Citizen journalism in the 2007 Australian Federal Election

Citizen journalists and news and political bloggers are set to have a considerable impact on journalistic coverage of the 2007 Australian federal election campaign. Already, even before the election proper has been called, the alternative viewpoints of citizen journalists and bloggers can be seen to have significantly disrupted the previously relatively static arrangements between government and opposition parties and the journalistic establishment, and to have challenged standard modes of reporting and interpreting political events. This paper discusses the role of citizen journalists and news and political bloggers in the 2007 Australian federal election campaign by examining four key sites of such alternative reporting, analysis, and commentary: the hyperlocal citizen journalism site Youdecide2007.org, the leading left-of-centre political group blog Larvatus Prodeo, the influential psephologist blogger Possums Pollytics, and ABC Online’s attempt at blogging the election campaign, The Poll Vault. It analyses the content and style of such initiatives, and tracks the take-up of their work across the wider Australian blogosphere and beyond (in part building on network mapping methodologies as outlined in Bruns, 2007), and on that basis presents an insight into the place of news and political blogging and citizen journalism within the wider Australian mediasphere throughout the federal election campaign

Full-Service MAC Protocol for Metro-Reach GPONs

“This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. In most cases, these works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder." “Copyright IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE.”An advanced medium access control protocol is presented demonstrating dynamic bandwidth allocation for long-reach gigabit-capable passive optical networks (GPONs). The protocol enables the optical line terminal to overlap the idle time slots in each packet transmission cycle with a virtual polling cycle to increase the effective transmission bandwidth. Contrasting the new scheme with developed algorithms, network modeling has exhibited significant improvement in channel throughput, mean packet delay, and packet loss rate in the presence of class-of-service and service-level differentiation. In particular, the displayed 34% increase in the overall channel throughput and 30 times reduction in mean packet delay for service-level 1 and service-level 2 optical network units (ONUs) at accustomed 50% ONU load constitutes the highest extended-reach GPON performance reported up to date.Peer reviewe

What Do Americans Think About Federal Transportation Tax Options? Results From Year 2 of a National Survey, Research Report 10-12

This report summarizes the results of a national random-digit-dial public opinion poll that asked 1,516 respondents if they would support various tax options for raising federal transportation revenues. The 11 specific tax options tested were variations on raising the federal gas tax rate, creating a new mileage tax, and creating a new federal sales tax. In addition, the survey collected standard socio-demographic data, some minimal travel behavior data, and attitudinal data about how respondents view the quality of their local transportation system and their priorities for government spending on transportation in their state. All of this information is used to assess support levels for the tax options among different population subgroups. The survey results show that a majority of Americans would support higher taxes for transportation—under certain conditions. For example, a gas tax increase of 10¢ per gallon to improve road maintenance was supported by 62% of respondents, whereas support levels dropped to just 24% if the revenues were to be used more generally to maintain and improve the transportation system. Other variants on a gas tax that received at least 50% support were increases of 10¢ per gallon with the revenues dedicated either to projects reducing accidents and improving safety or projects to “add more modern, technologically advanced systems.” For tax options where the revenues were to be spent for undefined transportation purposes, support levels varied considerably by what kind of tax would be imposed, with a sales tax much more popular than either a gas tax increase or a new mileage tax. A central goal of the survey was to compare public support for two alternative versions of a new mileage tax and eight versions of a gas tax increase. All variations on the two taxes increased support over that for the base case of each (a flat-rate mileage tax of 1¢ per mile and a 10¢ gas tax increase proposed without any additional detail). For example, varying the mileage tax by the vehicle’s pollution level increased support by 14 percentage points. For the gas tax, most notably, dedicating the tax proceeds to maintaining streets, roads, and highways increased support by 38 percentage points

What Do Americans Think About Federal Transportation Tax Options? Results From Year 2 of a National Survey, Research Report 10-12

This report summarizes the results of a national random-digit-dial public opinion poll that asked 1,516 respondents if they would support various tax options for raising federal transportation revenues. The 11 specific tax options tested were variations on raising the federal gas tax rate, creating a new mileage tax, and creating a new federal sales tax. In addition, the survey collected standard socio-demographic data, some minimal travel behavior data, and attitudinal data about how respondents view the quality of their local transportation system and their priorities for government spending on transportation in their state. All of this information is used to assess support levels for the tax options among different population subgroups. The survey results show that a majority of Americans would support higher taxes for transportation—under certain conditions. For example, a gas tax increase of 10¢ per gallon to improve road maintenance was supported by 62% of respondents, whereas support levels dropped to just 24% if the revenues were to be used more generally to maintain and improve the transportation system. Other variants on a gas tax that received at least 50% support were increases of 10¢ per gallon with the revenues dedicated either to projects reducing accidents and improving safety or projects to “add more modern, technologically advanced systems.” For tax options where the revenues were to be spent for undefined transportation purposes, support levels varied considerably by what kind of tax would be imposed, with a sales tax much more popular than either a gas tax increase or a new mileage tax. A central goal of the survey was to compare public support for two alternative versions of a new mileage tax and eight versions of a gas tax increase. All variations on the two taxes increased support over that for the base case of each (a flat-rate mileage tax of 1¢ per mile and a 10¢ gas tax increase proposed without any additional detail). For example, varying the mileage tax by the vehicle’s pollution level increased support by 14 percentage points. For the gas tax, most notably, dedicating the tax proceeds to maintaining streets, roads, and highways increased support by 38 percentage points

Voting Rights

Since the U.S. Supreme Court decided that George W. Bush would be President of the United States, everyone has been talking about voting but, as with the weather, no one has done much. Voting is said to be fundamental to our nation, but until the 2000 elections we didn't seem to understand how rickety our election process is.We know that in our federal system voting is administered by states, each one having different systems of casting and counting votes. But it goes deeper, as we saw in November and December. Voting is actually administered by counties (3000 nationwide), and takes place at precincts (several hundred thousand) where it is administered by Volunteer-Managers-for-a-Day (more than a million all told). The differences we saw in Florida between how votes are cast, counted, and miscounted by voters and officials in different precincts -- let alone different counties -- are not news. They can never be eliminated entirely but in the past they have been tolerated far too much.Small wonder that in such a system ascertaining the will of the people would not be easy even if everyone were pulling for an honest deal and a fair count and if we all shared the same vision of what that meant. But of course we don't. Therefore, working to improve our election system requires two focuses: (1) streamlining the system across-the-board, and (2) making the system fair to all voters and segments of voters.The federal government has a wide role to play in all this. Its power derives from several sources, some of which are: (1) power to enforce constitutional guarantees, especially equal protection and due process; (2) plenary power over federal elections; and (3) ability to spend money and offer money to states on certain conditions. The responsibility belongs to the executive branch directly, as well as in seeking legislation, and in litigating before the judiciary

2004 Presidential Election: Who Won The Popular Vote? An Examination of the Comparative Validity of Exit Poll and Vote Count Data

* There is a substantial discrepancy -- well outside the margin of error and outcomedeterminative -- between the national exit poll and the popular vote count.* The possible causes of the discrepancy would be random error, a skewed exit poll, or breakdown in the fairness of the voting process and accuracy of the vote count.* Analysis shows that the discrepancy cannot reasonably be accounted for by chance or random error.* Evidence does not support hypotheses that the discrepancy was produced by problems with the exit poll.* Widespread breakdown in the fairness of the voting process and accuracy of the vote count are the most likely explanations for the discrepancy.* In an accurate count of a free and fair election, the strong likelihood is that Kerry would have been the winner of the popular vote.This document was originally published by Verified Vote 2004, and is authored by Jonathan Simon, currently with Election Defense Alliance

Policy and Practice Brief: State Protection and Advocacy (P&A) Programs; Advocacy Services available from state P&A Programs can help Social Security and SSI recipients being served by Benefits Planning, Assistance and Outreach Projects

This brief provides an indepth profile of the myriad of protection and advocacy programs mandated by Congress which include the mandate, legal authority, eligibility and examples. This includes protection and advocacy for the developmentally disabled; individuals with mental illness; individual rights; assistive technology; beneficiaries of Social Security; and, the Client Assistance Program

FHCF: A simple and efficient scheduling scheme for IEEE 802.11e wireless networks

The IEEE 802.11e medium access control (MAC) layer protocol is an emerging standard to support quality of service (QoS) in 802.11 wireless networks. Some recent works show that the 802.11e hybrid coordination function (HCF) can improve signi¯cantly the QoS support in 802.11 networks. A simple HCF referenced scheduler has been proposed in the 802.11e which takes into account the QoS requirements of °ows and allocates time to stations on the basis of the mean sending rate. As we show in this paper, this HCF referenced scheduling algorithm is only e±cient and works well for °ows with strict constant bit rate (CBR) characteristics. However, a lot of real-time applications, such as videoconferencing, have some variations in their packet sizes, sending rates or even have variable bit rate (VBR) characteristics. In this paper we propose FHCF, a simple and e±cient scheduling algorithm for 802.11e that aims to be fair for both CBR and VBR °ows. FHCF uses queue length estimations to tune its time allocation to mobile stations. We present analytical model evaluations and a set of simulations results, and provide performance comparisons with the 802.11e HCF referenced scheduler. Our performance study indicates that FHCF provides good fairness while supporting bandwidth and delay requirements for a large range of network loads

From Registration to Recounts Revisited: Developments in the Election Ecosystems of Five Midwestern States

As a follow-up to a study of problems during the 2006 elections, examines the states' continuing adjustments to institutional arrangements, voter registration databases, convenience voting, and post-election processes in the 2008 elections