Accurate, Focused Research on Law, Technology and Knowledge Discovery Since 2002

Daily Archives: January 4, 2015

FCC Chief to Bolster Internet for Schools

Circling back to an important story via NYT, November 17, 2014: “With a goal of fiber-optic lines reaching to every school and a Wi-Fi connection in every classroom, Tom Wheeler, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission…propose[ed] a 62 percent increase in the amount of money the agency spends annually to wire schools and libraries with high-speed Internet connections. Mr. Wheeler will propose that the annual cap on spending for school Internet needs be raised by $1.5 billion, to $3.9 billion, according to an F.C.C. official who spoke on condition of anonymity but was authorized to release details of the proposal. The initiative is part of a continuing overhaul of the Universal Service Fund and its educational component, known as E-Rate. The new spending would lead to an increase of roughly 16 percent in the monthly fee on consumers’ phone bills. The fee is used to finance the Universal Service Fund, an $8.7 billion effort that provides phone and broadband connections for low-income populations, rural areas, and schools and libraries. F.C.C. officials say consumers would pay less than $2 a year in additional fees per phone line, or less than $6 extra per household, on average; currently the average household pays about $36 a year. But the amount an individual household pays can vary widely, with fees assessed on both home and mobile service. Businesses pay into the program as well. “While the impact on consumers will be small, the impact on children, teachers, local communities and American competitiveness will be great,” the F.C.C. said in a statement scheduled to be released on Monday.”

  • 12/22/2014Second E-rate Modernization Order Released – “On December 19, 2014 the FCC issued the Second E-rate Modernization Report and Order and Order on Reconsideration. Building on the E-rate Modernization Order adopted by the FCC in July, the improvements to the program adopted in this Order seek to close the high-speed connectivity gap between rural schools and libraries and their urban and suburban counterparts, and provide sufficient and certain funding for high-speed connectivity to and within all eligible schools and libraries. The FCC takes these actions to ensure the continued success of the E-rate program as it transitions from supporting legacy services to focusing on meeting the high-speed broadband connectivity needs of schools and libraries consistent with the recently adopted program goals and long-term connectivity targets.”

When Fast Trading Looks Like Priced Noise

Chinco, Alexander and Ye, Mao, When Fast Trading Looks Like Priced Noise (January 2, 2015). Available for download at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2544738 “Traders with different investment horizons value assets slightly differently. Motivated by this simple insight, we measure the amount of NYSE trading activity at horizons ranging from 1-minute to 1-month long. We find that the… Continue Reading

What We Know About Inequality (in 14 Charts) – WSJ

“If any one theme dominated economic policy debates and research over the past year, it was income inequality. The debate was kicked into high gear when French economist Thomas Piketty‘s book “Capital in the Twenty-First Century”  became a runaway best seller. (It’s not clear how many people who bought the book actually read much of it.) When President… Continue Reading

Half of online Americans don’t know what a privacy policy is

Pew – Aaron Smith – What Is a Privacy Policy: Research by “Joseph Turow [who studies digital marketing and privacy issues at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication] …also suggests that ordinary users don’t fully understand the scope of the data that is being collected on them — or how small amounts of data can… Continue Reading

Arrival of the Fukushima radioactivity plume in North American continental waters

John N. Smith, Robin M. Brown, William J. Williams, Marie Robert, Richard Nelson, and S. Bradley Moran.  Arrival of the Fukushima radioactivity plume in North American continental waters. PNAS 2014 : 1412814112v1-201412814. “The large discharge of radioactivity into the northwest Pacific Ocean from the 2011 Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear reactor accident has generated considerable concern about the spread of… Continue Reading

Evolutionary timescale of life

“TimeTree is a public knowledge-base for information on the evolutionary timescale of life. A search utility allows exploration of the thousands of divergence times among organisms in the published literature. A tree-based (hierarchical) system is used to identify all published molecular time estimates bearing on the divergence of two chosen taxa, such as species, compute… Continue Reading

New on LLRX – Tell the FCC to Require Read-Aloud for Future Kindles and Other E Ink Devices

Via LLRX.com – Tell the FCC to Require Read-Aloud for Future Kindles and Other E Ink Devices – David H. Rothman calls attention to a pivotal upcoming event for readers everywhere: On Jan. 28, 2015 if the Federal Communications Commission makes the right choice and sticks to its past inclinations, a regulatory waiver will expire. The waiver has… Continue Reading