purple motes

Offer Comments

Better Internet connectivity tends to be associated with more urban areas, areas with a greater concentration of high-tech industries and employees, and areas with wealthier, more educated populations.   These factors, however, do not provide simple explanations for the actual geographic pattern of Internet download speeds from Akamai's server network.  According to Akamai's measurements (which include residential and business customers), the U.S. state with the highest average Internet download speed in the second quarter of 2009 was New Hampshire.  New Hampshire is noted for extensive forests, beautiful mountains, and ice fishing.  Illinois, in contrast, includes Chicago, the third-largest U.S. city and long a major hub of trading and banking.  In average Internet download speed, Illinois ranks 45 out of all 51 U.S. states and the District of Columbia.  Illinois' average Internet download speed is only 46% that of New Hampshire.  While New York state is near the top of the average speed ranking and Alaska is at the bottom, unexpected relative positions, such as those of New Hampshire and Illinois, are prevalent in the ranking.

Unexpected dispersion in Internet download speeds appears in other Akamai data.  Looking at the distribution of download speeds across IP addresses within states, Washington state, which includes the headquarters of Microsoft and other high-tech companies, has among the lowest shares of IP addresses downloading at faster than 768 kbits/s.    That share for Washington is 77%.   Nevada and Maine, in comparison, have 98% and 96%, respectively, of IP addresses downloading at faster than 768 kbits/s.[1]   Looking at download speeds by cities, the city with the highest average download speed is Sandy City, Utah, and the next highest, Norman, Oklahoma.[2]   Most persons have never heard of either.

Dispersion in Internet download speeds suggests that idiosyncratic organizational factors greatly affect Internet connectivity.[3]   Technology for providing relatively high-speed Internet access is well understood and widely available.   But Internet connectivity impinges on a vast array of organizational activities and interests.  That's a real Internet congestion problem.

*  *  *  *  *

Data: Internet download speeds across U.S. states and cities, as measured by Akamai (Excel version)

Notes:

[1]  For the U.S. as a whole, the FCC's OBI Technical Paper No. 4, Broadband Performance, shows that 88% of U.S. Internet users have actual download speeds greater than 1 Mbps.  See Exhibit 18, which is based on comScore data for the first half of 2009.   Few comScore data are publicly available and little is know about the specifics of comScore's measurements.  See Steve Bauer, David Clark, and William Lehr, "Understanding Broadband Speed Measurements," pp. 16-7.   In the UK in May, 2010, about 92% of residential broadband connections had actual average download speeds greater than 4 Mbps.  See UK Broadband Speeds 2010.  Estimate based on Figures 4.2 and 4.5.

[2]  The set of cities considered are the top-ten cities by IP address density in each state.  See Akamai, "Observed Average Internet Speeds for U.S. Network Connections," p. 2.

[3] This dispersion does not particularly characterize the U.S.  Considering mobile broadband world-wide in 1Q 2010, Akamai observed:

we see that there is an extremely wide range in average connection speeds – oddly enough, the highest (7175 Kbps) and the lowest (105 Kbps) were both seen on providers in Slovakia.

See Akamai, State of the Internet, 1st Quarter, 2010 Report, p. 25.

2 Comments

A person living in Arlington, Virginia, measured his Internet connection quality using the Federal Communications Commission's Consumer Broadband Test.   He found his Internet download speed to be about 750 kilobits per second (kbits/s).  Studying Akamai data on observed average Internet speeds, I found that only about 2% of Internet addresses (from business and residential users) in Arlington, Virginia, have Internet connections this slow or slower.

Under a promise of anonymity, I interviewed this unusual, technologically backward Internet user to try to understand why he doesn't upgrade to faster Internet connectivity.   Here's a lightly edited transcript of that interview:

Why don't you upgrade to a faster Internet connection?

Because I'm cheap and lazy.  What I have is good enough.

What do you pay per month for Internet connectivity?

I pay $23.99 per month for Verizon's "Internet 768/128" service.   Plus they tack on about $10 a month worth of incomprehensible charges.  Maybe those are for Internet, too, although I think I paid them even when I just had phone service.

How much would it cost you to get faster Internet connectivity?

I don't know.  Every month I get several offers in the mail.  They don't make it easy to figure out how much in total the new service actually costs and how much faster it is.    So I just throw the offers out.   I'm lazy.

Don't you want faster connectivity?

Sure.  But I'm cheap and I'm lazy.

But with faster connectivity you'd save time.

I do my laundry in a laundry room in the basement of my four-story apartment building.  I've got to walk up and down four flights of stairs to do my laundry.  That wastes more time than my slow Internet connection.

With faster connectivity you could watch more video on the Internet.

I watch the videos that are worth watching.  Watching more wastes time.

What about online virtual worlds?  Every heard of World of Warcraft?

Yup.  When I'm old and bedridden, I'll play that.  And I'll read the newspaper, if it's still around.

What about video conferencing?

With prostitutes?

No, I mean for meetings and stuff.

I prefer to meet in the flesh.

You have no idea of all the great things you can do with high-speed Internet connectivity.

How am I supposed to find out? Verizon keeps raising its rate for my slow connection.   If I sign up for high-speed Internet, they'll just get me faster.

*  *  *  *  *

What that guy said reminds me of what an old farmer said.   See the video below.   They seem related.   Just goes to show why making progress in the communications industry is so difficult.

Offer Comments

La Meurte de un burócrata, which was made in 1966 by the Cuban Tomás Gutiérrez Alea and which is transliterated into English as The Death of a Bureaucrat, is an important film for viewers to view so that by that means the viewer will come to appreciate the importance of following appropriate procedures when engaged in burying a dead person when a claim for a pension is to be filed, so that the claim can be processed without unnecessary delay.  The length of the film is 85 minutes.  The format of the film is black and white.  The language of the film is Spanish.  The sound mix of the film is mono. It is recommended that this film be shown in schools, where the ages of the pupils are 15 to 18 years old, so that they do not misinterpret the meaning of the film, which should be preceded by a Powerpoint presentation outlining the key points.  In accordance with the results-based viewing standards established under LT-156/C, the standard evaluation form WTF-71 should be distributed after the showing.  Viewers should not be allowed to leave the cinema until the completed form is handed in to Evaluation Coordinator, who should ensure that the cinema doors are securely locked after the film begins and until such time as the Projection Director certifies that the viewing has impacted the viewers.

This month's other bureaucratic issues:

We note Paul Day's list of  "12 ways to design bureaucracy-free organizations."  This list is no cause for concern.   Eliminating bureaucracy from an organization will leave only entrepreneurs.  Then the organization will completely cease functioning and die.  Darwinian survival of the survivalists continually reproduces bureaucracy.

Bureaucrats in Berlin reported for duty despite 37-degree Celsius heat.  The workers went home only when management ordered them to do so.

Svetlana Gladkova at profy reports that a social network has been set up to serve Russian bureaucrats.  She is concerned that, given the crushing burden of work that they face, Russian bureaucrats lack time to participate in a social network.   The obvious answer is to hire more bureaucrats so that all necessary tasks can be completed.

According to John M. Glionna at the Los Angeles Times, some China officials are urging Chinese government bureaucrats to work less in giving speeches.  Those officials are lazy and foolish.  A woman outside a Beijing coffee shop noted:

This is just the way all Chinese express themselves in public. It's in our heritage and goes back to the way old Chinese poems were constructed.

The Chinese Ministry of Planning Production Affairs should hire this woman into a senior position.

James Otteson at Pileus laments that New Jersey officials did not correctly fill out a federal form and hence lost a $400 million grant.  This story shows that the federal government has greater bureaucratic competence than does the New Jersey government.  New Jersey should commission a task force to create a report on how to improve New Jersey's bureaucratic competence.

That's all for this month's Carnival of Bureaucrats. Enjoy previous bureaucratic carnivals here. Nominations of posts to be considered for inclusion in next month's carnival should be submitted using Form 376: Application for Bureaucratic Recognition.

Offer Comments

Offer Comments

In a nineteenth century dataset, cabinets group birds at a high level of similarity.  Each cabinet contains stuffed and mounted birds, arranged roughly in a grid.  On the top row of this cabinet are three flycatchers followed by three kingbirds.  On the second row are two kingbirds follwed by four flycatchers.  The next row displays a flycather, three phoebe's, and then three flycatchers.   The bottom row has an Eastern Pewee, a Western Pewee, three flycatchers, and then a Rose-Throated Becard.

The colored poster-board tags next to each bird provide textual information grouped into three fields.  The top textual field contains the common name.  The middle textual field contains genus followed by species.   The lowest textual field records unstructured information about the bird's geographic distribution, habitat, breeding, and other characteristics.

If you want to query this database, you have to go to the Peabody Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and search among the birds in the cabinets.  Databases like this represented the leading edge of knowledge about a century and a half ago.

At the leading edge of knowledge today are database tools like Needle.  Needle organizes a database as a graph of data nodes (pictures, names, text), so that types of information can easily have a wide variety of relationships.  Needle provides a powerful query language that can quickly produce much different views of data.  Needle makes a database live, active, and accessible anywhere through the Internet.

A knowledge revolution has occurred.  The challenge is to bring it to good practice.

Offer Comments

The DS1 and DS3 rates that the Ad Hoc Telecommunications Users filed publicly at the FCC are now accessible as an online, highly capable Needle domain (database).  Needle is a data system that makes it easy to look at the data in different ways and to sort and filter it, all from within a web browser.

The original filings (here, here, and here) provide the data as pdf pages displaying tables with highly complex row and column structures.   A human can read and page through the data as if it were text.  That data format serves neither the reading capabilities of humans nor the data-processing capabilities of computers.

To make the Ad Hoc DS1/DS3 rate data more accessible,  I extracted it from the pdf files and re-organized it into one, regular, comma-separated-value (CSV) file with 3698 data rows.  I also put together some relevant data documentation.   Analyzing the CSV file with a spreadsheet is possible but cumbersome.   Since the CSV file has a simple tabular data form, it's easy to analyze with a database program, if you have one.   You would download the data, import it into the database program, and then set up and run a query that generated the data view that you seek.

Needle makes many different views of the data easily accessible to a web browser.  Within Needle, a dataset is a graph of data nodes, where each data node is a single piece of data of a particular type.   The Needle Ad Hoc DS1/DS3 domain shows (on the left under "Every:") a linked list of every node type in that dataset.   If you click on any of these node types, a table will appear that has as its leftmost column a list of all the data nodes of the clicked type.   So, for example, if you click on "bandwidth," you will see the nodes DS1 and DS3 in the left column of the table.  The table also shows the number of attribute sets and the average circuit10 rate (a composite rate) across the DS1 and DS3 nodes, respectively.  You can look at the circuit10 rates by clicking on the circuit10 link (node type) on the left.   The resulting table shows all the circuit10 rates, in descending order, in the left column.  Other columns of the table show other attributes associated with each circuit10 rate.

For any table that you see, you can filter, sort, and group the data.  For example, to limit the table of circuit10 rates to DS1 rates, left click on the "bandwidth" column heading, select "filter by this column" in the pop-up menu, type DS1 into the box next to "show", and then click on "do" just to the right of that box.   The table will then contract to show just the DS1 circuit10 rates.  A similar procedure produces filters for company, year, state, reg type, term, and zone.  If you want to see the elements of each of these data types, click on that type on the left.   Options on the pop-up menu also provide for sorting and grouping.  Under "Index" on the top left, the "rates" and "rates subset" links show examples of tables made from grouping, filtering, and  sorting the cn (attribute set) nodes.  The "compare 2009 to 2006" and "compare 2009 to 2005" links under the index heading show tables that include circuit10 price ratios across the relevant years.  You can sort and filter these tables like any other table.

Any subset of data can be extracted easily from Needle.  At the bottom of each table are links "See this data as: Plain List · CSV · JSV · JSONa".  Just click on CSV to download a CSV file of the data.  If the table has groups, you need to flatten the table (switch grouping to a regular data column) before exporting.  Needle also offers API functionality that allows Needle to serve as a data repository for high-powered statistical analysis packages such as R or S.

Needle can do much more than what it is doing for the Ad Hoc DS1/DS3 dataset.  Needle's strengths include data acquisition, merging, and cleansing.  In addition, Needle's graph-based data organization can easily handle complex data structures that create nightmares in traditional relational databases, which require tabular data forms.  Needle, for example, can easily handle variable-length lists of items.  None of these strengths are applied to present the Ad Hoc DS1/DS3 dataset.   Needle here merely makes the Ad Hoc DS1/DS3 data much more easily accessible, especially compared to data published as pages of tables in a pdf document.

Offer Comments

The museum guard with a gun said, "Put your camera away. No photographs in the exhibit."  That's what I remember most about my first visit to the exhibit Revealing Culture, now at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington DC.  VSA, the International Organization on Arts and Disability, sponsored the exhibit.  The guard was just doing his job.  I respect the many, dedicated bureaucrats who diligently do their jobs.

While I was dismayed that the Corcoran Gallery forbade non-commercial photographs of Maya Lin's re-formations of natural landscapes, forbidding photographs at Revealing Culture is worse.  VSA was founded "to provide arts and educational opportunities for people with disabilities and increase access to the arts for all."  What about persons who are bedridden and can't physically come to the exhibit?  What about those who do not have money or time to travel to the exhibit?

Preventing art exhibit visitors from making non-commercial photographs signals an exhibit's avariciousness for artifacts and contempt for art.  Constraints are a natural feature of the real world.  But reasonable accommodations are possible.  Allowing visitors to make and share photographs of an exhibit costs the organizers neither time nor money.  Sharing of non-commercial photographs through social networks can bring a sense of the exhibit to many persons who otherwise would have none.  Sharing enhances true art.  Art exhibits that prohibit non-commercial photographs seem to have an anti-social obsession with possession.

Change is possible.[*]  Earlier this week, strolling about the area, I again entered Revealing Culture.   A museum guard was there.  Still unwillingly suspended in disbelief, I asked him if I could take photographs.  He said, "Yes, in here you can."  Wonderful!  An art exhibit that allows sharing culture!

My favorite work in Revealing Culture is Jon Berge's Four/For Mona Lisa.   On the wall facing the exhibit entrance, it resembles a band of shields that riot police use in charging a crowd.  But in reality the shields are boards offering braille representations of inner-city children describing the Mona Lisa:

• Mona Lisa is a lady in a picture.  Bright eyes, pretty smile.  She has no family.  She is outside in the sun.
• The Mona Lisa probably took a long time to draw so I bet she was very bored - and didn't want to stay any longer.  it only shows from the waist and up of her body.  the Mona Lisa has on eyebrows on her
• She looked like she wanted to kill Leonardo for making her pose for a picture and she doesn't dress like us.  Leonardo must be her husband.
• Mona Lisa looks sad because she is alone.  She is poor

Touching Four/For Mona Lisa activates a digital recording of the children reading their descriptions.  Reality gives of itself to everyone who seeks it, to each in a way that relates to her or his capabilities.  Jon Berge's Four/For Mona Lisa is art of reality.

Revealing Culture is at the Smithsonian's Ripley Center in Washington, DC, through August 29, 2010.

* * * * *

[*] A VSA publication, Arts Access Made Easy: Successful Strategies from the Award of Excellence in Arts Access, offers ten ways to achieve arts access.  It seems oblivious to the rapidly developing capabilities of digital networks.  Concern about access should include concern about being accessible through the Internet.  Moreover, Arts Access Made Easy is oriented toward organizational-bureaucratic actions.  Fostering grass-roots digital representations and peer-to-peer sharing across social networks can make a large contribution to improving access to a given body of work.

Offer Comments

Offer Comments

Anyone can now make and distribute video world-wide at zero incremental cost.  That's a mind-boggling video communication revolution.

Google's recent heroic effort to count the number of books that have been published around the world shows how scarce video has been.  Google estimates tomes -- symbolically distinguished, printed and bound works -- to number 146 million.  Google also estimates the number of video works in library catalogs to be about 2 million.[*]  Hence the number of video works equals less than 2% of the number of tomes that the world's libraries hold.

Other public library statistics indicate popular interest in video.  U.S. public libraries' video holdings amounted in 2008 to 5.4% of total items held.   These item counts include duplicates of works within a library and across libraries.  The higher video item share compared to the video work share suggests that U.S. libraries include more duplicate video items than duplicate print items from the world population of tomes and videos.  Moreover, U.S. libraries' video circulation accounts for about 30% of total item circulation in 2010.   The higher circulation share compared to item share for videos indicates that videos are borrowed more frequently than other items.

Public library holdings represent institutionally authorized items.  Commercial video rentals, which are about five times as numerous as video borrowing from public libraries, are institutionally authorized through a different process than are public library holdings.   The vast video libraries on YouTube and other video sharing sites typically have little institutional authorization.  Institutions are as much a part of reality as is human nature.   Institutions change much more rapidly than human nature, but much more slowly than human behavior.  Public libraries as institutions almost surely will endure.  But the share of video works distributed through public libraries probably will increase greatly.

*  *  *  *  *

[*] These are rough, imperfect estimates, but they seem to be the best available data-based figures that currently exist.  Complaining about statistics is easy.   Analyzing data and calculating statistics are difficult, but useful.

Offer Comments