With foreign journalists barred from what is one of the world’s most closed states, much of the worldwide media coverage is coming from exiled newshounds in countries such as Thailand and India — and their clandestine contacts on the inside. Technology ranging from the latest Internet gizmo to satellite uplinks to camera phones are ensuring pictures of the massed marches of monks and civilians and the response by security forces is on TV screens around the world in hours. The contrast to Myanmar’s last major uprising, in 1988, could not be more stark. Then, as many as 3,000 people were killed when soldiers opened fire on the crowds but it took days for the news — let alone pictures or video footage — to emerge. “The difference is night and day,” said Dominic Faulder, a Bangkok-based British reporter during the 1988 uprising.
Paper titled ‘Wireless Mesh Networking as a means of connecting rural communities: advantages, constrains and challenges – an analysis based on a case study from rural Sri Lanka’ co-authored by Chanuka Wattegama (LIRNEasia) and Rehana Wijesinghe (Enterprise Technology) has been accepted to be presented at the Wireless World Research Forum Meeting to be held 5-7 November, Chennai, India. The objectives of this paper are to discuss the appropriateness of Wireless Mesh Networking in a rural environment in empowering the community, the design and implementation challenges and how they were addressed, related policy issues including the unlicensing of 2.4 GHz and 5.1 GHz bands and explore the possibilities of replicating the Mahavilachchiya model. WWRF (http://www.
BY VERONICA S. CUSI, Businessworld THE PHILIPPINES was the second fastest-growing market for broadband worldwide in 2006, according to a study by UK-based research and consultancy firm Ovum. This was primarily due, however, to the fact that broadband is just taking off in the country, and Ovum said growth could be significantly higher if regulators allow more competition that would lead to cheaper services. Greece took the top spot in the study, and the other countries in the top ten list were Indonesia, India, Ukraine, Ireland, Thailand, Vietnam, Russia and Turkey. Total broadband growth in the Philippines from 2005 to 2006 was at 157% while Greece’s was 168%, Datamonitor affiliate Ovum said.
LANKA BUSINESS ONLINE – LBO “We hope to have 100 percent population coverage within the next 12 months, from 90 percent we have now,” Wijayasuriya said. “About 60 percent of our 450 million dollar investment pipeline for the next two-years will go into mobile, the rest into new areas like WiMax, cable TV, fixed-line telephones and grow our Internet business,” Wijayasuriya said. Powered by ScribeFire.
Asia Times Online Most Internet accounts in Myanmar are designed to provide access only to the limited Myanmar intranet, and the authorities block access to popular e-mail services such as Gmail and Hotmail. According to the OpenNet Initiative (ONI), a joint research project on Internet censorship issues headed by Harvard University, Myanmar’s Internet-censorship regime as of 2005 was among the “most extensive” in the world. The research noted that the Myanmar government “maintains the capability to conduct surveillance of communication methods such as e-mail, and to block users from viewing websites of political opposition groups and organizations working for democratic change in Burma”. An ONI-conducted survey of websites containing material known to be sensitive to the regime found in 2005 that 84% of the pages they tested were blocked. The regime also maintained an 85% filtration rate of well-known e-mail service providers, in line with, as ONI put it, the government’s “well-documented efforts to monitor communication by its citizens and to control political dissent and opposition movements”.
Computer enthusiasts in the developed world will soon be able to get their hands on the so-called “$100 laptop”. The organisation behind the project has launched the “give one, get one” scheme that will allow US residents to purchase two laptops for $399 (£198). One laptop will be sent to the buyer whilst a child in the developing world will receive the second machine. The G1G1 scheme, as it is known, will offer the laptops for just two weeks, starting on the 12 November. The offer to the general public comes after the project’s founder admitted that concrete orders from the governments of developing nations had not always followed verbal agreements.
TelecomTV – TelecomTV One – News The problem with this view is that Google has, apparently, already tried and failed several times to get a satisfactory price on capacity from existing trans-Pacific cable providers. The company certainly understands the unit costs of fibre networks as it already owns such infrastructure in the continental United States and, as the world’s Internet leviathan, is reportedly frustrated that it can’t get a decent price on the trans-Pacific route – although that is hardly surprising given that most of the capacity on such pathways is controlled by the very Tier 1 telcos that regard Google as a freeloader and undeserving beneficiary of much of the value of the Internet economy. Google doesn’t want to build a cable to sell bandwidth to third parties (although that could be a natural consequence and corollary of its plans), but because, as a voracious generator and recipient of Internet traffic, it wants to control its own destiny . And as our Friday report indicates, Google doesn’t want to build the cable unilaterally. Rather it would much prefer to share the price of construction and deployment with consortium partners so it can gain access to a fibre pair on […]
A member of the Presidential Commission on the Tsunami has written an informative article on floods, dam breaches and the lack of warning about them. Twenty one years after Kantale, 2.5 years after the tsunami, 1.5 years after we handed over our extensive report on dam safety to the Disaster Management Center, more sensible writing on the subject. The analysis is done, the remedies known, now is the time for implementation.
Software That Fills a Cellphone Gap – New York Times Rural cellularization may not sound like much, but Mr. Bose is a follower of Clayton M. Christensen, the management guru, who also happens to serve on Vanu’s board. Mr. Christensen told him that the best place to start a new business is where there isn’t yet an established market.
Chanuka Wattegama who authored the primer on the use of ICTs in disaster mitigation for the UNDP looks at the responses of littoral nations from South Africa to Thailand to the Bengkulu event. Nation special If the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami was a disaster marked by inaction, what happened on September 12, 2007 was marked by plenty of action, but a dearth of right action. It was certainly not an exemplary implementation of pre-determined and meticulously planned disaster avoidance activities. Did it make the vulnerable communities feel more secure? Or did it merely add to the confusion and chaos?
Professor Charitha Pattiaratchi, Leader of the Coastal Oceanography Group at the School of Environmental Systems Engineering of the Australian National Facility for Ocean Gliders carried out a real-time analysis of the tsunami alerts and warnings around the Indian Ocean basin following the massive Bengkulu earthquakes off the coast of southern Sumatra, Indonesia on 12 September, 2007. In his paper, Pattiarachi discusses background for tsunami generation, the present status of the tsunami warning system for the Indian Ocean, and the role of deep-water tsunameters in the detection of tsunamis on 12 September. For more details, see Indian Ocean Tsunami Warning System: Example from the 12th September 2007 Tsunami.
We assume that the failure of the Hikkaduwa tower will be examined as part of the comprehensive review the Minister has called for. The important thing is to think about warning as a chain with many links. If one link breaks, the chain breaks. The conclusions are that one must minimize the number of links and ensure that each is link is robust. It appears from the story that a link in the Galle district failed.
The Minister is to be commended for initiating the review of the alert process that went from alert to evacuation in minutes. Sri Lanka News | Online edition of Daily News – Lakehouse Newspapers Disaster Management Minister Mahinda Samarasinghe, called for an immediate review of the tsunami alert process that was put into operation on September 12 to learn from the experience and refine procedures the Disaster Management and Human Rights Ministry in a release said.He stated that the successful exercise could prove a platform for future improvements to the early warning process making it more effective and efficient.
The HazInfo paper titled “Last-Mile Hazard Warning in Sri Lanka: Performance of WorldSpace Satellite Radios for Emergency Alerts”, coauthored by Srinivasan Rangarajan, PhD (Senior Vice President Engineering, WorldSpace), Peter Anderson (Associate Professor, Simon Fraser University), Gordon Gow, PhD (Assistant Professor, University of Alberta), and Nuwan Waidyanatha (Project Manager, LIRNEasia) was accepted for oral/poster presentation at the Wireless Personal Multimedia Communications (WPMC) at The Birla Science and Technology Center in the heart of Jaipur, India, December 03 – 06, 2007. WorldSpace, a lead technology partner in the HazInfo research project, field tested 16 Addressable Radios for Emergency Alerts (AREAs) in the Sarvodaya Communities and 34 AREAs in the Sarvodaya District Centers. Although the AREA solutions lacked bi-directional communication and seemed the least effective, the AREA solution proved to be the most reliable that worked with utmost certainty and greatest efficiency even when GSM and CDMA cells were deactivated for over 2 months, at the beginning of this year, during military operations in the conflict prone North-East regions of Sri Lanka. The HazInfo research introduced a concept called “complementary redundancy”, where coupling the AREA addressable/broadcast technology with a GSM mobile phone or CDMA nomadic phone improves the overall performance (reliability and effectiveness) […]
Thailand’s response to Bengkulu was far superior to that of others. However, an excellent editorial in the Bangkok Post points out how they could do even better. The para below fits perfectly with our interest in developing a fast, reliable system for informing the media. Maybe I should send the letter we sent to the Sri Lanka DMC to Smith Dharmasarojana. Bangkok Post : General news As a first step, the Centre must immediately set up and use channels to all media within Thailand, domestic and foreign.