Here’s a semi-technical article from Telephony Online about FairPoint’s plans foir  “fixed WiMAX deployment using unlicensed bands to extend DSL reach” for cheaper last-mile access in very rural areas.
It’s an interesting counterpart to the wireless LINC project that I wrote about recently in my Telegraph column - which uses a variety of licensed and unlicensed [...]

Experts have found Asian longhorned beetles in 28 percent of the 9,260 trees they have checked around Worcester, Mass. There are 635,000 trees within the 62 square miles of the city and parts of surrounding towns that are the regulated area. If 28 percent of all them are affected that would be 177,000 trees which would need to be cut down and shredded. Wow.

We just returned from Washington DC where we visited my daughter and husband before they are off to Saudi Arabia as part of the US diplomatic corps. We spent some quality time in a couple of new museums in Washington.
The first one visited was the spy museum.
http://www.spymuseum.org/
This was great fun, looking at all [...]

Here’s a link to the origins of Dow Jones and why it was established. Since a lot of us are paying more attention to the daily ups and downs of our retirement funds, it’s nice to know where all this started.
http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi2426.htm

Another bit of financial-crisis fallout for innovative alternative energy ideas: the company Xethanol has decided that making ethanol out of cellulose from wood chips, weeds and similar plant matter is bad business; as reported here, they’re switching to getting methane out of old landfills. The problem isn’t the science or technology, it’s the business plan: [...]

Todays’ submission in the “depressing aspect of human behavior” category is the fact that the only good thing to come out of the financial turmoil of the past year is disappearing: The decline of gas prices has people ending their just-barely-started habits of automotive frugality, says the Globe and the NY Times.
Below two bucks a [...]

Here are the finalists for the 2008 “Product of the Year” from the New Hampshire High-Tech Council. The winner will be chosen, half by a panel and half by the audience, on Nov. 18 in an event at the Radisson-Center of New Hampshire. The finalists are:

Bradford Networks - NAC Director Guest/Contractor Services (GCS) - network [...]

There’s plenty of financial bad news for the “green tech” industry (ethanol plant closed in Indiana; Florida utility cuts wind-power plans; plug pulled on California wave-energy project ) - but if you want a quick example closer to home, consider this: The Going Green Expo in Manchester has been cancelled because the organizer went broke.

Powerspan of Portsmouth is one of the state’s most interest “green tech” firms; it develops various scrubber technologies for electric power plants, which isn’t terribly exciting, but it’s also developing a carbon capture technology for coal-fired plants which, if successful, could be a big deal indeed. It will begin the first field demonstration of [...]

The ability to divvy up software tasks that once had to take place in the beige box on your desk and distributing them around the Internet - creating virtual machines, or VM - is altering not just IT but business as a whole. New Hampshire has benefited from this process already with the umpty-billion-dollar sale of Nashua’s EqualLogic, which does VM data storage, to Dell.

Remember in the heady days before the dot-com bust, when free municipal Wi-Fi* was going to spread across the land, leading to an urban renaissance populated by cool folks with laptops? Reality set in as big cities cancelled or scaled back their much-hyped plans; in New Hampshire, just three cities have tiny operations.

One of the most interesting buildings in Nashua is the “egg” at the wastewater treatment facility - a 90-foot-tall, 1.3-million-gallon spheroid (it looks more like an onion dome on a Russian Orthodox church than an egg, actually) full of tons of bacteria that partially digest the city’s sewage, greatly reducing the amount of sludge that [...]

We keep several Notepad replacements in our shareware utility belts, including TextPad, NoteTab Light, and Notepad++. We do this because one program might have a feature that the others don’t, for example, multiple-file search and replace, word count, or HTML and CSS capabilities.
Our latest ersatz Notepad is DocPad, whose interface [...]

I’ve been receiving literature by mail and in the Telegraph about miracle heaters that are much more efficient than common sense (or science) allows. The latest of these touts high priced electric space heaters that include pages of testimonials from satisfied owners. Names are given, but no locations given. Even if we could contact these [...]

Lovely study by a medical journal that says up to half of all doctors routinely subscribe either inert placebos (sugar pills) or else relatively mild medicine (painkiller, etc.) that they know won’t have any effect medically - because patients want to be treated. (NY Times story here.) This has ethicists in a quandary - they [...]