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That’s why nobody likes them

Sep 5

[Note: This item comes from reader Randall. DLH]

From: Randall Webmail <rvh40@insightbb.com>
Date: September 4, 2010 9:33:23 PM PDT
To: johnmacsgroup@yahoogroups.com, dewayne@warpspeed.com
Subject: That’s why nobody likes them

“Moochers and Do-Gooders Both Shunned, Study Finds

By Charles Q. Choi, LiveScience Contributor

posted: 24 August 2010 10:14 am ET

The fact that groups of people typically choose to expel selfish individuals is no surprise. But new research suggests such troops often want to kick out generous members as well.

This counterintuitive behavior could be rooted in how such giving people make others feel bad, or simply in how they stand out from the crowd, researchers suggest.

Initially, psychologists were investigating if groups would tolerate individuals who contributed little toward group endeavors but also mooched little of the subsequent payoffs. The researchers told 104 college students they were each in groups of five, in which each member interacted via computer. In reality the other four members were played by the computer — three of the programmed members made consistently moderate choices, while the fourth typically made more extreme decisions.

Each group member was given 10 points. The students were told they could invest as many of the points as they wanted into a bank, and were told how much the other members invested. The number of points in the bank was then doubled, and each member could then choose to harvest up to a fourth of the points in the bank. Any leftover points were then doubled, and the process started over again for several rounds. The students were told that at the end, the points would be converted to tickets in a lottery for coupons to campus eateries. At the end of this experiment, four students were selected at random to get food coupons.

When asked whether they would like members to stay or leave the group, as expected the volunteers wanted to expel selfish moochers who invested little but harvested much, while they were indifferent to those who invested as much as they harvested. Surprisingly, however, generous members proved as unpopular as the bad apples.

Puzzled, the scientists ran the experiment twice more, asking volunteers if they thought generous members were either confused or simply behaving randomly. In general, people don’t like dealing with either incompetent or unpredictable individuals, and thus might want such members to leave the group, the psychologists reasoned. However, these studies not only replicated the initial findings, but also ruled out incompetence and unpredictability as reasons for the volunteers’ common desire to kick out selfless members.

[snip]

<http://www.livescience.com/culture/selfish-generous-people-altruism-100824.html>

<http://snipurl.com/11d6ua>

Case closed: why most of USA lacks 100Mbps ‘Net connections

Sep 3

Posted by dewayne in List | No Comments

Case closed: why most of USA lacks 100Mbps ‘Net connections

By Matthew Lasar | Last updated February 23, 2010 9:42 AM
<http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/02/case-closed-why-most-of-usa-lacks-100mbps-net-connections.ars>

Excitement about the approach of the Federal Communications Commission’s National Broadband Plan, due March 17, is inspiring ever more dramatic calls for greater high-speed Internet connectivity in the United States. This month, FCC Chair Julius Genachowski declared that the agency wants 260 million Americans hooked up to 100 Mbps broadband by 2020. Not to be outdone, the Media and Democracy Coalition says that by that same year consumer access to “world-class networks” should equal the present rate of telephone adoption (90%+).

As these calls for ever higher benchmarks reach a fever pitch, it’s worth remembering some of the grand proclamations of yesteryear. Take, for example, the TechNet group’s 2002 recommendation that the government should commit to a goal of 100 Mbps to 100 million homes and small businesses by the end of the decade—in other words, now. The consortium included CEOs and executives from Cisco, Microsoft, and Hewlett Packard.

Principle number one, they declared, was that the US “should foster innovation and reduce regulations—especially with respect to broadband applications and services.”

But in case you didn’t notice, 100Mbps x 100 million didn’t happen. About 75 to 77 million Americans currently access some kind of broadband, according to the latest data. That’s only assuming, however, that you accept 200Kbps as a flavor of “high speed Internet.” And a huge chunk of the population (over 30 percent) never go online at all—less because they’re retired and not interested; more often because they can’t afford the prices.

So why this shortfall of progress, especially compared to other countries? Some argue that everything is going fine. The US is just too spread out, that’s all—and we’ll catch up in due time. Others contend that we just haven’t spent enough government or private sector money on the problem. But the big thesis these days is that we missed the boat by curtailing wholesale network access to the big telcos and cable ISPs. By making it more expensive for smaller providers to link to AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, or Time Warner Cable in order to build out their own middle-mile systems, the government condemned most consumers to two ISP choices, at best.

The FCC’s own recently commissioned study by Harvard’s Berkman Center declared that “there is extensive evidence to support the position, adopted almost universally by other advanced economies, that open access policies, where undertaken with serious regulatory engagement, contributed to broadband penetration, capacity, and affordability in the first generation of broadband.”

We’re not going to categorically proclaim that this is indeed the solution to the nation’s broadband woes. But there’s no question that the policy of the FCC for the last dozen years has been to make it more expensive and even harder for businesses and competitive service providers to get Internet or telephone access (which are increasingly the same thing) at regulated rates.

[snip]

Sir Jobs Slays the Telco Dragon

Sep 2

Posted by dewayne in List | No Comments

Sir Jobs Slays the Telco Dragon

By Benoit Felten
<http://www.fiberevolution.com/2010/09/sir-jobs-slays-the-telco-dragon.html>

Yesterday was a long day for me, I was presenting the results of a study to a customer and talked for nearly 6 hours straight. You would have thought that, sitting in the airport with a 3 hour wait ahead of me I would stay away from work related topics. But I had my ipad with me, the wifi was pretty decent (if expensive) and my twitter stream was yelling at me that Steve Jobs was announcing lots of really cool stuff.

So I plugged into the live stream of the Apple conference (not that good in terms of quality, or rather, really good when it worked, but it didn’t work all that often…) and listened to Steve Jobs explaining in his low key manner how he was going to destroy the business model of a few other players in the industry.

I have already noted this oddity (in my opinion) that telcos blame Google for sending them too much traffic but not Apple for destroying their business models. Strange behaviour, for sure, but this might very well change now.

You see, beyond the fact that Jobs singlehandedly crushed any value in Myspace last night (Murdoch must be so happy right now…) by announcing Ping, he more importantly told telcos, and especially cablecos the world over: “let’s start digging the tomb of linear TV, and by the way, you can forget about VoD revenues.”

Ironically, this was a big topic of discussion and debate during the project reading that day. Discussing the importance of offering linear TV in attracting customers to FTTH, one of the guys in the customers’ team was convinced that the shift from linear to on-demand would be fast and that within a few years, not offering TV would no longer be an issue. I disagreed, using the usual arguments of football and other live events keeping the linear going for a long time.

[snip]

Cleaning the Henhouse

Sep 2

Posted by dewayne in List | No Comments

September 1, 2010

Cleaning the Henhouse
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/02/opinion/02kristof.html>

The latest salmonella outbreak, underscoring the failures of industrial farming, reminds me of the small chicken flock that I tended while growing up on a family farm.

Our chickens wandered freely, and one dawn we were awakened by frantic squawking. We looked out the window to see a fox rushing off with a hen in its mouth.

My father grabbed his .308 rifle and blasted out the window twice in the general direction of the fox. Frightened, it dropped the hen. Yet the hen, astonishingly, was still alive. She picked herself up, spun around dizzily a couple of times, and staggered back to the barn.

A month later, my aunt visited our farm with her Irish setter, Toby, who was always eager to please but a bit dimwitted. We chatted and forgot about Toby — until he bounded up proudly to show a chicken he had retrieved for us.

It was the very same hen that had survived the fox. We shouted, and Toby sadly dropped the bird. She ruffled her feathers, glared at the dog, and then stalked off while clucking indignantly.

Perhaps that hen might have been ready to choose a cage over the perils of canines on the range, and, obviously, my family’s model of chicken-farming was horrendously inefficient and no model for the future. But the other extreme of jamming chickens into small cages is a nightmare for the animals — and the salmonella outbreak underscores that it can be a health hazard to humans as well.

Inspections of Iowa poultry farms linked to the salmonella outbreak have prompted headlines about infestations with maggots and rodents. But the larger truth is: industrial agriculture is itself unhealthy.

Repeated studies have found that cramming hens into small cages results in more eggs with salmonella than in cage-free operations. As a trade journal, World Poultry, acknowledged in May: “salmonella thrives in cage housing.”

Industrial operations — essentially factories of meat and eggs — excel at manufacturing cheap food for the supermarket. But there is evidence that this model is economically viable only because it passes on health costs to the public — in the form of occasional salmonella, antibiotic-resistant diseases, polluted waters, food poisoning and possibly certain cancers. That’s why the president’s cancer panel this year recommended that consumers turn to organic food if possible — a stunning condemnation of our food system.

[snip]

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