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A useful overview of some of the flaws in common voting methods, and a plug for voting based on ratings, similar to Hot or Not. Very intriguing possibilities for improving US voting systems
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Telegeography’s lovely undersea cable map is now available as 1600×1200 desktop wallpaper. All the cool telecoms geeks are downloading it and you should too… :-)
Submarine Cable map! Of course I love it, but I think the $250 price tag is very prohibitive for the paper copy, as is the $75 fee for educational institutions. My university for instance does not purchase these on a regular basis due to the cost. Access to the digital dbase associated with these maps is in the thousands of $s for a time limited and restricted license type of use. Telegeography produces some very important reports that they sell at a very high price. As a student I had made a special request for a report on India, I was hoping they would be willing to share the report for educational purposes at little or no cost. Nada. These data and information are therefore only accessible to companies who can afford them or the government. NGOs who wish to study communication infrastructures for instance would probably not be able to afford the data to do a solid analysis. I think it is very unfortunate that our communication infrastructure is so very corporately and not publicly controlled. Somehow we as the public / world citizens pay for this infrastructure with fees and taxation and therefore we should have access to information about it.
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