IE9 surges 60% on Windows 7 in May

With all the Windows 8, Xbox, and Zune intrigue bouncing around, it has been easy to let Internet Explorer 9 slip to the back of our minds, but we shouldn?t let it fade.

Microsoft is rolling out the browser via Windows update as we speak, and as it is set to replace IE8, it will likely become the world?s most popular browser in due time.

The Redmond giant has released a new statistic today on IE9 that is worth ruminating on for at least one moment:

Worldwide, IE9 usage share on Windows 7 averaged 12.2% for the month of May ? a 60% increase from April.

But that number is only for Windows 7, what about the rest of the market? According to the same source, NetMarketShare, Internet Explorer 9 controlled some 4.19% of the total browser market in May. Clicky Web Analytics has the number just around 5%.

But both NetMarketShare and Clicky have the same trend in mind: up. Take a look:

Microsoft has to be happy with those graphs, but they might not always be so smooth in the future. Once the company has emptied its clip by using Windows Update to push adoption, it?s going to have to lean on other means. And yet, it will not be toothless, and 5% of the market in just a few months is nothing to sneeze at.

In the same post Microsoft claims that its anti-IE6 plans continue apace:

[W]e continue to see positive momentum in people upgrading to a modern browser with the share of IE6 and IE7 worldwide dropping almost another point in May. Our website ie6countdown.com continues to get great traffic with more than 1.5 million unique visitors and 2.8 million page views since its launch in March.

Whether you like IE9 or not, we all hate IE6, and its decline is the Internet?s gain. Let?s hope that its collapse accelerates.

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Source: http://thenextweb.com/microsoft/2011/06/01/ie9-surges-60-on-windows-7-in-may/

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Economic Scene: One Person, One Vote? Not Exactly

Two economists, Brian Knight and Nathan Schiff, set out a few years ago to determine how much Iowa, New Hampshire and other early-voting states affected presidential nominations.

Mr. Knight and Mr. Schiff analyzed daily polls in other states before and after an early state had held a contest. The polls tended to change immediately after the contest, and the changes tended to last, which suggested that the early states were even more important than many people realized. The economists estimated that an Iowa or New Hampshire voter had the same impact as five Super Tuesday voters put together.

This system, the two men drily noted in a Journal of Political Economy paper, ?represents a deviation from the democratic ideal of ?one person, one vote.? ?

A presidential campaign is once again upon us, and Iowa and New Hampshire are again at the center of it all. On Thursday, Mitt Romney will announce his candidacy in Stratham, N.H. Last week, Tim Pawlenty opened his campaign in Des Moines. The two states have dominated the nominating process for so long that it?s easy to think of their role as natural.

But it is not natural. It?s undemocratic, in fact. It is unfair to voters in the other 48 states. And it distorts economic policy in several damaging ways.

Most obviously, the federal government has lavished subsidies on ethanol, even though those subsidies drive up food prices and do little to solve the climate problem, partly because candidates pander to the Iowa corn industry. (Mr. Pawlenty, who now says the subsidies must end, is an admirable exception.) Beyond ethanol, a recent peer-reviewed study found that early-voting states received more federal dollars after a competitive election ? so long as they supported the winning candidate.

Pork is hardly the only problem with the voting calendar. In the long run-up to the first votes, Iowa and New Hampshire also distort the national conversation because they are so unrepresentative. They are not better or worse than other states, to be clear. But they are different.

Their populations are growing more slowly than the rest of the country?s. Residents of Iowa and New Hampshire are more likely to have health insurance. They are older than average. They are more likely to work in manufacturing.

Above all, Iowa and New Hampshire lack a single big city, at a time when large metropolitan areas are crucial to lifting economic growth. Big metro areas are where big ideas most often take shape and great new companies are most often born. The country?s 25 largest areas are responsible for 52 percent of the country?s economic output, according to the Brookings Institution, and are home to 42 percent of the population.

Yet metro areas are also struggling with major problems. The quality of schools is spotty. Commutes last longer than ever. Roads, bridges, tunnels and transit systems are aging.

You don?t hear much about these issues in the first year of a presidential campaign, though. No wonder. Iowa, New Hampshire and the next two states to vote, Nevada and South Carolina, do not have a single city among the country?s 25 largest. Las Vegas, the 30th-largest metro area, and the Boston suburbs that stretch into New Hampshire are the closest these states come.

So the presidential calendar becomes another cause of what Edward Glaeser, a conservative-leaning Harvard economist, calls our ?anti-urban policy bias.? Suburbs and rural areas receive vastly more per-person federal largess than cities. One big reason, of course, is the structure of the Senate: the 12 million residents of Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina have eight United States senators among them, while the 81 million residents of California, New York and Texas have only six.

Bruce Katz, a Brookings vice president and veteran of Democratic administrations, points out that the world?s other economic powers take their cities more seriously. China, in particular, has made urban planning a central part of its economic strategy.

?The United States stands apart as an anti-urban nation in an urbanizing world,? Mr. Katz told me. ?Our political tilt toward small states and small towns, in presidential campaigns and the governing that follows, is not only a quaint relic of an earlier era but a dangerous distraction at a time when national prosperity depends on urban prosperity.?

The typical defense from Iowa and New Hampshire is that they care more about politics than the rest of us and therefore do a better job vetting candidates. But the intense 2008 race between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton showed that if Iowa and New Hampshire care more, it?s only because of their privileged status. In 2008, turnout soared in states that finally had a primary that mattered, be it Indiana or Texas, North Carolina or Rhode Island.

A more democratic system would allow more voters to see the candidates up close for months at a time. The early states could rotate each year, so that all kinds ? big states and small, younger and older, rural and urban ? had a turn. In 2016, the first wave could include states that have voted near the end recently, like Indiana, North Carolina, Oregon and South Dakota.

A rotation along these lines would enliven the political debate. Investments in science and education, which are the lifeblood of future economic growth, might play a bigger role in the campaign. You could even imagine ? optimistically, I know ? that the deficit might prove easier to address if Medicare and Social Security recipients did not make up such a disproportionate share of early voters.

The issues particular to small-town America would still receive extra attention because so many of the 50 states are rural and sparsely populated. It?s just that Iowa and New Hampshire would no longer receive the extreme special treatment they now do.

And that special treatment is a nice thing, indeed. It focuses the entire country, and its next leader, on the concerns of only 1 percent of the population, as if democracy were supposed to work that way.

At a recent candidates? forum in Des Moines, The Wall Street Journal reported, the moderator did something that seemed perfectly normal: She chided Mr. Romney for not having spent enough time in Iowa lately. ?Where have you been?? she asked.

How do you think the rest of us feel?

E-mail: leonhardt@nytimes.com; twitter.com/DLeonhardt

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Tapping Quantum Effects for Software that Learns

In a bid to enable computers to learn faster, defense company Lockheed Martin has bought a system that uses quantum mechanics to process digital data. It paid $10 million to startup D-Wave Systems for the computer and support using it. D-Wave claims this to be the first ever sale of a quantum computing system.

The new system, called the D-Wave One, is not significantly more capable than a conventional computer. But it could be a step on the road to fuller implementations of quantum computing, which theoreticians have shown could easily solve problems that are impossible for other computers, such as defeating encryption systems by solving mathematical problems at incredible speed.

In a throwback to the days when computers were the size of rooms, the system bought by Lockheed, called the D-Wave One, occupies 100 square feet. Rather than acting as a stand-alone computer, it operates as a specialized helper to a conventional computer running software that learns from past data and makes predictions about future events. The defense company says it intends to use the new purchase to aid identification of bugs in products that are complex combinations of software and hardware. The goal is to reduce cost overruns caused by unforeseen technical problems with such systems, Lockheed spokesperson Thad Madden says. Such challenges were partly behind the recent news that the company's F-35 strike fighter is more than 20 percent over budget.

At the heart of the D-Wave One is a processor made up of 128 qubits?short for quantum bits?which use magnetic fields to represent a single 1 or 0 of digital data at any time and can also exploit quantum mechanics to attain a state of "superposition" that represents both at once. When qubits in superposition states work together, they can work with exponentially more data than the equivalent number of regular bits.

Those qubits take the form of metal loops rich in niobium, a material that becomes a superconductor at very low temperatures and is more commonly used as the magnets inside MRI scanners. The qubits are linked by structures called couplers, also made from superconducting niobium alloy, which can control the extent to which adjacent magnetic fields, representing qubits, affect one another. Performing a calculation involves using magnetic fields to set the states of qubits and couplers, waiting a short time, and then reading out the final values from the qubits.

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Economic Scene: One Person, One Vote? Not Exactly

Two economists, Brian Knight and Nathan Schiff, set out a few years ago to determine how much Iowa, New Hampshire and other early-voting states affected presidential nominations.

Mr. Knight and Mr. Schiff analyzed daily polls in other states before and after an early state had held a contest. The polls tended to change immediately after the contest, and the changes tended to last, which suggested that the early states were even more important than many people realized. The economists estimated that an Iowa or New Hampshire voter had the same impact as five Super Tuesday voters put together.

This system, the two men drily noted in a Journal of Political Economy paper, ?represents a deviation from the democratic ideal of ?one person, one vote.? ?

A presidential campaign is once again upon us, and Iowa and New Hampshire are again at the center of it all. On Thursday, Mitt Romney will announce his candidacy in Stratham, N.H. Last week, Tim Pawlenty opened his campaign in Des Moines. The two states have dominated the nominating process for so long that it?s easy to think of their role as natural.

But it is not natural. It?s undemocratic, in fact. It is unfair to voters in the other 48 states. And it distorts economic policy in several damaging ways.

Most obviously, the federal government has lavished subsidies on ethanol, even though those subsidies drive up food prices and do little to solve the climate problem, partly because candidates pander to the Iowa corn industry. (Mr. Pawlenty, who now says the subsidies must end, is an admirable exception.) Beyond ethanol, a recent peer-reviewed study found that early-voting states received more federal dollars after a competitive election ? so long as they supported the winning candidate.

Pork is hardly the only problem with the voting calendar. In the long run-up to the first votes, Iowa and New Hampshire also distort the national conversation because they are so unrepresentative. They are not better or worse than other states, to be clear. But they are different.

Their populations are growing more slowly than the rest of the country?s. Residents of Iowa and New Hampshire are more likely to have health insurance. They are older than average. They are more likely to work in manufacturing.

Above all, Iowa and New Hampshire lack a single big city, at a time when large metropolitan areas are crucial to lifting economic growth. Big metro areas are where big ideas most often take shape and great new companies are most often born. The country?s 25 largest areas are responsible for 52 percent of the country?s economic output, according to the Brookings Institution, and are home to 42 percent of the population.

Yet metro areas are also struggling with major problems. The quality of schools is spotty. Commutes last longer than ever. Roads, bridges, tunnels and transit systems are aging.

You don?t hear much about these issues in the first year of a presidential campaign, though. No wonder. Iowa, New Hampshire and the next two states to vote, Nevada and South Carolina, do not have a single city among the country?s 25 largest. Las Vegas, the 30th-largest metro area, and the Boston suburbs that stretch into New Hampshire are the closest these states come.

So the presidential calendar becomes another cause of what Edward Glaeser, a conservative-leaning Harvard economist, calls our ?anti-urban policy bias.? Suburbs and rural areas receive vastly more per-person federal largess than cities. One big reason, of course, is the structure of the Senate: the 12 million residents of Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina have eight United States senators among them, while the 81 million residents of California, New York and Texas have only six.

Bruce Katz, a Brookings vice president and veteran of Democratic administrations, points out that the world?s other economic powers take their cities more seriously. China, in particular, has made urban planning a central part of its economic strategy.

?The United States stands apart as an anti-urban nation in an urbanizing world,? Mr. Katz told me. ?Our political tilt toward small states and small towns, in presidential campaigns and the governing that follows, is not only a quaint relic of an earlier era but a dangerous distraction at a time when national prosperity depends on urban prosperity.?

The typical defense from Iowa and New Hampshire is that they care more about politics than the rest of us and therefore do a better job vetting candidates. But the intense 2008 race between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton showed that if Iowa and New Hampshire care more, it?s only because of their privileged status. In 2008, turnout soared in states that finally had a primary that mattered, be it Indiana or Texas, North Carolina or Rhode Island.

A more democratic system would allow more voters to see the candidates up close for months at a time. The early states could rotate each year, so that all kinds ? big states and small, younger and older, rural and urban ? had a turn. In 2016, the first wave could include states that have voted near the end recently, like Indiana, North Carolina, Oregon and South Dakota.

A rotation along these lines would enliven the political debate. Investments in science and education, which are the lifeblood of future economic growth, might play a bigger role in the campaign. You could even imagine ? optimistically, I know ? that the deficit might prove easier to address if Medicare and Social Security recipients did not make up such a disproportionate share of early voters.

The issues particular to small-town America would still receive extra attention because so many of the 50 states are rural and sparsely populated. It?s just that Iowa and New Hampshire would no longer receive the extreme special treatment they now do.

And that special treatment is a nice thing, indeed. It focuses the entire country, and its next leader, on the concerns of only 1 percent of the population, as if democracy were supposed to work that way.

At a recent candidates? forum in Des Moines, The Wall Street Journal reported, the moderator did something that seemed perfectly normal: She chided Mr. Romney for not having spent enough time in Iowa lately. ?Where have you been?? she asked.

How do you think the rest of us feel?

E-mail: leonhardt@nytimes.com; twitter.com/DLeonhardt

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Doom ported to the Web, video inside

Doom has been ported to the Web. That's right: you can now play the classic video game from the comfort of an Internet webpage, assuming your browser can handle it, of course.

This has been achieved by compiling Doom to JavaScript with Emscripten, an LLVM-to-JavaScript compiler. In other words, you can play it on the Web, using standard Web technologies like Audio and Canvas, without being forced to use any plug-ins.

You can try it yourself here: Doom on the Web. I tried it in Chrome 11 but it didn't work. If you're using Chrome, try one of the other channels and let me know in the comments if it works. I'd also be interested in knowing if IE9 or the IE10 preview can run it. The video below shows a user playing the game in a Firefox nightly build:

Doom was first released on December 10, 1993 by id Software. The series is widely considered to be a pioneer for the FPS genre. It introduced features such as 3D graphics, true 3D spatiality, networked multiplayer gameplay, and support for player-created expansions.

Doom is one of the most widely ported video games in the FPS genre: starting with the original MS-DOS shareware version, it has been released officially for seven computer operating systems, nine video game consoles, two handheld game consoles, and one cell phone.

That's just the official list. The Doom source code was eventually released under the GPL license by id Software, and fans made a point to create as many ports as possible. Some are replications of the DOS version, while others include modifications to creature design and game levels, or even offer levels that are not included in the original version.

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Source: http://www.techspot.com/news/44035-doom-ported-to-the-web-video-inside.html

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The Costs of Bad Security

Last month, Sony revealed the price tag associated with cleaning up the massive security breach that exposed personal information of more than 100 million users of its PlayStation Network and Qriocity streaming-media services: at least $171 million. It was the largest such breach any company had ever experienced, according to Sony's chairman, Sir Howard Stringer, and the staggering sum will cover security improvements, customer compensation, and investigative services. But the full toll will be harder to measure, because it will include the loss of customer confidence in the company.

The episode was a reminder of the stakes involved in data security?and an indicator that many organizations are not protecting themselves well enough. "When it comes to all of these security problems, companies aren't spending up front but have to spend a lot of money on the back end to fix things," says Thomas Ristenpart, a computer security researcher at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

This month, Business Impact focuses on securing data against theft and loss. We will explore the security tactics that companies ought to be using, the investments they ought to be making, and the questions they ought to be asking. We'll examine smart practices for mobile devices, remote workers, and cloud computing, and we'll get insights from top thinkers in the field.

Threats to the security of information are multiplying in part because the world's storehouses of data are rapidly growing as the cost of storage plummets and the availability of computers and network access expands. As this mother lode of data grows, so does its attractiveness to criminals and hackers.

To protect themselves, businesses can impose access controls on confidential data, encrypt this data and appropriately manage encryption keys, audit user activities, and bring on consultants to make sure security practices are up to date. And since the weak link in the security chain is often people, one of the most important things businesses can do is simply to train employees on basic data security practices. This month's package of stories will argue that information security isn't just a matter for the IT department to worry about. It has to register throughout a company, starting at the highest levels, where decisions about capital investments are made.

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Pressing Obama, House Bars Rise for Debt Ceiling

Republicans brought up the measure, which was defeated 318 to 97, to show the lack of support in the House for raising the $14.3 trillion debt ceiling without concrete steps to rein in chronic budget deficits.

The preordained outcome followed several acts of odd political theater on the House floor: Republicans urged the defeat of their own measure, while Democrats ? who not long ago were seeking just such a vote to raise the debt ceiling without attaching spending cuts ? assailed Republicans for bringing it up, saying its certain defeat might unnerve the financial markets.

Just in case, Republican leaders scheduled the vote for after the stock market?s close, and in the preceding days called Wall Street executives to assure them that the vote was just for show, to show Mr. Obama that he would have to make concessions in budget negotiations if a debt-limit increase is to pass Congress.

?This vote, based on legislation I?ve introduced, will and must fail,? said Representative Dave Camp, Republican of Michigan and chairman of the Ways and Means Committee.

Representative Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, the senior Democrat on the Budget Committee, objected. ?This is a political stunt,? he said.

Voting against the measure were 236 Republicans and 82 Democrats. No Republicans voted in favor.

The showdown over the issue is likely to continue well into the summer, with consequences for both parties and, potentially, for the economy and Wall Street, where the bond market in particular is watching the partisan standoff closely. Yet for all the talk of crisis should Congress fail to raise the debt ceiling by Aug. 2, when the Treasury Department says it will run out of room to meet all the government?s obligations without further borrowing, the financial markets are likely to yawn at Tuesday?s proceedings.

?Wall Street is in on the joke,? said R. Bruce Josten, executive vice president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

But beyond this week, Wall Street has reason to be nervous as the issue plays out, said people in both parties and in finance.

Investors have grown accustomed to partisan games of chicken that always end with the needed increase in the government?s borrowing authority. But this showdown, many say, is riskier because of the strongly held antispending, antitax views of the many freshman House Republicans combined with the fragility of the economic recovery.

?The people who are more politically savvy realize this may not be the normal brinkmanship,? said Senator Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia. Nor, he added, is this standoff like the fight a few months ago over the current year?s spending, which ended with a late-night deal shortly before the government would have shut down.

?The thing that people are missing is that in shutting down the government you can go to the 11th-and-a-half hour, and the consequences of not doing it, while significant, are not economy-threatening,? Mr. Warner said. ?You can?t go to the 11th-and-a-half hour on the debt limit. You don?t know what?s going to spook the bond markets.?

The chief wild card is the House Republican majority, which was elected last November after a campaign defined by voters? antipathy toward budget deficits. More numerous than the insurgents elected in the conservative waves of 1980 and 1994, many freshman Republicans have no experience in public office and consider themselves citizen-legislators who entered government to shrink it, regardless of the political costs.

?The people who have been sent to Washington most recently are bringing a strong message from the Republicans more to the right that really want something done about government spending,? said Joseph E. Kasputys, founder of IHS Global Insight and an official in the Nixon and Ford administrations.

Jennifer Steinhauer and Carl Hulse contributed reporting.

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NZXT, Corsair launch new wallet-friendly enthusiast cases

System builders have received four new chassis to pick from courtesy of NZXT and Corsair. At a meager $40, NZXT's Source 210 is among the finest cases available for frugal gamers who want the core essentials of an enthusiast chassis without paying for excess amenities.

The steel mid-tower doesn't skimp on wire management and boasts an interior paint job, a cutout for easier processor heatsink installations, a bottom-mounted power supply, support for up to seven expansion cards, as well as 130mm-long GPUs and 160mm-tall CPU coolers.

It also has room for three 5.25-inch drives alongside eight 3.5-inch drives and as many as seven 120mm fans (it's unclear if any actually come with the case, but dual 120mm front intake fans are mentioned). The front panel is outfitted with audio/mic jacks and two USB 2.0 ports.

At first glance, it seems the Source 210's greatest weakness is its lack of USB 3.0 support, but this is addressed with a second model. For a $10 premium, the Source 210 Elite trades one USB 2.0 for 3.0, gains a tool-less design and comes with a 140mm top-mounted exhaust.

Folks with a little more coin to spare should consider Corsair's new Carbide 400R and 500R, which also aim to bring luxury-grade comforts to mainstream pricing. Corsair says its sub-$150 Carbide cases adhere to the same "builder-friendly philosophy" as its Obsidian series.

The $99 Carbide 400R features tool-free installation, Corsair's solid wire routing system, room for up to eight expansion cards, 316mm-long GPUs, four 5.25-inch devices, and six 3.5-inch drives. It's also worth noting that all of the 3.5-inch bays natively support for 2.5-inch drives.

Along with pre-drilled holes for a bevy of 120mm and 140mm fans, there's also support for dual 240mm radiators. The front panel includes two USB 3.0 ports, one FireWire connector, audio/mic jacks, and a switch to toggle lighting, though Corsair doesn't include any lights.

At $139, the Carbide 500R offers a few more features, such as removable hard drive cages, a multi-channel fan controller, and it ships with a 200mm fan mounted to its left panel. Additionally, with a drive cage removed, there's a 452mm clearing for PCI Express cards.

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Source: http://www.techspot.com/news/44030-nzxt-corsair-launch-new-wallet-friendly-enthusiast-cases.html

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Economic Scene: One Person, One Vote? Not Exactly

Two economists, Brian Knight and Nathan Schiff, set out a few years ago to determine how much Iowa, New Hampshire and other early-voting states affected presidential nominations.

Mr. Knight and Mr. Schiff analyzed daily polls in other states before and after an early state had held a contest. The polls tended to change immediately after the contest, and the changes tended to last, which suggested that the early states were even more important than many people realized. The economists estimated that an Iowa or New Hampshire voter had the same impact as five Super Tuesday voters put together.

This system, the two men drily noted in a Journal of Political Economy paper, ?represents a deviation from the democratic ideal of ?one person, one vote.? ?

A presidential campaign is once again upon us, and Iowa and New Hampshire are again at the center of it all. On Thursday, Mitt Romney will announce his candidacy in Stratham, N.H. Last week, Tim Pawlenty opened his campaign in Des Moines. The two states have dominated the nominating process for so long that it?s easy to think of their role as natural.

But it is not natural. It?s undemocratic, in fact. It is unfair to voters in the other 48 states. And it distorts economic policy in several damaging ways.

Most obviously, the federal government has lavished subsidies on ethanol, even though those subsidies drive up food prices and do little to solve the climate problem, partly because candidates pander to the Iowa corn industry. (Mr. Pawlenty, who now says the subsidies must end, is an admirable exception.) Beyond ethanol, a recent peer-reviewed study found that early-voting states received more federal dollars after a competitive election ? so long as they supported the winning candidate.

Pork is hardly the only problem with the voting calendar. In the long run-up to the first votes, Iowa and New Hampshire also distort the national conversation because they are so unrepresentative. They are not better or worse than other states, to be clear. But they are different.

Their populations are growing more slowly than the rest of the country?s. Residents of Iowa and New Hampshire are more likely to have health insurance. They are older than average. They are more likely to work in manufacturing.

Above all, Iowa and New Hampshire lack a single big city, at a time when large metropolitan areas are crucial to lifting economic growth. Big metro areas are where big ideas most often take shape and great new companies are most often born. The country?s 25 largest areas are responsible for 52 percent of the country?s economic output, according to the Brookings Institution, and are home to 42 percent of the population.

Yet metro areas are also struggling with major problems. The quality of schools is spotty. Commutes last longer than ever. Roads, bridges, tunnels and transit systems are aging.

You don?t hear much about these issues in the first year of a presidential campaign, though. No wonder. Iowa, New Hampshire and the next two states to vote, Nevada and South Carolina, do not have a single city among the country?s 25 largest. Las Vegas, the 30th-largest metro area, and the Boston suburbs that stretch into New Hampshire are the closest these states come.

So the presidential calendar becomes another cause of what Edward Glaeser, a conservative-leaning Harvard economist, calls our ?anti-urban policy bias.? Suburbs and rural areas receive vastly more per-person federal largess than cities. One big reason, of course, is the structure of the Senate: the 12 million residents of Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina have eight United States senators among them, while the 81 million residents of California, New York and Texas have only six.

Bruce Katz, a Brookings vice president and veteran of Democratic administrations, points out that the world?s other economic powers take their cities more seriously. China, in particular, has made urban planning a central part of its economic strategy.

?The United States stands apart as an anti-urban nation in an urbanizing world,? Mr. Katz told me. ?Our political tilt toward small states and small towns, in presidential campaigns and the governing that follows, is not only a quaint relic of an earlier era but a dangerous distraction at a time when national prosperity depends on urban prosperity.?

The typical defense from Iowa and New Hampshire is that they care more about politics than the rest of us and therefore do a better job vetting candidates. But the intense 2008 race between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton showed that if Iowa and New Hampshire care more, it?s only because of their privileged status. In 2008, turnout soared in states that finally had a primary that mattered, be it Indiana or Texas, North Carolina or Rhode Island.

A more democratic system would allow more voters to see the candidates up close for months at a time. The early states could rotate each year, so that all kinds ? big states and small, younger and older, rural and urban ? had a turn. In 2016, the first wave could include states that have voted near the end recently, like Indiana, North Carolina, Oregon and South Dakota.

A rotation along these lines would enliven the political debate. Investments in science and education, which are the lifeblood of future economic growth, might play a bigger role in the campaign. You could even imagine ? optimistically, I know ? that the deficit might prove easier to address if Medicare and Social Security recipients did not make up such a disproportionate share of early voters.

The issues particular to small-town America would still receive extra attention because so many of the 50 states are rural and sparsely populated. It?s just that Iowa and New Hampshire would no longer receive the extreme special treatment they now do.

And that special treatment is a nice thing, indeed. It focuses the entire country, and its next leader, on the concerns of only 1 percent of the population, as if democracy were supposed to work that way.

At a recent candidates? forum in Des Moines, The Wall Street Journal reported, the moderator did something that seemed perfectly normal: She chided Mr. Romney for not having spent enough time in Iowa lately. ?Where have you been?? she asked.

How do you think the rest of us feel?

E-mail: leonhardt@nytimes.com; twitter.com/DLeonhardt

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UK?s Radioplayer announces 5.7m unique listeners a month

Radioplayer, the UK online digital radio service, has announced that almost 6m listeners have been accessing the service each month.

We reported back in March that the BBC and a number of commercial partners had launched the joint venture for UK radio lovers. Radioplayer is a web app, a centralised hub where you can now listen to 238 radio stations from across the country. This includes all the national and regional BBC stations, as well as commercial stations and smaller local stations. Radioplayer is essentially a search engine for UK radio, which allows you to listen to a range of stations without leaving the site.

The Radioplayer project was an ambitious one, but it?s one that so far seems to have gathered a lot of interest. In the four weeks from the 25th of April, about 5.7m unique listeners tuned into to use the service, amounting to 22.5m times in total. Radioplayer is currently working with Rajar ? the radio industry audience measurement body ? to validate these figures.

Michael Hill, Managing Director of Radioplayer, said:

?Growing digital radio is a long game, but we now have two magic ingredients. A simple, consistent Radioplayer with millions of users, and an industry working collaboratively on its digital future. It?s a great start.?

Indeed, getting so many different stations from across the industry to collaborate on this project was a big achievement, and it?s perhaps recognition that the radio industry understands the need to pool its collective resources to compete with other broadcast channels.

Radioplayer launched at the end of March with 157 stations, and whilst it has added more than another 80 stations since then, it?s looking to add the remaining 400 Ofcom-licensed stations by next year. And with mobile apps on the horizon for later in the year, it looks certain that Radioplayer?s repertoire will continue to grow.

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Source: http://thenextweb.com/uk/2011/06/01/radioplayer-announces-5-7m-unique-listeners-a-month/

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