This was not a fight we were involved in, but were following with peripheral vision. For those who were in the thick of it, it must be a good day. For us too, because an open Internet benefits everyone. “Let us be clear,” the White House statement said, “online piracy is a real problem that harms the American economy, threatens jobs for significant numbers of middle class workers and hurts some of our nation’s most creative and innovative companies and entrepreneurs.” However, it added, “We will not support legislation that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet.
Conventional evaluation privileges short-term outcomes (if it gets to outcomes at all). This is unavoidable. As a teacher I used to think that the true results of my efforts would be seen five-ten-fifteen years down the road. But my university needed to know how good a teacher I was every quarter or every year, so remedial action could be taken or my good/bad teaching could be factored into my next pay raise or promotion. How my students did fifteen years later was the true test, but the time frame was wrong for what the university had to do.
The World Bank – Google collaboration seems a brilliant idea; key to its success is how national government react. But if even some cooperate . . . .
It took a little time, but a comprehensive report on the Bangkok launch of teleuse@BOP4 results has been published in the Nation (Thailand). The survey found that Thai users spent more than any other nationality on mobile phones, $93 on average compared to $50 or less elsewhere. Most of the phones they bought had radio connections, while 14 per cent had a Web browser and 5 per cent had touch-screens. Ninety-one per cent of the Thais said they’d used a mobile phone in the previous three months, up from 77 per cent in 2008. More than 90 per cent of the urban users made regular calls, compared to 80 per cent in the rural areas.
We cannot do what the Judge is asking Google, et al., to do. It’s tempting to suggest tech awareness classes for judges, but perhaps the more effective will be common sense classes: This week, a judge in New Delhi raised eyebrows when he said, according to a widely cited report by the Press Trust of India, that “like China,” India might be compelled to block certain Web sites that contained obscene or offensive material. The comments of the judge, Suresh Kait, came in response to a lawsuit, filed by a private citizen in the capital, New Delhi. The suit demands that Internet companies screen content before it is posted on sites like Facebook, Google or Yahoo, that might offend the religious sentiments of Indians.
Yesterday ICANN started receiving applications for new gTLDs with a very high hope to “discover the next big .thing”. You can also have a video
Yesterday ICANN started receiving applications for new gTLDs with a very high hope to “discover the next big .thing”. You can also have a video overview of the Next Big .Thing. This initiative of ICANN has already generated lot of interest from all...
Introducing competition in the Pacific is a challenge. With the exception of Paupa New Guinea, all the Pacific Island countries are so small and population so dispersed that telecom investors have very little interest. On top of this, these Pacific mar...
Introducing competition in the Pacific is a challenge. With the exception of Paupa New Guinea, all the Pacific Island countries are so small and population so dispersed that telecom investors have very little interest. On top of this, these Pacific mar...
According to LBO’s second write up on our teleuse results, the higher awareness of health information services in Sri Lanka can be explained by two factors: the mismatch between supply and demand in the government health-services sector and the existence since around 2000 of e Channeling, a multi-modal service that allows people to make appointments at private health facilities (and pay for them) over a mobile, over the Internet, through an intermediary at a local pharmacy and so on. I tend to give greater weight to the latter; government health services are rationed through congestion all over the world, not only in Sri Lanka. There is nothing like the service being available for awareness to rise. The study in 2011 by the LIRNEasia think tank said found that the use of mobile phones for services other than the basic voice function was still sparse among the poorest users compared with a previous survey in 2008. In Sri Lanka only six percent of users in the so-called bottom-of-the-pyramid (BOP) or poorest segment knew of banking services through mobile phones compared with 18 percent in India and 15 percent in Thailand.
Vinton Cerf, Google’s chief Internet evangelist, has challenged the U.N. report and questioned the merit of accessing Internet a human right. He said, “It is a mistake to place any particular technology in this exalted category, since over time we will end up valuing the wrong things. For example, at one time if you didn’t have a horse it was hard to make a living.
In the Pacific, as per the Doing Business 2012 report there are winners and losers. The economy that improved the most in the ease of doing business in 2010/11— with improvements in 3 or more areas of regulation measured by Doing Business— is the S...
In the Pacific, as per the Doing Business 2012 report there are winners and losers. The economy that improved the most in the ease of doing business in 2010/11— with improvements in 3 or more areas of regulation measured by Doing Business— is the Solomon Islands.
We predicted the spread the BTN model from Asia to Africa. We saw the duopoly structure in Latin America preventing its spread to that continent. We really didn’t say much about Europe, except in passing. But it looks like the issuance of a fourth license in France (we did not even know France had only three operators! How backward!
If telephony was supplied as it was in the bad old government-monopoly days, we wouldn’t have the current levels of access. It is because the service was reinvented that things changed. In the same way it is necessary to reinvent the university. The writer thinks mobile phones, especially smartphones will have something to contribute to the solution. From South Asia through much of the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa, it’d be impossible to build schools or train teachers fast enough to keep up with the “youth bulge” that has given humanity more than a billion teenagers either to nurture or tame — the difference depending largely on access to education beyond elementary grades.
For some time, I was thinking to have a PIRRC blog to share and comment on some interesting worldwide ICT news and developments with my colleagues in the Pacific. It was not urgent so I carefully placed it in my New Year resolutions basket. The basket ...