Author: Andrew Sullivan

This week the White House announced a new effort to spur municipal broadband development. Amy Schatz puts the move in context:

Internet providers have mostly fought such locally owned systems, particularly ones that would be built in areas where local phone and cable companies offer services. Thanks in part to lobbying by Internet providers, there are laws in 19 states restricting municipalities from funding competing systems. Aside from concerns by competitors, there have been a few cases where locally owned systems have run into financial trouble, since it’s extremely expensive to build fiber networks and incumbent Internet providers in some cases have cut their prices to retain customers.

Sam Gustin takes note of the timing:

Next month, the FCC will decide whether to assist two cities—Wilson, North Carolina and Chattanooga, Tennessee —which have asked the feds to help them bypass state laws that pose barriers to super-fast community networks. Obama’s latest statement provides a powerful political boost to FCC chairman Tom Wheeler, who has made clear his intention to “preempt state laws that ban competition from community broadband.”

Timothy B. Lee looks at the politics:

Last year, the Republican-controlled House passed language banning the FCC from banning states from banning cities from building municipal networks. It never became law, thanks to opposition from Senate Democrats and President Obama. But it could become another flashpoint in the relationship between Republicans in Congress and the FCC — a relationship that’s already been strained by disagreements over network neutrality regulations.

This is one reason President Obama’s support for municipal broadband is important. Now that he’s on the record supporting the concept, he’s more likely to veto legislation that tried to overrule the FCC on the issue.

Meanwhile, the new GOP Senate may be planning to preempt the upcoming FCC ruling. Drilling down, Jason Koebler finds there are in fact 21 states that restrict municipal Internet efforts in one way or another:

There are three different “categories” of state law banning municipal broadband. There are “If-Then” laws, which have some requirements for municipal networks such as a voter referendum or a requirement to give telecom companies the option to build the network themselves, rather than restrictions (some are easier to meet than others). Then there are “Minefield” laws, which are written confusingly so as to ​invite lawsuits from incumbent ISPs, financial burden on a city starting a network, or other various restrictions. Finally, you’ve got the outright bans. Some of these are simple, others are worded in a way that make it seem like it’d be possible to jump through the hoops necessary to start a network, but in practice, it’s essentially impossible.

Yglesias elaborates on the funding blocks, noting that Big Internet seems much happier to spend money on lobbying than expanded infrastructure:

The 2009 stimulus bill, for example, provided a grant to the District of Columbia to build a publicly owned fiber-optic network, but the city’s not allowed to use it to deliver fiber connections to its residents. In San Antonio, the city-owned electrical utility already built a fiber network but lobbyists got the state legislature to pass a law making it illegal for households to use the fiber.

So even though we have the technical ability to deliver cheap, super-fast internet and we have the financial ability to finance the construction, we don’t actually have the network. In fact, we’re so in hock to the interests of the broadband incumbents that we don’t even use all the fiber networks we’ve already built.

Evan Swarztrauber doesn’t like the president’s plan:

The greatest regulatory barriers to deployment are local, not Federal: cities make it painfully difficult to deploy new infrastructure. Google Fiber’s great accomplishment is convincing cities to get out of the way. Yet the White House focuses entirely on cities as the solution — not by cutting red tape, but by building their own networks to compete with private providers. That means taxpayer dollars that should go to pay teachers and fix potholes, are instead squandered on inefficient and expensive networks.Governments, unlike private companies, can simply borrow and throw money at broadband projects until they “work,” leaving taxpayers on the hook.

But Tim Fernholz thinks Obama’s play might prove to be smart jujitsu:

Put simply, competition spurs faster and cheaper broadband service. The administration notes that academic studies and empirical data show that when new networks come to town, everyone gets better: When Google built a fiber-optic network in Kansas, speeds on existing networks there nearly doubled; when it announced a similar plan in Austin, Texas, AT&T hastily unveiled its own investment plan.

The White House isn’t really expecting municipal internet to make a major dent the market share of existing cable providers. As with the short-lived “public option” for health insurance before it was cut from the president’s health care proposal, the idea here—and on a much smaller scale—is to hold telecoms’ feet to the fire by providing a baseline level of service.

Jonathan Bernstein wonders if she just “clinched” the nomination:

There were two indicators this week. First, after months of playing around, Senator Elizabeth Warren finally declared herself out more definitively. It wasn’t Shermanesque, and plenty of politicians  have entered or re-entered past presidential races after more solid exits, but it’s getting late for someone to rule out a run and still have time to mount a serious one. …

The other development this week  is that several big-name operatives have signed on to Clinton’s campaign, even though she hasn’t even made an informal announcement yet that she is running.

First Read covers the recent hires:

[B]y grabbing Obama’s chief pollster (Joel Benenson) and media consultant (Jim Margolis), Clinton has decided to enlist key parts of Obama’s campaign 2008-2012 team, discarding the folks who ran her polling and media in ’08. And she isn’t only grabbing Benenson — she’s lured the other part of Obama’s polling/analytics organization (John Anzalone and David Binder), the Washington Post reported. When you add the fact that John Podesta is leaving the Obama White House to serve as a liaison between the Clinton campaign and White House (as well as to handle the Clinton Old Guard), it’s pretty easy to conclude that Clinton won’t be running away from Obama. In fact, it’s looking like she will be more connected to him than ever. And the people she’s hiring are the best-equipped campaign folks to reassemble the Obama-voter coalition.

Dave Roberts is happy about Podesta joining the Clinton campaign:

Podesta’s got long history in Washington and most of it speaks well of him. He was by all accounts a shrewd chief of staff for Bill Clinton; he founded the Center for American Progress, which has been a huge success; and more recently he has been working inside the White House to encourage Obama to be bolder, which is paying dividends in a sustained burst of executive action from immigration to community college to paid work leave to climate change.

Speaking of that: Perhaps Podesta’s greatest recent achievement is to convince the White House to be bold on climate even in the face of Republican wins in the 2014 midterms.

Cassidy chips in two cents:

The move was hardly unexpected: Podesta is a Clintonite through and through. He served in Bill Clinton’s White House from start to finish, rising through the ranks to become Chief of Staff, a post he held from October, 1998, to January, 2001. For months now, Podesta has been telling people that if Hillary decided to run he would most likely join her.

Now that Podesta has taken the plunge, it almost makes official what we already know: Hillary is in. And so are many longtime residents of Planet Clinton.

Google is on it:

Jim Edwards calls the Google Translate app “the most astonishing piece of mobile software I’ve seen in months”:

Google Translate lets you read anything in a foreign language; translate any text, even handwriting; and carry on a live conversation with another person as the app translates what you’re saying. The software translates instantly, whether via text, photo, or voice.

Or as Lance Ulanoff explains, “once you select the two speaking languages, Google Translate can auto detect them as they are spoken.” Below is a demo that’s almost as remarkable as the GIF seen above:

Ulanoff tried it with a Turkish-speaking intern:

At first, we stumbled because the intern, who is also fluent in English, kept responding to what I was saying and not waiting for Google Translates’ interpretation. Eventually, she got it right and started waiting for my translated words to be spoken by the app.

Initially, she told me, the translation was perfect, but when I started to speak in longer sentences, it basically fell apart and got a lot of it wrong. As I tested with others who spoke in Greek, German and French, we noticed the same thing. We could never completely rely on Google translate to get the words right.

He found a lot of similarities between Google’s app and Skype Translator. John Pavlus tested out the latter:

The limitations of Skype’s translation software are … revealing, since they show how difficult it is for even the smartest machine to mimic the subtleties of effective human conversation. Determining which meaning of a word is appropriate in different contexts can be vexing. “If software is translating between American and British English, and it recognizes the word ‘football,’ it also needs to know when to change it to ‘soccer’ and when to keep it as ‘football’ or ‘gridiron,’” says Christopher Manning, a professor of linguistics and computer science in Stanford University’s Natural Language Processing Group.

Matthew Braga explains why realtime translation is so difficult:

“The reason that real-time [translation] is difficult for most of us is that it’s really a matter of probabilities,” said Gerald Penn, associate chair of the University of Toronto’s department of computer science, and a specialist in natural language processing. In a modern speech recognition system, a computer is typically trained on a language model—essentially, a database of what people are most likely to say, and in what order. Using this model, a computer gathers speech data from a microphone, and makes some educated guesses about what was actually said.

“The modern approach is not to make the guess right away,” Penn explained, “but to collect the evidence, and then rank it, score it, and augment it.” The challenge is performing this process fast and accurately enough that you can create the illusion of a conversation, where the translation appears to happen in real-time.

A few words to add to my post yesterday on the religious roots of today’s era of terrorism. I think it’s perfectly possible to agree with that analysis of what is going on, while disagreeing on what to actually do about it. There’s this tendency to conflate a willingness to recognize some core illiberal parts of Islam as the problem with an invade-occupy-and-torture strategy of the last administration. But the two are easily separable. In fact, it is perfectly obvious at this point that a military strategy will not only fail but actually make things worse. There is no doubt in my mind that the invasion of Iraq, for example, advanced the cause of Jihadism as much as the brutal torture of Muslims by the CIA and every other branch of the armed services as well. The two brothers behind the Charlie massacre were both converted, we are told, by images from Abu Ghraib and Gitmo.

So what can we do? We cannot be the reformers of the Islamic world – again, that would make matters worse. Equally, in my view, we must not give an inch on freedom of expression, especially blasphemy. We need to drop the double standards and not self-censor with some religions, while ripping on others. We should have the right to rip on them all. If you’re going to publish photos of Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ, you sure can publish the rather innocuous cover of Charlie now at large. Ross makes some excellent points on this today.

Our main current tool is NSA spying. It’s very hard to know how necessary our current expansive spying apparatus really is – because it’s cloaked in the secrecy that effectively ends democratic accountability, except via the executive branch, which, even when held by a liberal Democrat, is far too terrified of presiding over another attack to question anything the CIA or NSA tells them. But do I prefer that kind of surveillance to drone wars that seem to be fomenting more Jihadism than they eliminate? I’d say so. I’d rather not do either, but it’s clear we have a real problem, and that terror directed at basic freedoms of travel and expression requires vigilance. If that means a retreat on privacy, that’s a trade-off I’m prepared to make.

But even the best intelligence will fail in the face of well-concealed sleeper cells or lone wolves or lone packs.

The French identified the Charlie mass-murderers long before the attack. They failed to prevent it. (They tell us they are preventing many plots, and again, we have to trust them, even though in the US, little trust can exist when high intelligence officials like Clapper and Brennan lie directly to the Congress and the public and even spy on their over-seers and are never held to account by the president.) But the fact remains that some of these attacks will succeed – because they only need to win once, while we have to win every time. We cannot ultimately control that but we can control our response. We must make sure we do not take the Jihadist bait, with racist or polarization, and ratchet up a cycle that only leads to more Jihadism and more terror. That’s where I think Obama’s strength lies in this: with his remarkable imperturbability and emotional calm. I think that’s a shrewder defense than declaring a “war” on Jihadism with every attack.

We can end the worst provocations – by closing GTMO and truly pressuring the Israelis to stop the explosive settlement campaign to wipe Palestine off the map. And we can keep calm and carry on. The huge crowds in France last Sunday were magnificent. A bigger test comes now – whether we can soldier on without further polarization and a common defense of core Western ideas. I think we can. Because I think we must. Even as so many dead lie round.

America is no longer the only game in town:

Though the United States is still leading the world in research related to diseases, it is rapidly losing its edge, according to an analysis in the American Medical Association’s flagship journal JAMA. If you look at biomedical research around the globe, the United States funded 57 percent of that work a decade ago. The U.S. share has since dropped to 44 percent, according to the study published online Tuesday.

Jason Millman adds that “medical investment in the United States grew at just .8 percent per year between 2004-2012, a major slowdown from the 6 percent annual growth between 1994 and 2004.” And, using the above chart as evidence, he questions how wisely that money is being spent:

It’s not just that the investment is slipping, the authors argue. The funding priorities are leaving major research gaps. In all, 27 diseases account for 84 percent of U.S. mortality, but together they receive just 48 percent of funding from the National Institutes of Health. Some diseases, like cancer and HIV/AIDS, get funded at better rates than predicted based on the disease burden, while others like stroke and depression fall short, according to an analysis by study author Hamilton Moses III of Alerion Advisors. Research into migraines is particularly underfunded, even though 36 million Americans, or 12 percent of the population, suffer from migraine headaches, according to the American Migraine Foundation.

Bill Gardner thinks America’s declining dominance is a “concern only to the degree that the US is doing less than it could”:

The growth of investment in health research across the rest of the world is only to the good. But here is the thing that shocked me. The authors looked at what health systems (that is, hospitals and hospital systems) and insurers invest in improving the services they provide. I would have hoped that insurers — who finance health care — and health systems — who deliver care to patients — would have invested significantly in service innovations. This is not the case. …

To get a sense of how little health systems (that is, hospitals and larger integrated systems) invest in improving their product, you should know that the median US industry invests about 2% of its revenue in research and development. Health system investment in service innovation is an order of magnitude less than that.