Every where Government agencies are territorial and fear losing their budgets and ability to stand ground. Therefore, choose to work as a silo with less lateral integration. Such structures are ineffective and lead to irresponsible behaviour at the expense of causing havoc on the citizens. Time and time again we hear of the shortcomings arising from unplanned and ad-hoc procedures carried out in the presence of hazard events. The past experience being the 2012 April 11 Sumatra earthquake.
David Ebert, the second keynote speaker at the ISCRAM2012, in his talk says – “Recently, big data analytics has become the buzz in international news and corporate campaigns as the technology to change the future. However, while necessary in our modern data deluge of over one zetabyte of digital data, the common big data analytics approach tends to utilize only computational power and algorithms to turn data into information and then knowledge and provide an answer to the responder or decision maker using the system. In contrast, visual analytics capitalizes on the best and complimentary abilities of both components of the human-computer decision-making process through iterative, interactive visual interfaces to leverage and supplement the cognitive capabilities of the human user.” In our Real-Time Biosurveillance work, this is exactly what we did; thus, take the over 100s of records coming from each clinical facility every day, then present them to Epidemiologists using temporal and spatial data visualization methods offered by the T-Cube Web Interface. Additionally, provide them with tools to drill into and apply statistical analyses methods to look for unusual patterns in the large data set.
Francis Boon presented the LIRNEasia and Sarvodaya conducted feasibility study at the CDAC Media and Tech workshop in London.
Claude S. Fischer wrote one of the most important books on teleuse, America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940, University of California Press. (1992). I’ve owned the book for years; recommended it to many. He knows what he’s talking about.
We have been grateful for funding from the UK Department for International Development channeled through IDRC. In the speech that I quote from below, the UK Minister for Universities and Science, comes out strongly for public availability of publicly funded research. 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.
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.
Ericsson has released results of a representative sample survey (3,000 sample) of teleuse in Bangladesh. This is a rare quantitative study for the region. We hope to make a few more posts on it, hopefully after getting a hold of the full report. The Daily Star provides a summary worth reading. The trend towards internet use for social networking in urban areas of the country is growing remarkably, keeping pace with the global trend, he said.
Finally, some good news from Dhaka. Four mobile operators have cooperatively started to swap frequencies to yield a more rational arrangement. Congratulations to the regulator, the industry body and the operators. After the rearrangement process, the quality of services of the mobile operators will be better than before with reduced call drops and more efficient network, said Abu Saeed Khan, secretary general of Association of Mobile Telecom Operators of Bangladesh (AMTOB). Explaining the matter, Khan said, if you have three pieces of land in different places, you will have to make more boundaries to separate your lands from others.
First, a new medium becomes an extension of the old ways. Politician’s speeches on websites. Then gradually, new ways emerge. Internet is used for politics in ways hitherto impossible. NYT reports an interesting new way of doing politics.
According to this overview, m-money is the future. The survey, released earlier this month by the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project along with Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center, asked just over 1,000 technologists and social scientists to opine on the future of the wallet in 2020. Nearly two-thirds agreed that “cash and credit cards will have mostly disappeared” and been replaced with “smart” devices able to carry out a transaction. But a third of the survey respondents countered that consumers would fear for the security of financial transactions over a mobile device and worry about surrendering so much data about their purchasing habits. Sometimes, those with fewer options are the ones to embrace change the fastest.
Competencies for a holistic education, Sinhala (Adaptation of basic competencies in the teacher handbook for Grade 3 , Sri Lanka)
A new report on the information needs and communication patterns of smallholders as well as agricultural micro-enterprises is now available on our website. The report is based mainly on the findings of smallholder and agricultural-micro-enterprises surveys, which were carried out as part of the Teleuse@BOP4 study. Some findings from the qualitative component of Teleuse@BOP4 have also been incorporated. |Executive summary | Full Report (PDF, 1.9Mb) |
I was at dinner with some people who advise governments earlier today. One said they had identified the top four apps for government. I asked who would develop them? And who decided? Without being rude, I said that innovation is like throwing 100 things at a wall and seeing what four things stick.
It was in December 2005 that I wrote the following in an op-ed in the Daily Star: The SAT-3 cable did not increase Internet traffic from Africa, including Nigeria. Indeed, the year-on-year growth slowed in the year after the cable (71 percent in 2002 and 53 percent in 2003). In the case of Nigeria, one reason could have been delays in completing the national infrastructure necessary for full use of the cable. While the landing station was completed in December of 2001 and the cable was inaugurated in May of 2002, the traffic started flowing from Nigeria only in April 2003. Those familiar with the repeated delays in contracting the “dry” segment of the cable from Cox’s Bazaar to Chittagong are likely to see the similarities.
Theme: Can ICT benefit the small farmers? “Putting Farmers First” Chair: Mr. Vikas Nath, Associate Director, Future of the United Nations Project, Switzerland Speakers: Dr. Harsha de Silva, Member of Parliament, Consultant Lead Economist, LIRNEasia, Sri Lanka Can ICT benefit small farmers? Tackling Smallholder Quality Penalty |Presentation | Ms.
An international treaty document, the Reference Paper that is part of the Fourth Protocol to the General Agreement on Trade in Services, states that spectrum is a scarce resource. It is scarce only because (a) exclusive use of most frequencies is the norm (WiFi is an exception), and (b) the bands for which cheap equipment is manufactured are few. So the scarcity is not “natural,” it is human-created. Therefore Professor Read, as quoted in the NYT, is correct: Arguing that the nation could run out of spectrum is like saying it was going to run out of a color, says David P. Reed, one of the original architects of the Internet and a former professor of computer science and engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.