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Wednesday, November 17, 2004 |
87% of Americans participate in online communities.
Personal Democracy Forum (see previous post) reports on a new survey by ACNeilsen:
87 percent of all Americans say they are a part of an online community, and while shared personal interests, hobbies and health-related communities rank very high, 49 percent of Americans also say they participate in public issue sites. That's more than who say they belong to professional groups (37%) and school volunteer groups (30%). Online community members are also about four times as likely as offline community members to say they interact with each other on a daily basis.
[Smart Mobs]
Um, yeah, except that it isn't true.
Have I done the research? Nope. But the percentage of US'ns online is well under 87, so, I infer, 'tain't no way that 87% of the nation participates in online communities.
Nice thought, though.
10:05:32 PM 
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Making of the next President: Ali Larijani's diary. I guess the Iran presidential election would eventually come down to a dirty fight between Akbar Rafsanjani, former president and Ali Larijani, former head of Iranian radio and TV (IRIB). But Ali Larijani, very close advisor to the Supreme Leader, is not very well-known in the West, despite his crucial position among the young conservative politicians. He is known to be one of their greatest strategists who has been leading the gradual but very effective crackdown on the entire reform movement. He has a PhD in philosophy and before running the TV and radio for the past ten years, he's... [Editor: Myself (English)]
9:33:58 PM
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The Real Problem with Voting: The biggest trouble lies not so much in the technology but in poll workers’ failure to follow the procedures that would assure reliable results. By Ted Selker, in Technology Review.
As co-director of the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project (VTP), I have been involved in inventing new secure voting machines, designing better ballots, and analyzing problems in the overall voting experience. Concerns about opportunities for voting equipment fraud have always been central to debates about elections. The VTP’s analysis of elections has shown that registration problems, poor ballot design, and careleess polling place procedures dominate the way votes are lost. Now, people are concerned about the 2004 election; to help, we released a report showing that exit polls did not in fact predict that John Kerry would fare better than he actually did in Ohio polling stations that used electronic voting machines. I have enjoyed the opportunity to carefully watch elections at hundreds of polling places nationwide for the past three-and-a-half years. What I have observed is that grave errors of judgment and protocol are apparent almost everywhere, regardless of the voting method used. Even in a well-run election, a poll-watcher witnesses an array of problems.
Nothing demonstrates this more clearly than what I saw on November 2 while watching voting at 28 precincts in the Boston area.
2:39:24 PM
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Online registration goes smoothly after past trouble. Registration began Nov. 8 with over 2,000 students registering in the first three days and over half of the them registered online. There were relatively few problems with online registration, despite registrar office moves and the e-mail server being down for portions of registration week, said Don Morris, the registrar for the university. [The Journal]
2:35:30 PM
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China eats mobile phones for breakfast.
Interesting post by Joi Ito about the pace of adoption of mobile phones in China:
Today I was on a panel at a JETRO conference with Hong Liang Lu. He has some amazing numbers about telephones China. Chinese are buying 90M new mobile phones a year. (Compared to 80M total mobile phones in Japan.) Japanese are about to make pre-paid mobile phone illegal because they are being used in crime. 80% of Chinese cell phones are pre-paid because of collection issues. PHS (Personal Handy Phone) which was developed in Japan (and I thought was a dead standard) is heavily deployed in China with 70M subscribers vs. only 5M subscribers in Japan. Minutes are as cheap as 1 cent per minute in China. China has 300M land-line phones and 300M mobile phones now.
[Smart Mobs]
2:34:50 PM
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Spending like drunken sailors.
Correct us if we're wrong, but "conservatives" are running Congress and the White House, right? What is so conservative about this: Spending and spending and when the credit line runs out, taking it up another unaffordable notch. Congress has to raise the debt ceiling to the tune of about $800 billion by Thursday to avoid hitting its limit on borrowing money and defaulting on the government debt. This could have been done weeks ago, since we actually reached the $7.38 billion debt ceiling in early October, but Reuters explains, "The Republican-led Congress avoided increasing the borrowing limit before the Nov. 2 election as leaders did not want to have the politically sensitive vote."
[Salon.com]
2:25:13 PM
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Yahoo deploys DomainKeys, hopes for the best
By digitally signing every email that Yahoo! transmits, the
company hopes to persuade others to follow suit in helping stem the
epidemic of unwanted e-mail. The technology is not without its faults,
but also has the potential to perform the impossible. [Ars Technica]
10:47:34 AM
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