The smallholder quality penalty, defined below, is the key concept emerging out of the agriculture supply chains work conducted by LIRNEasia in 2010-12: The Smallholder Quality Penalty is the financial penalty on the market price imposed on the smallholder by the first-handler (mostly a collector) due to the uncertainty of produce quality. This allows the first-handler to offset potential losses due to the perception of lower quality when selling to the next handler downstream. Thus the SQP exists in most transactions in supply chains that involve smallholders. SQP is based on perception and maybe partly justified. Smallholders are often resource-constrained and are unable to make the investments necessary to ensure quality.
An unexpected benefit of our visit to Islamabad was learning that a new academic publication had been launched in December 2011 by the Bangladesh Institute for ICT in Development and the University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh. The working papers are listed below: * Bottom of the Pyramid Expenditure Patterns on Mobile Phone Services in Selected Emerging Asian Countries by Aileen Agüero and Harsha de Silva * Mobile banking: Overview of Regulatory Framework in Emerging Markets by Rasheda Sultana * Factors Affecting e-Government Assimilation in Developing Countries by Boni Pudjianto and Zo Hangjung * Inclusive Development through e-Governance: Political Economy of e-Government Projects in Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, and Kerala in India by Rajendra Kumar * New Media, Knowledge Acquisition and Participatory Governance in Rural Bangladesh by Jude William Genilo and Marium Akther * e-Krishok: A Campaign to Promote Agricultural Information and Services through ICT by Shahid Uddin Akbar, Parvez Mohd. Asheque, Shariful Islam Four out of six of the papers came from LIRNEasia/CPRsouth. The first is authored by Aileen Aguero (of DIRSI, worked up during her time at LIRNEasia) and Consultant Lead Economist Harsha de Silva. The second, third and fourth papers are from CPRsouth4.
On July 4th, we were pleased to be able to share some of our research and explore areas of common interest with colleagues at LUMS, thanks to the kind invitation of Vice Chancellor Adil Najam. The slides we used to initiate the discussion are here. But they do not fairly depict the content of the conversation. Here is how it was reported on the LUMS website. Two representatives of LIRNEasia, a think tank that researches information and communications technology (ICT) across Asia, spoke at the LUMS Faculty Lounge on July 4, 2012 for an event organised by the Internet and Society Initiative.
We were flattered to see the highest authority for telecom in India use an image from our Teleuse@BOP research, unacknowledged, on the front page of its website. The image appears to have been taken from a post from our partner on this project, Nalaka Gunawardene. We have more good images. We’d happy to share them with an entity as prestigious as the DoT. Just ask.
LIRNEasia and the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority co-hosted an event titled “What can telecommunications do for Agriculture?” in Islamabad on 3rd July 2012. The event was intended to stimulate cross-sectoral conversations between the telecommunications and agriculture sectors in Pakistan and was the first event of its kind in Pakistan. The presentations from the event are given below: Welcome note by Dr Muhammad Yaseen, Chairman PTA Session 1: Information needs and ICT access by the poor Dr. Rohan Samarajiva, LIRNEasia How the poor use ICTs: Findings from multi-country studies of Teleuse at the Bottom of the Pyramid Ms.
Interesting, but perhaps not fully accurate, first read of the emerging cloud-centric model from the NYT. We are seeing a new business ecosystem with all sorts of mobile and cloud-connected devices. Each is a powerful computer, with connections to a nearly infinite amount of data storage and processing in the cloud. “We’re entering this era where consumer electronics is the hardware, and the software and the cloud,” said Matt Hershenson, Google’s hardware director. His view increasingly holds for business computing, too.
I was pleased to read that detection devices for nuclear hazards are to be set up in Sri Lanka, even if it was from a foreign publication. I have been one of the few to point out that Sri Lanka lives in the shadow of nuclear reactors, while getting none of the benefits. This announcement indicates that someone in authority is paying attention. Following the request of AEA, International Atomic Energy Authority (IAEA) decided to help Sri Lanka set up seven early warning detectors and provide equipment worth 72,000 Euros, said Warnakulasuriya. “With nuclear leakage at Fukushima in Japan last year the region felt the need for nuclear disaster warning systems.
Al Jazeera reports that a lot of server farms got knocked out by bad weather in the US. Instead of making us rethink the cloud, this suggests that we need more redundancy, preferably with server farms on the other side of the world. Sean Ludwig, from VentureBeat, wrote in a blog post, “The outage underscores the vulnerabilities of depending on the public cloud versus using your own data centers.” The outages on Amazon’s cloud server come two weeks after a similar incident when a number of popular websites hosted by Amazon went down. A report into the incident by Amazon found that a configuration error was made during a routine upgrade.
WSJ has a piece on big data. “It’s not unlike a microscope—taking something you can’t see and bringing it into the scale of perception,” Aaron Koblin, 30, told me at lunch in Google’s San Francisco office. He’s head of the company’s Data Arts Team. Mr. Koblin’s work sits right on the line between art and information.
Google is entering the cloud services market. Cloud computing just got a lot bigger. On Thursday Google announced that it would offer computing as a service accessible over the Internet, much like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Rackspace and others. Google said its prices would be about 50 percent below those of current market rates. Urs Hölzle, the Google senior vice president for technical infrastructure, said Google was drawing off its own long history of managing millions of servers around the world.
Earlier this month, I visited Papua New Guinea, the biggest country in the Pacific with a population of over six million and having 462,840 square km of land.
PNG is an amazing and culturally diverse place on earth. It is estimated that more th...
Earlier this month, I visited Papua New Guinea, the biggest country in the Pacific with a population of over six million and having 462,840 square km of land.
PNG is an amazing and culturally diverse place on earth. It is estimated that more th...
LIRNEasia and the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority are jointly organizing an event on the role of telecommunications in agriculture at the Serena Hotel in Islamabad on 3rd July 2012. The event aims to increase cross-sectoral conversations and work in promoting the use of ICT applications in agriculture. LIRNEasaia is being represented by our CEO Rohan Samarajiva and research managers Sriganesh Lokanathan and Nilusha Kapugama More details to follow later.
The Sri Lanka Medical Association is organizing a Symposium on eHealth Opportunities and Challenges in Sri Lanka, July 6th 2012 at BMICH, Colombo. Senior Research Fellow Nuwan Waidyanatha is one of the invited speakers at the session on e health initiatives: Current e health initiative in Sri Lanka 1.15 am eIMMR Dr N.C. Kariyawasam, MBBS, MSc Medical Officer (Health Informatics) Ministry of Health & Dr B.
One of the things that LIRNEasia tries to do in the region is to maintain good working relationships where possible with high-quality universities in the region. The Lahore University of Management Science (LUMS) has been on our radar from the start (with one of its faculty Dr Joseph Wilson working with us as a Research Fellow from the start). However, the return to Pakistan of Professor Adil Najam to assume duties as the Vice Chancellor of LUMS resulted in the interest moving up a level. Therefore we took the opportunity afforded by our agricultural applications event in Islamabad to arrange a visit. It is our hope that this will result in at the minimum a greater involvement by LUMS in CPRsouth and hopefully some joint proposal writing to support research.
The ITU homepage announces the death of former Secretary General (1983-89) Richard Butler. Dick Butler had many achievements to his credit, the most well known being the successful outcome of the crucial and difficult World Administrative Telephone and Telegraph Conference (WATTC) held in Melbourne in 1988 at which new rules governing the conduct of international telecommunications services were approved in a fraught environment. There is value in looking at that achievement today, especially in light of the upcoming WCIT in Dubai, that will seek to revisit the International Telecommunication Regulations adopted in Melbourne during Dick Butler’s watch. What we’d like to emphasize is that Dick Butler was a forward looking man. Having been in the ITU for over two decades prior to becoming Secretary General, he could have acted to reinforce the existing dysfunctional status quo.