- Improving Health Care — Adam Bosworth’s speech to the Aspen Health Forum. It starts strong and just gets better: There is a lot of talk about improving health care. And there is a lot to improve. Inadequate Evidence: We don’t know enough about what works. We should require sharing of population statistics across practices and hospitals in order to better determine what works for whom. We should reward practices and hospitals that are delivering the best most cost-effective long-term outcomes and penalize those that deliver the worst.
- topia.termextract — Python library for term extraction, so you can get a list of the nouns and noun phrases used in a piece of text. (via Simon Willison)
- Key to Understanding Network Neutrality — David Pennock neatly identifies the crucial issue, that service quality and price levels be uniformly applied and not arbitrary based on how much the service provider thinks they can gouge from the customer. The key to understanding this debate is recognizing the difference between anonymity and egalitarianism. A mechanism is anonymous if the outcome does not depend on the identity of the players: two players who bid the same are treated equally. It doesn’t matter what their name, age, or wealth is, what company they represent, or how they plan to use the item — all that matters is what they bid. This is a good property for almost any public marketplace that ensures fair treatment, and one worth fighting for on the Internet.
- (the item I linked to releases in a week’s time, I will link again when it’s live–sorry for the inconvenience. In the meantime, please enjoy this video of a monkey washing a cat)
"network neutrality" entries
Google Fiber and the FCC National Broadband Plan
I’ve puzzled over Google’s Fiber project ever since they announced it. It seemed too big, too hubristic (even for a company that’s already big and has earned the right to hubris) — and also not a business Google would want to be in. But the FCC’s announcement of their plans to widen broadband Internet access in the US puts Google Fiber in a new context. The FCC’s plans are cast in terms of upgrading and expanding the network infrastructure. That’s a familiar debate, and Google is a familiar participant. This is really just an extension of the “network neutrality” debate that has been going on with fits and starts over the past few years.
Google Enters the Home Broadband Market
So That's What All of Google's Dark Fiber Was For
In a week already full of Google announcements, another bomb was casually dropped today via Google’s blog. The Borg from California announced that it was experimentally entering the Fiber to the Curb (FTTC) market, and that they planned to offer much higher speeds than current offerings (1Gb/sec) and competitive pricing. The announcement also talks about what, when you remove the marketspeak, is a commitment to net neutrality in their service. This, of course, is not surprising, given Google’s strong lobbying for neutrality to the FCC and congress.
Innovation Battles Investment as FCC Road Show Returns to Cambridge
Opponents can shed their rhetoric and reveal new depths to their thought when you bring them together for rapid-fire exchanges, sometimes with their faces literally inches away from each other. That made it worth my while to truck down to the MIT Media Lab for yesterday’s Workshop on Innovation, Investment and the Open Internet, sponsored by the Federal Communications Commission. The event showed that innovation and investment are not always companions on the Internet. An in-depth look at the current state of the debate over competition and network neutrality.
Four short links: 12 August 2009
Health Data, Python Term Extraction, Network Neutrality, New Database
Sprint blocking Cogent network traffic…
It appears that Sprint has stopped routing traffic (called “depeering”) from Cogent as a result of some sort of legal dispute. Sprint customers cannot reach Cogent customers, and vice versa. The effect is similar to what would happen if Sprint were to block voice phonecalls to AT&T customers. Here’s a graph that shows the outage, courtesy of Keynote : Rich…
The wiretapping accusation against P2P and copyright filtering: evidence that we need more user/provider discussion
Celebrated law expert Paul Ohm suggests that cable companies and other
ISPs might be breaking the federal wiretap law by doing deep packet
inspection. But the same kinds of deep inspection that Ohm decries is
also used for spam and virus filtering. On the other hand, I wonder
whether web mail services such as Hotmail, Yahoo! and Google would be
guilty of wiretapping if they check traffic. These dilemma suggest to
me that the relationship between ISPs (or mail service providers) and
customers has to change, and perhaps that the wiretap statute has to
adapt.