shouting loudly

As of last Friday, the Rocky Mountain News, has closed up shop. And so goes the newspaper of my childhood. It’s another sad story in a sad sector in a sad economy. For the morbidly curious, here’s a regularly updated map of newspaper layoffs and closings. This is not to say that newspapers are dead. [...]

In the summer of 2005, I attended a 2 week course at the Annenberg Sunnylands’ Institute in Statistics and Methodology (ASIMS, aka “Stats Camp”) in Palm Desert, CA. I took the class on regression and ANOVA, taught (very well) by Wharton stats professor Bob Stine, used the statistical program R. Out of dissatisfaction with the very [...]

Here’s a great article by the Times exposing how text messages are incredibly overpriced and discussing one Senator’s investigation into the subject. Text messages may cost you and me $.20 per, but they cost the carriers almost nothing to send, says Srinivasan Keshav, a professor of computer science at the University of Waterloo, in Ontario. Here’s a [...]

Most of you perhaps don’t know that I am writing my dissertation about Global Voices. But this is an incredible group of people who make sure that parts of the world that otherwise gets ignored in the mainstream media get their voices heard. They are currently looking for donations that will help them sustain the [...]

This Harvard Crimson interview with Girl Talk is quite good. Here’s a relevant gem: 13. FM: A significant aspect of the narrative out there about you deals with the legality of your music, which uses samples from other artists without permission. Have you ever even been sued? GT: We’ve had no problems. I feel that [...]

In a(nother) huge election day win, yesterday the FCC deregulated the “white spaces” between TV stations, allowing technology firms and enthusiasts the right to play around in these unused channels of high-quality spectrum. In a 5-0 decision, the Commission issued a ruling allowing anybody to transmit messages in white spaces, within fairly limits on the [...]

I cannot recommend against Globat.com strongly enough. After the break, you’ll find a complete and total telling-off of a company with some of the worst customer service practices imaginable. Even if you don’t read it, avoid them at all costs. Will update w/ their reply.

Why are media and power always a bad combination? Whether it is the elite who is abusing the media for its own purposes (in the words of Chomsky and Herman, to ‘manufacture consent‘) or whether it is the media themselves who are powerful, often heard as in ‘the media are biased‘, the message seems clear [...]

I’m stoked by Damian Kulash’s New York Times opinion calling for mandated network neutrality. It’s a far more accessible, engaging piece than almost anything written on the subject, and he makes a compelling case. Kudos to him. P.S. On a personal note, it’s been a metric year since I blogged, and for good reason. Life [...]

In light of Verizon’s decision to block text messages from NARAL for no reason other than their content, Public Knowledge has created an online form for submitting comments to the FCC. This is an important telecom policy issue, and it would still be a problem if Verizon were blocking any messages due to their political [...]