In 1992, I wrote parts of a report for the National Regulatory Research Institute in the US on privacy and competitive implications for transaction-generated information (a term that has been eclipsed by the less informative “big data” in recent times). We covered all utilities, including electricity. Burns,Robert; Samarajiva, Rohan & Mukherjee, Roopali (1992) Customer information: Privacy and competitive implications, NRRI 92-11 . Columbus OH: National Regulatory Research Institute. Now, 20 years later, the issue is hot, the subject of a BBC story: The EDPS report voices concern over the “potential intrusiveness” of smart meters, which it says can track what members of a household do in the privacy of their homes.
The quotation below is from an NYT article based on British Council research that shows intra-Asian collaboration in science is highly productive. Having studied research collaborations in the ICT policy and regulation field as were starting CPRsouth, we were waiting for such collaborations to emerge organically. Seven conferences have gone, and we have yet to see intra-Asian collaboration, though we are seeing Asia-Africa collaboration. This was catalyzed by an internship offered to Rohman, and Indonesian national studying in Sweden, by our sister organization, Research ICT Africa. The quotation below refers to research on aquaculture.
VoiceICT4D project page LIRNEasia, through a stakeholder forum, advocated the Sri Lanka Disaster Management Center (DMC) to move towards a multi-agency situational-awareness platform by creating a register of alerting authorities and then sharing it’s call center and Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system resources for emergency communication. The “Do you Hear Me” video, communicating the need for voice-enabled Information Communication Technologies (ICTs), to empower community-based emergency coordination, was visited by 496 viewers, of which 48 or them shared their knowledge on the subject. UNISDR debut film festival on DRR, selected our video as as one of the best three in the category of “best human interest story” Peer-reviewed scientific articles presented the realization study evidence emphasizing the practical technical instabilities and deficits in those technologies. The message was news to most researchers and practitioners. IVR-based solutions are gradually gaining momentum.
The South Asia Democratic Forum conference held on October 11, 2012 featured a talk (delivered in the form of a video) on the pernicious effects of the certain proposals before WCIT 2012. The talk is here.
The ITU publishes an annual ranking of ICT development, with ICT access and use being given 40 percent of the weight each and a sub-component known as skills, made up of education indicators, given 20 percent. Of the SAARC countries, Afghanistan and Bangladesh are not covered. Of the six that are covered, Maldives and Sri Lanka hold on to their 72nd and 105th places, showing no improvement nor regression. Bhutan falls back one place to 118; India three places to 119; Pakistan two places to 127 and Nepal brings up the rear at 137th place (a regression of 3 places from 2010). It is not that their scores have not improved.
It was just two years ago that Bangladesh was elected to the Council of the International Telecommunication Union. One would think that Bangladesh would be treated with added respect as a result. However, it appears that it has been excluded from the ITU’s annual compilation of the ICT Development Index for 2012. It is not completely absent, being included in the comparisons of price baskets. But on the main index, it’s absent.
Behavioral economics has brought to the fore the power of the default. As big data makes it easier to understand people’s actual behaviors and guide their choices, the power of the default is beginning to be fought over. Interestingly, it’s Microsoft versus the rest. Next came an incensed open letter from the board of the Association of National Advertisers to Steve Ballmer, the C.E.
Your data are not your data. They are the digits of Life’s longing for itself. They come through you but not from you, And though they are with you yet they belong not to you. If Gibran were around today, would his magnificent poem look somewhat as above? I am not sure.
Something to think about. Earlier this month, Facebook announced that it had 1 billion active users. Of that, 81 percent were said to be outside the US and Canada. The top-five countries in ranked order at this time are US; Brazil, India, Indonesia, Mexico. Last year, there were lots of reports about Facebook building a server farm in Northern Sweden.
Thought-provoking piece, based on company-survey data, about how place is becoming irrelevant to work. BTW, the tax principle that Bangladesh is praised for was implemented in Sri Lanka maybe five years ago. The online work is already changing how some governments think about labor. Last May the government of Bangladesh decided to classify online work as export-related commercial income, free of taxes, instead of as a taxed offshore remittance. The idea, Mr.
Sri Lanka Telecom Growth 1992-2010 The validity of the proposition that extending the existing accounting-rate regime for international voice to Internet traffic in order to provide additional revenues to increase the build-out of broadband infrastructure in developing countries rests on the claim that the accounting-rate regime contributed to the extraordinary increase in voice connectivity over the past years by providing funds for building out the infrastructure. As can be seen from the Figure above, the rapid growth that led to the elimination of the persistent waiting lists in Sri Lanka commenced in 2002-03. It was in this same period that the government liberalized the international telecommunications market, issuing multiple external gateway licenses. The inflow of revenues from the accounting-rate regime fell sharply. Yet connectivity exploded.
Technocrats (and people like us who emphasize the rational) would prefer a rational, integrated solution. But we rarely get greenfield opportunities. In almost all cases vested interests dominate. So the reform that gets done is imperfect and messy. This is the message P Chidambaram, Minister of Finance seems to be giving to NYT.
We’re playing around with some ideas about connectedness. We want to use big data to see what real (as opposed to administratively mandated) communities are. Using Facebook’s analytics page, did some surface analysis of SAARC and ASEAN. It is very clear that India is the center of SAARC, being the country that most Bhutanese have friends in (value of 5 given) and the country with the second-largest number of friends for Bangladeshis, Maldivians, Nepalese, Pakistanis and Sri Lankans (value of 4). I guess the only surprise there is Pakistan.
Recently, I had to explain my aversion to Intellectual Property law, despite my PhD work being on copyright law and policy. I said it was the most inelegant and dishonest branch of the law. The central dictum is “ideas are free, only expression is protected.” Yet, even lists of addresses and telephones numbers were protected by copyright (this was subsequently changed in the US). There just did not seem to be an intellectual foundation; just a series of post hoc rationalizations.
LIRNEasia exploits the wisdom of the crowd, or at least of the informed crowd. Its launch, back in 2004, was at an Expert Forum that brought in knowledgeable regulators, policy makers, stakeholders and researchers to discuss seeds of research ideas and give ideas for new research. Keeping with that tradition, we brought in a number of experts to discuss some initial cuts on papers being developed in the context of the Ford Foundation funded project, “Facilitating and enriching policy discourse on increasing broadband access by the poor in India”. The meeting was attended by senior officials of the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), Chairman Dr Rahul Khullar and Advisor Mr Sudhir Gupta. The topics covered included regional specificities of broadband development, contributions that could be made to an improved investment environment by licensing policies, the opportunities presented by the “digital dividend” repurposing of frequencies for broadband development and metrics to assess efficacy of broadband policies.
Robert Pepper is the vice president for global technology policy at Cisco. He has elaborated “a grave threat” in ITU’s “fatally flawed proposals to update” the way Internet would be regulated. While analyzing the impact of revising International Telecommunications Regulations (ITRs), he said: It could break the global Internet into unconnected islands of national or regional networks, extend telecommunications regulations to computing, or lead to onerous government regulation of the Internet……….. Some proposals for the WCIT would control the routing of Internet traffic in the name of security but would balkanize the Internet and threaten Internet freedom.