CENIC News

In late June, the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) released a study entitled "Californians and Information Technology", the third in a series focusing on information technology. (All surveys, including the 2008 and 2009 surveys on Californians and Information Technology, can be found on the PPIC website.) This latest survey however includes some information of great relevance and value to educators and providers of technology services to schools and colleges. Some of these findings may be expected by members of the CENIC community, but others may surprise us.

In the "expected" category, the percentage of Californians using the Internet has grown from 65% in 2000 to 84% today. Incidentally, according to the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project, the nationwide average is 77%. More than half of Californians have a desktop or laptop computer and access the Internet from it, while 40% of Californians access the Internet from cell phones. That the latter statistic has increased recently would also not surprise us, but what may be surprising is the size of the increase: only 19% of Californians used cell phones to access the Internet in 2008 -- a mere three years ago! -- compared to today's 40%. In an economy where people may feel pressure to cut back even on necessities, this increase speaks volumes of the value placed on Internet access "to go" by the communities served by our schools and colleges. Furthermore, 93% of Californians have cell phones, 39% of those say they have smartphones, and 41% of Californians value using the devices beyond making traditional phone calls to the point where they have purchased a data plan.

When coupled with the fact that 63% of parents of children 18 or younger report visiting their child's school website "sometimes or often," the rapid rate of increase in cell phone and smartphone use to access the Internet indicates a rising need for educational websites that have been optimized or natively designed for such access.

Use across ethnic groups may be a bit surprising and indicate a related need for schools and colleges to promote such communication tools in varying ways within their diverse communities. While the use of cell phones for Internet access is strongly present across all racial and ethnic groups, there is variation in such use as 57% of African Americans, 43% of white Americans, 41% of Asians, and 32% of Latinos access the Internet this way. Clearly, the need for awareness among educators of the growing reliance of their communities on cell and smartphones to access the Internet is coupled with a need for awareness of how that use varies with ethnic, cultural, and very likely linguistic differences.

This report contains a large range of other useful information to those provide technology and networking support to the educational community. To view the entire report as well as others, readers of CENIC Today are invited to visit the PPIC website.

July 2011 has seen a great deal of activity on behalf of California's K-12 System, with new Gigabit connections between the Humboldt County Office of Education and the Northern Humboldt USD, the Montebello Unified School District and the CalREN backbone node at Los Angeles, and two Lassen County Office of Education connections to the CalREN backbone node in Sacramento and to the Modoc County Office of Education.

The University of California also received a 10 Gb/s connection this month, between biomedical research university UC San Francisco and their data center.

Lastly, the University of San Diego also received a new connection, an upgrade to 500 Mb/s from their previous 250 Mb/s connection. As well as providing greater bandwidth, the new connection also follows a diverse path from the campus's alternate connection, providing robust insurance against network outages.

Mark your calendars now for March 12-14, 2012 -- that's when California's research and education community will come together in beautiful Palo Alto, CA for three days of programming, demonstrations, and human networking at the CENIC Annual Conference!

The conference will be held at the Sheraton Palo Alto and Stanford University. Be sure to keep an eye out for future issues of CENIC Today for updates about registration, programming, travel, hotel rooms, and more!

In a previous issue of CENIC Today, readers were informed of the extensive visits to 63 anchor institutions throughout the Central Valley which would benefit from the Central Valley Next Generation Broadband Infrastructure Project, a $66.6 million project partly funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act which involves building, operating, and maintaining a fiber-optic network infrastructure that will traverse 1,371 miles of California's Central Valley in addition to last-mile wireless capability over parts of four counties (Fresno, Kern, Kings, and Tulare).

The environmental reports required by the National Environment Policy Act (NEPA) and the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) have been completed and are in review by the appropriate oversight agencies. Approval by the NTIA and the CPUC is anticipated shortly.

The Project's routes and constructions plans were developed during the previously mentioned extensive series of meetings held with county and city leaders, institution representatives, and experts throughout the 18 counties. As a result of these meetings and the completed environmental reports, the engineering of routes and entrances to anchor tenant sites (including K-12 COE, CCC and CSU) is now underway.

With the finalized routes and approval from the the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) and the CA Public Utilities Commission (CPUC), construction is slated to begin Fall of 2011.

Up-to-date information can be found at the Project website.

One of the compelling uses of an advanced network such as CalREN is that of making one-of-a-kind resources available to researchers around the world and facilitating dispersed collaborations through them. While we've seen examples of this in previous CENIC Star Performers as well as at the CENIC Annual Conferences, many of them have focused on deep ocean research and astronomy, where research facilities can be located in places that are difficult or hazardous for people to visit.

Such extreme environments are not the only places that function as "home base" for such research, though. The UC Merced Sierra Nevada Research Institute features another such distributed natural-world laboratory in a pilot project undertaken by researchers both at UC Merced and UC Berkeley and directed by UCM's Roger Bales. The collaboration is supported by Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS), one of the four California Institutes for Science and Innovation.

Through this pilot project, an extensive network of wireless sensors will be installed in the Sierra Nevada to measure variables such as soil moisture and snow depth in order to understand and better predict the area's behavior and future as a critical source of water for California, among other aspects. Once again, the real-time interaction -- provided by wireless broadband -- will enable experiments and collaborations to take place that would otherwise not be possible, and with colleagues spread around the nation and even the world. As part of the NSF-funded Southern Sierra Critical Zone Observatory, the project will give researchers a brand new window into the large-scale behavior of this vast ecosystem and climate zone. Wireless access to the networked sensors is an important part of the project as well, as laying cables through such a sensitive environment would be problematic.

Dr. Bales joined the University of California, Merced, as Professor of Engineering in June 2003, and is one of UC Merced's inaugural faculty. He received his BS from Purdue University, an MS from the University of California, Berkeley and his PhD from the California Institute of Technology. He worked as a consulting engineer from 1975 to 1980, prior to his Ph.D., and was Professor of Hydrology and Water Resources at the University of Arizona from 1984 to 2003. He has published over 100 papers in diverse fields of research including snow hydrology, alpine hydrology and biogeochemistry, polar snow and ice, contaminant hydrology, and water quality. In 2007 he was named Acting Director, and in 2008 Director, of the UC Merced Sierra Nevada Research Institute.

To learn more about the other Star Performers that CENIC has featured, please visit our website at www.cenic.org.

US & World Networking News:

Santa Ana College launched a new website this week that allows viewers to easily access information on their smartphones. Student intern Andrew O'Melia teamed up with Costa Mesa-based Textopoly Inc. and the SAC Web Committee to create a user-friendly site.

Japan's KDDI has seen the future of cellular service, and Wi-Fi has a starring role. The mobile operator will build out a Wi-Fi network composed of 100,000 hot spots and a WiMAX overlay that will take traffic off the cellular network when needed and will integrate seamlessly with the carrier's existing 4G network.

A $1 million grant shared between California State University and California Community Colleges will help students transfer in additional disciplines. Complete College America established the grant, Complete Innovation Challenge, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, to help improve college completion rates.

"California's Math Pipeline: Success Begins Early" points to the critical importance of early success in Math for all of California's students. The brief presents compelling new data that shows while all groups of students have made progress on math achievement, dramatic gaps exist among groups of students as early as second grade, and that these gaps tend to persist over time.

At the TeraGrid '11 Conference earlier this month, John Towns delivered a keynote describing the end of the 10-year TeraGrid program and the ramp up of XSEDE, its replacement. XSEDE (EXtreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment) will be the recipient of $121 million from the NSF over the next five years to support the new project.

In a paper published online today by Nature, the world's top research journal, researchers at UBC and University of California Santa Barbara announced that they've made a major advance in dealing with one of the biggest obstacles to development of a radical new kind of computer.

About CENIC and How to Change Your Subscription:

California's education and research communities leverage their networking resources under CENIC, the Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California, in order to obtain cost-effective, high-bandwidth networking to support their missions and answer the needs of their faculty, staff, and students. CENIC designs, implements, and operates CalREN, the California Research and Education Network, a high-bandwidth, high-capacity Internet network specially designed to meet the unique requirements of these communities, and to which the vast majority of the state's K-20 educational institutions are connected. In order to facilitate collaboration in education and research, CENIC also provides connectivity to non-California institutions and industry research organizations with which CENIC's Associate researchers and educators are engaged.

CENIC is governed by its member institutions. Representatives from these institutions also donate expertise through their participation in various committees designed to ensure that CENIC is managed effectively and efficiently, and to support the continued evolution of the network as technology advances.

For more information, visit www.cenic.org.

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