High-Speed Connections to the Internet Increased by 33% in 2005

From the news release:

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) today released new data on high-speed connections to the Internet in the United States. Twice a year, all facilities-based broadband providers are required to report to the Commission basic information
about their service offerings and types of customers pursuant to the FCC’s local telephone competition and broadband data gathering program (FCC Form 477). Statistics released today reflect data as of December 31, 2005…We summarize here information from the thirteenth semi-annual data collection, thereby presenting a snapshot of subscribership as of December 31, 2005.3 High-speed lines connectin homes and businesses to the Internet increased by 18% during the second half of 2005, from 42.4 million to 50.2 million lines in service, compared to a 12% increase, from 37.9 million to 42.4 million lines, during the first half of 2005. For all of 2005, high-speed lines increased by 33% (or 12.3 million lines). The presence of high-speed service subscribers was reported in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, American Samoa, Guam, Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands, and in 99% of the Zip Codes in the United States.

Complete Report, Lots of Charts and Tables) (27 pages; PDF)

See Also: Just Released: New Stats of Local Telephone Competition in the U.S.
From the Summary Statistics:

• End-user customers obtained local telephone service by utilizing approximately 143.8
million incumbent LEC switched access lines, 31.6 million CLEC switched access lines, and 203.7 million mobile telephony service subscriptions at the end of 2005.
• Of the 31.6 million CLEC end-user switched access lines, 5.1 million lines were provide over coaxial cable connections. The 5.1 million lines represent about 50% of the 10.1 million end-user switched access lines that CLECs reported providing over their own local loop facilities.
• Mobile telephony service providers reported 203.7 million subscribers at the end of 2005, which is 22.6 million, or 12%, more than a year earlier. About 6% of these subscribers were billed by mobile telephony service resellers.
• At least one CLEC was serving customers in 82% of the nation’s Zip Codes at the end of 2005. About 98% of United States households resided in those Zip Codes. Moreover, multiple carriers reported providing local telephone service in the major population centers of the country.
• The 31.6 million lines reported by CLECs is about 18% of the 175.4 million total enduser switched access lines reported for the end of 2005.
• CLECs reported 13.9 million (or 13%) of the 108.3 million lines that served residential end users and 17.7 million (or 26%) of the 67.1 million lines that served business, institutional, and government customers.

Complete Report/Full Text (24 pages; PDF)

Source: FCC

Just Released, BusinessWeek/Interbrand The World’s Most Valuable Brands, 2006
Complete Package (Stories, Lists, Video, Background, and Graphics)

Direct to: Top 100 List (Interactive) and Methodology for Rankings
Click at top of column to reorder by that metric.

Top 5 (Overall)
1) Coca-Cola
2006 Brand Value: $ 67,000 (in millions)
2) Microsoft
Brand Value 2006: $56,926 (in millions)
3) IBM
Brand Value 2006: 56,201 (in millions)
4) GE
Brand Value 2006: 48,907 (in millions)
5) Intel
Brand Value 2006: 32,319 (in millions)

So where do some of the major search and online brands appear on the list.

2) Microsoft (was also at #2 in 2005)
Brand Value 2006: $56,926 (in millions), 2005 value: $59,946 (in millions)
Down 5%

24) Google (up from #38 in 2005)
For some perspective, Nescafe is at 23 and Dell is at 25.
Google now has the biggest one-year gain in the five year history of the list, brand value up 46% in the past year.
See this chart.
Brand Value 2006: $12.38 (in millions), 2005 value: 8,461 (in millions)
Fast Fact: At number 2, in terms of brand value growth from 2005 is Starbucks. Up 20%.
Does GoogleBucks sound good to anyone? (-: Contextual advertising on your coffee cup perhaps based on the blend or where the the coffee was grown or better yet on your buying habits with your Starbuck’s card? Perhaps it will be served on GoogleJet along with Starbucks music. (-:

39) Apple (up from 41 in 2005)
Brand Value 2006: $9,130 (in millions), 2005 value: $7,985 (in millions)
Up 14%

47) eBay (up from #55 in 2005)
Brand Value 2006: $6,755 (in millions), 2005 value: $5,701 (in millions)
Up 18%

55) Yahoo (up from #58 in 2005)
For some perspective, Heinz is at 54 and Volkswagen at 56
Brand Value 2006: $6,056 (in millions), 2005 value: $5,256 (in millions)
Up 15%

65) Amazon.com (up from 68 in 2005)
Brand Value 2006: $4,707 (in millions), 2005 value: $4,248 (in millions)
Up 11%

78) Reuters (down from 74 in 2005)
Brand Value 2006: $3,961 (in millions), 2005 value: $3,866 (in millions)
Up 2%

Much much more from Interbrand, including:

+ Complete report with commentary about each company. (28 pages; PDF).

+ League Tables (PDF)

+ Interbrand Analysis
Worth noting that Google’s “Do No Evil” mantra/slogan/call it what you like still gets attention and notice. In fact, Interbrand’s analysis begins by mentioning that it’s still key to their positioning and rise. From the document, “Google’s positioning “Do no evil” creates opportunity to grow at the other end of the spectrum from Microsoft, increasing the brand value by 46% and making it the top climber on this year’s report.”

+ Valuable brands you may have never heard of (PDF)

+ Archives Back to 2001 Including Some Country Reports

See Also: Best Canadian Brands, 2006 (PDF)

The Fortunate 50: The Top Earning American Athletes
Source: Sports Illustrated
“When it comes to the money game, no one even comes close to Tiger Woods, who has a jaw-dropping $97.6 million in earnings. But the average wealth of the 50 actually fell by $500,000 since last year’s list. The reason? Endorsers are taking fewer chances on athletes and increasingly turning to Hollywood celebrities (No. 2 Phil Mickelson and No. 4 Kobe Bryant are the only others on this list to have a noticeable increase in corporate income). As always, our figures include salary, bonuses, winnings, endorsement money and appearance fees.”
+ Top 20-Earning Foreign Athletes
+ Future Fortunates

Statistics: Occupational Projections and Training Data, 2006-07 Edition (U.S.)

This statistical and research supplement to the 2006-07 Occupational Outlook Handbook presents detailed, comprehensive statistics used in preparing the Handbook. It also discusses how the data are prepared and presents new research—information that is valuable to training officials, education planners, vocational and employment counselors, jobseekers, and others interested in occupational information. This edition of the supplement is the 18th in a series dating back to 1971.

Chapters include:
I. Education and Training Classification Systems
II. Accounting for Offshoring in Occupational Employment Projections
III. The 2004–14 National Employment Matrix Structure
IV. Selected Occupational Data, 2004 and projected 2014
V. Factors Affecting Industry Employment and Occupational Utilization, 2004–14
VI. Estimating Occupational Replacement Needs
VII. Education and Training Statistics: Completions, by field of study

Some tables are available in XLS format.

Download by chapter or complete doc at one time (PDF; 216 pages).

If you like your home pages crisp and low impact, you’re going to love ShopEasier.com. It’s just a search box. More documentation is to come but keeping it simple and allowing the technology to do the work is what ShopEasier seems to be about.

What makes ShopEasier different than other shopping engines?

1) Use of the SurfWax LookAhead technology. See results (in this case product listings) as you type. We’ve written about the use of LookAhead and its availability to any webmaster several times.

Here are two examples 1 ||| 2 that will provide you not only with some background but more examples.

Dynamic, pre-emptive searching is a trend we’ve seen growing during the past couple of years. What makes LookAhead a bit different is that unlike “suggestion” services, ShopEasier takes you directly to the product listing AND not to a results page where those terms are simply mentioned.

2) The other important feature of ShopEasier is that it allows you to quickly check product pricing from 5 well-known online databases:
+ Become.com
+ Froogle
+ Shopzilla
+ NextTag
+ Amazon.com
Here’s an example:
As we enter T-R-E-O a number of Palm Treo products appear. Remember, ShopEasier in its very early stages and more product listings are being added all of the time.

As the dynamically generated box of products appears and begins to focus if/when you enter more letters, “hits” appear in the box. Now, simply select the product and the merchant of your choice and off you go to the specific product entry. Not to just a search results page where you have to find the result.

Our only complaint is that after selecting a merchant you need to go back and “re” find the product if you want to compare with another merchants. I’m sure this is an issue that can be easily corrected. (-:

Finally, what also makes ShopEasier valuable is that you DO NOT need to enter the product name in any specific order. ShopEasier “rotates” keywords so product listings appear no matter what order you enter them in. Not only can ShopEasier be used as a tool to help you compare prices but it also can serve as product discovery tool, helping you discover products and suppliers that you might normally miss.

Again, LookAhead is all about saving the time of the user. A very good thing in our opinion. Yes, it’s different but who says the way things are today is the way it has to be.

Postscript: Librarians might be interested to see LookAhead technology (what powers ShopEasier) demonstrated with an OPAC. Here’s one example from a library system in suburban Chicago.

Diane Kovacs has started to report the results of her core reference tools surveys for 2006. First up:

+ ‘Core’ or Essential Reference Tool Survey: Government Documents (2006)
The list is divided into three categories: Print, Free Web, Fee-Based

A full list of surveys can be accessed here. Many will be updated in the coming weeks. ResourceShelf will post news of updates as we learn about them.

Final Draft Report Now Available:
Our Cultural Commonwealth: The final report of the American Council of Learned Societies Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities & Social Sciences

“Cyberinfrastructure” is more than just hardware and software, more than bigger computer boxes and wider pipes and wires connecting them. The term was coined by NSF to describe the new research environments in which high-performance computing tools are available to researchers in a shared network environment…Of course, scholarship already has an infrastructure: that infrastructure consists of the libraries, archives, and museums that preserve information; the bibliographies, finding aids, and concordances that make that information retrievable; the journals and university presses that distribute the information; and the editors, librarians, archivists, and curators who link the operation of this structure to the scholars who use it. This infrastructure was built over centuries, with the active participation of scholars. The report, available now in final draft form, will appear in final form in the fall, 2006.

Direct to Full Text of Report (PDF; 63 pages)

Source: American Council of Learned Societies

Two new papers that caught our eye via dLIST at the University of Arizona.

1) Survey on Faculty of Library and Information Science Education in Japan
by Keita Tsuji, Yuko Yoshida, Makiko Miwa, and Hiroya Takeuchi, Tomohide Muranushi, and Masami Shibata (2006)
In Proceedings The Asia-Pacific Conference on Library & Information Education & Practice 2006 (A-LIEP), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

From the abstract:

As a part of LIPER research, a questionnaire survey was performed on Library & Information Science instructors in Japanese universities. In quantitative terms, this research revealed the characteristics and teaching goals of LIS instructors, the similarities of librarian certification courses, and the overlap with instructors of those courses. Also, an analysis of freeform question responses about LIS education revealed the instructor’s varied thoughts on LIS education and also revealed awareness of problems related to profession and curriculum issues and education goals.

2) Open access – current developments in India
by Subbiah Arunachalam, (2006) In Proceedings Berlin 4 Open Access: From Promise to Practice, Max-Planck-Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute) Potsdam-Golm. From the abstract:

Despite a long history of science, scholarship and philosophical inquiry dating back to millennia before the emergence of modern European civilization, India is struggling to keep pace with the West in science and technology. Although there are about 300 universities, and about the same number of government funded research laboratories under agencies such as the Departments of Atomic Energy and Space and the 1 Ministries of Defence, Agriculture, Science & Technology, and Ocean Development, India’s research output in science and technology, as seen from the Web of Science, is barely 2.5% of the world’s journal literature. What is more, in none of the subjects Indian papers on the whole are cited as often as the world average. It will not be wrong to conclude that India is contributing to growth of knowledge in the sciences sub-optimally. There is a crying need for strengthening higher education (and, indeed, education at all levels) and promoting excellence and innovation in research. India is investing millions of dollars to set up three institutions of excellence in science on the lines of the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore and six world class medical colleges and hospitals of the quality of the All India Institute of Medical sciences in underserved regions.

+ Google launches open-source repository (via News.com)

+ Yahoo! Appoints Renowned Database Systems Expert Dr. Raghu Ramakrishnan as Research Fellow

In his new role, Ramakrishnan will help define and execute the strategy behind Yahoo!’s social search platform and contribute his extensive experience in database systems to Yahoo! Research and the company’s ongoing development of trusted community technology. He will be based in Sunnyvale, CA, where he will report to the Head of Yahoo! Research, Dr. Prabhakar Raghavan.

+ FAST Search and Transfer and Career Builder Extend Relationship

From a news release:

Twenty-five college students from across the nation surveyed segments of the Library’s nonbook collections and identified unique items by working closely with Library staff and curators in the Copyright Office; Manuscript Division; Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division; Music Division; Prints and Photographs Division; Rare Book and Special Collections Division; Special Materials Cataloging Division; and Geography and Map Division. Their work builds upon the contributions of last year’s class of summer interns who similarly unearthed treasures among the Library’s Copyright deposits.

More than 100 previously uncataloged items in the Library’s collections that were acquired through the historic copyright registrationand deposit system were found. These include:

+ An 1870 theater program copyrighted by Edwin Booth, proprietor of Booth?s Theatre in New York and brother of President Lincoln’s slayer, John Wilkes Booth
+ A 1900 blueprint for a proposed expansion of the White House
+ Early 20th century photographs of baseball great Cy Young and team photos of the Cubs and White Sox (ca. 1906)
+ A 1916 play script for “See America First,” by composer Cole Porter and his college roommate
+ A 1957 film clip of actress Gloria Swanson on ?The Steve Allen Show?
+ Musical score for the 1968 film “Planet of the Apes” by award-winning composer Jerry Goldsmith
+ Audio recordings reflective of contemporary American pop culture

The copyright registration and deposit system was centralized in the Library of Congress by an Act of Congress approved by President Ulysses S. Grant on July 8, 1870. Since that historic day, more than 32 million works of authorship — most of which represent forms of creativity that are uniquely American — have been registered for copyright protection. In addition to researching the actual deposit copies submitted to the Library of Congress for registration in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, interns in the U. S. Copyright Office, Manuscript Division and the Library’s Rare Book and Special Collections division have also been reviewing thousands of handwritten applications submitted by the copyright applicants. This rare and unique chronological record of creativity, spanning the period from 1870 to the early 1900s, has yielded many unique descriptions of works registered for Copyright by Americans from all walks of life.

The Junior Fellows Summer Intern Program is a joint project of the U.S. Copyright Office, Library Services, Office of Workforce Diversity, Human Resources Services and the Office of the Chief Financial Officer. The program is made possible through the generosity of the late Mrs. Jefferson Patterson.

July/August Issue of EDUCAUSE Review Now Online

Articles include:
+ Lessons for the Future Internet: Learning from the Past
by Michael M. Roberts

+ A Post-Millennial’s View of Online Courses
by Hannah Storm

+ The Myth about the Digital Divide
by Brian L. Hawkins and Diana G. Oblinger
Note: We were glad to read that the authors also include Eszter Hargittai’s discussion of the Second-Level Digital Divide, that focuses on various issues including onliner research skills. Important.

Country Profile: Mexico
27 pages; PDF.

This series of profiles of foreign nations is part of the Country Studies Program, formerly the Army Area Handbook Program. The profiles offer brief, summarized information on a country’s historical background, geography, society, economy, transportation and telecommunications, government and politics, and national security.

See Also: Other Federal Research Division Country Profiles

Source: Library of Congress, Federal Research Division

One Planet Many People: Atlas of our Changing Environment

Produced by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), One Planet Many People: Atlas of our Changing Environment compares and contrasts spectacular satellite images of the past few decades with contemporary ones, some of which have never been seen before.

The huge growth of greenhouses in southern Spain, the rapid rise of shrimp farming in Asia and Latin America and the emergence of a giant, shadow puppet-shaped peninsula at the mouth of the Yellow River are among a string of curious and surprising changes seen from space.

Highlights ||| Full Text (by chapter) ||| 405 PowerPoint Slides

Source: United Nations Environment Programme

Stanford Law School and Cornerstone Research Release Mid-Year Securities Fraud Class-Action Filings Report: Securities Fraud Lawsuits Continue to Decline in First Half of 2006

From the news release:

The annualized number of “traditional” securities fraud class actions filed from January through June 2006 decreased 31 percent compared to 2005 levels, falling from 179 filings to an annualized estimate of only 123, based on 61 filings through June 30, 2006, finds a new, mid-year report released today by the Stanford Law School Securities Class Action Clearinghouse in cooperation with Cornerstone Research.

Direct to Full Text of Report (15 pages; PDF)

Source: Stanford Law School Securities Class Action Clearinghouse in cooperation with Cornerstone Research

Map: Humanitarian Crisis in the Middle East (PDF; 250 KB)
Source: International Federation of Red Cross And Red Crescent Societies (IFRC)
Situation map.

+ Letter Report: TSA’s Develpment of Its Weapons Management System Using RFID (Redacted), OIG-06-44 (PDF; 9 Pages)

+ Review of CBP Actions Taken to Intercept Suspected Terrorists at U.S. Ports of Entry, OIG-06-43 (PDF; 11 Pages) 07/25/2006

+ Improved Administration Can Enhance Science and Technology Laptop Computer Security (Redacted), OIG-06-42 (PDF; 36 Pages ) 07/27/2006

From the summary:

The image of a typical “mom and pop” business is getting a makeover, according to new data on these burgeoning enterprises released today by the U.S. Census Bureau. Yesterday’s notion of a family-run corner store is giving way to Internet-based auctions, nail salons and even motorcycle dealerships, according to Nonemployer Statistics: 2004. PDF)

Highlights:

The nation added nearly a million businesses with no paid employees between 2003 and 2004 to reach 19.5 million, a growth rate of 4.7 percent over a one-year period. Businesses without a payroll make up more than 70 percent of the nation’s 27 million-plus firms, with annual receipts over $887 billion.

The report has data on 17 million individual proprietorships and on more than 1.3 million corporations and 1.2 million partnerships. Nonemployer firms may be run by one or more individuals, can range from home-based businesses to corner stores or construction contractors and are often part-time ventures with owners operating more than one business.

Among the fastest-growing: building finishing contractors (22.5 percent), Internet service providers (18.7 percent), nail salons (14.7 percent), electronic shopping and mail-order houses — including Internet-based consumer trade (12.7 percent), lessors of real estate (9.7 percent), formal wear and costume rental stores (8 percent) and motorcycle dealers (7.4 percent).

Florida led the nation in the growth of these small businesses with a 7.6 percent increase between 2003 and 2004. Georgia climbed to second place with a 7.1 percent increase, while Nevada fell from first to third place with a 6.4 percent increase.

The Census Bureau cautioned that the numbers released today may be understated because the hurricane-impacted areas of Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas were granted additional time by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to file 2004 tax returns.

Summary ||| Direct to Full Text ||| Tables

Source: U.S. Census

Resource of the Week
By Shirl Kennedy, Deputy Editor

I honestly can’t remember how I happened onto this week’s resource. I do remember that it stopped me in my virtual tracks because of the depth and quality of the content. Economic statistics are often useful and sometimes vital. But we may not understand them as well as we wish we did. And perhaps we’re not quite sure where to obtain this kind of data in the first place…and how to use it once we have it. Well, why not let some experts do the legwork for you? (We really love these one-stop shopping sites here at ResourceShelf.)

NABE Links
Source: The National Association for Business Economics (NABE)
“This set of links is a guide to useful and interesting information in the field of business economics. We try to do more than just point you to the home page of many of these large, sprawling web sites — we also try to take you directly to the most relevant pages, for data and analysis.” Yessss! So let’s have a look at the nine high-level categories here:
+ Macro Data and Links — Included here are pointers to both financial and non-financial information available from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Census Bureau, the Conference Board, the Congressional Budget Office, the Council of Economic Advisors, the Federal Reserve Board, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the U.S. Department of Treasury, as well as a variety of annotated links to sites providing unique resources.
+ International Data and Links — Find pointers to information available from U.S. government agencies, statistical agencies of various countries (links are to English language pages), international agencies — and a comprehensive, well-annotated list of links to other organizations offering quality data and more.
+ Micro/Industry Data and Links — “These links focus on individual sectors of the economy, or individual industries. To organize them on this page, we’ve used the new NAICS codes. You’ll find links to data from relevant government agencies, trade associations, business organizations and specific industry research groups.” This page is nicely done, with annotations provided when something is not self-explanatory.
+ Regional Economic Data and Issues — Here you can find links to data available from the Census Bureau, Bureau of Economic Analysis, Small Business Administration, the regional Federal Reserve Banks, city and county data books, academic entities, etc.
+ Federal Reserve Corner — “This page serves two purposes. First, we want to set up a convenient set of links to the wealth of information and data available from Federal Reserve web sites. Second, we highlight interesting articles from Federal Reserve research publications with a brief review and a link to the whole article, where available.”
+ Economic Blogs — This page provides “a listing of blogs and other high-frequency sites that primarily talk about economic or financial subjects.” Some of the links are annotated.
+ Economic Research Institutions and Think Tanks — Good list, with comprehensive annotations.
+ Financial Market News and Data — Basically a list of media outlets, newswires, aggregators, and financial market websites.
+ Tools for Economics and Finance — This category includes econometric, statistical, and mathematical software, as well as spreadsheet add-ins. Annotated links to both free and commercial resources.

“NABE® is an association of professionals who have an interest in business economics and who want to use the latest economic data and trends to enhance their ability to make sound business decisions. There are approximately 2,500 members representing more than 1,500 businesses and other organizations from around the world. Since its founding in 1959, NABE® has continued to attract the attention of the most influential and prestigious economic leaders in business. Past Presidents have included several former Federal Reserve Governors, the former Chairman of the Board of Governors for the Federal Reserve System, Alan Greenspan, and other senior business leaders.” Pretty good credentials, no?