When scientists publish their research, they also make the underlying data available so the results can be verified by other scientists.

At least that is how the system is supposed to work. But lately social scientists have come up against an exception that is, true to its name, huge.

It is “big data,” the vast sets of information gathered by researchers at companies like Facebook, Google and Microsoft from patterns of cellphone calls, text messages and Internet clicks by millions of users around the world. Companies often refuse to make such information public, sometimes for competitive reasons and sometimes to protect customers’ privacy. But to many scientists, the practice is an invitation to bad science, secrecy and even potential fraud.

Report.

There’s a vast market of consumers in countries like Brazil, China, India, and the Phillipines who want access to financial services like credit cards, loans, or insurance,” says Jonathan Hakim, Cignifi’s chief executive. “But while they may have jobs, and some have bank accounts, there really is no credit history for them.” One thing they do have? Mobile phones.

Cignifi has developed sophisticated modeling software that can look at usage data from consumers’ mobile phones and make predictions about who that person is and how they live. There’s no single data point —like making lots of short calls between 2 and 5 a.m. every morning —that suggests that someone is a bad credit risk. But Hakim says, “The way you use your phone is a proxy for your lifestyle. It’s not random. So we’re looking at things like the length of calls, the time of day, and the location you make them from. Also things like whether you top up [a pre-paid SIM card] regularly. We want to see how stable the patterns are. When you look at that, you can create these behavioral clusters that give you information about users’ appetite for new [financial] products, and their ability to repay a debt.”

The rally in Citi Field on Sunday was sponsored by a rabbinical group, Ichud Hakehillos Letohar Hamachane, that is linked to a software company that sells Internet filtering software to Orthodox Jews. Those in attendance were handed fliers that advertised services like a “kosher GPS App” for iPhone and Android phones, which helps users locate synagogues and kosher restaurants.

Nat Levy, 25, who traveled from Lakewood, N.J., to attend, said he frequently surfed the Web at a cafe, overseen by a local rabbi, that filtered out certain types of online content and monitored which Web sites he visited.

He said he often used the Internet to deal with customers for his company. “You get to do business the same way,” he said. “I have unlimited access, but it’s done in a kosher manner.”

Eytan Kobre, a spokesman for the event, delivered a more intense message to reporters outside the stadium. “The siren song of the Internet entices us!” he pronounced in a booming voice. “It brings out the worst of us!”

Still, Mr. Kobre confirmed that the event would be broadcast live on the Internet, via a stream available to homes and synagogues in Orthodox communities around the New York area. He said the general public would not be able to gain access, but several unauthorized streams appeared soon after the rally began.

“This is a program that intrudes on people’s lives, just like the Environmental Protection Agency or the bank regulators,” said Daniel Webster, a first-term Republican congressman from Florida who sponsored the relevant legislation.

“We’re spending $70 per person to fill this out. That’s just not cost effective,” he continued, “especially since in the end this is not a scientific survey. It’s a random survey.”

In fact, the randomness of the survey is precisely what makes the survey scientific, statistical experts say.

Each year the Census Bureau polls a representative, randomized sample of about three million American households about demographics, habits, languages spoken, occupation, housing and various other categories. The resulting numbers are released without identifying individuals, and offer current demographic portraits of even the country’s tiniest communities.

It is easy to see why the company continues to look outside its home market despite the risk of complications. Pressed by Dubai’s agile operator, du, Etisalat has seen eroding domestic profits and market share.

Meanwhile, revenues from the company’s international operations, driven by strong performance in Saudi Arabia, Nigeria and Afghanistan, grew 21 percent in the first quarter of 2012, compared with the same period last year. Etisalat’s international gains helped first-quarter total revenue rise 2 percent to 8.2 billion dirhams, or $2.23 billion, offsetting a 2.6 percent drop in domestic revenue to 6.09 billion dirhams.

In Africa, Etisalat also has operations in Sudan, Egypt and Tanzania, as well as Ivory Coast. International revenues account for about 28 percent of total sales.

In a move that will no doubt irk MTN and Vodacom, Knott-Craig says he wants the Independent Communications Authority of SA (Icasa) to drop the rates even further beyond the 40c/minute they will reach in March 2013.

“To Icasa, I say: ‘Drop mobile termination rates even further, provide Cell C with asymmetrical rates to help us achieve the scalability we need to compete even more fiercely with the large incumbents, and we will surprise you and them with our response.’”

Report.

Today, after just eight years in existence, Facebook now has more than 750 million users all by itself. At that astonishing rate of growth, the company is on track to accomplish much more than just a multibillion-dollar IPO. Facebook is on the cusp of becoming a medium unto itself—more akin to television as a whole than a single network, and more like the entire web than just one online destination. The evidence for that transformation goes well beyond the sheer number of users. Many businesses now bypass the traditional web altogether, limiting their online presence to Facebook. Already the platform has spawned one billion-dollar company (the social gaming giant Zynga) and swallowed another (the photo network Instagram). The average time people spend on the site has increased from four and a half hours per month in 2009 to nearly seven hours—more than twice that of any major web competitor.

The results were far more dramatic. Well after the financial help and hand-holding had stopped, the families of those who had been randomly chosen for the BRAC programme were eating 15% more, earning 20% more each month and skipping fewer meals than people in a comparison group. They were also saving a lot. The effects were so large and persistent that they could not be attributed to the direct effects of the grants: people could not have sold enough milk, eggs or meat to explain the income gains. Nor were they simply selling the assets (although some did).

FOR the past decade, technical support has been in the vanguard of globalisation. With the costs of intercontinental communication shrivelling to virtually nothing, phone and online customer services have migrated to wherever they can be managed most efficiently and cheaply. India blazed the trail, building a $5 billion outsourcing business on helping Westerners solve high-tech niggles.

Recently, the Philippines has taken over as the world’s call-centre hotspot, offering comparable wage costs to India, with the added benefit—at least to North American ears—of a Yankee drawl. But even as half a million Filipino customer-service representatives urge callers to have a nice day, they may want to peer over their shoulders.

Some of the biggest brands in software, consumer electronics and telecoms have now found a workforce offering expert advice at a fraction of the price of even the cheapest developing nation, who also speak the same language as their customers, and not just in the purely linguistic sense. Because it is their customers themselves.

The Library of Congress will award the $1 million John W. Kluge Prize for lifetime intellectual achievement in the humanities and social sciences to Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who had a distinguished international career as a scholar before twice being elected president of Brazil. An official announcement will be made in Washington on Monday, with an awards ceremony there on July 10.

Report.

European lawmakers on Thursday approved a plan to extend and lower the Continent’s limits on mobile phone roaming charges paid by consumers for another five years, and added the first controls on mobile Internet use.

In addition to the caps, the legislation adopted by the European Parliament will allow E.U. residents to buy roaming services from a carrier besides their regular operator beginning in 2014, an attempt to create competition in the market that will lower prices and supplant the need for price controls.

Report.

He has written a recent piece in the Boston Review, not based on his own research, but on a range of work, including one of his students.

People using the Internet, most studies show, increase the volume of their meaningful social contacts. E-communications do not generally replace in-person contact. True, serious introverts go online to avoid seeing people, but extroverts go online to see people more often. People use new media largely to enhance their existing relationships—say, by sending pictures to grandma—although a forthcoming study shows that many more Americans are meeting life partners online. Internet dating is especially fruitful for Americans who may face problems finding mates, such as gays and older women. Finally, people tell researchers that electronic media have enriched their personal relationships.

People typically turn new technologies into devices for doing what they have always wanted to do. And people like to stay in touch. A century ago, Americans, especially women, turned two new technologies marketed for other purposes, the telephone and automobile, into “technologies of sociability.” Developers of the Internet meant it to be a tool for the military and for scholars, and only a few imagined it might even serve business. Now users have made the Internet a largely social technology. (Not all new technologies develop this way; books and television are other, asocial stories.)

Worth a read, asocially.

Therefore, it is pleasing to be able to report that LIRNEasia has insisted on making its publicly funded research, publicly available, with almost no exceptions.

Our starting point is very simple. The Coalition is committed to the principle of public access to publicly-funded research results. That is where both technology and contemporary culture are taking us. It is how we can maximise the value and impact generated by our excellent research base. As taxpayers put their money towards intellectual enquiry, they cannot be barred from then accessing it. They should not be kept outside with their noses pressed to the window – whilst, inside, the academic community produces research in an exclusive space. The Government believes that published research material which has been publicly financed should be publicly accessible – and that principle goes well beyond the academic community.

A short piece I wrote on my own time (IDRC is subject to Canadian government restrictions against any expenditures of Canadian funds in/for Myanmar) was just published in English in the Myanmar Times. I am hopeful the Bamar translation will also be published.

The text is below:

In 2010, I worked on a section of an ITU report about information and communication technologies in the least developed countries (ITU, 2011). Analyzing the countries that were at the bottom of the league tables in telecom, I found to my unhappiness that Burma was one before the last in mobile telephony. Hearing that N Korea was reaching 1 million active connections by end 2011, I checked the data again. Now Myanmar is last, other than for St Helena, a UK colony with a population of 5,000, which does not seem to have any mobiles.

Figure 1: Countries with lowest mobile SIMs/100 people,

Source: ITU/ICT Indicators Database, 2011.

It is not that N Korea has more mobiles than Myanmar, but that as a proportion of the population it is performing better, as a result of the rapid increase in connections driven by a foreign-owned private operator issued a license in 2008. Myanmar has had mobiles for longer, but according to data reported to the International Telecom Union by the government, the government-owned operator’s progress has been slow, compared to other low-performing countries that have not reformed their sectors.

Table 1: Total mobile connections and growth rates among the countries with lowest penetration

Source: ITU/ICT Indicators Database, 2011.
Notes: CAGR stands for Compound Annual Growth Rate, the best indicator of growth over time. The right-most column shows the percentage increase from 2009 to 2010.

There is no doubt that some of the data may not be accurate (whenever one sees numbers nicely rounded to thousands, one questions their veracity). It is the duty of the relevant country authorities to report the most current and accurate data to the ITU. In the case of Myanmar the 2009 number has been supplied by the Ministry of Posts and Telecom, while the 2010 number is an ITU estimate, which explains the round figure for 2010 and not for previous years. It would not be fair to use data from the Ministry only for Myanmar, but even if one tries, there are problems. The Ministry reports data by project not by aggregate connections; and the problems of rounded numbers persists.

But let us assume that there may be more mobiles in Myanmar than the ITU reports. Even then, it can, at most, overtake N. Korea and regain its old place at second (or third, counting St Helena) from the bottom. Is this something worth debating? The real challenge is to vault out of the Bottom Ten altogether, and give the people of Myanmar electronic connectivity on par with neighboring countries.

To achieve this goal, Myanmar has an advantage.

Late-starter advantage

Starting late means that most of the mistakes have been made, by others. In the world of policy design, we spend the most effort working around previous mistakes. For example, Thailand’s recent effort to develop its ICT sector has been bedeviled by the existence of concession contracts from a previous time. A green field is much easier to work with.

So, if the government wants to take Myanmar out of the Bottom Ten, what should it do? This is not the place for detail, but here are five key actions that must be taken at the outset:
• Build a national open-access fiber backbone as a Public Private Partnership
• Conduct an assessment of spectrum use and availability, especially for 3G and 4G technologies
• Initiate action to refarm or reassign frequencies if valuable frequencies have been assigned to low-value uses (it is most likely that the military are using frequencies across the spectrum)
• Design a technology-neutral access network license system
• Design and implement a clear market entry/exit policy modeled on Pakistan’s 2003 policies
In all these cases, the government should insist on solutions that are appropriate for developing country contexts and avoid the wholesale importation of policies developed and implemented in advanced market economies (Samarajiva & Zainudeen, 2008). International consultants will be required, but they should be carefully managed and coordinated so that the overall scheme is coherent and suits the local circumstances.

Managing the policy actions will require the establishment of a policy cell within a strong Ministry, preferably Finance and Planning. Most, if not all, of the present employees of Ministry of Posts and Telecom (14,770) should be moved into the national backhaul network PPP.

A sector specific regulatory authority will be needed. The first policy actions can be taken in parallel with the design and planning of the regulatory body.

Getting the architecture right

The green-field advantage will be lost if the overall architecture is not right, if the different policy actions do not cohere. For example, Timor Leste had green-field advantage, but wasted it by giving a long-term monopoly concession to Portugal Telecom. Today, Timor Leste is a telecom backwater, even if it is not in the Bottom Ten.

One way to get the basic elements of the architecture right is to learn from the experience of China’s engagement with the World Bank as it emerged from decades of closed-economy policies (Bottelier, 2006). Engaging with an entity such as the World Bank, rather than a specific country or company, opens up access to a range of lessons on telecom reforms: many successes, but some failures as well. The lessons are more important than the money.

I will illustrate with one failure and one success.

Since the late 1990s, the World Bank and its associated experts (e.g., Wellenius, 2000) promoted universal service funds as effective tools to bring the benefits of connectivity to the poor. At the time, this was an attractive solution and one that was superior to the previous practice of imposing universal service obligations on telecom operators. While significant benefits were gained, the instrument did not perform as well as expected, with more than USD 8 billion lying unspent in universal service accounts worldwide (Somasekhar, 2010).

The World Bank Independent Evaluation Group (2011, para 4.28), upon reviewing experience in multiple countries over five years, conceded that it failed to live up to the original promise:
Equity and integration of marginalized groups have been more effectively supported by Bank support for ICT policy and sector reform than by operations specifically designed to achieve these goals. ICT operations that supported reforms to introduce competition into the sector, when successful in supporting those reforms, have had significant impact, especially in access to cellular telephony services. This increase in overall access has had a spill-over effect of providing access to the underserved. Lower tariffs (especially in cellular telephony), falling handset prices, and the expansion of prepaid cellular services are all channels that facilitate access by the poor. One indicator of the poor becoming part of the customer base of cellular telephony providers is the monthly average revenue per user (ARPU), which declined from about $20 in 2002 to about $5 in 2010 in developing countries.
The success was in reforms to introduce competition to the telecom sector, as referred to above. Not only did these reforms bring the benefits of electronic connectivity to the poor, they paid back the costs of reforms many fold.

I was personally involved in managing aspects of telecom reforms for the government of Sri Lanka, funded by credits from the World Bank (Samarajiva, 2000, 2001; Samarajiva & Zainudeen, 2008). The total expenditures could not have exceeded USD 15-20 million. In 2010 alone, the government of Sri Lanka took in USD 122 million as revenues from the partially privatized telecom industry (Rajapaksa, 2011). Today, Sri Lanka is at the forefront of ICT developments in South Asia (behind only the Maldives in mobile connectivity), with almost universal access to voice telephony at some of the lowest prices in the world, and making good progress on broadband connectivity as well.

References
Bottelier, Pieter (2006). China and the World Bank: How a partnership was built. Stanford Center for International Development, Working Paper 277. http://www.stanford.edu/group/siepr/cgi-bin/siepr/?q=system/files/shared/pubs/papers/pdf/SCID277.pdf
ITU (2011). The role of ICT in advancing growth in least developed countries: Trends, challenges and opportunities. Geneva: ITU. http://www.itu.int/ITU-D/ldc/turkey/docs/The_Role_of_ICT_in_Advancing_Growth_in_LDCs_Trends_Challenges_and_Opportunities.pdf ).
Laurence, Jeremy (2011, November 21). Secretive N. Korea opens up to cellphones, Reuters. http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/11/21/uk-korea-north-cellphone-idUSLNE7AK01C20111121
Rajapaksa, Mahinda (2011, November 21). Fiscal management report 2012. http://www.treasury.gov.lk/depts/fpd/reports/fmr/2012/fmr2012-eng.pdf
Samarajiva, Rohan & Zainudeen, Ayesha (2008). ICT infrastructure in emerging Asia: Policy and regulatory roadblocks, New Delhi & Ottawa: Sage & IDRC. http://www.idrc.ca/en/ev-117916-201-1-DO_TOPIC.html
Samarajiva, Rohan (2000). The role of competition in institutional reform of telecommunications: Lessons from Sri Lanka, Telecommunications Policy, 24(8/9): 699-717. http://www.comunica.org/samarajiva.html
Samarajiva, Rohan (2001). Sri Lanka’s telecom revolution. OECD Observer (February 1). http://www.oecdobserver.org/news/fullstory.php/aid/487.html
Somasekhar, M. (2010). Pak ahead of India in use of Universal Service Funds, Hindu Businessline, http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/todays-paper/tp-info-tech/article991070.ece?ref=archive
Wellenius, Bjorn (2000). Extending Telecommunications beyond the market: Toward universal service in competitive environments. Public Policy Journal, Issue 206. http://rru.worldbank.org/PublicPolicyJournal/Summary.aspx?id=206
World Bank Independent Evaluation Group (2011). Capturing technology for development. http://ieg.worldbankgroup.org/content/ieg/en/home/reports/ict.html

The Pirates’ insight is that the Internet is both message and medium. Young Germans, who spend large amounts of time online, care deeply about government attempts to regulate or monitor their activity; at the same time, the Internet offers a way for the party to completely upend German politics.

Using a software package they call Liquid Feedback, the Pirates are able to create a continuous, real-time political forum in which every member has equal input on party decisions, 24 hours a day. It’s more than just a gimmicky Web forum, though: complex algorithms track member input and generate instantaneous collective decisions.

Of course, on some level Liquid Feedback is a gimmick, an effort to get young people interested and involved in the humdrum of German politics, outside the campaign season and even off line. Whatever it is, it works: late last month some 1,300 members trekked to the small northern city of Neumünster to elect a new executive board.

¶