March 2011

As part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, Congress set forth an ambitious goal of establishing a definitive National Broadband Map. Understandably, researchers are now anxious to use the data received to quantify the extent of broadband availability and to explain the relationships between availability and socio-economic factors.

While the National Telecommunications and Information Administration should be lauded for its inaugural effort to complete this Herculean task, it is nonetheless important to recognize that the mapping data currently has many known and yet-to-be-discovered defects. These errors include, but are not limited to, measurement errors and sample selection, both of which can cause severe problems with empirical analyses. In light of the known defects in the data and the lack of a robust data verification process, the analyst must proceed with caution and considerable modesty.

Indeed, until a data verification process is put into place and the known defects remedied, all statistical and econometric results using the National Broadband Map data should be viewed with skepticism as such work permits no strong causal and policy-relevant conclusions. Over time, as some of the measurement error and sample selection problems are resolved, econometric models may offer more robust conclusions. As always, empirical research using the Map data should begin with a sound, rational framework explaining observed outcomes.

The folks at American Idol were only giving helpful stage direction when they told a homosexual contestant to “gay it up.”

That’s what a lawyer for the talent show says, at least. In a motion to dismiss a federal harassment suit against the show, attorney Mark Goldberg denies that notorious contestant Ian Benardo was harassed or discriminated against and argues that some of the comments at issue were “acts of acceptance and encouragement.” Benardo, 30, who has sued the show three times, claimed in his January 2011 suit that producers directed him to act in a stereotypically effeminate way during his performance of “Gloria.” He also says that he was repeatedly called “fag” and “homo,” and that at one point a producer threatened to “shove this mic up your @$$.”

World-renowned jurisprudent Marvin Ammori has joined the new America Foundation as a Legal Fellow.

He currently helps lead the JD/LLM program in Space and Telecom Law at the Nebraska-Lincoln College of Law and teaches courses on cyberlaw and domestic and International telecommunications. Professor Ammori was Free Press's top policy lawyer in Washington, DC, where he served as the lead lawyer before the Federal Communications Commission on the Comcast-BitTorrent case regarding network neutrality. His scholarship, published in journals at Michigan, Missouri, Indiana, and Catholic, focuses on freedom of speech and new technologies. He is also a Term Member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a regular blogger at Balkinization and the Huffington Post.

[Commentary] In February 2011, two pilots of a new standard for sending health information securely over the Internet were launched. The pilots -- one in Minnesota and one in Rhode Island -- are the first tests of the Direct Project, a Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) initiative designed to simplify the exchange of information within the health care industry. The most noteworthy aspect of this initiative is how quickly it happened. These initial pilots are taking place less than a year after the Direct Project was started. The project represents an unusual experiment in accelerating the creation of the Nationwide Health Information Network. The project has demonstrated how rapidly a "lightweight" open process can yield useful results compared with typical government-sponsored IT development projects.