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Welcome to the 21st Century Project Blog
Welcome to the new blog for The 21st Century Project at the LBJ School of Public Affairs, the graduate school of public policy at the University of Texas at Austin. This blog will be an ongoing source of news and opinion about technology policy, particularly policy about telecommunications, the Internet, broadband, digital media, community technology, and how society and organizations are being changed by networked information. The 21st Century Project started in 1991, and affiliated with the LBJ School in 1994, but this blog and this Web site are new. This blog will be authored principally by Gary Chapman, director of the Project, who was the first executive director of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, then a newspaper and magazine columnist for ten years. He is a member of the faculty at the LBJ School, where he teaches classes and conducts research on the topics described on this Web site. Click on the “Projects” link at the top of this page to see what The 21st Century Project has been doing, or the “Classes” link to see the sort of classes offered in technology-related policy areas at the LBJ School. Feel free to register for this site and comment on any of the posts, or sign up for e-mail announcements. Simply use the “Register” button in the right-hand margin if you haven’t already registered here. Once you’ve registered, you can comment on blog posts, too. We’ll be adding more features to this Web site in the near future. Please tell us what you’d like to see—just use the “Contact” link in the navigation bar at the top of each page. Again, welcome, and either sign up for e-mail updates or revisit this Web site for news, commentary and dialog about our evolving networked society.
Internet 2 up to 100 Gbps, 400 Gbps Next
Internet 2 is run by a consortium of university partners, and managed by Level 3 Communications, the Colorado-based Internet backbone carrier. The AP story notes that the 100 Gbps network allows Internet 2 participants to use a single, dedicated 10 Gbps channel for specific applications. The article mentions that physicists who want to acquire enormous datasets from the new Large Hadron Collider at the European Organization for Nuclear Research are likely to be among the early users of such channels. A 10 Gbps channel can download 1 megabyte of data in 0.0008 seconds; a typical movie in uncompressed digital format could be downloaded in about 5 seconds.
UT Austin to Launch Belo Center for New Media The Belo Foundation of Dallas has given the University of Texas at Austin a $15 million gift to help launch the Belo Center for New Media, which will be built on the site of a current parking lot, across Dean Keeton Street from the College of Communications. Construction for the $35 million complex is expected to begin in January 2009 and take two years. It will expand the facilities of the College of Communication and feature state-of-the-art classrooms, labs, production facilities and auditoriums for performances and film showings. The College’s promotional brochure for the Center (a PDF file) says that the goal is for the Center to become “the premier center for research and teaching on media convergence in the United States.“
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