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The modern-day philosopher Thomas Kuhn theorized that scientific revolutions are only brought about by practitioners who are not already trained to think a certain way - or to use Kuhn's terminology, in keeping with a given paradigm. When people train themselves to believe something, they expect their observations to match their beliefs, and thus may fail to observe something truly revolutionary. And it is observation that is the "step one" of science.

So it was with the face of Thomas Kuhn looming largely overhead that a panel of two security architects, a noted Gartner researcher, and two risk management professionals met at the RSA Conference in San Francisco last week. Two worlds collided here, and this was one of the focal points. One side represented the existing paradigm. The revolutionaries came in suits with calculators and adjustment formulas. And Gartner's Bob Blakley literally wore a Satan suit just to make sure the fire and brimstone kept flowing.

Last week, my colleague David Strom reported on the latest annual "State of the Internet" report from content delivery network Akamai. The report showed that while Americans are finally experiencing faster average broadband speeds on a quarter-by-quarter basis, those speeds only began eclipsing those of Sweden in the second half of 2010, and still have about 40% of gap to close if it hopes to achieve par with Japan - which, at this rate, it might do in about a decade.

If Web connection speeds are, as Google has said so often in touting the performance of its Chrome Web browser, essentially a product of end user perception, then perhaps any technology that applies itself solely to improving that perception will be at least as worthy of investment, if not more so, than investing in the Internet backbone itself. That's the conclusion Akamai itself has reached in its buyout of two-year-old Web front-end optimization service Blaze.

Akamai delivers a lot of content around the globe and every quarter they look at overall trends in bandwidth and connectivity. The 2Q11 report is out now and like the last edition, you can have some fun with choosing particular states or countries and graphing their overall trends right on the home page linked above. Akamai carries a lot of the big-ticket Internet traffic across its network, ranging up to a third of overall global traffic.

Internet content hosting provider Akamai released its latest "State of the Internet" report today for the first quarter of 2011. The report shows a slight increase of 5% in total IP addresses connected to their network from last quarter and an overall increase in 20% from last year. Italy replaced Canada as the source of traffic in the top ten countries.