A Freedom fone (FF) workshop was conducted on 28 Jan 2015 at Wayamba University of Sri Lanka. The purpose was to train the staff of Department of Export Agriculture (DOEA), who has been working with us to promote the campaign Original post is at: http://mobilizingknowledge.blogspot.ca/2015/02/a-training-workshop-on-interactive.html
I was invited to a roundtable discussion on the first part of the above question today, along with the heads of several think tanks in Colombo. Having gone out of sense of citizenship, I will summarize the key points that I made so something is realized from the expenditure of two hours that could have been otherwise spent. Be it academic research or policy-relevant research there is always an audience. What matters are that audience’s criteria of research quality. In the academic world, peer review operationalizes that albeit imperfectly.
At LIRNEasia, we do not treat interns only as cheap labor (though they are that too). They each have a mentor, a researcher who works with them and spends time with them. After all, LIRNEasia was set up by a person who loved and continues to love the learning culture of a good university but could not stomach any more faculty meetings. But as with all students, whether we have done any good through our efforts with our interns takes time to become evident and usually that time frame does not mesh with the short durations of projects and their evaluations. But in Ransimala Weerasooriya we have an exception: A Musaeus College student from Thalawathugoda has earned the University of Queensland (UQ) Centenary Scholarship for undergraduate studies in Economics, with just one a year being offered to an international student.
Just realized that we had not provided the link to the video of the talk given on January 16th. The stream.
It’s a tribute of sorts that old findings from research we no longer do gets carried in the UK mainstream media. Millions of Facebook users in developing countries do not realise that they are using the internet, suggesting that, in many people’s minds, the two are one and the same, according to a report by Quartz. In a survey of Indonesians by think tank LIRNEasia in 2012, many of the respondents talked enthusiastically about how much time they spent on Facebook, but said that they did not use the internet. An unrelated survey by Research ICT Africa discovered a similar trend, with the number of respondents saying they used Facebook much higher than those who said they used the internet.
The ICT Agency of Sri Lanka was created in 2003 as a new kind of government organization focused on implementation. Its tag line was “Ideas actioned.” We are pleased by the announcement that Chanuka Wattegama, an alumnus of LIRNEasia with work experience also in the UNDP’s regional ICT initiative, has been appointed to the Board by the new government. Chanuka was the founder editor of Sri Lanka’s leading IT magazine and has been writing about how ICT plays out at the village level for many years, including when he worked with LIRNEasia. This website carries many of his writings on this subject based on first-hand observations.
We no longer do quantitative and qualitative research on the demand-side of Internet use (except in Myanmar) but it is indeed gratifying to find work that we did in 2012 being described and even replicated at some cost in 2015. In an attempt to replicate Stork and Galpaya’s observations, Quartz commissioned surveys in Indonesia and Nigeria from Geopoll, a company that contacts respondents across the world using mobile phones. We asked people whether they had used the internet in the prior 30 days. We also asked them if they had used Facebook. Both surveys had 500 respondents each.
Modi Seeks Telecom Ministry to Speed Up Broadband Project http://t.co/Iz433L5HJ0 pic.twitter.com/6VvpnnVs65 — New Indian Express (@NewIndianXpress) February 8, 2015 When I saw the tweet, I thought Modi was going to takeover the telecom portfolio. Only to find it was a bad headline that had then crept into a misleading tweet.
Verizon is in the the news and under the gun for its use of supercookies to track mobile users. The company uses the tracking technology — alphanumerical customer codes known as supercookies — to segment its subscribers into clusters and tailor advertising pitches to them. Although Verizon allows subscribers some choices regarding the use of their information for marketing purposes, the company does not permit them to opt out of being tagged with the persistent tracking technology. Our discussion: Within the first cluster proposed by Solove, the most relevant problem is surveillance. In the context of big data, it is useful to distinguish between active and passive surveillance.
India has excluded Assam and Manipur, two of its troublesome northeastern states, from the 17,500-km long Trans-Asian Railway (TAR) network. It has proposed a Bangladesh-Myanmar railway link via Tripura and Mizoram instead, according to Times of India. Indian policy makers now want to bypass the areas in Assam and Manipur. According to the new proposal, Dhaka should be connected to Jawahar Nagar in north Tripura, which is south of Mahisasan from where new lines will be laid to proceed towards Sairang in Mizoram from where it would be connected to an existing line at Ka Lay in Myanmar. “The UNESCAP plan is not final and there is room for modification.
A 24/7 news channel interviewed me about the mobile-only taxes proposed by the new government. It is not online (yet) so I cannot give a link. The last question I was asked by the interviewer was about my recommendations to the government. Here is what I said: 1. The proposal that the mobile operators should pay the 25 percent tax on voice calls currently paid by mobile users should be withdrawn.
In a world where everyone is reaching for better, faster and more feature packed mobile phones, a little known Australian company has designed and manufactured a mobile phone focusing on the bare minimum, with the elderly in mind, particularly those with mental and physical limitations. The KISA phone (KISA stands for Keeping It Simple Always), designed in consultation with community organizations such as Vision Australia and Guide Dogs Victoria, first marketed the product in August last year and is aimed at those who struggle with technology. It has been received as an excellent mobile communications solution for people with impaired vision, hearing or dexterity. This is a compact phone, light enough to be worn around the neck with a lanyard strap and can be pre-programmed with up to 10 numbers. It can receive calls from any number, just like a regular phone although it can dial out only the numbers that were preset.
Last night (4th February 2015), the TV Channel Derana invited me to participate in a debate in Sinhala on the interim budget presented by the new Minister of Finance. Here I used the case of punitive taxes on mobiles as a way of discussing the possible implications for investment in general, and for the ICT sector in particular. There was an intriguing tangential discussion on mobiles being bad per se that I will write about separately. Link to video clip in Sinhala.
One thinks that the case has been made over and over again that the connectivity made possible by ICTs is a good thing. Governments appear to act on this basis when they formulate telecom and broadband policies and sometimes even direct subsidies to encourage greater connectivity. Yet, whenever there is need for money all that falls by the wayside and Willie Sutton takes over. Willie Sutton was a famous bank robber who was asked why he robbed banks. “I rob banks because that’s where the money is,” he said.
The roiling debate on Internet governance in a post-Snowden world is not one that we participate in fully. There are only so many hours in a day. But this debate caught my eye. Someone systematically engaging Richard Hill, the theorist behind the ITU’s position at WCIT 2013. It seems to me that what most bothers the statists is that the Internet has broken up the tight controls that states used to be able to exercise over thought, expression, and access to information.
The Royal Statistics Society and the Overseas Development Institute had organized a well-attended public discussion on big data and the future of conventional government statistics. I was pleased that there was nothing very news said, from our perspective, because that shows that we are not lagging behind in this space. I found the comments by John Pullinger, the National Statistician of the United Kingdom, of significant interest given we are making a presentation to the senior officers of the Sri Lanka Department of Census and Statistics this coming Friday. One of his comments was that good professionals had to keep up with new techniques. If a doctor were to treat people with methods from the 1950s, they would be driven out of the profession.