Did You Know; Shift Happens - Globalization; Information Age

URGENCY, Convening Power, K-12 Education!

Ann Arbor conference focuses on economic transformation

Posted on 10/15/2007 10:33:47 AM

More than 200 people are taking part in a two-day conference in Ann Arbor to discuss how Michigan’s public universities can be leveraged to improve the state’s economy and drive global competitiveness.

University of Michigan Vice President for Research Stephen Forrest told attendees the conference is meant to “challenge us to think hard about how to move faster toward economic diversification.”

Forrest says the University Research Corridor, linking the University of Michigan, Michigan State, and Wayne State, needs to focus on Michigan’s strengths, which he identified as Advanced Manufacturing, Health Sciences, Energy, and IT. To do so, he says, will require building stronger relationships with industry, in what UM President Mary Sue Coleman has called “partner or perish.”

Forrest says Michigan’s universities have traditionally been conservative, but the changing times require more comfort with intellectual risk-taking and more efforts on campus to encourage entrepreneurial activity from faculty and students.

He also says there is a critical need for funding to support what he called the “critical gap” between the formulation of an idea and validating it’s marketability.

Forrest’s views were echoed on video by Norman Augustine, former CEO of Lockheed Martin, who serves on the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. Augustine says three times as much money is spent on litigation as on research, with the result that the U.S. has now fallen from first to seventh in its ability to take advantage of new developments in IT.
While the federal America Competes Act was passed to help address those shortcomings, Augustine says it’s really up to state and local officials to help companies adapt so they can be more competitive in the worldwide marketplace.

Dingell to conference-goers: educate your lawmakers

Democratic Congressman John Dingell told a conference in Ann Arbor that they have a critical role to play addressing the issues facing Michigan’s economy, but their role is not well understood by many lawmakers in Lansing. Dingell told the “Role of Engaged Universities in Economic Transformation” conference that procuring adequate funding for basic research and technology means convincing Lansing that providing funds for Michigan’s public universities is, in his words, “not expenditures, but investments.”

According to Dingell, some lawmakers don’t understand the role universities play in developing new products for the marketplace and spinning off new businesses and new jobs for the economy. He says research work at universities has also been hampered by philosophy, citing religious points of view that have imposed restrictions on stem cell research at the University of Michigan.

Pointing to Route 128 in Massachusetts, Dingell says the climate was right for an explosion of growth in IT industries. He challenged the University Research Corridor to lead a similar effort in Michigan. “You have the ability to create that climate,” Dingell said, saying government is looking for the best programs and support from the private sector to help build American competitiveness against the larger world.

But he also warned them that getting a program passed, like the federal America Competes Act, isn’t enough. The program, approved overwhelmingly by Congress this summer, has not yet been funded. Dingell says a key is to convince lawmakers, both in Lansing and in Washington, that the future of the Michigan and U.S. economies is based on technology and innovation.

Dingell says while “lean and mean” is the prevailing point of view in Lansing, he doesn’t think that view serves public universities well. He says the universities, and the URC, need to step up and show that they can lead Michigan out of the current mood of doom and gloom, and provide the will to address the economic issues facing the state.

Speaker Urges Stronger University-Business Partnerships

Charles Vest is clear.

"The mission of a public university is to create opportunities," he says.

And he told a conference in Ann Arbor the universities must become serious partners with government and industry to fuel research, transfer knowledge, and help create new businesses.

Vest is the President of the National Academy of Engineering and President Emeritus of M.I.T. and keynoted the “Role of Engaged Universities in Economic Transformation” conference in Ann Arbor, which continues Tuesday.

Vest says in the 20th Century, technology was focused on physics, electronics, high speed communication and high speed transportation. He sees the 21th Century emphasizing biology, energy, environmental, health and information issues.

One frontier, he says, is “microscopic,” where biotech, nanotech and IT are seeing a merger of science and engineering and an emphasis on smaller, faster, and more complex.

The other frontier, says Vest, is “macrosopic,” with an emphasis on worldwide issues like energy, water, sustainable resources, and health care. Here, the emphasis is on larger and more complex and science must work hand-in-hand with the social sciences and the humanities to develop bio-based materials, biofuels, and personalized predictive medicine.

An avowed supporter of an “open source” approach, Vest called for the creation of “Knowledge Integration Communities”, where people from government and the entrepreneurial community are engaged in the early stages of university research. He says such groups can help develop new technologies for market more quickly.

While he says most new jobs will come from small and medium-sized companies, Vest also encouraged a limited number of strategic alliances between university researchers and large companies, citing M.I.T.’s alliance with DuPont in biological research. He says trust and communications are keys to making such partnerships both productive and rewarding.

Vest told the conference that public universities play an important role providing what he called “convening power” – a place where people can come together to talk through issues and network with each other. He identified a second role as knowledge transfer, by producing graduates and sharing faculty. He also says public universities have the potential – largely unexplored – to elevate the quality of K-12 education in the community.

Public school education is a key concern for Vest, who said only 15% of high school graduates in the U.S. are prepared to pursues science and engineering degrees at the university level. He says more teachers are needed in the classroom who have math, science and technical degrees and who can inspire the next generation of students to pursue a career in technology.

Vest is also concerned about the state of connectivity in the U.S. He says the country is falling behind when it comes to broadband access, and needs to invest an additional $10 billion dollars a year to improve basic infrastructure if companies are to operate effectively in a global economy.

Elsewhere Monday, the three universities announced:

-- that the former Traverwood offices and laboratories of Pfizer Inc. have been converted into a wet lab incubator that is already filling up, and that MSU has similar plans for a former Pfizer facility in Holland. Also, Ann Arbor Spark is establishing two additional office incubators in Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti and is working with 31 startup businesses that have or plan to move into one of their three business accelerators.

-- That UM and Wayne State would join forces to form STIET (Socio-Technical Infrastructure for Electronic Transactions), a multi-disciplinary research-education program involving corporations like Google, Yahoo and IBM to train the PhDs who will transform the Internet into one that is speedier, more secure and spam-free. Simultaneously, they are developing new technology to make it easier for the best and brightest minds to collaborate, creating virtual classrooms and laboratories that enable faculty and students to share classes and laboratory assets seamlessly. Key to the effort is Michigan LambdaRail, an ultra high speed fiber optic network developed by the universities.

-- That all three universities are working to greatly expand research related to a highly promising industry: alternative energy. MSU this summer received a $50 million grant to help establish the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center and this fall opened a $10 million alternative energy research center. Meanwhile, Wayne State has established the National Biofuel Energy Lab and lured NextEnergy to its TechTown development while U-M has established the Michigan Memorial Phoenix Energy Institute, part of a $35 million per year investment in energy research.

Building upon a promise to increase partnerships, the URC has recently announced a number of outreach efforts across the state including:

--Working with 20 other Michigan colleges and universities to establish the Michigan Higher Education Recruitment Consortium to attract and retain talent in the state

--Partnering with community hospitals in the landmark National Children's Study.

--Establishing offices for UM and MSU Detroit-based research and outreach efforts. Their locations, close to the Wayne State campus, further aid the ability to collaborate.

The presidents Monday also released the first annual report on the progress of the URC. A pdf version of the report is available at: http://www.urcmich.org/commentary/2007AnnualReport.pdf

For more on the University Research Corridor and other URC initiatives, visit: www.urcmich.org



Who should shake state out of rut?

October 16, 2007

BY TOM WALSH

FREE PRESS COLUMNIST

Michigan has no excuse for not being a thriving leader in the knowledge-based, environmentally conscious global economy of the future.

We have fresh water and lots of other great natural assets.

We have a rich history of innovation and entrepreneurship, from automotive pioneer Henry Ford to pizza peddlers Tom Monaghan and Mike Ilitch.

We have a wealth of engineering talent and some of the top research universities in the world.

But we're lazy. Complacent. We have a sense of entitlement and no sense of urgency.

Watching the levees break

Those were but a few of the words and phrases used to explain Michigan's current sad state of economic affairs Monday during the first day of a 2-day conference in Ann Arbor entitled "The Role of Engaged Universities in Economic Development," sponsored by the University Research Corridor alliance of University of Michigan, Michigan State University and Wayne State University.

"Our" Hurricane "Katrina has been out on the horizon for a generation, and we just watched it come," said Rick Snyder, CEO of venture capital firm Ardesta in Ann Arbor, and former president of computer maker Gateway Inc.

Of five things necessary to propel a local economy for takeoff, Snyder said, Michigan is well positioned in technology and has a decent infrastructure. But in the three key areas of capital, talent and culture, "We're flashing red for crisis. We must make major improvements."

The state lacks a well developed venture capital network to seed and nourish new business formation and growth, and even the state's major institutions invest much of their money out of state, Snyder said. And many graduates of Michigan universities leave the state after college.

Sense of entitlement

Culture, Snyder said, "is our biggest problem." Michigan's tremendous industrial success through much of the 20th Century left many of its people with a sense of complacency and entitlement, an assumption that good jobs and wealth always would be available. And even though the impact of automation and global competition has been evident for several decades now, Michigan's response has been tepid, he said.

Mark Murray, president and CEO of Meijer Inc., the Grand Rapids-based retail chain, echoed Snyder's assessment.

"I don't sense the state of urgency that's needed for Michigan to recover as well as it should," said Murray, a former state treasurer and budget director under former Gov. John Engler.

Snyder said the state's political leaders, as is clear from the recent budget battle and tax hikes, have shown virtually no leadership to help pull Michigan out of its no-growth economic stagnation of the past seven years.

Therefore, Snyder said, it's important that the state's major universities show economic leadership by boosting their community involvement.

Derrick Kuzak, group vice president of global product development for Ford Motor Co., made a similar point on a national scale, suggesting that academia join with the automotive industry to push for a rational U.S. energy policy, since the politicians in Washington, D.C., have failed to do so.

"The auto industry will make fundamental changes to reduce its carbon footprint. It's a social responsibility and a business imperative," he said, but it would be much better to have scientists armed with data making key decisions rather than politicians acting on whims.

Filling the leadership void

Are Michigan's major universities ready to step up to a more activist role in fostering economic growth, including a more direct role in local and national politics?

It's not something that comes naturally.

The University of Michigan has long existed as an intellectual outpost, in many ways a world apart from the hurly-burly of industrial Detroit, although Ann Arbor and downtown Detroit are virtually the same distance along I-94 from Metro Airport.

And MSU, WSU and all the other state universities depend in part on the largesse of government for financing. Can they afford to take bold, sometimes controversial positions on issues in those many areas where business and economics meet public policy?

If not our big prestigious universities, who will step forward to lead Michigan's complacent people and hapless politicians out of the economic wilderness?

Contact TOM WALSH at 313-223-4430 or twalsh@freepress.com.

A little "3-Card Monte' Anyone?"

---

October 9, 2007

Op-Ed Columnist

High-Stakes Flimflam

By BOB HERBERT

It’s time to rein in the test zealots who have gotten such a stranglehold on the public schools in the U.S.

Politicians and others have promoted high-stakes testing as a panacea that would bring accountability to teaching and substantially boost the classroom performance of students.

“Measuring,” said President Bush, in a discussion of his No Child Left Behind law, “is the gateway to success.”

Not only has high-stakes testing largely failed to magically swing open the gates to successful learning, it is questionable in many cases whether the tests themselves are anything more than a shell game.

Daniel Koretz, a professor at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, told me in a recent interview that it’s important to ask “whether you can trust improvements in test scores when you are holding people accountable for the tests.”

The short answer, he said, is no.

If teachers, administrators, politicians and others have a stake in raising the test scores of students — as opposed to improving student learning, which is not the same thing — there are all kinds of incentives to raise those scores by any means necessary.

“We’ve now had four or five different waves of educational reform,” said Dr. Koretz, “that were based on the idea that if we can just get a good test in place and beat people up to raise scores, kids will learn more. That’s really what No Child Left Behind is.”

The problem is that you can raise scores the hard way by teaching more effectively and getting the students to work harder, or you can take shortcuts and start figuring out ways, as Dr. Koretz put it, to “game” the system.

Guess what’s been happening?

“We’ve had high-stakes testing, really, since the 1970s in some states,” said Dr. Koretz. “We’ve had maybe six good studies that ask: ‘If the scores go up, can we believe them? Or are people taking shortcuts?’ And all of those studies found really substantial inflation of test scores.

“In some cases where there were huge increases in test scores, the kids didn’t actually learn more at all. If you gave them another test, you saw no improvement.”

There is not enough data available to determine how widespread this problem is. “We know it doesn’t always happen,” said Dr. Koretz. “But we know it often does.”

He said his big concern is where this might be happening. “There are a lot of us in the field,” he said, “who think that if we ever really looked under the covers, what we’d find is that the shortcuts are particularly prevalent in lower-achieving schools, just because the pressure is greater, the community supports are less and the kids have more difficulties. But we don’t know.”

One aspect of the No Child Left Behind law that doesn’t get enough attention is that while it requires states to make progress toward student proficiency in reading and math, it leaves it up to the states themselves to define “proficiency” and to create the tests that determine what constitutes progress.

That’s absurd. With no guiding standard, the states’ tests are measurements without meaning.

A study released last week by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and the Northwest Evaluation Association found that “improvements in passing rates on state tests can largely be explained by declines in the difficulty of those tests.”

The people in charge of most school districts would rather jump from the roof of a tall building than allow an unfettered study of their test practices. But that kind of analysis is exactly what’s needed if we’re to get any real sense of how well students are doing.

Five years ago, President Bush and many others who had little understanding of the best ways to educate children were crowing about the prospects of No Child Left Behind. They were warned then about the dangers of relying too much on test scores.

But those warnings didn’t matter in an era in which reality was left behind.

“No longer is it acceptable to hide poor performance,” said Mr. Bush, as if those who were genuinely concerned about the flaws in his approach were in favor of poor performance.

During my interview with Dr. Koretz, he noted that by not rigorously analyzing the phenomenon of high-stakes testing, “we’re creating an illusion of success that is really nice for everybody in the system except the kids.”

That was a few days before the release of the Fordham Institute Study, which used language strikingly similar to Dr. Koretz’s. The study asserted that the tests used by states to measure student progress under No Child Left Behind were creating “a false impression of success.”

The study was titled, “The Proficiency Illusion.”

Clarion Call: Michigan's "Economic Competitiveness" Transformation

Conference to Look at Transforming Michigan


Presidents of the three universities that make up the University Research Corridor (URC) consortium will put some big brains together around the task of fixing Michigan’s economy.

They are hosting a conference called "The Role of Engaged Universities in Economic Transformation,” which will gather together leaders from academia, business, government and think tanks to explore ways they can best work together to transform and revitalize the state.

Action teams will work together to come devise the next steps they can take to speed of the development of Michigan's knowledge-based economy. Speakers include:

• National Academy of Engineering President Charles Vest, president emeritus of MIT and a former University of Michigan provost.

• U.S. Rep. John Dingell, the dean of the House and chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

• Assistant U.S. Secretary of Commerce Sandy Baruah, who oversees the department's Economic Development Administration.

• Derrick Kuzak, group vice president of global product development for Ford Motor Co.

• Rick Snyder, co-founder and CEO of Ardesta LLC and chairman of Gateway Computers.

• Meijer Inc. President Mark Murray, former president of Grand Valley State University and a former Michigan state budget director.

• The URC presidents: U-M President Mary Sue Coleman, Wayne State University President Irvin D. Reid and MSU President Lou Anna Simon.

The conference is aimed at addressing the major competitiveness issues raised a recent National Academy of Sciences report called "Rising Above the Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future.'' It will take place Oct 15-16 at Rackham Auditorium, 915 E. Washington, Ann Arbor, on the campus of the University of Michigan.

The conference is free and open to the public but registration is required. To register, visit: http://www.urcmich.org/events or http://cms.housing.umich.edu/urc

For a more complete agenda, click here.


DAY 2 AGENDA (See Below "Workforce Needs:" The Role of STEM Education in the Economy

The Role of Engaged Universities in Economic Transformation
Conference Home

Day 2 - Plenary Session, Rackham Auditorium
and Conference Workshops, michigan League / Alumni center

See Day 1

REGISTRATION AND CONTINENTAL BREAKFAST, 7:30 AM - 8: 30 AM

PLENARY SESSION, 8:30 AM - 9:45 AM
Panel Discussion with
Stephen R. Forrest, Vice President for Research, University of Michigan
Tom Walsh, Business Columnist, Detroit Free Press
Michael Finney, President and CEO, Ann Arbor SPARK
Philip H. Power, Chairman and President, Center for Michigan

WORKSHOPS
10 AM - NOON and 1 PM - 3PM
Box lunch will be provided -- see Registration Form

CONFERENCE WRAP-UP • WINE & CHEESE RECEPTION
3PM - 4:30 PM

Program download (as of 10/5/2007)

Topics

Business/Economic Needs:

1. University-Business Partnerships
Discussion Leaders
Morning

• Doug Rothwell, President, Detroit Renaissance
• Marvin G. Parnes, Associate Vice President for Research and Executive Director of Research Administration, University of Michigan
  Afternoon
• Katherine E. White, Professor, Law School, Wayne State University
• Fred Reinhart, Associate Vice President for Technology Commercialization, Wayne State University
2. Regional Economic Development
Discussion Leaders
Morning

• Paul R. Dimond, Attorney, Miller Canfield
• James F. Hettinger, Battle Creek Unlimited
  Afternoon
  
• David C. Hollister, President, Prima Civitas Foundation
• Grady Burnett, Director, Online Sales and Operations, Google, Ann Arbor
3. Venture Capital
Discussion Leaders
Morning

• Mary Campbell, Managing Director, EDF Ventures
• Cindy Douglas, Michigan Economic Development Corporation
  Afternoon
• Mark Weiser, Managing Director, RPM Ventures
• Kenneth J. Nisbet, Executive Director, Office of Technology Transfer, University of Michigan
4. Great Lakes as an Economic Resource
Discussion Leaders
Morning

• John C. Austin, Nonresident Senior Fellow, Brookings Institution
• Paul N. Courant, University Librarian and Dean of Libraries
  Afternoon
• Soji Adelaja, John A. Hannah Distinguished Professor in Land Policy, Michigan State University
• Victoria Pebbles, Associate Program Manager, Great Lakes Commission

Sector Needs:

5. Universities and Advanced Manufacturing
Discussion Leaders
Morning

• Rick McHugh, Midwest Coordinator, Unemployment Insurance Safety Net Project, National Employment Law Project
• A. Galip Ulsoy, William Clay Ford Professor of Manufacturing, University of Michigan
  Afternoon
• Edward A. Wolking Jr., Executive Vice President, Detroit Regional Chamber of Commerce
• Kenneth Chelst, Chair, Department of Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering, Wayne State University
6. Universities and the Biotechnology Sector
Discussion Leaders
Morning (Biotech/biomed)

• James R. Baker Jr., Director, Michigan Nanotechnology Institute for Medicine and the Biological Sciences (M-NIMBS)
• John C. Greenfield, Executive Director, Core Technology Alliance
  Afternoon (Biotech/biomed)
  
• Ramani Narayan, Professor, Chemical Engineering and Materials Science, Michigan State University
• Brian Athey, Associate Professor of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, University of Michigan
  Afternoon (Biotech/bio-fuels/bio-economy)
• Steven Pueppke, Director, Office of Biobased Technologies, Michigan State University
• Lawrence A. Molnar, Program Manager, Business & Industrial Assistance Division, University of Michigan
7. Universities and the Energy Sector
Discussion Leaders
Morning

• Gary S. Was, Director, Michigan Memorial Phoenix Energy Institute, University of Michigan
• Jim A. Croce, CEO, NextEnergy
  Afternoon
• Simon Ng, Professor of Engineering, Wayne State University
• Levi T. Thompson, Professor of Chemical Engineering, University of Michigan
8. Universities and the Information Technology Sector
Discussion Leaders
Morning

• Michael P. Wellman, Professor, Computer Science and Engineering, University of Michigan
• Richard Sheridan, President, Menlo Innovations
• Harry Wan, Vice President, Engineering, Arbor Networks
• Philip K. McKinley, Michigan State University [TENTATIVE]
  Afternoon
• Thomas A. Finholt, Research Professor and Associate Dean for Research and Innovation, University of Michigan
• Farshad Fotouhi, Professor and Chair, Department of Computer Science, Wayne State University [TENTATIVE]
• Laurence Kirchmeier, Product Development, Merit Network [TENTATIVE]
• Betty H.C. Cheng, Professor, Computer Science and Engineering, Michigan State University [TENTATIVE]

Workforce Needs:

8. Worker Retention and Skill Development
Discussion Leaders

• Paul M. Hunt, Associate Vice President for Research, Michigan State University
• JaNice Marshall, Dept. Chair, Civil Technology Program, Lansing Community College
• Larry A. Good, Chairman, Corporation for a Skilled Workforce
• TBA
9. The Role of STEM Education in the Economy
Discussion Leaders
Morning

• Joseph S. Krajcik, Professor and Associate Dean, School of Education, University of Michigan
• Maria M. Ferreira, Associate Professor and Program Coordinator of Science Education, College of Education, Wayne State University
  Afternoon
  
• Thomas F. Wolff, Associate Dean for Undergraduate Studies, College of Engineering, Michigan State University
• Cinda-Sue Davis, Director, Women in Science and Engineering Program
10. Public attitudes/quality of life
Discussion Leaders
Morning

• Lou Glazer, President, Michigan Future, Inc.
• Philip H. Power, Chairman and President, Center for Michigan
• Eric Cedo, President and Founder, BrainGain Marketing
  Afternoon
  
• Donald F. Holecek, Professor, Department of Community, Agriculture, Recreation and Resource Studies, Michigan State University

The conference is being organized by the University Research Corridor. Funding for the conference is provided by the Richard Lounsbery Foundation.

Questions? Contact Conference Management Services, 734-764-5325 or conferences@umich.edu

Signaling a "Decade of Digital Discourse." SEE YOU THERE!

SCIENCE TEACHERS CONVERGE ON COBO

The National Science Teachers Association, the largest professional organization in the world promoting excellence and innovation in science teaching and learning, announced that it will be in Detroit Oct. 18-20 for its 2007 Midwestern Area Conference on Science Education.

Participants from across Michigan and neighboring states will meet to discuss the latest issues in science education, learn about new teaching tools and techniques, network with fellow science education professionals, and hear thought-provoking presentations from world-renowned scientists and educators. The conference will be held at the Cobo Center and other area venues.

Designed to enhance professional development and provide networking forums for science educators, the three-day conference -- held in conjunction with the Metropolitan Detroit Science Teacher Association -- will feature hundreds of presentations about the latest breakthroughs in science and hands-on workshops covering every discipline, grade level and teaching focus.

Educators will discuss popular issues, including the No Child Left Behind Act, science literacy and the nation’s competitiveness, and the teaching of evolution and global climate change. In addition, attendees will hear about the hottest topics in science education from nationally renowned speakers, including Sally Ride, former NASA astronaut and president and CEO of Sally Ride Science.

Attendees will also have the opportunity to explore NSTA’s Exhibition of Science Teaching Materials. From the latest high-tech calculators to scientifically engineered container gardens, attendees will be able to examine and learn about the latest science education materials, laboratory equipment and computer hardware and software available.

For more information, visit www.nsta.org/conferences/2007det/registration.aspx.

Why Mac? TIME!

Forsee: WiMaxed Out

Sprint Chief's Bet Failed to Pay Off

By Frank Ahrens and Kim Hart
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, October 9, 2007; D01

Perhaps someday, WiMax will be the key to turning around Sprint Nextel, the beleaguered Reston cellphone company. Perhaps someday, consumers will walk and drive across the country, enjoying uninterrupted, high-speed Internet service, watching video, e-mailing and talking on the phone over the Web, thanks to WiMax.

But Sprint chief executive Gary D. Forsee -- the man who committed $5 billion this summer to turn the company into the nation's No. 1 WiMax provider -- won't be around to oversee it.

Forsee resigned yesterday afternoon after running the company for four years. On his watch, Sprint stock steadily climbed, from $12 per share to a high of more than $25 per share in early 2006. But shares have slumped since then, closing down nearly 3 percent yesterday at $18.50, as Wall Street criticized Forsee's decisions.

Specifically, analysts and investors thought that Forsee was short-shrifting his company's core business -- phones -- while throwing a much-riskier, high-cost Hail Mary: building a WiMax network. So far, the expensive project has been met with delays and technical hurdles.

WiMax is like a much bigger WiFi. WiFi allows you to cruise the Web from your local coffee shop without having to plug your laptop into an Internet connection, but if you walk too far away, you lose your signal. WiMax promises high-speed Internet service hundreds of miles wide.

The ultimate dream is overlapping WiMax zones covering the country, letting subscribers stay connected to the Internet even as they travel, getting passed off from one WiMax zone to the next in the same way that cellphone towers pass callers from one phone to the next.

Sprint's $5 billion investment is aimed at slowing other big telecoms, such as Verizon and AT&T, from becoming big players in WiMax. Owning the WiMax space could prove lucrative enough to be a change agent for the troubled Sprint, enabling it to transform from a third-place cellphone carrier that's barely adding customers into the dominant provider of next-generation communications.

This summer, Forsee predicted Sprint would reach 100 million Americans with its WiMax service. In 2006, when Sprint announced plans to build a WiMax network, Forsee said: "We'll give customers the power to harness business information and personal entertainment easily and inexpensively -- and in ways that they will one day wonder how they lived without."

But the technology to make WiMax work has been slow to roll out, and analysts estimate it won't gain consumer momentum until late 2008 at the earliest. Sprint is still testing mobile WiMax technology. It announced during the summer that it would partner with start-up Clearwire, which was trying to build its own WiMax network, to combine forces and speed rollout. But Sprint said last week that the finalization of the Clearwire deal is being delayed.

Sprint is now in the position of figuring how to move forward with the WiMax plan -- without the man who dreamed up the plan. This far in, Sprint may be committed to building out the WiMax network but may not be able to do it fast enough to adequately transform the company to Wall Street's liking.

Sprint's WiMax predicament is like owning miles of pristine beachfront property and then being unable to build condos on your very valuable, exclusive property.

"The fact that they bought a $5 billion network without testing it was a violation of fiduciary duty," said Patrick Comack, senior equity analyst at Zachary Investment Research in Miami Beach. "It's like buying a $5 billion car without test-driving it first."

He added that the company is still struggling to perfect the network's ability to hand over traffic between towers as people move between coverage areas, which is necessary to stay connected while driving, for example.

Forsee found himself in much the same situation as Jean-Marie Messier, former head of Vivendi Universal. Like Forsee, Messier had a vision when he took over the company in 1996.

Messier envisioned that consumers from the Left Bank to Hollywood would pay to download music and videos to their cellphones and mobile devices. Messier spent Vivendi Universal into near-bankruptcy, buying telecom, movie and music companies, chasing the dream.

Messier was right but about five years too early. His company's stock plummeted, the disparate conglomerate never fit together and it ended up getting sold off in pieces. Messier was kicked out by his board in 2002.

Mike Nelson, an analyst with Stanford Group, said investors would not be so concerned about the big bet on WiMax if Sprint was also showing signs of fixing the core wireless business.

"If we were Sprint's CEO for a day, we wouldn't kill WiMax, since it could eventually be a competitive advantage, but would halve the spending in 2008," Philip Cusick, equity research analyst at Bear Stearns, wrote Friday in a note to investors. "We would re-emphasize the core business . . . over non-core distractions" like its prepaid Boost brand and WiMax, he wrote.

In August, Sprint gained new subscribers for the first time in a year but also warned it expected to lose subscribers in the third quarter.

Cusick added that he does not expect WiMax to gain momentum until late 2008 or 2009. A management shift could further delay Sprint in finalizing its contract with Clearwire to build out the network.

"We believe that Sprint is likely to de-emphasize the WiMax business, which could result in a slower rollout for WiMax in the U.S., lower economies of scale for Clearwire and shrink the ecosystem necessary to attract consumer electronics companies to WiMax," Cusick wrote.

"THE DIGITAL COMMONS"

COMMONS Project Explores Alternative for Underserved Communities

Oct 1, 2007, By Sascha D. Meinrath

The United States faces a worsening broadband crisis.

Over the past half-decade, the United States has fallen behind a growing list of industrialized nations in broadband penetration rates, delivery speeds and price per megabit.

Rural and poor communities are doubly discriminated against, often receiving little or no broadband access and paying higher service rates when they do have access. In addition to other benefits, the Cooperative Measurement and Modeling of Open Networked Systems (COMMONS) project offers one approach to alleviate the problem.

Initiative History

In December 2006, the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA) held the North American Strategy Workshop to discuss and launch innovative collaboration among researchers and interested broadband networks from across the continent.

This initiative was developed to solve three acute and growing problems facing the Internet: a self-reported financial crisis in the Internet service provision industry that poses a severe threat to broadband growth and American competitiveness; a data acquisition crisis that has stunted the field of network science; and a critical dilemma within emerging community, municipal, regional and state networks, who need affordable broadband connectivity but face severely limited service level, usage and provider options.

The COMMONS project is partnering with national backbone providers to interconnect participating community, municipal, regional and state networks to one another, and to the global Internet. COMMONS peering - the voluntary interconnection of administratively separate Internet networks for the purpose of exchanging traffic between the users of each network - is available to city, county, state and federal government entities; academic institutions; community Internet initiatives (e.g., community wireless networks); and commercial entities based on three conditions.

These three conditions are, first, that networks will make select operational data available to COMMONS researchers under appropriate legal data-sharing and privacy safeguards. Second, the attached networks must agree to develop and abide by COMMONS policies, which will be based on the research results of empirical data analyses of network usage. Third, participating networks must abide by the acceptable use policies (AUP) set by the COMMONS Project Coordination Committee.

The COMMONS project merges representatives from industry, community and municipal networks; regional and state networks; and Internet researchers, community organizers and developers building next-generation data communications technologies.

The initial Strategy Workshop participants also included heads of research, infrastructure, media and policy organizations, and telecommunications lawyers. The diversity of workshop participants helped ensure that major project stakeholders were represented in the proceedings and could provide insights into the potential pitfalls and opportunities the COMMONS Project might face in coming years.

The COMMONS Strategy Workshop report is available at the Web site.

Laying the Groundwork

Charter members of the COMMONS project forged a consensus mission statement for the initiative. This statement of purpose laid the groundwork for future organizing efforts and provides a glimpse of how COMMONS differs from other initiatives to bring affordable broadband to underserved communities.

COMMONS is a community of interest comprising local networks, broadly defined, that seek to utilize an AUP-neutral communications infrastructure; mitigate geographic disparities in the cost of Internet access and wide-area network connectivity; enable competitive environment in the connectivity market; benefit from economies of scale; and realize a vision for ownership in an open, universal and scalable backbone infrastructure.

COMMONS is also a community of network operators who recognize that the future usefulness and security of the Internet depend on the availability of empirical network data; support the availability of that empirical data to the academic research community; and insist that the data collected and utilized be handled in a manner respectful of personal privacy.

In addition, the project is a community of people who seek to exchange ideas on, and devote resources to, a wide variety of common interests to further the objectives stated above, including approaches to social problems that make the most of innovative technology and business strategies; political, legal and regulatory strategies; and community networking.

While the benefits to participating communities are fairly obvious, the active collaboration of the network research community is an innovative element of the project. The motivation behind scientists' involvement in broadband service provision is worth looking into because it provides valuable insights into often-ignored shortcomings in our understanding of the Internet itself.

Analyzing in the Dark

When the National Science Foundation Network (NSFNET) backbone was privatized in 1995, the network science community lost access to the only set of publicly available statistics on a national Internet backbone network. This transition, perhaps inadvertently, eliminated an opportunity to conduct analyses on a widely used national backbone.

Today, far from having an analytic handle on the Internet, network researchers often lack the ability to measure traffic at the granularity necessary to make increasingly critical infrastructure improvements. Legislators operate under an enforced ignorance of potential security problems when the scientific community can't identify potential congestion points on the Internet, and labor under an empirical cluelessness about how the Internet can be improved.

Access to the network traffic data that the COMMONS project would collect would let researchers begin solving problems of cyber-security, spam overload, privacy invasion and identity theft, digital rights management and piracy, network congestion, pricing discrimination, illegal pornography, and many other issues. Without this data, network scientists, regulators and decision-makers are left fumbling in the dark as they attempt to address these seemingly intractable and growing problems.

Over the past decade, while the Internet's core continued to expand, scientific measurement and modeling of its systemic characteristics has largely stalled. The proliferation of multimedia content, and new services and applications, makes the acquisition of data far more difficult and costly than in previous years. Much like a scanning electron microscope is a critical tool for modern physics laboratories, high-powered (and concomitantly expensive) measurement tools are needed by Internet researchers to keep pace with the Internet's increasing complexity.

A growing number of policy analysts believe we can't build a national broadband policy that brings America into the digital future without a solid understanding of what's happening on our current networks. Throughout the decades that the U.S. government was a steward of the Internet, the only statistics collected regularly were those required by government contract. Since the Internet's privatization, we've embraced a policy that has sacrificed this data access. It's clear to network scientists, however, that this privatization created disastrous outcomes for network science and basic research.

Why COMMONS Works

Due to regulatory, political and market constraints of incumbent local exchange carriers and other broadband providers, Internet researchers have been unable to study mission-critical aspects of the Internet, or the state of its current robustness, capacity, usage and problem areas.

This means that potential solutions to these issues remain more conjecture than empirically backed analysis. Meanwhile, telecommunications regulators and policymakers have increasingly called for methodologically sound study of Internet usage, analysis of potential failure points and improvements to this vital infrastructure.

By offloading the responsibility for supporting Internet service delivery to so-called "unprofitable areas" from commercial providers, the COMMONS initiative will alleviate economic pressures on providers and provide much-needed competition. COMMONS also offers an unprecedented opportunity to establish standards of scientific integrity in the field of Internet research by providing rigorous empirical data against which theories, models and simulations can be validated.

Also, because the COMMONS test bed supports analysis of actual Internet traffic, it informs debates on increasingly important technical, economic, policy, privacy and social issues related to the Internet. The COMMONS project not only allows struggling community networks to cost-share a financially daunting component of their connectivity, but it also provides a forum for the cooperating networks and research community to share lessons learned with one another.

We're also at a unique inflection point in Internet history - a time when the idea that wireless infrastructure is "too inexpensive not to deploy" is starting to gain traction in public debates. In the last several years, the growth of wireless access has been astounding.

According to the MuniWireless.com 2006 State of the Market Report, the municipal wireless market alone has grown from $47.5 million in 2004 to $235.5 million in 2006. The market is predicted to well exceed $1 billion before the end of the decade, with the number of networks almost doubling each year.

When mapping these networks geographically, one can see that the COMMONS project is tapping into a national (and global) phenomenon with critical mass to support an incredible research endeavor.

Though wireless broadband numbers may look promising, the United States is falling dangerously behind in Internet infrastructure penetration, although even the extent to which we are falling behind has been obscured by faulty and opaque measurement and analysis methodologies.

In his seminal analysis and report on the state of U.S. broadband - Broadband Reality Check II - Free Press Research Director Derek Turner states that policymakers must require the FCC to improve its data collection on broadband markets. "Policymakers cannot adequately assess the problems in the broadband market, nor identify the most appropriate solutions, if the FCC provides poor information," Turner wrote. "The starting point should be a more precise measure of which geographic areas have service (using a smaller unit than the ZIP code). Beyond that, carriers should be required to report the percentages of households where broadband service is available in every service area, the percentage of households that subscribe, and the average cost per megabit of throughput. This evidentiary record will allow an accurate analysis of the problems we face and foster solutions that will achieve results."

COMMONS begins to address seven key areas identified by workshop participants as critical to the initiative: infrastructure issues, regulatory harmonization and reform, outreach and education, research and technological development, business model innovation, expansion of broadband services, and vision for the future.

For participating networks, the incentive to join COMMONS is similar to that of participants of Internet2, NLR, Quilt and the 33-plus state networks trying to execute similar agendas on a smaller scale: collective buying power, ongoing access to extensive research data, affordable fiber infrastructure, and transparent and accountable collaboration.

Broader Impacts

Cisco, CAIDA and (inter)national backbone providers have joined together with community, local, municipal, regional and state networks to support a large-scale incentive-based experiment in end-to-end network workload, performance, economic and behavioral measurement on an unprecedented national, intersegmented, interprovider scale.

Attached networks would agree to collaborate with network researchers by, for example, allowing researchers access to historical and current operational data, where necessary in an appropriate form made anonymous to protect users; agreeing to permit and/or participate in occasional openly reviewed experiments required to test new technologies; making customized end-user polling tools available to community network users who participate in project-related behavioral research; and adhering to responsible general administrative guidelines as set by the policy board to ensure project-funded resources are used securely and appropriately - for example, ingress �????�???�??�?¯�????�???�??�?¬?ltering to prevent spoofing, sufficient logging to support DOS traceback, 24/7 accessible networking support contact, network neutrality requirements.

When the companies who own the infrastructure under study are declaring bankruptcy, measurements are scarce. And when the companies who own the infrastructure are competing against each other, existing measurements are often considered extremely sensitive or completely proprietary. And yet, changing technologies, commercial strategies and regulatory policies have brought dramatic restructuring of Internet service delivery at the local, regional, national and global levels. Accompanying these changes are a variety of strong but conflicting (and generally unverified) assertions concerning the relative feasibility, necessity and superiority of different possible outcomes of this restructuring.

These assertions pose a problem for both researchers and policymakers. Given the increasingly critical role of information and communications technologies for national productivity, economic competitiveness, and even security, the costs of error could be grievous. Yet decision-makers are often forced to operate in an information vacuum - having access only to the information that the companies who would be affected by policy and regulatory changes are willing to share.

Both U.S. telecommunications companies and user advocates are unhappy with current communications policy. Prices for services are higher than many other industrialized nations, and broadband penetration is lower. Telecommunications companies have increasing trouble attracting investment and claim their broadband services need exemption from common carrier regulation in order to thrive.

Solutions tend to focus on industry-centric approaches to policy reform - for example, how much price-control leverage the government should have over telecommunications carriers, how much freedom should telecommunications carriers have to price-discriminate, how much subsidization of telecommunications companies is necessary, which entities should be forced to pay for universal service for rural areas, among many other questions.

The problem is that the dearth of Internet research makes it impossible to come up with reliable empirical answers to many of the questions regulators and politicians need answers to. Thus, national telecommunications policy is forced to advance blindly at a time where the United States is losing its competitive (broadband) edge. The COMMONS project provides a collaborative environment for policymakers to help shape the research questions under study and offers a vital resource for regulators seeking to make decisions based on empirical scientific research.

The COMMONS project offers an innovative experimental test bed that also provides affordable broadband to participating networks. Through collaborative peering and rigorous data collection and analysis, the COMMONS project facilitates both basic research and innovative improvements to the Internet. COMMONS presents an unprecedented opportunity for establishing standards for scientific integrity for in vivo Internet research using rigorous empirical data to validate theories, models and simulations.

The potential outcome of this project promises researchers a clearer picture of the nature and characteristics of the current Internet than ever before possible while informing discussions of future architectures and related design issues. The COMMONS project also provides an opportunity for opening up the "economics, ownership and trust layers" of inter-networking in much the same way the transport, network and application layers of the Internet are open to innovation.

At this critical juncture in telecommunications history, COMMONS provides a much-needed resource to help us chart the future of communications.

Sascha Meinrath is a regular contributor to Government Technology's Digital Communities and a co-editor of MuniWireless.com. Sascha serves as vice president of CTCnet, a U.S.-based network of more than 1,000 organizations united in their commitment to improve the educational, economic, cultural and political life of their communities through technology, and also founded The Ethos Group, a telecommunications consulting firm focusing on maximizing the community benefits of broadband technologies. Sascha blogs regularly at SaschaMeinrath.com.