The Telecom Digest for November 30, 2010
Volume 29 : Issue 322 : "text" Format
Messages in this Issue:
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Date: Sat, 27 Nov 2010 14:51:48 -0500
From: Fred Goldstein <fgoldstein.SeeSigSpambait@wn2.wn.net>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: US may disable all in-car mobile phones
Message-ID: <20101127195150.AF4E53409D@mailout.easydns.com>
Disabling mobile phones in moving cars must be a good idea because
the country is suffering from a scourge of motor vehicle fatalities
that has skyrocketed since mobile phones became common. Let's look
at the statistics to prove this thesis.
In 1994, mobile phones were still pretty uncommon. There were 36,254
motor vehicle fatal crashes in the US. The number peaked at 39,252
in 2005, a time when cell phones were everywhere. Of course in 2005,
vehicles were more dangerous (the SUV craze was peaking), the
population was a little bigger, and the increase in fatalities was
just 10%, but the narrative requires us to say that it was skyrocketing.
Texting was not as popular in the US, at first, as it was in Europe.
But texting really spread in the late 2000s. In 2009, when
anti-texting-and-driving laws were just starting to spread, the
fatality rate had exploded to a whopping 30,797/year, an increase of,
uh, negative 8455. Yep, gotta act on that threat!
Fatalities per 100 million miles traveled has fallen from 1.73 in
1994 to 1.13 in 2009. It has been a fairly steady decline.
Cite: http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Main/index.aspx
--
Fred Goldstein k1io fgoldstein "at" ionary.com
ionary Consulting http://www.ionary.com/
+1 617 795 2701
Date: 28 Nov 2010 04:16:52 -0000
From: John Levine <johnl@iecc.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: How Ma Bell Shelved the Future for 60 Years
Message-ID: <20101128041652.7239.qmail@joyce.lan>
>For the purposes of DATA use, I would readily believe that in the
>1950's that "magnetic recording technology wasn't ready".
I wouldn't. In 1951 the UNIVAC I used UNISERVO magtapes as its
primary I/O device. If you wanted to use cards, they later provided
offline card to tape and tape to card units.
I hope this excerpt isn't typical of Tim Wu's new book, because it
manages to pack a phenomenal amount of wrongness into every paragraph.
R's,
John
Date: Sat, 27 Nov 2010 22:37:15 -0500
From: Monty Solomon <monty@roscom.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: A Bully Finds a Pulpit on the Web
Message-ID: <p0624089ec9177cbac6e0@[10.0.1.2]>
A Bully Finds a Pulpit on the Web
By DAVID SEGAL
The New York Times
November 26, 2010
SHOPPING online in late July, Clarabelle Rodriguez typed the name of
her favorite eyeglass brand into Google's search bar.
In moments, she found the perfect frames - made by a French company
called Lafont - on a Web site that looked snazzy and stood at the top
of the search results. Not the tippy-top, where the paid ads are
found, but under those, on Google's version of the gold-medal podium,
where the most relevant and popular site is displayed.
Ms. Rodriguez placed an order for both the Lafonts and a set of
doctor-prescribed Ciba Vision contact lenses on that site,
DecorMyEyes.com. The total cost was $361.97.
It was the start of what Ms. Rodriguez would later describe as one of
the most maddening and miserable experiences of her life.
The next day, a man named Tony Russo called to say that DecorMyEyes
had run out of the Ciba Visions. Pick another brand, he advised a
little brusquely.
"I told him that I didn't want another brand," recalls Ms. Rodriguez,
who lives in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan. "And I asked for
a refund. He got rude, really obnoxious. 'What's the big deal? Choose
another brand!' "
With the contacts issue unresolved, her eyeglasses arrived two days
later. But the frames appeared to be counterfeits and Ms. Rodriguez,
a lifelong fan of Lafont, remembers that even the case seemed fake.
Soon after, she discovered that DecorMyEyes had charged her $487 - or
an extra $125. When she and Mr. Russo spoke again, she asked about
the overcharge and said she would return the frames.
"What the hell am I supposed to do with these glasses?" she recalls
Mr. Russo shouting. "I ordered them from France specifically for you!"
"I'm going to contact my credit card company," she told him, "and
dispute the charge."
Until that moment, Mr. Russo was merely ornery. Now he erupted.
"Listen, bitch," he fumed, according to Ms. Rodriguez. "I know your
address. I'm one bridge over" - a reference, it turned out, to the
company's office in Brooklyn. Then, she said, he threatened to find
her and commit an act of sexual violence too graphic to describe in a
newspaper.
Ms. Rodriguez was shaken but undaunted. That day she called Citibank,
which administers her MasterCard account, and after submitting some
paperwork, she won a provisional victory. Her $487 would be refunded
as the bank looked into the charge and discussed it with the owner of
DecorMyEyes. A final determination, she was told, would take 60 days.
As that two-month deadline approached, Mr. Russo had dropped his
claim for the contact lenses he'd never sent. But, she said, he began
an increasingly nasty campaign to persuade her to contact Citibank
and withdraw her dispute.
...
https://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/28/business/28borker.html
Date: Sat, 27 Nov 2010 20:58:42 -0800
From: Thad Floryan <thad@thadlabs.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: How Ma Bell Shelved the Future for 60 Years
Message-ID: <4CF1E182.5060307@thadlabs.com>
On 11/27/2010 2:55 PM, David Clayton wrote:
> On Fri, 26 Nov 2010 19:27:05 -0800, Thad Floryan wrote:
>
>> On 11/26/2010 2:11 PM, Lisa or Jeff wrote:
>>> [...]
>>> Anyway, I don't see in the above where magnetic recording was
>>> perfected as a usable technology, or an explanation why Hickman's
>>> invention wasn't utilized. Note that many years often go between the
>>> time something is invented and the by the time it can be inexpensively
>>> manufactured and meet industrial standards. It took ten years for the
>>> transistor to be developed into something that would be cheaper and more
>>> reliable than the vacuum tube, and several decades more before it
>>> finally replaced all applications of the vacuum tube.
>>>
>>> The Bell Labs history specifically states that AMA used paper tapes when
>>> developed in the 1950s because magnetic recording technology wasn't
>>> ready.
>> A point of disagreement verified by tens of millions of music lovers.
> .........
> I believe that statement is now being taken out of context.
>
> For the purposes of DATA use, I would readily believe that in the 1950's
> that "magnetic recording technology wasn't ready".
IBM would disagree. In 1949 they sought a successor to punch cards and
in 1951 that effort came to fruition as the Tape Processing Machine:
http://www.columbia.edu/acis/history/701-tape.html
> I clearly recall the limitations of open-reel, cassette and other Audio
> magnetic media even in the 1970's and even the most expensive equipment
> was a constant battle with precision alignments and cleaning to get the
> best out of them.
I still have one reel-reel stereo audio tape machine from ages ago and I
never had to "play" with its heads and cleaning took just seconds since all
the parts that could accumulate tape oxide were open and readily available.
With the "good" tapes I'd use it was never a problem.
I also (still) have two Teac "Esoteric Series" model 860, arguably the
finest cassette deck ever made http://thadlabs.com/PIX/Teac_860.jpg
(picture taken just a few minutes ago), and they never needed any head
alignment. The only adjustments required for normal use is bias and EQ
for a specific tape. I do have the service manual and it, too, states
no adjustments required unless the head assembly is replaced, after which
the adjustments are locked-down "with a drop of locking paint."
FWIW, I also have an R. B. Annis Model 25 magnetometer used for checking
residual magnetism in tape heads and guides, and demagnetizers to "fix"
any problems found. Detail here:
http://www.rbannis.com/products/magnet/5.html
And to be really perverse, I still have a functional paper-tape reader:
http://thadlabs.com/PIX/paper_tape_reader.jpg
that still reads my paper tapes from the 1960s.
:-)
Date: Sun, 28 Nov 2010 16:18:08 -0500
From: Monty Solomon <monty@roscom.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: The Zuckerberg Revolution
Message-ID: <p06240820c918770e3553@[10.0.1.2]>
The Zuckerberg Revolution
Social media have increased the volume of our communications yet
diminished the substance of them.
By Neal Gabler
November 28, 2010
America's favorite boy genius, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, has
announced a new form of messaging. E-mail, the last Internet link to
traditional, epistolary, interpersonal communication, is, he said,
outmoded. Young people, by which he meant younger than his own 26
years, desired something more nimble for their iPads, mobile phones
and other devices. What he proposed was a "social inbox" where users
could readily access messages from friends and then sort them - sort
of a cross between instant messaging and Twitter.
We are so accustomed by now to declarations of new technological
revolutions that another one hardly gets noticed, especially when it
comes to finding new ways of minimizing how we communicate with each
other. And it is entirely possible that this proposed geological
change will be no more geological than all those other alleged
game-changers. But whether his messaging system really transforms how
people communicate or not, Zuckerberg issued what amounts to a
manifesto that in its own terse way conveys what is already altering
our lives - not only how we interact but also how we think and feel.
It may even challenge the very idea of serious ideas. Call it
Zuckerberg's Revolution.
It qualifies as a revolution because how we communicate largely
defines what we communicate. You know: "The medium is the message."
When Johannes Gutenberg invented the first movable-type printing
press, it was rightly considered one of the signal moments in human
history. By allowing books to be mass produced, Gutenberg's press had
the immediate effect of disseminating ideas far and wide, but it also
had the more powerful and less immediate effect of changing the very
construction of thought - through typography.
The social theorist Marshall McLuhan, in his book "The Gutenberg
Galaxy," posited that the printing press resulted in what he called
"typographic man" - humans with a new consciousness shaped by the
non-visual, non-auditory culture of print. He felt that print's
uniformity, its immutability, its rigidity, its logic led to a number
of social transformations, among which were the rise of rationalism
and of the scientific method. In facilitating reason, print also
facilitated complex ideas. It was no accident that it coincided with
the Renaissance. Print made us think better or, at least, with
greater discipline. In effect, the printing press created the modern
mind.
Writing scarcely 20 years after McLuhan, in 1985, Neil Postman, in
his path-breaking book "Amusing Ourselves to Death," saw the
handwriting - or rather the images - on the wall. He lamented the
demise of print under the onslaught of the visual, thanks largely to
television. Like McLuhan, Postman felt that print culture helped
create thought that was rational, ordered and engaging, and he blamed
TV for making us mindless. Print not only welcomed ideas, it was
essential to them. Television not only repelled ideas, it was
inimical to them.
...
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-gabler-zuckerberg-20101128,0,7889675.story
Date: Sun, 28 Nov 2010 13:01:25 -0800 (PST)
From: Tom Horne <hornetd@gmail.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: US may disable all in-car mobile phones
Message-ID: <c4cce3cd-8f2b-4ea8-9503-af2af359c78c@30g2000yql.googlegroups.com>
On Nov 27, 7:02 am, Stephen <stephen_h...@xyzworld.com> wrote:
> On Thu, 25 Nov 2010 21:26:38 -0500, Bill Horne <b...@horneQRM.net>
> wrote:
>
> >On Fri, Nov 26, 2010 at 12:43:52AM -0000, John Levine wrote:
> >> >> Hmmn. Could you explain exactly why I can't use my phone when I'm
> >> >> on the train?
>
> >> >It's the classic tale of 10% of the population ruining it for the
> >> >remaining 90%.
>
> >> If you're referring to the 10% of the people who dangerously talk on
> >> the phone while driving, I would agree.
>
> >> If you think that "moving at more than 20 mph" is synonymous with
> >> "driving a car", I have to conclude that you've never been to New York
> >> or any other large city with useful transit, or ridden in a carpool.
>
> >> It's possible there is some technical hack to recognize a phone that
> >> is being used by the operator of a moving vehicle, but this isn't it.
>
> >Gentlemen,
>
> >I agree that a blanket prohibition won't work if it's based on only
> >one test. (Sorry, Tom).
>
> >But -
>
> >What can we do that will work and will be accepted by drivers?
[Moderator snip]
>
> before you get too far on this particular justification - is it true?
>
> In the UK road safety is getting better not worse (measured by
deaths)http://www.dft.gov.uk/pgr/statistics/datatablespublications/accidents.
..
>
> if this trend is replicated wherever you are, then that sort of rips
> away the underlying main justification.......
>
> what it doesnt do if is prove 1 way of the other whether some of those
> deaths are caused by mobile use and that the stats would be even
> better if phones got turned off when getting in a car - but i think it
> is going to be much harder to justify draconian changes on the back of
> it.
I wouldn't care one bit if traffic deaths were plummeting. If cell
phone use is causing even one death of a person who had no control
over the cell phone users actions then I want that use banned. The
entire purpose of the exorcise of the police power of the state is to
protect people from the negligent or criminal actions of others. As
long as the state allows these needless deaths to continue it is
failing the dead and everyone who cares about them in the most
profound way. I know that the money will win in the end of course but
I don't have to like it!
--
Tom Horne, speaking only for himself.
Date: 29 Nov 2010 00:55:39 -0000
From: John Levine <johnl@iecc.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: US may disable all in-car mobile phones
Message-ID: <20101129005539.3988.qmail@joyce.lan>
>I wouldn't care one bit if traffic deaths were plummeting. If cell
>phone use is causing even one death of a person who had no control
>over the cell phone users actions then I want that use banned.
If using a cell phone to call 911 to report erratic drivers and other
highway dangers is causing even one death to be averted, then I want
that use made mandatory.
There are clearly some kinds of phone use that are dangerous, e.g.,
the woman at the light in front of me with two kids in the back seat
who didn't move when the light turned green because she was too busy
texting. (I know this because I saw her do the same thing when I was
next to her at the next light.) But there are other uses that are
benign, e.g., passengers texting.
We don't use seatbelt interlocks, because there are too many ways they
don't work. I don't see any reason to expect that cell phone
interlocks would work any better, but I do expect that combinations of
fines and public education can get most people to stop using their
phones while driving, just as they've gotten most people to buckle
their seatbelts.
R's,
John
Date: Sun, 28 Nov 2010 17:09:06 -0600
From: bonomi@host122.r-bonomi.com (Robert Bonomi)
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: U.S. Shuts Down Web Sites in Piracy Crackdown
Message-ID: <xd2dnamQyIKPfG_RnZ2dnUVZ_vGdnZ2d@posted.nuvoxcommunications>
In article <p0624088ac91710eb4106@[10.0.1.2]>,
Monty Solomon <monty@roscom.com> wrote:
>
>U.S. Shuts Down Web Sites in Piracy Crackdown
>
>***** Moderator's Note *****
>
>Somebody please tell me why Immigration and Customs Enforcement is
>involved with video piracy.
Just a guess -- but it is a long-standing part of the assigned duties of
"Customs" to seize (a) "counterfeit", and (b) copyright and/or trademark
infringing goods being brought into the country.
And, as a part of their _enforcement_ powers against smuggling, and
(not so incidentally) other forms of unlawful importation of proscribed
items, there are long-standing provisions in law providing for the seizure
of assets used in criminal enterprises. Over the years, Customs has owned
a LOT of vehicles (planes, automobiles, trucks, and ships, among others),
with a history going back long before the days of "Prohibition".
Date: Sat, 27 Nov 2010 19:28:29 -0800 (PST)
From: Lisa or Jeff <hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: How Ma Bell Shelved the Future for 60 Years
Message-ID: <627539b7-5efb-46fd-b4ed-596b00cfa177@k11g2000vbf.googlegroups.com>
On Nov 27, 5:55 pm, David Clayton <dcs...@myrealbox.com> wrote:
> >> The Bell Labs history specifically states that AMA used paper tapes when
> >> developed in the 1950s because magnetic recording technology wasn't
> >> ready.
>
> > A point of disagreement verified by tens of millions of music lovers.
>
> .........
> I believe that statement is now being taken out of context.
>
> For the purposes of DATA use, I would readily believe that in the 1950's
> that "magnetic recording technology wasn't ready".
The other issue is cost. It's hard for us to believe today, but back
in the 1950s electro-mechanical equipment was cheaper than
electronics. It wasn't until 1962 that IBM sold more computers than
relay tabulator machines, and tab machines remained the most cost-
effective choice for some applications for at least another decade.
Even when a customer acquired an IBM electronic computer, they usually
still got tabulator gear to handle front-end and rear-end processing,
leaving only certain parts of the work to be done by the computer.
That is to say, there was considerable work for which it was cheaper
to run on a tab machine than an electronic computer, and this
continued well into the 1970s. (Most of us have seen computer rooms
that had an old sorter or tab printer for auxillary work.)
The Bell Labs history describes the AMA paper tape punch as a
[relatively] inexpensive mechanism due to using countersunk holes
instead of expensive dies to make the punch (there's a lot more on
this subject in the book). I've seen them in operation and they
looked very complex. But I suspect in terms of maintainability and
first cost they may have been cheaper than an electronic tape drive
and reader and associated support equipment, especially in the 1950s.
(Air conditioning may have been required as well for electronics,
which most central offices did not have back then.)
The unit I saw in regular service was in the mid 1970s. Why it hadn't
been replaced by magnetic tape I can't say, but as mentioned, at that
time electro-mechanical gear was still widely used in both the Bell
System and in information processing in general. Also, the Bell
System tended to build its equipment to very durable standards and
then use it for many years.
Remember too that the peak of step by step deployment wasn't until
1974, despite No. 5 crossbar and ESS out by then.
I believe it was cost reductions in electronics into the early 1980s
finally made it worthwhile to dump old electro-mechanical gear en
masse. This applied to both telephone switching and information
technology. (For example, in IT, converting data entry from
keypunching cards to key data to tape/disk or on-line systems. Early
on-line systems were not cheap--they needed extensive CPU and disk
space, plus terminals and line controllers, all of which were
expensive.)
Wasn't a widespread ESS in that era the No 5? When did that come out?
Date: Sun, 28 Nov 2010 16:49:21 +0000 (UTC)
From: "Adam H. Kerman" <ahk@chinet.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: How Ma Bell Shelved the Future for 60 Years
Message-ID: <icu16h$k2m$2@news.albasani.net>
Michael G. Koerner <mgk920@dataex.com> wrote:
>On 2010.11.26 16:11:19, Lisa or Jeff wrote:
>>Did telephone wires use plastic as an insulator that far back? I
>>thought that came in the 1960s, before that paper, textile, and rubber
>>were used. While some plastics were available in the 1940s, I thought
>>their big growth was after WW II.
>I'm not sure on telephone use, but plastic insulated wire pretty much
>became S.O.P. in consumer-grade radios in the years immediately after
>WWII, although cloth insulated wire was also used into the early 1950s.
>Cloth insulation was the normally used material thoughout the 1920s and
>1930s until the start of the War and rubber was used in a lot of sets
>from the very late 1930s until the War interrupted production. Rubber had
>a nasty habit of drying out and rotting, causing electrical hazards.
Cloth was the outer covering of wires around a rubber compound. Older
plastics weren't very good either after 10 years or so. Today, we use
thermoplastics.
There is a scary amount of wiring out there decades passed its usable life.
Date: Sun, 28 Nov 2010 16:16:21 -0600
From: bonomi@host122.r-bonomi.com (Robert Bonomi)
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: How Ma Bell Shelved the Future for 60 Years
Message-ID: <eJydnXtYD90oSW_RnZ2dnUVZ_vqdnZ2d@posted.nuvoxcommunications>
In article <6755199f-8927-4cbf-a722-5d2d38eae797@l20g2000vbd.googlegroups.com>,
Lisa or Jeff <hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com> wrote:
>
>Speaking of insulation lifetime....
>
>What happens when those old internal wires are used to carry things
>like DSL?
They 'usually' work OK. wire lengths are short enough that the "deficiencies"
do not rise to the level to bar functionality.
>Is there problems with leakage or capicitance?
Not those specific deficiencies, as much as inductive pick-up due to the
lack of 'twist'.
Some years back I lived in a 1964 construction 32-unit (8 units/floor, 4
floors) apt building, about 6,000 wire-feet from the C.O.. One 50-pair
drop to the building, terminated on screw terminals. The 'house' wiring
was "quad" (J-K), _in_conduit_, with the 4 vertically aligned units sharing
a common conduit.
The Installer's test gear gave a 'stress' reading of "34" at the wall-jack
in my unit. It read "6" at the 50-pair termination. I don't know just
what 'deficiencies' it was measuring, or whether the scale was log or
linear, but it was clear that most of the issues were in the circa 80'
of quad wiring from the building DMARC to my unit, and not in the 'F1'
run from the C.O. to the building.
Date: Sun, 28 Nov 2010 16:41:55 +0000 (UTC)
From: "Adam H. Kerman" <ahk@chinet.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: Cellphone bias in polls?
Message-ID: <icu0oi$k2m$1@news.albasani.net>
Garrett Wollman <wollman@bimajority.org> wrote:
>Wes Leatherock <wesrock@aol.com> wrote:
>>This was in today's Washington Post. I thought that calls to
>>cellphone users were limited to those who had agreed to be called,
>*Robocalls* to cellphones are limited in that way. If you have an
>actual human dialing the randomly-chosen numbers -- even if they work
>in some telemarketing boiler-room -- then it's OK.
But what about predictive dialers? The dialer targets numbers in a sequence
or geography, dials every line number attempting to make a connection (hence
all those hangups), then assigns them to outbound calling positions. Do
paid pollsters actually dial numbers themselves without use of predictive
dialers? I wonder. Volunteer pollsters using temporary phone banks or
even donated telephone lines probably would dial themselves.
>There have always been issues with getting a representative sample by
>any means of polling -- whether automated telephone or in-person
>interviews or anything in between -- because many people (most
>people?) will refuse to participate. The polling industry has
>historically assumed that (non-)participation is effectively
>uncorrelated with the variables the survey is investigating; this is
>usually handled by weighting the survey results to match an objective
>population model (usually taken from census data and, for political
>polling, historical election results).
. . . assumptions that are not safe to make, unless you have a very well
conceived poll on nonparticipation and actually survey those who wouldn't
otherwise participate, which is a contradiction.
>Pew's data show conclusively that cell-phone-only households are not
>representative of the population as a whole[1] and therefore cannot be
>modeled in this way. Of course, there is still a large nonparticipation
>rate even when cell numbers are included in the sample, so we still
>don't know whether the nonparticipating cell-phone-only households have
>the same bias as participating cell-phone-only households.
>[1] Specifically, cell-phone-only households are younger, more
>Democratic, and less affluent than landline households, if I remember
>the Pew results correctly. You can go to Pew's Web site and find the
>complete survey protocol.
We've changed the definition of household, well, not for common sense
purposes but for combinations of people who are readily surveyed. Because
it was painful to get Ma Bell to combine residential bills for multiple
households, this billing concept was useful for polling purposes. With cell
phones, what is a household? If pollsters have access to cell phones, then
they have access to something derived from billing records. Not every user
on a cell phone family plan resides in the same house. I know a number of
small businesses that provide cell phones for employees using family plans.
I'm not sure it matters, for no concept of a household means that polling
one individual is representative of other members of the same household.
Furthermore, there's some relationship between an adult child's opinion
and the demographics of his parents but it's not necessarily the strongest
influence. Depending on what age you reach the young adult, he'll have
completed a different amount of college than his parents and at a young
age won't actually know if he'll complete graduate school. Polls trying
to establish basic demography ask about level of college completed.
A cell phone user, knowing he's paying for air time, may be less willing
to participate in the poll than a land line user. I'm leery of any
conclusions of cell phone only users, because we still don't know what
a representative sample is or who those reached represent with those
ubiquitous quick and dirty polls reported in the newspapers.
In my state, one pollster was consistently reporting that voters favored
statewide Republican candidates early in the cycle. I asked a friend who
runs various campaigns who knew who the guy was. He explained that he's
well known for surveying in rural areas and smaller cities and not known
for surveying in major metropolitan areas. He said he's a good pollster,
however, his results can be regarded as good only for the areas surveyed
and cannot be extrapolated to the entire state.
Candidates know these things. They attempt to publicize somewhat weighted
polls to improve their own fundraising ability. Newspapers and television
nightly news often do a bad job on reporting the known strengths and
weaknesses of pollsters.
Suppose you surveyed a representative group of people. You compare in person
results to telephone results. In person, you ask people extensive questions
about their telephone services and usage and use this data to weight the
results of those reached by various forms of telephone. It's still likely
that "corrected" telephone survey results are different from in person
results. Why? Survey takers themselves may prefer one method over the other.
Surveying is more art than science.
Date: Sun, 28 Nov 2010 16:38:12 -0600
From: Neal McLain <nmclain@annsgarden.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: How Ma Bell Shelved the Future for 60 Years
Message-ID: <4CF2D9D4.5020706@annsgarden.com>
Lisa or Jeff wrote:
> Did telephone wires use plastic as an insulator that far back? I
> thought that came in the 1960s, before that paper, textile, and rubber
> were used. While some plastics were available in the 1940s, I thought
> their big growth was after WW II.
I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned gutta percha. Gutta percha was
amazing stuff: biologically inert, tough and hard at room temperature,
but easily formed or molded when heated. During late 1800s and early
1900s, it was used in variety applications: telegraph and telephone wire
insulation, golfballs, fake-wood furniture, pistol grips. Dentists used
it to fill teeth after root canal surgery. Gutta percha is obtained
from the sap of the gutta-percha tree, indigenous to southeast Asia and
northern Australasia. [1-3]
The Copper Development Association's website reports that:
| Gutta percha and various rubber compounds were used for insulating and
| water proofing the telegraph and early telephone cables. Telephone
| cables were employed for aerial, underwater and underground use
| around 1879. Early cables were single grounded wires followed by
| metallic circuits lines after their development. By 1887 all of the
| newly manufactured cables were metallic circuit cables. Some of the
| early telephone cable applications were across the East River Bridge,
| under the North River between New York and New Jersey and across the
| Delaware River from Philadelphia to Camden. There were numerous cable
| manufacturers. The cables made by the different manufacturers were
| very similar but not identical. The cables contained up to 100 copper
| wires. They were insulated with cotton, cotton impregnated with
| paraffin, gutta percha or a rubber compound, and then in wrapped
| in lead. [4]
References:
[1] "Gutta-percha." Wikipedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gutta-percha
[2] "Submarine communications cable." Wikipedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_communications_cable
[2] "Telephone Cables" from The history of electric wires and cables,
Chapter 14.
Robert Monro Black, Science Museum (Great Britain)
http://tinyurl.com/2awk5vv
[4] "The Evolution of Telephone Cable."
Copper Development Association Inc.
http://www.copper.org/applications/telecomm/evolution.html
Neal McLain
Date: 28 Nov 2010 23:44:44 -0000
From: John Levine <johnl@iecc.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: How Ma Bell Shelved the Future for 60 Years
Message-ID: <20101128234444.3284.qmail@joyce.lan>
>I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned gutta percha.
Good point. Gutta percha is what made the transatlantic telegraph
cable possible in the 1850s
The company that manufactured it was creatively called The Gutta
Percha Company. After a few name changes, it's still around as Cable
and Wireless, which runs the telcos in a lot of British colonies and
ex-colonies.
R's,
John
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