Public Transit Adds Data Points

Here in DC, WMATA (Washington Metro Area Transit Authority) has started putting up signs at all its bus stops that have a unique stop number on them.
What this number symbolizes is a unique ID that riders and WMATA operators can use to point to an exact location and stop.
As you can see from the sign, [...]

My Tech Policy Memo to President-Elect Obama

For my excellent “What’s Shaping the Internet?” class with Professor Michael Nelson, we had to write a 6-page memorandum to either President-Elect Obama, Google CEO Eric Schmidt, or some other organization head, using three main policy points.
I chose to advocate for an innovation commons, a push for open-source government interfaces, and a national identity system.
I [...]

The Digital Africa Surprise

For my African Development class, I was required to write a 15-page paper on some aspect of African economic development. I chose to write about converging factors, such as the east coast Africa backbone coming online, the cloud, and cheap online tools, contributing to a surprising boom in African digital connectedness to occur in [...]

Webheads for Africa

This is an aside but today’s market rally (Dow +936) was astounding. I barely made any money though (sadface) because most of the move was on a gap up and I think you would’ve had to be suicidal to buy on Friday to hold over the weekend. To be honest I don’t know [...]

Optimism

So the G7 is meeting up with Dubya this weekend and so far nothing substantial has been announced. These people are useless. Dubya gets wheeled out to give a clueless speech that inspires no confidence. If anything, it encourages fear. Fear that we have no leadership to help us fix these [...]

My Paper on American and Japanese 3G Networks

I wanted to post the paper I wrote for my “political economy of international communications policy” class last semester (Spring, ‘08).  The topic of my research was how the build-outs of the networks in the US and Japan along with cultural differences led to the uses of cell phones and bandwidth that we can currently [...]

Stereotyping Grad Programs

In my “What’s Shaping the Internet?” class last week, we were talking about universal communication access briefly when the only MBA student in the class commented that he thought it was all a waste of money and that he believed “the free market should handle it”.
I am so freaking tired of hearing that phrase.  It’s [...]