n his laptop computer, biology professor Leonard Guarente plays a video clip of 29-month-old mice hobbling around a cedar-chip-filled cage. They?re scruffy, fat, slow moving, and over the hill by rodent standards. Then he plays a clip of another group of 29-month-old mice. They?re svelte, frisky, and scrambling around like adolescents. What?s their secret? These mice have eaten about two-thirds as many calories as their portly peers. Not only does the meager diet seem to keep them light in the limbs, but they tend to live 30 percent longer than their well-fed friends and are less likely to contract age-related diseases, such as diabetes and cancer.
Daily Archives: September 24, 2004
Dartmouth pushes broadband – hard
Hanover, N.H.-based Dartmouth College is well-known in wireless circles for being one of the first colleges to embrace Wi-Fi technology. Recently, the college went through a network upgrade.
The original network, says Brad Noblet, Dartmouth director of technical services, cost $1.2 million. That covered 200 access points (APs) and the wiring they required. “Now we want to go to 1,500 APs.”
But that’s not all. The original Cisco APs were 802.11b only, and now the college wants to serve 802.11a, b, and g, using Aruba 52 APs.
Of course, the college doesn’t sell wireless, so that’s not the problem. “People on the campus love wireless. The challenge is capacity,” explains Noblet.
These are heavy users. Students do language lab classes from their own room using video over IP, for example, and Noblet admits that heavy use of video on the network presents a real capacity challenge.
Wisconsin: Squeezing the taxpayer….
Steven Walters summarizes a variety of viewpoints on the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute’s recent study on state government spending (7.7% above the national average). The real crunch (and why the spending battles continue at the local and state level): Wisconsin’s income is 2.8% below the national average. [75K PDF]
This problem will not improve until our economy is increasingly based on high growth, valued added businesses. Wisconsin’s above average government spending was supported for decades by the state’s now declining manufacturing base. This change, which will take many years, requires an open mind, a willingness to avoid coddling and subsidizing declining industries, rethinking government spending (consolidating services and making sure the services we provide make sense in the 21st century) and doing everything we can to encourage business formation. It also requires economic and political leadership, which is, in my view, is generally lacking. (see this national example where the NAB has successfully kept public spectrum for TV stations). Note that TV viewer numbers are declining…..
Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett’s latest budget caps the property tax increase @ 2%