I’ve been asked about how we choose our research topics. Intuition, I answer. Lot of discussion among the team and intuition. How did we choose the case studies for the research on agricultural value chains? Here, the team assembled a lot of data too.
We have worse postal services in our region. They do not have hard budget constraints, so they keep going. But the future looks bleak for those that do have hard budget constraints: Mail volume has plummeted with the rise of e-mail, electronic bill-paying and a Web that makes everything from fashion catalogs to news instantly available. The system will handle an estimated 167 billion pieces of mail this fiscal year, down 22 percent from five years ago. It’s difficult to imagine that trend reversing, and pessimistic projections suggest that volume could plunge to 118 billion pieces by 2020.
The end game in m health: medical monitors implanted in the body, wirelessly connected to doctors and nurses who can take remedial action. Not really something researched in Nuwan Waidyanatha’s m health projects, but still worth keeping an eye on: “If the technology delivers as promised,” Mr. Casey says, “then we believe that’s when we’ll move from sensors on people diagnosed with a disease to literally everybody.” Professor Rogers is a co-founder of MC10, an electronics company in Cambridge, Mass., that is aiming to turn the epidermal monitor prototype into a commercial product in 2013.
In our current emergency communication research aiming to enable interoperability between Freedom Fone and the Sahana Disaster Management System for disseminating Common Alerting Protocol messages and receiving Situational Reports over voice channels, we came a cross the situation where the 2N UMTS modem license had silently expired. During our silent-test this weekend, in preparation for a drill this week, we noticed that the license had abruptly expired. Unaware of the licensing dependency, the Sarvodaya Hazard Information Hub staff were scratching their heads trying to figure out what had happened. Even though the problem was identified, given that it is the weekend, getting any immediate support from the vendor is questionable. This project: FF4EDXL follows from LIRNEasia’s HazInfo and Biosurveillance research.
Our world is still overwhelmingly populated by feature phones, but it won’t be long before smartphones take over (only question is when). Just yesterday we were discussing how GPS enabled smartphones, if given to government officials or even private sector people, can overcome the problem of them actually going to the places they’re supposed to go to (the example was the agriculture extension officer who does not go to the actual place where the plants are, but gives instructions from the office or the road). So here’s an update on the smartphone wars: The competition is only going to grow more heated. Android doesn’t just use different carriers, different manufacturers, and different software than the iPhone; it represents a different vision for the entire mobile industry. Apple exerts complete control over the iPhone.
One of the most significant ICT applications in the world is being pioneered in India: the Unique Identifier. “What we are creating is as important as a road,” said Nandan M. Nilekani, the billionaire software mogul whom the government has tapped to create India’s identity database. “It is a road that in some sense connects every individual to the state.” For its proponents, the 12-digit ID is an ingenious solution to a particularly bedeviling problem.