As of 8:30 p.m., the Public Safety emergency line, (718) 817-2222, has been returned to service.

The campus is still experiencing a power outage at the following locations—non-Public Safety telephones, and wired and wireless Internet connections are also affected:

Thebaud: Completely Out of Service

Alpha House/Tennis house: Completely Out of Service

Rose Hill Gymnasium: Completely Out of Service

Security Booths: Partial Service

University Church: Completely Out of Service

Emergency Blue Light phones: Partial Service

Finlay: Partial Service

Queens Court: Completely Out of Service

More buildings and locations may be affected as repairs are made. Electricians are on site and continuing to work to restore power to the campus, but we do not yet have an estimate for full restoration of service.

Thank you for your patience and cooperation as we resolve these issues.

]]> 109535 https://now.fordham.edu/science/computer-scientist-shares-strategy-for-a-light-speed-internet/ Tue, 04 Apr 2017 18:46:58 +0000 http://news.fordham.sitecare.pro/?p=66523 The internet is nowhere near as fast as it can be, and the right changes could lead to a giant leap in productivity, a computer scientist told a gathering at the Lincoln Center campus.

In “The Internet at the Speed of Light,” Bruce Maggs, Ph.D. the Pelham Wilder Professor of Computer Science at Duke University and vice president for research at Akamai Technologies, described why slower internet speeds hurt consumers and businesses and how the system often thwarts efforts to speed up the delivery of data from computer to computer.

To illustrate the challenge, Maggs and his team downloaded the first 20 kilobytes from the 500 most popular websites in each of 103 countries—roughly 28,000 distinct websites. The medium download was 35 times slower than the time it would have taken at the speed of light.

This is nothing new, he said. Amazon.com has determined that every 1/10th of a second—a seemingly trivial amount of time—that customers are waiting for a website to load accounts for the loss of 1 percent of revenue.

“Whether we say we do or not or whether [we]perceive it or not, people browsing interactive web pages get frustrated and quit if the results aren’t fast,” he said.

Maggs said there are both technical and economic challenges related to the speed of data transmission. On the economic side, Internet Service Providers promote bandwidths as high as 500 megabits per second, but ignore “latency,” or how many milliseconds it takes data to travel between its source and destination.

On the technical side, internet traffic travels on optical fiber cables, which are 1.5 times slower than the speed of light in a vacuum. More vexing, however, is the way the internet is designed as a “network of networks,” as Maggs dubbed it. This is because internet protocols were designed to allow independent organizations to run their own networks and to route traffic as they see fit, he said.

In an experiment, he sent data from one machine in Warsaw, Poland, to another just across the city. It arrived, but not before it took a 660-mile detour through Frankfurt, Germany.

“There are thousands of internet service providers around the world all running networks. Each one is self-contained, but if it ever needs to talk to the rest of the world, there has to be a place where two networks peer and exchange traffic,” he said. “Although these two networks had a presence in Warsaw, they didn’t actually have a connection in Warsaw” and needed to make the “exchange” through Germany.

To get around these problems, Maggs suggested that networks work together more closely and to create incentives for faster delivery—perhaps through a separate subscription rate to those willing to pay for it. If the number of steps computers have to go through to establish a connection could be lowered, speeds could improve.

Another option, Maggs said, is the use of microwave towers like the system that high-frequency traders have built between Chicago and New York. The latest network is within 95 percent of the speed of light, and a second one is being considered between Chicago and Seattle, where a trans-oceanic cable runs to Tokyo.

Maggs said his research showed a system like it could be established among the 120 largest U.S. cities, on 3,000 existing towers. It would have limited capacity, however; thus would only be useful for people who would pay a premium—gamers, content providers, and content delivery networks, for example.

“You’d have to still bundle this with traditional service and you’d have to mediate with traffic that goes over the fast network versus the traditional network,” he said.

But by “shaving latency off interactions with their users, they’d make more profit.”

Maggs’ appearance was part of the Clavius Distinguished Lecture series.

Their goal was to emphasize the dangers associated with the unrestricted Web, especially pornography and gender mixing. Rabbinic leaders discussed the internet’s encroachment on ultra-Orthodox Jewish values in an age they dubbed “a crisis of emune (faith).”

Nearly five years later, Ayala Fader, Ph.D., an associate professor of anthropology, sees this challenge in the ultra-Orthodox community as a critical moment of cultural and religious change. She said the internet has amplified existing tensions among the ultra-Orthodox. There is a sense that more and more ultra-Orthodox Jews are leaving their communities or losing faith, but continuing to practice publicly— living what they call “double lives.”

As a result, Fader said, the internet has become a nexus for these concerns, with leadership trying to control its use and those living double lives using it as a lifeline to connect with other religious doubters.

“I don’t know if so many more people are leaving than a decade earlier or if they’re just louder, more public, and more well-organized, but I think there’s a sense in the communities that this is a moment when they need to start thinking about how they’re going to move into the 21st century,” said Fader, author of Mitzvah Girls: Bringing Up the Next Generation of Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn (Princeton University Press, 2009)

Fader has been awarded a $50,400 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities for her forthcoming book, Double Life: Faith, Doubt and the internet, which examines the community’s contemporary struggle to define authentic ultra-Orthodoxy.

“I was thrilled to be awarded the fellowship. It will give me sustained time to just focus on writing the book,” said Fader, who has been conducting research on this topic since 2013.

Fader first began the project by connecting with ultra-Orthodox Jews who had, during the mid-2000s, been active on the J-blogosphere, a Jewish blogging community. After interviewing members of various forums and Jewish blogging sites, she learned that the internet gave ultra-Orthodox Jews living double lives an opportunity to explore secular knowledge and activities, like going out together, and learning to bicycle and ski. It also provided a space where they could anonymously critique their communities and their rabbinic leadership.

“There are a lot of reasons that led people to lose faith in the kind of ultra-Orthodoxy they were living,” said Fader, who noted that the community had adapted to other types of technologies in the past—from newspapers and radio to television and books—without as much difficulty. “The internet is problematic because people need to use it for business. You can’t throw out the internet and you can’t keep it out. It’s also easily accessed, privately.”

Watch Ayala Fader discuss the ultra-Orthodox community’s response to “kosher” cellphones. 

To better influence their constituency to resist the lure of the internet, many rabbinic leaders are working closely with ultra-Orthodox schools.

“If you don’t agree to sign a contract when your children begin school [pledging]that you won’t have the internet at home, [and]that you won’t have a smartphone, then your kids can be denied access to school,” said Fader. “There are people who have left their communities—not because they didn’t have access to smartphones but because they didn’t feel they could continue to live these kinds of double lives.”

In recent years, there have been a few compromises allowing for some use. In 2013, the cell phone company Rami Levy Communications began selling “kosher smartphones” or rabbi-approved mobile phones that filter and block content considered immoral. Samsung, one of the world’s largest tech companies, debuted its first kosher smartphone specifically for ultra-Orthodox users last year.

Yet, despite efforts to permit some access to the Web, there is still a push to position smartphones as dangerous or contaminating objects, said Fader.

“There is a movement to not carry smartphones out in public, and an effort by educators in particular to create a sense of shame in having them,” said Fader.

She said the constant tug of war between the internet and religion isn’t limited to the ultra-Orthodox faith. It exists in many insular religious communities around the world.

“For religious communities that attempt to control their members’ access to the wider world, the internet is both an incredible tool and a dangerous piece of technology,” she said.