By Kellan Davidson
ITHACA, NY – Under the cold glow of bare halogen bulbs, 14-year-old J.C. Rumsey glares at his own reflection in a chipped mirror propped up against a wall. He carefully adjusts his footing and puts up his dukes.

The swaying rhythms of soul music drown out the buzz of an old space heater by the door of the small 3-room warehouse turned boxing gym.

Three beeps from a timer, measuring the 3-minute rounds of a boxing match, are the pacemaker for the gym. The first beep serves as the cue for Rumsey’s orange, pre-wrap bound fists to begin flying toward his likeness in the fogged mirror.

Behind him stands his trainer, David Brown. As he watches the young man he thumbs his cap that has “JESUS” boldly embroidered across it above his hairline. He says Central New York is ripe with talent and young Rumsey shows a lot of potential.

The Greater Ithaca Activities Center has served Ithaca’s boxing culture for 38 years and is the oldest boxing program in the area, according to GIAC Program Coordinator, Michael Thomas.

This past year, the GIAC’s primary location at 318 N. Albany St. was temporarily closed for renovation. The building is a former school that was built in 1922 and converted into the GIAC’s headquarters. Given few renovations to serve programs specifically, the building began to deteriorate. Now, thanks to a $4 million grant from the Ithaca City Council, the changes are beginning to happen and the building is being restored.

Though the boxing rooms had been renovated only 2 years prior, the new renovations will improve the room’s ventilation and upgrade its restroom facilities.

Forced out, the dedicated training staff found a new location. Starting in September 2009 the program temporarily moved to a small warehouse off of Route 13.

The unfinished building holds 3 heavy bags, a floor-to-ceiling dodging bag and a portion of the floor roped off and padded, to serve as a practice ring. The conditions are tight for now, but Brown says it gets the job done, calling the room “the home of champions.” Brown says, “We accept this, it’s a hole in the wall, but it’s some place the kids can come.”

Brown is a former boxer himself, forced into retirement due to eye damages from fighting. Two cornea transplant surgeries later, Brown began training a new generation of boxers alongside his childhood friend, Danny Akers. It is Brown’s job to take the younger fighters that show up to the gym and teach them proper footwork and punching form.

Brown has come to the gym to train with the fighters from 5 to 7 p.m. every Monday through Friday for years. Only recently has the GIAC proposed to put him on the payroll, before, Brown was doing it solely for the love of the sport and desire to help the community.

Brown’s fellow trainer, Akers, is in Florida with a product of the boxing program, Willie Monroe Jr.

Monroe Jr. is an idol around the GIAC gym. He is currently in Florida as the sparring partner for World Boxing Council welterweight champion, Andre Berto, before his fight against challenger Carlos Quintana on April 10. Monroe Jr. is the success story many of the GIAC fighters strive to match.

“A goal of ours is to help facilitate [kids'] growth in the world of boxing, as well as real life; to see [our fighters] take it to that level is awesome,” says Thomas.

The no-nonsense approach around the gym has produced successful fighters since its inception. Brown makes it very clear that the program requires a lot of discipline and obedience. “What you put into training is exactly what you’ll get out of it,” says Brown.

This year alone the GIAC boxing program has produced 7 fighters that will be traveling to Buffalo, N.Y., for the New York State Gold Gloves Championship in April.

The GIAC is also a member of the U.S.A. Boxing Association, which enables them to coordinate their own events. Other programs from Rochester, Buffalo, Syracuse and Geneva all send fighters to compete in the Chester “Chet” Cashman Classic boxing tournament, held in Ithaca’s Cass Park. The event is named after a former GIAC trainer, who has recently gone into a nursing home, only 5 years after retiring from training.

Rumsey hopes to compete in the tournament sometime soon. He represents the future of the GIAC boxing program as he trots around the makeshift ring and throws his right-hook at an invisible opponent (a punch he takes particular pride in). “That’s it, cut him off,” says Brown as he leans on the top rope, fixated on the boy’s footwork.

“I want to take it big,” says Rumsey; when asked how he plans to do it, he simply says, “Keep coming here.”

By Kellan Davidson
ITHACA, NY— Avid hiker Paul Warrender tussles the hair of his brittany spaniel, Roxy, as he prepares to embark on his weekly 10-mile hike.

Warrender is a seasoned hiker; he spent many years hiking the trails in Northern New England and Western Massachusetts before moving to Ithaca in August 2009. Since moving to Ithaca he has become a member of one of the most popular hiking groups in the Ithaca area, the Cayuga Trails Club.

Bare branches weave intricate patterns overhead, dappling the Rim Trail of Robert H. Treman Park with sunlight. It is unseasonably warm for April, but Warrender sticks to the trails he knows are open.

“Trail closures are for very good reason. Here in the Finger Lakes, winter and early spring trail closures can make more sense than one might think,” Warrender says.

Many of the trails that run along the Ithaca gorges are fenced off at the moment and boldly posted as being closed. Any paths that are bordered by steep cliff faces can represent particular danger to hikers.

John Guilford, the 5th year manager of Buttermilk Falls State Park, says, “Colder temperatures in the evening will freeze water along a cliff face, when it melts there could be as much as a half-pound to a pound worth of icicles that can fall from as high as 150 feet, that can pose a serious hazard to hikers.”

Some trails are closed in November and cannot reopen till June, as the ice can cause safety hazards well after it has melted. The expanded ice may wedge its way between rocks and the soil or layers of rock in sedimentary cliff faces. When the ice thaws the rock may be jarred loose and could fall on hikers or cause the trails to give out.

“Depending on the area, some of these broken pieces fall a hundred feet or more and we’re not talking about small stones. Often, stones weighing hundreds of pounds come crashing down without notice, certainly not an ideal place to be hiking at the time,” says Warrender.

Maintenance staff at Buttermilk Falls State Park must travel on each trail, carrying poles to safely knock down rocks and icicles every 25 feet. The trails must then be manicured to ensure their structural stability.

To make sure that hikers know which trails are suitable for hiking, Buttermilk Falls fields calls through their regional office to tell which trails are open or closed at any given point in time.

The State Parks that house the trails are not the only ones spreading the message about the dangers of hiking on closed trails. The Ithaca Office of Fire Prevention (a branch of the Ithaca Fire Department) also posted a warning on the City of Ithaca website.

The Ithaca Fire Department is part of the first-response team when things go awry on the hiking trails in the Ithaca Area. “All firefighters are trained to some level in water and rope rescue, though some are more proficient than others,” says Fire Chief, J. Thomas Dorman.

Dorman says that they are called in on 5 to 10 rescue situations in the area surrounding the gorges every year. He says most of them are broken legs or ankles, injuries he describes as minor.

Correct water rescue procedure can be one of the most important things to know in the Ithaca area as a rescue worker. The water in the gorges below most hiking trails are in the 40-degree range well into the spring. An individual can suffer from hypothermia within minutes of hitting water of this temperature and be physically unable to save him or herself.

For this reason, the Ithaca Fire Department is well outfitted to deal with these emergencies. The fire department has two motorboats, (one that is inflatable and can fit into the back of a rig), personal flotation devices (PFDs), helmets, yards and yards of rope, dry suits and throw bags amongst others. “I couldn’t even name all of the equipment we have off-hand,” says Thomas

Safety on the trails starts with the hikers, however. It is imperative that hikers abide by the postings on trails and only walk on trails that are open. “Hikers should always come prepared with good footgear and water,” says Guilford.

“Instead of hiking on a closed trail, find a trail that isn’t closed; I can tell you from first-hand experience never to take Mother Nature for granted,” says Warrender as he begins another endeavor into Ithaca’s beautiful scenery.

By Kellan Davidson

ITHACA, N.Y.—Viewers file in to have their tickets taken at the Regal Cinemas at the Ithaca Mall. When they enter the theater they sit silently enthralled as the movie begins and patrons cling to their seats throughout. James E. Cutting, psychology professor at Cornell University, aimed to explore the phenomenon of what keeps viewer’s eyes pinned to the silver screen.

Cutting says there are two dimensions in film: shot length and camera motion. The first paper that Cutting released in the journal of Psychological Science was a study on shot length.

Cutting was interested in comparing the patterns of shot length in film to a trend line called one over frequency, or simply 1/f. One over f is a function that was determined by a study performed by professor of psychology at University of Texas David L. Gilden. The study was designed to test reaction time over a certain duration.

The study involved people performing a menial task over a period of time, Cutting used people pushing a button to determine whether or not a group of letters forms a word as an example. “People can decide usually in about 500 milliseconds on average, but sometimes they are fast and they can do it in 350 and sometimes they just seem to be sitting there for a second or a second and a half,” Cutting said.

“If you look at the pattern of all of those over about 500 trials you get this incredibly jagged response,” said Cutting. This is 1/f, a line that is essentially a visual representation of human’s allocation of attention over time. Cutting was intrigued by the study and wondered if the shot lengths in film followed this same pattern of human attention.

Cutting, along with 3 graduate students, took a look at the average shot length of 150 films spanning in 15-year intervals between 1935 and 2005. “The movies were chosen to represent, as best as we could, 5 genre so there’s action films, adventure films, comedies, dramas and animations,” said Cutting. There were roughly 20 to 35 films in the study from each genre, with the exception of animations where there were only 10.

The shot lengths were gathered by using a computer algorithm designed by one of Cutting’s graduate student researchers, Jordan DeLong. The algorithm caught 98 percent of all the cuts in the movies, which cut down on a lot of man-hours for the project.

“Though it took sometimes as much as 10 hours for the algorithm to run, we weren’t busy, it would just run overnight, and then we could come in do it much faster than if we started from scratch and went through the films frame-by-frame,” Cutting said.

The 2000 film “Perfect Storm” was one of several exceptions that did not respond well to the algorithm. Though the shot lengths are an average of a reasonable 5 seconds or so, the intense amount of splashing water in the film confused the algorithm. So the team was forced to go through the film frame-by-frame, a tedious 4-hour process.

As with anything else, a sufficient sample size was necessary to compare the films to the 1/f trend line. Cutting says it takes a minimum of 500 shots before he can say confidently that a movie follows 1/f. There is a great deal of variance in shot length, much of which depends on the era they were produced. “Older movies have in the lower ranges of 500 or 600 shots, if the shot length is 2 and a half seconds or so they can easily be upwards of 2,000 shots,” said Cutting.

In the end what Cutting discovered was that from 1950 to the present more and more films are closer to the 1/f trend line. What makes this so interesting is that 1/f is studied in physics, economics and biology, amongst others, but film may be the only domain where there is a visible evolution of the pattern. So this means that over time movies have become increasingly synchronized with the way we as humans think.

Given that this information was not readily available before, the question is how did this happen?

Hollywood editors are an elite and rather small group that thrive on selective borrowing. By viewing other movies and recycling the shot structure and pacing that proved successful in the past, editors have inadvertently shaped films around the pattern of human thought through trial and error.

The evolution of the film industry into a big business may also have had large implications on the shift toward the 1/f line. Now that studios can afford to put more film stock into each film production a given scene or sequence can be shot from upwards of 10 angles. These different takes then provide more options for the editor in terms of ways they can cut the scene and alter the amount of shots in a given sequence.

Cutting has been in contact with an editor in Hollywood to find out the process by which the scenes are cut, to further understand the pattern. He was told that the editor would determine the pacing of the cuts for a given scene and keep it more or less uniform throughout, then switch it in the next sequence, a trend which just so happens to follow 1/f.

The next study Cutting is in the process of researching is the effects of the other dimension of filmmaking on the brain: camera motion. Cutting is using a different algorithm to measure the deviation in motion between each frame and the frame proceeding it using a separate algorithm. This deviation will once again be set against the 1/f line to see if the erratic shooting style used in movies like “Cloverfield,” that Cutting likes to call “queasy cam” has any correlation.

As viewers file out of the dark theater, their eyes glazed over and the air thick with conversation about the film, it seems that 1/f is the last thing on their minds. Whether they know it or not, however, their mind has just been subjected to one of the most stunning evolutions of humanity’s adaptation to their own thought process.

By Kellan Davidson

A small robot made of densely packed gears, microchips and metal rods lay limp with its 4 spindly legs splayed out across the floor.

With a sudden jolt, each leg shoots up and explores its own range of motion. It contorts and stretches, and finally stands on top of its spider-like limbs. It rocks in each direction, as if limbering itself up. Then it proceeds to walk, clumsy at first, then progressively faster and more agile.

The thing is: no one is controlling this robot. It is exploring itself, figuring out its own shape by running data collected in its motions through a series of algorithms and then actually figuring out how to move entirely on its own.

Even when one of its legs is removed from its body, the machine adapts. It learns its new shape and refigures the best way for it to move. With three limbs the robot moves similar to every drunken uncle’s favorite wedding reception dance move: the worm.

The machine seems the technological nightmare that blockbuster directors would dream of: a robot with self-recognition and the ability to learn on its own. This machine did not just create itself, however. It was endowed these abilities by its creator, in this case, man.

The machine, dubbed the “starfish robot,” was invented in a Cornell laboratory by Josh Bongard, Victor Zykov, and Cornell professor Hod Lipson.

Lipson, along with 4th year doctoral student in computational biology at Cornell University, Michael Schmidt, decided to expand the idea of adaptive algorithms into studies outside of robotics. So came the Eureqa software.

“The robot is trying to figure out what its body looks like, what the shape of its legs are and how to move based on data it collects on its own; Eureqa does the same thing. It tries to find the best equation as a means to an end, except it is fitting it to a set of experimental data,” says Schmidt, holding the limp starfish robot in his hands.

The Eureqa software is certainly not as visually astounding as the starfish robot. It looks a lot like a standard Excel spreadsheet, the implications of the software on science, however, may leave the little robot in the dust.

Schmidt and Lipson first put the algorithm to work by analyzing experimental data with relationships that are already common knowledge in physics. They started with pendulums and air tracks, tools commonly used in college freshman-level physics classes to demonstrate the laws of motion.

They brought the rigs into a motion-tracking lab, a room outfitted with cameras designed to pick up the motion of tiny infrared markers they placed on the moving parts. The cameras picked up the motion of the markers and translated it into raw data.

The Eureqa software filtered this data into separate columns that are reserved for each variable within the experiment. The software then takes the data and creates equations, attempting to both reduce error and produce the simplest model. Sure enough, the algorithm worked, producing the expected equations for each system, so they gave it a more complicated undertaking.

They put a double pendulum under the watchful eye of the motion-capture cameras and let the Eureqa system see what it did. The double pendulum is a chaotic system, with one swinging pendulum sending another, smaller, pendulum that is attached to it into a dizzying whirl as it moves back and forth. To the average observer, the awkward tango of the two pendulums within the system would seemingly have no pattern what so ever. Eureqa, however, is no average observer.

Over the course of a day, Eureqa looked through the data, trying to fit an equation to the system through process of elimination. Equations were expanded, eliminated, shortened and adapted to the relationships between the experimental values, custom fitted to the data. Eureqa does not fit an existing model; it defines the model that is closest to the data set, essentially finding the law that governs those specific values.

In the case of the double pendulum it eventually simplified the complex, seemingly random data into one simple equation: F=ma, or Newton’s second law of motion. This is interesting because the program derived this equation with no prior knowledge of physics, which meant that the algorithm could potentially be applicable to defining the laws within any science.

Soon the word got out about Eureqa and people began coming in droves looking to use the mathematical genius of Eureqa to analyze their data. Data sets varied from experimental biological data to financial data to the distance between cows in a herd.

“It’s a very horizontal program it applies to any field that deals with data and modeling or prediction, anything where there is some sort of equation that helps you understand it better,” says Schmidt.

The requests became so numerous that Schmidt and Lipson published a version of Eureqa online, simple enough that anyone, computer scientist or otherwise, could operate it. Now there is a Google Group that only acts more or less like technical support. Schmidt operates the group, adapting the software around the demands of its users only asking that any research performed using Eureqa cites Schmidt and Lipson in their findings.

This has pushed Schmidt and Lipson out of much of the research that is being done with the Eureqa software, aside from a select few experiments that Schmidt and Lipson are acting on as collaborators. One such experiment is the study of a single cell of bacteria by Dr. Gurol Suel at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center.

Suel was looking for Eureqa to find the laws that govern the fluctuations of the thousands of different parts within a single cell of bacteria: genes, nutrients, and proteins, amongst others. So Schmidt and Lipson abided, putting all the values into Eureqa.

So Eureqa thought, in the mechanical sense at least, and popped out two equations that stated the constants within the cell. Suel checked the equations against the cell and found that they were all correct. But one question remained. Why?

Here is where the implications on science of the Eureqa software begin to show. Being that Eureqa does not operate under the prior conceits of science there is a disconnect in understanding between man and machine. This phenomenon is referred to as technological singularity.

“The algorithm can produce the answers for us, but it’s crucial that we understand those answers. If we don’t have a way of having the computers teach us and connect the meaning of the answers they’re giving us back to what we already know, or put it in some greater context that we can understand, they’ll leave us kind of in the dark,” says Schmidt.

Think about the phenomenon in the terms of a simple analogy. Think about your great grandmother trying to pick up an iPhone and use it, she may understand it is the way of the future, but as far as its practical application goes she is entirely behind the curve. Now think of this on a global scale and instead of a computer acting as a communication device it is studying the laws of nature that preside over our everyday lives. We can watch the computers evolve their theories on the world around us but won’t be able to understand it or be able to use it to our benefit. Kind of frightening, huh?

So this is the next step for the Eureqa team, trying to develop an appendix of sorts to relate what we know to the equations that the software conjures up. What they are trying to do is apply the same principle of Eureqa to map out correlations between the commonly accepted solutions and the more simplified, but unexplained answers provided by technology.

Schmidt understands that this technology may be a long time coming and believes several doctoral students will come and go, dedicating their time to writing this script before it comes a reality.

Schmidt now stands in the center of a laboratory in Cornell’s Upson hall, over the powered off starfish robot that sits lifeless on a table in front of him. He explains that the group at Cornell has also begun to explore the idea of 3D printing, which is the direct fabrication of material through a series of jets that can build things to exact specification out of anything from urethane to chocolate.

“So one day you could have [the starfish robot] walking around, playing with test tubes and double pendulums and then going up to a 3D printer and producing more copies of itself so it can work faster or on more problems, but that’s in the very distant future,” says Schmidt with a disarming grin.

Settle down science fiction fans, the robot apocalypse may be a long way down the road. But one cannot help but look at Eureqa and its precursor, the starfish robot, and wonder where this technology will leave mankind in the future.

With this in mind, the government set out to try and limit the exploitation of the speed of Internet transmission. One of the Internet adjustments the government was trying to prevent is a profit model built through bandwidth management. There is only so much information that a certain ISP can broadcast at a certain time because they only have so much bandwidth capacity to play with. So a company can profit further by offering better service to the greater majority of its clients through decreasing the speed of the few.
This issue came to the forefront when the FCC went to court against Comcast in a case that was decided earlier this year. The case was brought about when the ISP slowed the speed of transmission for their users using BitTorrent peer-to-peer file sharing in 2007, on the grounds that the heavy traffic caused by the file sharing was slowing down their network. This action (affectionately dubbed “throttling”) was playing favorites in terms of content, which was in stark opposition to the competitive and equally balanced network that the FCC looked to sustain.
The FCC made an order to Comcast saying that they must end all favoritism in terms of broadcasted content. Comcast obeyed the order but filed an injunction against the FCC to have the order vacated. In the Telecommunications Act of 1996 the FCC claimed they were responsible “to preserve the vibrant and competitive free market that presently exists for the Internet and other interactive computer services, unfettered by Federal or State regulation.” This claim was made under the presumption that the Internet was defined as a common carrier, or Title II.
The Federal Appeals Court ruled otherwise, seeing the rules that preside over Internet actions as being over broad. The Internet, to this point, had always been under title I designation, which gives the FCC significantly less authority over it. This means and that they were unable to prove true ancillary impact as defined by a clause of the Telecommunications Act of 1934 that states: “perform any and all acts, make such rules and regulations, and issue such orders, not inconsistent with this chapter, as may be necessary in the execution of its functions”. The order was vacated as the court decided it was not an action that was ancillary to the broadcaster.
Though it was of little consequence, Brian Roberts, the CEO of Comcast said on January 27, 2010 that Comcast’s regulation of the bandwidth in 2007 was “a mistake.” In a separate class-action lawsuit, the users who suffered the brunt of the slowdown were able to receive their share of a $16 million settlement under the penalty of perjury if the BitTorrent clients were used for piracy.
The fact that the FCC is unable to regulate broadband service in any significant way throws a serious wrench in one of President Obama’s prized goals for the nation. The National Broadband plan is the goal to provide broadband to the roughly 100 million citizens who do not currently have access to it. The plan also contains goals to use broadband to streamline emergency response systems, health care data transfer and promote online learning among other things. Without the ability to legislate the speed at which information travels over broadband networks none of these actions can be guaranteed to occur rapidly and therefore cannot be implemented.
The plan also recognizes the growth of mobile broadband through cellular networks, stating: “spectrum policy must be a key pillar of U.S. economic policy. The contribution of wireless services to overall gross domestic product
grew over 16% annually from 1992–2007 compared with less than 3% annual growth for the remainder of the economy”. Unfortunately for the government they are out of the loop in terms of regulating cellular broadband as well. Cellular communications are considered a title III communication, a designation invented for radio services.
The boom of data plans on smart phones that offer information services like the Internet on them came so quickly that the government failed to truly adapt the rules surrounding net neutrality through this medium. The majority of what the FCC handles in terms of radio communications is what services have permission to broadcast on specific bandwidths, title III designation doesn’t offer much more power than title I designation in terms of broadcasted information services.
Verizon is another company whose profit model is also in direct conflict with the future of net neutrality. Verizon executives recently met with Google in a power summit of sorts that had Internet purists fearing for the web’s future. Verizon’s long history with Google’s Android operating system on their handset and tablets lead them to meet with the Internet super-giant before they implemented their new money making scheme. Verizon planned to make speed-tiers for their wireless broadband service, which essentially means that those companies that pay more money to Verizon would be given speed priority. These sponsored sites are in direct opposition to Google’s profit model where websites pay them for advertisement placement, which essentially creates priority on an otherwise equal playing field. There has also been speculation that Verizon will create a pay-tier system for their wireless services that will include some packages that will cost more for the consumer but will reflect less, if any, of the speed favoritism; any way you look at it, Verizon gets paid.
Julius Genachowski, chairman of the FCC said of the Verizon-Google talks that “Any outcome, any deal that doesn’t preserve the freedom and openness of the Internet for consumers and entrepreneurs will be unacceptable.” Unfortunately for him, after the decision against the FCC in the Comcast case, there is precious little the FCC can currently do to stop this from happening. The FCC has seen the closed-door talks between Verizon and Google and matched them with closed-door meetings of their own.
In a letter to Genachowski, jointly written by Henry Waxman, chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Science, and John D Rockefeller IV, chairman of the Senate Committee Commerce, Science and Transportation, there was significant concern voiced over the future of net neutrality.
“To accomplish [The objectives established in the National Broadband Plan], the Commission should consider all viable options. This includes a change in classification, provided that doing so entails a light regulatory touch, with appropriate use of forbearance authority. In the long term, if there is a need to rewrite the law to provide consumers, the Commission, and industry with a new framework for telecommunications policy, we are committed as Committee Chairmen to doing so.”
The change in classification that is spoken of in the letter is the most logical move for the FCC to make in this situation. The idea would be to change the “information service” classification that the Internet currently has in the eyes of the Commission, to a “telecommunications service,” which would make the Internet in-bounds for further government regulation. To do this, they would have to pass a bill through congress, which may be more challenging than they would hope. During this midterm election more than a third of House and Senate candidates that signed a letter in support of the preservation of net neutrality lost.
It is arguable that to keep a healthy business relationship with Google, Verizon announced that they would keep all wired transmissions free of this payola-prioritization. The question is how long the neutrality of wireline networks will be of any consequence. Wires seem to be becoming a thing of the past and Verizon is quickly buying up space on the airwaves while it still exists. Recently Verizon expanded their bandwidth capabilities by purchasing the 700 MHz spectrum in an FCC auction for $10 billion. The price tag gives a hint as to just how profitable cellular data plans are and will be for a long time. People want Internet wherever they can make phone calls, and with the invention of speedy 4G wireless internet, wireless cards and data service enabled tablets it is obvious that wireless data transmission is and will continue to be an incredibly important and influential broadcast medium.
Wireless networks also have a broad definition, anything from cell phones, your home’s wireless router, even a garage door opener has had to be approved by the FCC for production and falls under title III regulation. Wired systems are fading quickly for the simple reason that they are incredibly expensive to create. Simply reviewing the National Broadband Plan shows that even the U.S., one of the most cyber-savvy nations in the world, still has 100 million citizens without it. Countries that do not have the same base wireline infrastructure built in the U.S. are unlikely to build one. Looking at it from a strictly economic point-of-view, it makes much more sense for an Internet company to build several wireless towers in a city than to lay thousands of feet of cable.
Take a look at the issue on a domestic scale. People have already realized the ability to shrink cost by going wireless in their homes. A simple $20 router can supply Internet to an entire home, and is infinitely expandable so no more cords need to be bought to attach more computers or devices to the network. Already, if there is no security on the router, an entire block can leach off of one WiFi source. This same idea will be parlayed on a greater scale in entire communities. Mountain View, California, for example, is a city that is supplied as a whole with a wireless network, thanks to none other than the Internet giant they share a backyard with, Google.
The lines that distinguish wireless from wire line services are also more blurred by the day. Many smartphones can now connect to WiFi networks and make calls as voice over Internet services (VoIP) without using a chat client like Skype (though these phones can do that too!). Telephone calls can be made without ever once connecting to the classic CDMA and GSM networks that phone companies currently run on. Companies like WiLine and e-xpedient are already blanketing entire cities with wireless connections accessible with a subscription fee. These companies count as wireless networks and therefore are out of the realm of the “free” wireline services that Verizon suggests.
But what about the wireless spectrum? Won’t it be too exhausted to be expanded this much? Well, it is true that there will be no new space on the spectrum magically created for this worldwide WiFi expansion to happen, companies will soon be able to do more with less. The Internet is currently experiencing a renaissance, evolving into IPv6 from the old IPV4 form of data that had been the norm since the 1980s. IPv6 will allow for significant expansion of the Internet thanks to the ability to offer unique IP addresses to every client (this is essentially your computer’s internet ID card). With the old form of the Internet IP addresses were repeated and therefore had to be sorted through to be sure the proper end points were reached by each address. The new form will allow for simplified, and thus faster, end-to-end routing. It is essentially the difference between giving a person a street address and giving them directions on how to get there and giving someone an address and then teleporting them to the doorstep.
The United States government is about to blink on the issue of net neutrality and, at this point, they simply cannot afford it. They are already well behind in the fight for net neutrality but should not accept the half-hearted promises from companies like Verizon about wireline communications. Wireline communications are an excellent place to start, but the importance of wireless communication cannot be ignored.
The death of net neutrality has some serious implications for the growth and diversity of Internet commerce. Small Internet businesses will be crippled before they can even begin. Huge corporations will pay other huge corporations to have their transmissions be sped up and people will favor big business’s information thanks to the brevity of its delivery period (time is money and all). This issue is beyond the scope of lassiez-faire or trickle down economics, it is a social issue that may see our nation evolving into an oligarchy. In the near future we may see big business dictating the information that they want us to see, or we will have to pay them for the right to see other material. Failure to act on this issue is poor civic health and a dangerous line for a government, already so polluted with big business funding, to traipse on

Despite the fact I couldn’t get the Park scholarship, I still hope to save my family and myself the weight of any more loans and will get out by next May. Pretty surreal to be leaving so soon, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t ready to see the real world.

As a college student I’ve come to value the thing I used to fear as a kid. I’m becoming my parents.

My parents came up last weekend, just missing the warm weather unfortunately. I ate with them at Madeline’s in the commons (which was pretty good, the price tag was a little high, but given the occasion it was certainly worth the splurge). The interior of the space was covered with impressionist paintings and bizarre chandeliers that spiraled out in random directions across the ceiling. The decor did its best to distract, but it couldn’t pull any of us out of conversation.

Earlier we went antiquing, which sounds about as fun as running head-long into a wall, but with my parents I actually enjoyed it much more than I thought I would. Though they tended to look more at furniture while I meandered through the strange nic-nacs and beer periphenalia that might suit my leased house for next year.

Regardless, it was a nice revelation to have. When the things you run away from for so long turn out to be a bigger part of you than you ever thought. Sorry for the sentimentality.