworthy customer support. That might be excellent customer support from a company like Zoho or bad and wasteful customer support from a company like Verizon.

I am happy to report another example of excellent customer support from the online survey service SurveyGizmo.  They have tutorials and webinars on their Web site, and instead of customer forums, they offer email support.

I recently asked a technical support question, and, as you see below, received a cheerful answer in 51 minutes and an answer to a follow up in 68 minutes. Even better -- mine is a free account. If I were paying, I could have called on the phone with my question.

Here is the actual email exchange:

Larry Press
Sep 08 09:31 pm
Is there a way to delete a group of responses -- those before a specified date?

SurveyGizmo
Sep 08 10:22 pm
Hi Larry,
We don't actually have the ability to delete groups of responses, but this is a great idea. I think you should add this suggestion under our green Feedback tab on the right side of your account. This would be very useful!

Larry Press
Sep-08 2010 10:22 pm.
Thanks -- is there any way to delete them other than viewing and deleting them one at a time?

SurveyGizmo
Sep-08 2010 11:30 pm.
You can only delete all responses or delete them one at a time.
Sorry for the inconvenience!

The cost of differentiated services

We have seen ways in which the information-service business model is enriching cable and telephone companies at our expense.  Charges for text messaging might be the most egregious example of a service that is priced much higher than its cost in spite of supposed competition among cell phone companies.

The author of a recent New York Times article calculates that at 20 cents per text message, cell phone companies are charging $1,498 to transfer one megabyte of data.

But, if you send a lot of text messages, you would probably switch from a metered plan to an unlimited plan, which is typically $20 per month.  We average about 500 text messages a month, according to Nielsen, the media measurement firm.  A $20 unlimited plan would drop the price of a text message to 4 cents, or $300 a megabyte.  Nielsen says teeneagers average about 104 messages a day. That drops the charge to "only" $47.62 a megabyte on a $20 unlimited plan.

Contrast these prices with Apple's music distribution, which uses the vanilla Internet.  Apple sells a song for $1.29.  If they had to pay $47.62 per megabyte to transmit that song to the user, it would cost them about $180 per song.  At 20 cents per message, it would cost Apple $5,486 per song.

If you read the New York Times article, you will also see that the cell companies are moving traffic from the cellular network to WiFi -- the same thing we consumers are doing.

How does Twitter select Trending Topics?

This morning around 6 AM, PST, I noticed that the newly announced Samsung Galaxy tablet was at the top of Twitter's world wide Trending Topics list.  It was also at the top of the United States list and number two in the UK.

But, it was not even listed in the top 10 for Los Angeles.  I figured that was because it was early in the morning, so I checked New York and London.  Nothing.

It turns out that the Samsung tablet was not listed in the top 10 of any of the cities listed by Twitter:  Atlanta, Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Dallas-Ft. Worth, Houston, London, Los Angeles, New York City, Philadelphia, San Antonio, San Francisco, Seattle, São Paulo and Washington, D.C.

Half an hour later, the Galaxy had replaced Stephen Hawking as number one in the UK, but it was still not in the top 10 for London.

Twitter says they will sell the 11th spot on the Trending Topics list to a term that is in the top 1-200.  Do they also sell spots on the top 10?  If they are selling Trending Topic spots without identifying them as paid, will their credibility be undermined?

Electronic text books

Monterey College of Law is distributing Apple iPads to all students enrolled in a supplemental curriculum program that helps them prepare for the state's bar exam.

The program is motivated by the desire to save time for busy night students who typically work full time and have families, not cost. However, technology improvement coupled with new business models will eventually drive the cost of electronic textbooks well below that of printed textbooks, as shown in this cost breakdown.

Electronic book sales have already passed hard cover sales at Amazon, and the cost of a Kindle reader is down to $139.

In addition to cost and time savings, electronic textbooks will have new features including capability for social or collaborative reading. It is too soon to know what those features will be or how they will work, but check the Institute of the Future of the Book if you are curious about the possibilities.

Would you prefer electronic to printed textbooks?

Soluto, a cool program/service, measures boot time. Solid state disk wins big

When I got my new laptop with a solid state drive (SSD), I ran benchmarks comparing it to my old laptop and desktop with their hard drives. Windows 7 was faster than Vista, 64-bit was faster than 32-bit, and, most important, SSD was faster than a hard drive.

I've now run a final benchmark using Soluto, a program and service that analyzes and times the boot process. My new laptop, running 64-bit Windows 7 on an SSD loads 61 applications while booting in 36 seconds. My old laptop, running 32-bit Windows 7 on a hard drive loads 55 applications while booting in 2 minutes 32 seconds.

The SSD speed advantage makes for a qualitative improvement. SSD boot time is less than 25% of hard disk boot time, and it launches applications almost instantaneously. The responsiveness is relaxing. (The Soluto tag line, "enjoy your PC," is appropriate).

Soluto is a cool program/service. It shows all the programs you launch during boot divided into three groups: those you should not launch, those you may or may not want to launch and those that must be be retained.

You install Soluto locally, but it has a program description database to help you decide whether to drop a program. It also displays the percent of users who have decided to keep or drop a program. Finally, it keeps track of what you have taken out of the boot group, so you can add a program back with a single click if something unforeseen occurs.

Digital manipulation in politics and culture

The Internet demands skepticism. Anyone can publish any "fact," and sites like these:

• http://meetthefacts.com
• http://factcheck.org
• http://www.politifact.com

help us separate fact from fiction.

Media can also be manipulated. For example, Fox News broadcast excerpts from President Obama's recent West Point speech, then accidentally posted a version with the applause removed on their Web site. (Some claim it was not an accident, but the poor quality of the editing supports Fox' assertion -- they would have done a better job if it were intentional).

Images are easily modified. These photos of President Bush reading a book upside down on 9-11 and John Kerry at an anti-war rally with Jane Fonda are Photoshop fakes:


Or, Consider these before and after shots taken from an eye opening Dove soap commercial:


As the commercial shows, makeup plus Photoshop can drastically alter an image. (Stretching her neck is the coolest step).

One might argue that the first examples are the most important -- in a democracy we should be able to trust our news media. But the second has social implications as well -- it sets unrealistic goals for appearance.

Can you find other examples of deception on the Internet?

A novel application -- drone helicopter with streaming cameras merges real and virtual worlds

Parrot, a French company, demonstrated an iPhone-controlled drone helicopter ("quadricopter") at the Consumer Electronics Show.

As you see in this video, the iPhone is used to control the drone and to view streaming video from its on-board cameras.



This is a novel application, using the iPhone to control a physical object and augmenting reality by letting you see what the drone sees -- it blends the real and virtual worlds.

This demo used an iPhone, but Parrot promises to port the application to other phones and tablets -- their goal is to sell the drones.

A few caveats -- Parrot refused to speculate on the price, but my guess is that it will be pretty expensive since it requires a lot of computing and mechanical hardware. The iPhone and the drone use WiFi to communicate, which limits its range. Power requirements will also cap flight length.

Lest those caveats discourage you, recall that the Wright brothers first flight lasted 12 second and covered 120 feet. It only took 66 years to get from that flight to a safe return flight to the moon, and information technology improves faster than aviation technology.

What sorts of devices will you be controlling in five years? What sorts of cameras and censors will be feeding data to your portable device?

Singapore is installing fiber to every building

This figure is taken from a an ITU study on the Internet in Singapore that I worked on several years ago. It depicts the government role as an equity investor in the ISP industry. (The government has played a similar role in the oil, finance, shipping and biotechnology industries).


Continuing that policy, the government of Singapore is investing in fiber to every home, school, government building, business and hospital. Their Next Generation Plan is for 95 percent of buildings to have access to a 1 Gbps connection by 2012.

They will also follow the model of competitors using open, shared infrastructure, which seems to be working well in Stockholm and other cities.

There are caveats. Singapore is a small, city nation, and a very high percent of the population lives in apartment buildings. That makes this plan relatively cheap. Retail connectivity prices are also a question mark -- will there be sufficient competition over the shared infrastructure to keep them low?

If the network succeeds, and 1 Gbps connectivity becomes ubiquitous, what applications might they develop? What would you use a 1 Gbps link for?

64-bit Windows 7 upgrade -- disk reads are 25% faster

In a recent post, I mentioned that I had a new Dell laptop with a solid state disk (SSD) instead of a rotating magnetic disk (HD). I discussed the advantages of SSD and its relationship to Internet connection speed, and presented some rough benchmarks of disk speed. It was about twice as fast as my desktop computer and 4 times as fast as my old laptop with a hard disk.

Today I upgraded the operating system from 32 to 64-bit Windows 7, and re-ran the ATTO disk benchmark. As shown here, writes are about the same speed, but reads are 25% faster than with 32-bit Windows 7. I did not benchmark application load or boot time with the 32-bit operating system, but it feels noticeably faster now.

Your brain on the Net -- enhanced productivity and pleasure or wasteful distraction?

We discuss the affect of the Internet and information technology on the way we work and our brains.

The New York Times recently ran three articles highlighting some of the psychological research showing negative effects of our use of information technology: The Risks of Parenting While Plugged In, An Ugly Toll of Technology: Impatience and Forgetfulness and Hooked on Gadgets, and Paying a Mental Price.

The latter article focused on Kord Campbell, who seems distracted by information technology while working and during family and other activities. This photo shows his workstation.

The Times also published some online tests of one's ability to switch focus and a video showing Campbell's eye movements while he works.

Articles like these raise questions about our productivity when multitasking and about addiction. Does the Internet make you more productive? Does your attention dart around as rapidly as Mr. Campbell's (see the video)? Where do we draw the line between relaxing play or being in a productive state of "flow" while working and harmful addiction?

Essential ban on new public power companies and projects barely fails -- will public Internet infrastructure be next?

California voters narrowly rejected proposition 16 yesterday. Had it passed, it would have essentially banned new and expanded municipal power projects, by requiring 2/3 majority support from voters before local governments could form or expand municipal utilities.

Pacific Gas and Electric (the power company portrayed in the movie about Erin Brockovich) spent over $46 million on the campaign.

PG&E's non-stop ads claimed to be protecting our right to vote, but blocking competition from municipal power companies was the clear motive. Had their goal been thoughtful debate on proposed public power projects, they would have said so in their ads, and called for a simple majority rather than a prohibitive 2/3 majority.

This was a close call, and it illustrates the political power of a wealthy corporation.

Large ISPs like Verizon and AT&T fight vigorously against public Internet projects by lobbying at all levels and in court. Might we one day see a proposition on the "right to vote on public Internet projects?"

Twitter writing style improves quickly

I started a Twitter stream for my class on February 17th, and have posted about 125 tweets.

This graph shows the moving average of the length of the previous ten posts. As you see, the average length has grown over time, approaching the 140 character maximum. The average length of my latest ten posts is 139.2 characters, the shortest is 136 characters, and six of them are 140 characters.

I spend about two minutes rewording each post, and find that I can typically get two or three statements or questions into each.

Long posts are not necessarily better than short ones, but in this case I am summarizing and linking to longer articles or other documents. I can help the reader decide whether to follow the link by saying more in my summary.

FCC survey of home and mobile connectivity -- most people don't know their connection speed, but they are satisfied

An FCC study shows that 80% of US home users do not know their Internet download speed. This is nearly unchanged from the 2006 Pew Internet study on Home Broadband Adoption.

Breaking the FCC survey down, men and young people are more likely to know their home download speed than women and older people:

• 71% of men do not know their speed.
• 90% of women do not know their speed.
• 73% of those between the ages of 18 and 29 do not know their speed.
• 88% of people age 65 do not know their speed.

There were somewhat less pronounced differences among different races and income groups.

The survey also inquired as to satisfaction with both home broadband and mobile Internet speeds:

• 50% of home broadband users are very satisfied.
• 41% of home broadband users are somewhat satisfied.
• 33% of mobile users are very satisfied.
• 38% of mobile users are somewhat satisfied.

Regardless of how you slice it, most people do not know how fast their Internet connections are and most people are satisfied with their connectivity, though mobile users are less satisfied than home users.

An important caveat is that they are satisfied with respect to the applications they now use. Would an email and Web surfing user be satisfied if they started uploading videos to YouTube, watching hi-definition movies or sporting events, playing multi-player games or holding family meetings over the Internet?

Do you know your connection speed? Are you satisfied with it? Going beyond your individual need for speed, how might society benefit from higher speeds?

An ineffective email conversation

We cover the importance of precise, conversational writing on the Internet.

The following is the start of the transcript of an email conversation about ordering laptop computers that lasted more than nine months. The conversation eventually involved nine people. It was frustrating and ineffective because the people did not heed the basic guidelines we have suggested for Internet conversations -- they did not carefully read messages, did not respond to specific requests, did not meet commitments, and failed to quote previous messages to maintain context.

Many people wasted time in this exchange, and the funds were poorly spent. By the time the laptops arrived, the vendor had introduced a newer model.

The transcript begins as a conversation between me (LP) and the School administration (SA), School purchasing department (SP), and the University purchasing department (UP). It began in mid August 2009, when I informed the SA that my laptop warranty was about to expire, and I needed to replace it. The first reply was positive, but the commitment made in it was subsequently forgotten and ignored.

From: SA
To: LP
Date: Mon, 17 Aug 2009 23:26:44 -0700

I talked to the dean about getting a laptop for you using the grant money. The answers are as follows:
...You should get a new one no later than Oct. 1
...Your laptop should be no more than $2,200 as budgeted

Based on this, I sent a note to UP:

From: LP
To: UP, SA, SP
Date: Tuesday, August 18, 2009 2:21 PM

I would like to purchase a laptop combining funds from my foundation account and the $2,200 allocation from the Dean.
I would like to move ASAP because the warranty on my current laptop expires in a couple of days. Sorry for the rush.

And received this reply:

From: UP
To: LP, SA, SP
Date: Tue, 18 Aug 2009 14:29:52 -0700

1. Send the configuration from the Dell web site. [SP], can you forward a Req with the % that you are paying from the Stateside.
2. Also forward a PO from the Foundation

Then SP took responsibility from UP -- they said they would handle it.

From: SP
To: LP, UP, SA
Date: Wed, 19 Aug 2009 15:24:20 -0700

Thanks for the information. Also the grant is not processed via the Procurement Office (you are off the hook), this is a Foundation purchase. We have a Dell rep we work with on these types of purchases.

Also I have not gotten the information on the account being established. Once that is done, I will notify you and send you information on how to contract the rep so you can request an equote. I'd have you do that now but the equote has an expiration date.

I was worried about the warranty expiring, so asked if I could speed the process up by configuring the laptop sooner:

From: LP
To: SP, SA
Date: Wednesday, August 19, 2009 3:34 PM

> Once that is done, I will notify you and send you information
> on how to contract the rep so you can request an equote. I'd
> have you do that now but the equote has an expiration date.

Could I contact him or her now and start the process? I am in a rush because the warranty on my current laptop is going to expire in a few days, and I am *highly* dependent upon it.

I did not get a reply from SP, but did get a reply from SA:

From: SA
To: LP, SP
Date: Wed, 19 Aug 2009 19:13:07 -0700

Larry - let me look into the situation and I will handle

SA followed up with:

From: SA
To: LP, SP, UP
Date: Thu, 20 Aug 2009 17:57:08 -0700

On Tuesday I will check and see if there is some money in a grant I have that I could use to purchase a laptop for Larry.

A week later, I followed up with SA, quoting his earlier message:

From: LP
To: SA
Date: Thu, 27 Aug 2009 12:39:19 -0700

>On Tuesday I will check and see if there is some money in a
>grant I have that I could use to purchase a laptop for Larry.

I have a configuration ready to go -- are the funds available now? My current service contract has expired, and that is worrisome.

And received this reply:

From: SA
To: LP
Date: Thu, 27 Aug 2009 14:03:02 -0700

No the funds are not available - we have not yet received the grant approval - I expect to receive any day.

But, nothing happened, and my warranty had expired, so two weeks later, I followed up with SA, again quoting his earlier message:

From: LP
To: SA
Date: Thursday, September 10, 2009 4:16 PM

> No the funds are not available - we have not yet received the grant
> approval - I expect to receive any day.

Has there been further news on this?

And SA replied:

From: SA
To: LP, SP
Date: Fri, 11 Sep 2009 17:38:09 -0700

News on what?

This was just the beginning, eventually nine people were involved in the conversation, which stretched out over nine months. I got the laptop in June, 2010.

SSD: faster storage; faster Internet

I got a Dell laptop with solid state storage (SSD) instead of a rotating magnetic disk drive (HD). As shown here, the SSD is about twice as fast as my desktop computer and 4 times as fast as my old laptop with a hard disk.

These benchmarks are not 100 percent comparable (the machines had different configurations and operating systems) nor realistic (they only test raw read/write speed), but they show a clear advantage for SSD.

The speed difference is confirmed by my subjective sense of the SSD machine -- program load times feel much shorter.

The SSD should also consume less power and be more reliable than the equivalent HD.

It is interesting to consider the trade off between running network applications like Google Docs versus local applications like Microsoft Word as storage and Internet speeds increase.

Today I have a 3 Mbps link to the Internet at my home, so my old laptop storage access is about 100 times faster than my Internet connection. With SSD, that jumps to around 400 times, favoring local applications.

If, as the (conservative) FCC plans, I can upgrade my Internet connection to 100 Mbps, the pendulum will swing back toward network applications. If Google's vision is realized, and I can connect at 1 Gbps, network applications will look still better. Furthermore, once an application is "fast enough," additional speed does not matter.

On the other hand, SSD performance is also improving -- it will be interesting to see how this all plays out.

Which applications are already fast enough on the Internet that you choose them over local applications? Which are close?