America's Most Wired Cities - Forbes.com

You might enjoy this article in Forbes. While any such ranking is somewhat suspect, the PR value is unmistakable. Atlanta finished in first place ... Here are some details:

Some obvious choices finished high on the list. Techie Seattle, home to Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people ), came in second, one notch above last year. San Francisco, the closest major city to Silicon Valley, was fourth for the second time. Though rich in hot spots, both lagged behind other cities in broadband adoption. (It works the other way, as well: Boston ranks second in broadband but poorer showings in the other categories dragged it down to 13th overall.) Two other major metropolises, Chicago and New York, improved their standings from 17th to 8th and 12th to 9th, respectively, to make the top 10, driven by more widespread adoption of high-speed Internet.

Other top-10 finishers were more surprising, such as third-place Raleigh, N.C. Raleigh Chief Information Officer Gail M. Roper attributes the city's strong showing to its thriving entrepreneurial culture, technology initiatives, major universities and fast-growing, highly-educated population. As CIO of Kansas City (No. 22) from 1996 to 2006, Roper focused on digital-divide issues, working to improve youth and student access to the Internet. In Raleigh, she is considering building a citywide wi-fi network to expedite public services, cut telecom costs and deliver tourism information.

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Measuring a city's "wired-ness" is an imperfect science. New York's less-wired outer boroughs weigh down its overall ranking. Some new initiatives aren't yet reflected in the data we used. Several lower-ranked cities, like Philadelphia (No. 26), are building wireless networks that provide wi-fi to downtown areas. In New York, CBS is constructing hot spots in midtown Manhattan.

[snip]

To compile our list, we began with top markets in broadband adoption as determined by Internet market research firm Nielsen Online. Utilizing Nielsen market data eliminated some large, tech-savvy cities, such as San Jose, Calif. (Nielsen aggregates San Jose data with the San Francisco market area, and so San Jose's broadband can't be accessed separately.) We also dropped cities that didn't make the U.S. Census Bureau's top 100 list, including Salt Lake City and Hartford, Conn. We then calculated the number of service providers per city using statistics from the FCC and wi-fi hot spots per capita via public hot spot directory JiWire.

The rankings are here ... Pittsburgh ranked 23, ahead of Philadephia (26).

NOTE: Forbes doesn't do permalinks, so, unfortanately, the links will be dead one day.

"Free for All" -- tales from the front lines of the public library

You might enjoy reading this article ...

Drunks in tutus, drugs in bathrooms and chick fights in parking lots don't sound like the stuff of a librarian's memoir, but Don Borchert's book has them all.

In his recently published "Free for All: Oddballs, Geeks, and Gangstas in the Public Library," Borchert culls the strangest stories from his 13 years as an assistant in a small Torrance branch library. With wry humor, he offers an insider's look at how a would-be sanctuary has become, as his title suggests, a catch-all gathering place where devoted readers are joined by Internet-savvy latchkey kids, semi-homeless misfits and everybody in between. The result has librarians talking -- some not so nicely -- about changes in their image and their place of work.

Spatial cognition: who are the worst drivers?

At the risk of igniting a war ... you might find this article interesting, given that spatial information systems/information processing is a significant research area in the school.

Long Live Closed-Source Software

This article over at Discover is interesting and goes against conventional thinking:

But back to that dingy bachelor pad near MIT. When Richard [Stallman] told me his plan, I was intrigued but sad ... If politically correct code was going to amount to endless replays of dull stuff like Unix instead of bold projects like the LISP Machine, what was the point? Would mere humans have enough energy to carry both kinds of idealism?

Twenty-five years later, that concern seems to have been justified. Open wisdom-of-crowds software movements have become influential, but they haven’t promoted the kind of radical creativity I love most in computer science. If anything, they’ve been hindrances. Some of the youngest, brightest minds have been trapped in a 1970s intellectual framework because they are hypnotized into accepting old software designs as if they were facts of nature. Linux is a superbly polished copy of an antique, shinier than the original, perhaps, but still defined by it.

Is Bangalore no longer a cost-saving location?

This article is interesting, suggesting that Bangalore's cost differential is no longer that attractive:

Munjal Shah, the CEO of Riya points out in his blog that for some programmers, the salary rapidly rose to 55% of US salaries. He writes: “Bangalore wages have just been growing like crazy. To give you an example, there is an employee of ours who took the first 5 years of his career to get from 1% to 10% of his equivalent US counterpart. He then jumped from 10% to 20% of his US counterpart in the next 1 year. During his time with us (less than 2 years) he jumped to 55% of the US wage.

In the next few months we would have had to move him to 75% just to ‘keep him at market.’” Once the salary rises to 75% of US salaries, the overhead cost differences between India and the US would overwhelm the financial viability.