Interesting link between ICT network growth and LIRNEasia’s interest in applying ICTs to disaster preparedness:
BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Mobile masts signal rain showers
“The signals from mobile phone masts have been used to measure rainfall patterns in Israel, scientists report.
A team from the University of Tel Aviv analysed information routinely collected by mobile networks to make their estimates.
Writing in the journal Science, the researchers say their technique is more accurate than current methods used by meteorological services.
The scientists believe the technique can also measure snowfall, hail or fog.
“It may also be important because if you know there is heavy rainfall - you can warn about floods,” Professor Hagit Messer-Yaron, of the University of Tel Aviv, told the BBC News website. “
…
AirJaldi Summit - Dharamsala, India
Above is a link to a meeting on license-free WiFi networks, centered on what has been built at Dharmasala, the venerable Dalai Lama’s headquarters (he was denied the opportunity to visit Sri Lanka for the 2550 Buddha Jayanti, despite all the Buddhist rhetoric of our current government: http://www.buddhistchannel.tv/index.php?id=1,2155,0,0,1,0.)
But that is another story.
What they can do in Dharmasala, we cannot do in Sri Lanka. Underlines the need for revision on the obsolete 1991 Act.
LIRNEasia is sending its Lead Economist Harsha de Silva to participate on a MIT scholarship to the first ever executive course offered by the Poverty Action Lab this summer. The Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, a unit within MIT’s Department of Economics, serves as a focal point for development and poverty research based on “randomized trials”.
According to Harsha, this program can significantly contribute to WDR & LIRNEasia’s ongoing and future research projects on ICTs. For example, “In the Teleuse on Shoestring project it is difficult to measure how much the poor actually benefitted from having access to the phone. There are a number of variables like cultural background, access to other infrastructure services, level of education etc which make it difficult for us to pinpoint how much…
Tags: Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, AIDS Prevention, Asia, Bill Gates, Harsha de Silva, India, Kenya, Melinda Gates, MIT, MIT\'s Department of Economics, Poverty Action Lab, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, www.povertyactionlab.org.
http://www.cellular-news.com/story/17101_print.php
The GSM Association recently announced that its Emerging Markets Handset program is exceeding expectations: mobile operators in Bangladesh, China, India, and Russia have already purchased 12 million of its Ultra Low Cost Handsets (ULCH). But will the initiative reach the rest of the three billion unconnected peoples in emerging markets? Under current cost models that is unlikely.
The problem is that even at US$30 the ULCH’s price is too high for at least a billion of this population.
The annual gross per capita income in sub-Saharan Africa is just US$371. It is unrealistic to expect people there to spend 10% of their annual income on a mobile phone. So semiconductor vendors, such as Texas Instruments, Freescale, Philips, and Infineon are continuing to reduce the Bill-of-Materials for ULCH…
Tags: Alan Varghese, Bangladesh, cellular telephone, China, Ericsson, Freescale, GSM, GSM Association, India, Infineon, LG Electronics, Motorola, Nokia, Philips, Russia, Samsung, semiconductor, Sharedphone, software, Sony, South Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, Texas Instruments, Ultra Low Cost Handsets, USD.
Hello… how do the poor use their phones? By Frederick Noronha, Indo-Asian News Service
Dhaka, April 30 (IANS) It’s a billion dollar question: how do the poor of the planet use their mobile phones? A South Asian study conducted in India and Sri Lanka that looks at telecom users with monthly incomes of less than $100 says that over half the respondents do not even own the phone they use.
Read more at DailyIndia.com Click here to access the main Shoestrings study
by Martyn Warwick - 28/4/2006 11:57:47
http://www.telecomtv.com/news.asp?cd_id=6652&url=news.asp?cd_id=6652
Ofcom, the UK’s uber-regulator of telecoms and the media has just published its Communications Market Report for the Nations and Regions of the UK. It analyses the availability, take-up and usage of telecoms, Internet and broadcasting services and applications across the whole of the British Isles. The watchdog will use the comprehensive new report as the empirical basis for much of its ongoing and future regulation
Ofcom conducted the research late last year, and, although things have moved on a bit since, the new report provides the most up-to-date snapshot of the British telecoms, web and broadcasting landscape that we have, and it shows not only that the UK has a marked digital divide but also that it is proving difficult…
Tags: ABC, bandwidth services, Blair administration, Britain, British Isles, Broadband, broadband access, broadband infrastructure, broadband Internet access, cellular telephone, Digital TV, Ed Richards, GBP, Internet access, London, Martyn Warwick, mobile and fixed telecoms services, Northern Ireland, Ofcom, phone services, satellite TV, SMS, socio-economic group, United Kingdom, Wales.
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