(This is part 2 of a two-part post; for background on the Gini coefficient see part 1.) I previously discussed use of the Gini coefficient as a way to measure income inequality (or equality, as the case may be), and promised to discuss why Howard County is noteworthy in this regard. In brief, Howard County is one of only seven counties in the US (out of 800 counties and other geographic areas) that rank in the top 5% (positions 1-40) for both median household income and income equality (as measured by the Gini coefficient): ...

(This is part 1 of a two-part post; for the conclusion see part 2.) In a previous post I discussed the concept of median income and how it avoids certain distortions inherent in mean (average) income. However median income by itself is not adequate to characterize the economic status of households in Howard County (or anywhere else for that matter). In particular, the median income just provides the “midpoint” for income, i.e., the income value for which 50% of the households make more and 50% make less; it does not address the question of how income is actually distributed among the various households. ...

This doesn’t sound good: While researching a Howard County-related blog post today I happened to follow a Google search to www.columbia-md.com (a domain controlled by General Growth Partners), and got the following message: “This Account Is No Longer Active.” I guess when your stock’s in the toilet and you’re flirting with bankruptcy you’ve got more pressing things to worry about than keeping your web sites up.

I happened to get an eMusic email a few days ago (announcing new releases in the alternative/punk category) and noticed a link to a “special offer for AT&T Mobile subscribers,” with the promise that “You could win 6 months of free AT&T mobile service.” I recently became an AT&T subscriber (when I bought an iPhone), so this sounded intriguing and I clicked on the link. It turned out to be a sweepstakes tied to a trial offer for eMusic Mobile, and isn’t even applicable to me because eMusic Mobile doesn’t work with iPhones. ...

In a previous post I investigated the question of whether those in Howard County with annual incomes of $120,000 or more truly constituted the “wealthy few” or not. (The answer: No.) Key to that investigation was the idea of median household income, as reported by the US Census Bureau in its annual Amercian Community Survey. It turns out that the ACS data provide some interesting insights into what makes Howard County special, and can help explain the nature of the conflicts that have raged over the future of Howard County in general and Columbia in particular. ...

Today I got interrupted from my Swindleeeee!!!!! blogging slumber by the news that David Pakman is leaving eMusic. I have been critical of Pakman one or two times (most notably for not getting into “social software” earlier), and I have no idea how Pakman was perceived inside eMusic by its employees. However there’s no question that Pakman was a strong and consistent voice for moving the music industry past the DRM debacle, and that he had a clear (and I think mostly correct) vision of eMusic’s target market and how best to serve it; I suspect that without him eMusic would either have failed entirely or would have been acquired and then ruined by some clueless major corporation. ...

Last night a post by local blogger Wordbones caught my eye. Based on a story in the Baltimore Sun, it discussed proposed plans for affordable housing in Columbia Town Center, housing that would be reserved for those with income of less than $80,000 (10% of total units) or those with income between $80,000 and $120,000 (another 10% of total units). Wordbones particularly noted a quote in the article from Alan Klein of the Coalition for Columbia’s Downtown: ...

For those Mozilla folks and others who’ve been following my full blog feed: I happen to live in Howard County, Maryland, between Washington DC and Baltimore.For a while now I’ve been following Howard County local bloggers but haven’t joined the conversation myself. I’ve now been prompted to write on at least one Howard County topic, and in the event I write more I’ve started a Howard County category for my blog and a corresponding feed. If you’re not interested in this stuff I suggest you consider resubscribing to just my Mozilla feed. ...

Johnathan Nightingale recently addressed a very common question, namely why Firefox doesn’t automatically accept self-signed SSL certificates as being valid. I don’t have much to add to Johnathan’s discussion of the issues with self-signed certificates, but speaking on behalf on the Mozilla Foundation I do want to address some of the comments that I’ve seen people make with regard to SSL certificates, certification authorities (CAs), and Mozilla. First, a quick refresher: To support SSL web sites need a combination of a private key kept on the server and a public key embedded with other information (most notably the server’s domain name, and also in some cases the name of the organization operating the server) in a digitally-signed document, the certificate. When a browser connects to an SSL-enabled web server the server sends its certificate to the browser. If the certificate was digitally signed by a third party certification authority known to the browser, the certificate is treated as valid and the browser proceeds to use the information in the certificate to kick off the SSL protocol. (The public key in the certificate is used in setting up SSL encryption, the domain name in the certificate is double-checked against the domain name the browser was supposedly connecting to, and for Extended Validation certificates the organizational name in the certificate is displayed in the Firefox 3 site identification button to the left of the location bar.) ...

As announced by Mitchell Baker earlier and followed up by Mark Surman, Mark will be coming on board in a month or so as the Executive Director of the Mozilla Foundation. We in the Foundation have all had a chance to speak with Mark in depth both by phone and in person at the summit in Whistler (including during a healthy-snack-fueled “Foundation road trip” up from Vancouver). I’ll let others add their own take, but I for one am very happy that Mark decided to take this opportunity to join the Mozilla Foundation and the Mozilla project. ...