I started reading about cancer because people kept pestering me about electro magnetic radiation from mobile handsets and towers. Siddhartha Mukherjee is the best writer on cancer. But I have to admit I have yet to read his Pulitzer winning “The emperor of all maladies.” In Ohio, where I lived for over a decade, they took asbestos really seriously. Buildings were condemned because of asbestos.
But this time they are not the numbers given by the ITU. They are the exaggerated claims of the BTRC. The Daily Star questions: If BTRC’s figures were true, Bangladesh would be among the top 20 countries in the world in terms of number of internet users. Alas, it is nowhere in sight. Munir Hasan, an ICT expert and secretary general of Open Source Network, estimates the number of internet users in the country to be no more than 1.
National Consultancy for ILO on Green Jobs Asia, ILO-2011June18
A state-owned enterprise. But you cannot call a state-owned enterprise a monopoly. Not in China. Challenging the system, Mr. Zhang contends, has been the key to China’s economic success.
Acxiom does a lot more than just analyze streams of transaction-generated information (our definition of big data). But TGI is an important element of what does into Acxiom’s machines. Few consumers have ever heard of Acxiom. But analysts say it has amassed the world’s largest commercial database on consumers — and that it wants to know much, much more. Its servers process more than 50 trillion data “transactions” a year.
The Wall Street Journal reports that legislative action is required for permitting competition in Myanmar telecom market: Officials have enacted an investment law with guarantees against nationalization and have proposed tax reform. However, these don’t go far enough. The state still controls the most lucrative industries, since a 1989 law restricts private enterprise in oil and gas, mining and telecom. This makes it imperative that the retrograde ITU sponsored draft law be thrown out and a piece of legislation appropriate for the 21st century be adopted.
The 3rd LIRNEasia Disaster Risk Reduction Lecture will be held on 19 June 2012, Tuesday at 1500 hrs at the Sri Lanka Foundation Institute, 100 Independence Square, Colombo 7. The main talk by LIRNEasia Senior Research Fellow Nuwan Waidyanatha on “making emergency communication effective” will complement the opening presentation by the Director General of the Sri Lanka Disaster Management Center on the Sri Lankan tsunami warning system. It will highlight how the DMC can better perform its role in emergency communication and coordination. There are complexities in managing multiple agencies and offering a common platform to manage all-hazards all-media alerting and reporting. Possibly the harder problem may be the social elements.
I was in Kathmandu June 11-13 for a World Bank workshop on regional cooperation for journalists. I could have talked about the challenges of increasing integration in the world’s least integrated region through the lens of the battles over CEPA. But I decided to talk about a subject that was much more mundane, but one where we at LIRNEasia could provide current factual information that no one else could: the related topics in intra-SAARC calling charges being too high and within SAARC roaming charges being rapacious. The talk is here. The media included: Nepal’s Republica and Sri Lanka’s LBO.
Making Emergency Communication Effective LIRNEasia’s 3rd Disaster Risk Reduction Lecture On 19 June 2012 from 15:00 – 17:00 at the Sri Lanka Foundation Institute, 100 Independence Square, Colombo 7 The main talk will focus on actions to improve alerting and situational-reporting to make emergency communication more effective. The talk will focus on establishing an alerting profile and a multi-agency situational-awareness software tool that the Sahana Software Foundation has developed. Such a tool can help bring organizations together to more effectively communicate disaster information and ease them away from unproductive silo thinking. It will also allow the Disaster Management Center to perform its functions better. Moderator: Major General (retd.
Dialog Axiata, Sri Lanka’s leading mobile operator launched mobile money payment system yesterday with the consent of central bank, Sri Lanka. Back in 2009 LIRNEasia‘s Senior Policy Fellow Muhammad Aslam Hayat wrote about the possibility of having mobile money in Sri Lanka and LIRNEasia facilitated it. Dialog is the first operator to be licensed by Sri Lanka’s central bank to make mobile payments. “The dawn of the mobile money era in Sri Lanka has been made possible by the progressive, and financial inclusion focused, regulatory ethos of the Central Bank of Sri Lanka,” Wijayasuriya said. “In this respect Sri Lanka’s payments and settlement legislation and Mobile Payment regulations stand among the most progressive in the world.
Given below in sober scientific language is the outcome of decades of deliberation: After a week-long meeting of international experts, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), which is part of the World Health Organization (WHO), today classified diesel engine exhaust as carcinogenic to humans (Group 1), based on sufficient evidence that exposure is associated with an increased risk for lung cancer. The New York Times explains that the implications are more serious for people in developing countries : The W.H.O. decision, the first to elevate diesel to the “known carcinogen” level, may eventually affect some American workers who are heavily exposed to exhaust.
The Government of Bangladesh announced its intention to impose more taxes on mobile bills last week. My op-ed in the Daily Star drew on economic principles and regional experience. There is no debate about the government requiring money. A dynamic sector such as telecom must make its fair contribution. Collection leakages in telecom are much less than in other sectors because it is a modern sector with automated billing and collection mechanisms.
Research Fellow and Knowledge Management Specialist Dilini Wijeweera is the sole Sri Lankan to be awarded a Hubert H. Humphrey fellowship for 2012-13. She will spend an academic year at the Evans School of Public Affairs at the University of Washington in Seattle. We wish her well.
An oped by Khairul Islam and Nilusha Kapugama on how mobiles can help match supply and demand for cold storage space for Bangladesh potato harvest has been published in Daily Star. The most widely accessible form of ICT in Bangladesh is mobile phone. An information management system can ensure that information on the availability of space can be sent out to traders and farmers. The cold storage owners are a part of the Bangladesh Cold Storage Owners Association. The association can collect the information about the availability of space from members.
Is it that the Top of the Pyramid is more into multi-SIM use than the BOP? It appears from the report that multi-SIM use may be higher than was reported by Teleuse@BOP4. Or, it could be indicating that multi-SIM use is on the increase, with greater availability of multi-SIM handsets. CyberMedia Research (CMR), a computer and electronic market research firm said 35 of percent of handsets sold in 2011 could have more than one network connected (multi-subscriber identity module). Around 5.
In most countries that we work in, the restrictions on foreign ownership are minimal. Bangladesh has become an exception in recent times. Bhutan had restrictions but they appear to be on the way out. Foreign investment and the refusal of foreign owned companies to play by the rules of the “club” resulted in the Thai market being transformed. We really do not see the point.