Networking
From Roger Simon (the real one) at Politico.com:
…Obama’s victory certainly says a great deal about how the right person with the right message at the right time can move very far and very fast in this country, no matter what the barriers.
Indeed. I’m looking forward to a great and inspirational presidency, and one that’s more moderate than the one we’ve just seen. Much more moderate.
This is from AOL.
Obama flips Ohio, and wins Kerry states Pennsylvania and New Hampshire. This is looking like a wipe-out, and even Arizona is too close to call so far. Obama’s turnout models say he’s going to win Virginia, and that will seal the deal.
Nate Silver has called the election for Obama, based on Ohio and his model. Congratulations, President-elect Obama. (7:00 PM PST.)
And congratulations, America, for this historic breakthrough.
And a personal note to Kevin Martin: please clean out your desk and leave the building, promptly.
OK folks, we now officially have a trend:
Dixville Notch, NH (AHN) – The town of Dixville Notch, New Hampshire, with a population of around 75 people and only 21 registered voters, has picked Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) to be the next president of the United States. Obama defeated Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) by a margin of 15 votes to 6.
I figure the election is going to be essentially over by 6:00PM Pacific Time: if Obama takes Pennsylvania and Virginia, McCain is pretty much out of it, and if you throw in Indiana it’s all over:
“We could know Virginia at 7,†he said. “We could know Indiana before 8. We could know Florida at 8. We could know Pennsylvania at 8. We could know the whole story of the election with those results. We can’t be in this position of hiding our heads in the sand when the story is obvious.â€
For a rundown of the early states to watch, see Nate Silver in Newsweek.
It’s a shame that McCain has to lose so decisively, because he’s obviously a decent man with many admirable qualities. If he had only spent a little more time on his VP pick, he could have saved his reputation. But he’s bound to have already realized that, and probably tried to get Palin to graciously step down. She’s not the sort of person to do “gracious,” of course, and I look forward to reading the full story in the weeks to come.
OK, not exactly.
A million fans came to the parade in Philly on Friday. I’d say baseball is still the National Pastime. This was a pretty decent World Series, apart from the Philly weather and the inept umpiring. I wanted the Rays to win, but the result’s not exactly heart-breaking either. Comcast had a lot to do with it, apparently, which must rankle Mr. NASCAR, Kevin Martin, whose car has crashed.
This little gem is from FiveThirtyEight.com
So a canvasser goes to a woman’s door in Washington, Pennsylvania. Knocks. Woman answers. Knocker asks who she’s planning to vote for. She isn’t sure, has to ask her husband who she’s voting for. Husband is off in another room watching some game. Canvasser hears him yell back, “We’re votin’ for the n***er!”
Woman turns back to canvasser, and says brightly and matter of factly: “We’re voting for the n***er.”
In this economy, racism is officially a luxury. How is John McCain going to win if he can’t win those voters?
I surmise that Tuesday night’s election night coverage isn’t going to take very long.
FiveThirtyEight.com is the most interesting election horse race site. It’s run by Nate Silver, the Baseball Prospectus stats guy, who does the most thorough analysis of polling data, sophisticated in a way that only a Sabermetrician can fully appreciate. Silver rejects the “tightening race” narrative that we’ve started to hear, as he looks at state polls and projects the Electoral College outcome:
If the state polls aren’t showing movement toward McCain, then it is probably the case that any perceived movement in the national polls is sampling noise. If anything, in fact, the state polls are showing movement toward Obama on balance, not just in battleground states like Virginia, but also in non-battlegrounds as diverse as New York, Oklahoma, Oregon and Arizona.
Movement in the popular vote in non-battleground states is not significant, so let’s not get distracted. But let’s not forget to vote, either (I’ve already voted, thank you very much.)
Like several other engineers, I’m disturbed by the white spaces debate. The White Space Coalition, and its para-technical boosters, argue something like this: “The NAB is a tiger, therefore the White Spaces must be unlicensed.” And they go on to offer the comparison with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, arguing as Tom Evslin does on CircleID today that “If we got a lot of innovation from just a little unlicensed spectrum, it’s reasonable to assume that we’ll get a lot more innovation if there’s a lot more [unlicensed] spectrum available.”
According to this argument, Wi-Fi has been an unqualified success in every dimension. People who make this argument haven’t worked with Wi-Fi or Bluetooth systems in a serious way, or they would be aware that there are in fact problems, serious problems, with Wi-Fi deployments.
For one thing, Wi-Fi systems are affected by sources of interference they can’t detect directly, such as FM Baby Monitors, cordless phones, and wireless security cameras. Running Wi-Fi on the same channel as one of these devices causes extremely high error rates. If 2.4 and 5.x GHz devices were required to emit a universally detectable frame preamble much of this nonsense could be avoided.
And for another, we have the problem of newer Wi-Fi devices producing frames that aren’t detectable by older (esp. 802.11 and 802.11b gear) without an overhead frame that reduces throughput substantially. If we could declare anything older than 802.11a and .11g illegal, we could use the spectrum we have much more efficiently.
For another, we don’t have enough adjacent channel spectrum to use the newest version of Wi-Fi, 40 MHz 802.11n, effectively in the 2.4 GHz band. Speed inevitably depends on channel width, and the white spaces offer little dribs and drabs of spectrum all over the place, much of it in non-adjacent frequencies.
But most importantly, Wi-Fi is the victim of its own success. As more people use Wi-Fi, we have share the limited number of channels across more Access Points, and they are not required to share channel space with each other in a particularly efficient way. We can certainly expect a lot of collisions, and therefore packet loss, from any uncoordinated channel access scheme, as Wi-Fi is, on a large geographic scale. This is the old “tragedy of the commons” scenario.
The problem of deploying wireless broadband is mainly a tradeoff of propagation, population, and bandwidth. The larger the population your signal covers, the greater the bandwidth needs to be in order to provide good performance. The nice thing about Wi-Fi is its limited propagation, because it permits extensive channel re-use without collisions. if the Wi-Fi signal in your neighbor’s house propagated twice as far, it has four times as many chances to collide with other users. So high power and great propagation isn’t an unmitigated good.
The advantage of licensing is that the license holder can apply authoritarian rules that ensure the spectrum is used efficiently. The disadvantage is that the license holder can over-charge for the use of such tightly-managed spectrum, and needs to in order to pay off the cost of his license.
The FCC needs to move into the 21st century and develop some digital rules for the use of unlicensed or lightly-licensed spectrum. The experiment I want to see concerns the development of these modern rules. We don’t need another Wi-Fi, we know how it worked out.
So let’s don’t squander the White Spaces opportunity with another knee-jerk response to the spectre of capitalism. I fully believe that people like Evslin, the White Space Coalition, and Susan Crawford are sincere in their belief that unlicensed White Spaces would be a boon to democracy, it’s just that their technical grasp of the subject matter is insufficient for their beliefs to amount to serious policy.
In Slate, see The GOP ticket’s appalling contempt for science and learning
This is what the Republican Party has done to us this year: It has placed within reach of the Oval Office a woman who is a religious fanatic and a proud, boastful ignoramus. Those who despise science and learning are not anti-elitist. They are morally and intellectually slothful people who are secretly envious of the educated and the cultured. And those who prate of spiritual warfare and demons are not just “people of faith” but theocratic bullies. On Nov. 4, anyone who cares for the Constitution has a clear duty to repudiate this wickedness and stupidity.
Quite so.
Commenting in Spiked on the Lessig School of digital piracy enablement, Andrew Orlowski traces the odd course of progressive thought on creativity:
In polite company, sympathy for copyright is in short supply, while for politicians, the ‘creative economy’ is little more than a platitude. Such attitudes are most deeply held amongst people who consider themselves liberal, forward thinking or progressive.
Which is deeply odd, because for 150 years liberals and progressives have embraced the artistic creator as both an ally and a pathfinder. From William Morris’ Arts and Crafts movement, to the many schemes devised by postwar social democratic governments, the creator was an aesthetic rebel, a political ally and a visionary, an ethos that owed much to Shelley’s view of the poet as the ‘unacknowledged legislator’. What many of these initiatives had in common was a creator’s economic independence, typically supported through the mechanism of copyright.
The progressive’s support of creator’s rights expressed an optimistic view of society and human nature. But ever since digital utopianism swept through the chattering classes in the early 1990s, this positive view has been replaced by one of misanthropy and paranoia.
At some point you’d hope these expropriators would realize that derivative works of pseudo-creativity can’t flourish without some original material to plagiarize.