COB-14: advancing progress forward
OECD broadband rankings have become a leading indicator of progress in communications development. Broadband subscribers per 100 inhabitants for the United Kingdom, France, Japan, the United States, and Germany are 21.6, 20.3, 20.2, 19.6, and 17.1 (Dec. 2006 figures). These statistics depend on reporting from a large number of bureaucrats in private telecommunications companies. For [...]
Tagged: broadband
television serves couch potatoes
Most television watching is best modeled as a two-stage decision process. First, a person decides to watch television. That means the person sits on a couch and stares vacantly at a large screen a few yards away. Then the person decides what to watch. That means choosing among current, salient video programming offerings. These two [...]
Tagged: advertising, time use
public libraries outperformed video rental businesses
From 1985 to 2004, video rentals from U.S. public libraries grew 340%. Over the same period, video rentals from U.S. commercial rental businesses grew 140%. Public libraries’ video rental activity did grow from a smaller base: 70 million videos loaned in 1985 (6% of the number of videos commercial outfits turned in that year), to [...]
Tagged: libraries, video
Nairobi, September 23, 1997
He had come from south Sudan to the Refugee Office in Nairobi. He was wearing a tattered formal jacket and dress shoes. I had on a t-shirt and Reebok runners. He approached me with, “Where are you from?” then a smile and a formal “Welcome!” He asked how blacks are treated in America. “Could a [...]
better networked citations
Web citations make connections well. Web citations combine widely varying citation texts with a standard address (URL). The authority for a standard address can remap it and associate other addresses with it. Anyone can create citations and addresses. Freely available search engines find all citations and rank them according to various algorithms. The result is [...]
Tagged: knowledge
farmer digs into youtuber
Was rural life once like the Waltons and Little House on the Prairie? Now reinventing the interview on YouTube, a retired farmer asks some tough questions and describes rural life as it truly was in the 1930s, before television. (click on image to play video)