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"Revamping the Army National Guard training program so soldiers can spend more time at home will cost at least $128 million this year, and officials say they need nearly double that amount next year to properly train and equip their forces, The Associated Press has learned."
So PC World is reporting on a Gartner study that says that upon reaching a high threshold of broadband penetration "ISPs will concentrate less on building out their networks to reach new customers and more on expanding what customers can do with their broadband Internet connections." This appears to be good news for those of us in urban or suburban areas but less so for those in rural areas.
This is Harold Jarche's fault for getting me on this kick again. Harold recently blogged about seeing a presentation by Richard Florida - author of Rise of the Creative Class, Flight of the Creative Class and Who Is Your City? I had written earlier about what I considered to be the disconnect between Florida's assertions about location actually gaining in importance and Thomas Friedman's 'World is Flat' contention.
Well after reading Harold's post, I also saw several articles about a recent United Nations report concerning the growth of urbanization. The report contends that "By the end of this year, half of the world’s 6.7 billion people will live in urban areas, according to a report unveiled by the United Nations today, which also predicts that future growth of the world’s urban population will be concentrated in Asia and Africa."
That certainly sounds like location matters doesn't it? The big growth points will be "found in the cities of Africa, such as
Lagos and Kinshasa that are not yet megacities but will be in the
future, and the cities of Pakistan and Bangladesh, such as Lahore,
Karachi and Dhaka." So even as technology races forward and you'd expect that to dilute somewhat the growth of megacities, especially in developing areas, turns out, not so much.
Might be a good thing to have a session or two at some upcoming conferences (hint, hint) to discuss what kind of impact this urban growth will have on our industry as well as what our industry can do to make this as positive a historical moment as possible. Just a thought.
So the U.S. House passes a new, 4-year moratorium on taxing access to the Internet. How ridiculous that we are having this debate at all. State and local governments worry that the moratorium will hurt their revenues...really? What is their cost? Last I looked, I was already paying for my access to the Internet...and you dopes are worried about your revenues? Tell me what your costs are? Isn't that the idea of taxes? To cover the costs of providing government services? Argh.
(link)
"I.B.M., at a conference in Washington today, is announcing that it will begin offering its employees in the United States specialized savings accounts for training and education. The “learning accounts” will be modeled on 401(k) retirement accounts, which began in the late 1970s. Workers will put up to $1,000 a year into the accounts, and I.B.M. will contribute 50 cents for every dollar put in by the employee. Under the I.B.M. plan, the employee decides how and when to spend the money, held in an interest-bearing account. When an employee leaves I.B.M., the individual takes the account."
How smart is IBM looking right now?
(via Stephen Downes) There something wrong here. Something a bit off kilter. Evidently Steve Jobs, the Sage of Cupertino, made some comments at the Texas Public Education Reform Foundation's Statewide Summit (hmmm Pentavirate anyone?). Apple's chief (who happened to be sharing the stage with Michael Dell) was critical of the role (a detrimental one as he sees it) of unions in U.S. schools. The oft cited quote is:
"What kind of person could you get to run a small business if you told them (sic) that when they came in they couldn't get rid of people that they thought weren't any good?" he asked. "I believe that what is wrong with our schools in this nation is that they have become unionized in the worst possible way," Jobs said. "This unionization and lifetime employment of K-12 teachers is off-the-charts crazy."
OK, so Jobs think unions are bad - I get the point. I think it is an overly simplistic point but GEEZ did the blogosphere go nuts on it. Christian Long goes sub-orbital but has a good point when he says:
"Perhaps we ought agree -- for once -- that the entire 'public education experiment' (in the US) of the last 150+ years has been an insanely SUCCESSFUL adventure. It worked. Unbelievably well if you consider mass literacy, shifting from an agrarian to an industrial nation, making citizen voting habits nearly universal, and providing a relative social zeitgeist (along with TV) for most to share."
Scoble also has something to say, as does Dan Farber and Don Dodge. I don't find it amazing at all these pundits are having a strong reaction to what Jobs says - they always seem to - I know that goes for me usually. The odd position I find myself in now though is wondering why all these pundits, when the time seems so ripe, why are they all ignoring the statements that Bill Gates made TWO YEARS AGO to the National Governors Association.
Why are all these pundits passing up the opportunity to place the head of Microsoft and his take on U.S. schools against the head of Apple and his views? This is a match made in blog-heaven. I actually think that the statements that Gates made are actually more insightful than Jobs and get a lot closer to the real issue of what is wrong with our schools. Gates said in part:
"America’s high schools are obsolete. By obsolete, I don’t just mean that our high schools are broken, flawed, and under-funded – though a case could be made for every one of those points. By obsolete, I mean that our high schools – even when they’re working exactly as designed – cannot teach our kids what they need to know today."
So on the one hand we have a CEO saying unions are bad and on the other we have one going past that and saying that the very design of our school system - which has indeed worked well for 150 years but which is in no way guaranteed to work well for the next 150 - is broken. I can't believe that I am defending the fact that in this instance, it seems that Gates is outclassing Jobs and I can't believe that no one else seems to be talking about it (at least Friedman was talking about it 2 years ago).
WIRED has the full transcript of Senator Stevens' horrifically confusing rant on net neutrality, tubes and dump trucks. For the full insanity, listen to the audio and be sure to read the hysterical forensic dissection of why the Senator's own INternets are so slow.
So from left to right,
Booz Allen Senior VP - Mike McConnell
US Senator - Bob Bennett
Supreme Court Justice - Stephen Breyer
former CJCS and SECSTATE - General Colin Powell
Turns out that they were all part of a panel at the Aspen Ideas Festival. How'd you like to have a panel made of people - any one of whom could keynote a whole conference? The panel BTW, was on "Order, Law and Governance in the 21st Century." OK..I'm impressed.
Thanks to Brent Schlenker for tipping me off to this one. Brent point me to a site called ZoomInfo (the only reason I'm giving out the link is so you can go there and tell them to remove your data if you'd like to).
Now I am pretty sure that what the do is legal...they have bots spider the Web and then they populate templates about people with info those bots find. So they have various fields like employment history, colleagues, affiliations and the like. One of the problems is that they get so much wrong - they still had me working at my last job and had my job title from that last job as "Host" (I'm assuming because I co-hosted an event at that last job). They also had me working for Intel - because I gave a presentation with someone who works at Intel and their system couldn't parse that finely I assume. They listed my title from another past job incorrectly as well because someone had referred to me that way in a blog post.
All this stuff is publically available through Google, it's just that their aggregation makes so many mistakes, I'd rather people see the data in raw form. So of course there is this option to "claim" your profile - like somehow now the onus is on you to take ownership of your own data..I love that.
You go into the process and for me the proverbial straw was the point in the process at which they could not verify me as the owner of my profile because their system is so faulty that none of the email addresses it had for me were ones that I still have access to. So the other option - INPUT YOUR CREDIT CARD DATA! Really? Serioulsy? You assemble this horribly screwed up profile of me and then you want me to trust you with my credit card? Not in this life sporto. So I emailed them.
To their ever-so slight credit, they did respond fairly quickly and I am now led to believe that my profile has been removed from their system - and that does indeed seem to be the case. Really though, could you think up a better business model designed to piss people off than this?
