Gregory Mankiw is a gutsy economist. He defended outsourcing while still serving in the Bush administration. He is a also a good economist. He could make a living on textbooks alone. He is now advising Mitt Romney as he campaigns for the presidency.
Free WiFi and access to internet is getting popular everywhere. Some commercial entities and traditional retailers such as Starbucks and McDonalds discovered a long time ago that free internet attracts customers.This week I came across two news on this...
Free WiFi and access to internet is getting popular everywhere. Some commercial entities and traditional retailers such as Starbucks and McDonalds discovered a long time ago that free internet attracts customers.This week I came across two news on this...
It has been an unfortunate fact that Sri Lanka and India have signed many agreements that have not been implemented. This caused me to write a column some years back entitled “An MOU to implement MOUs.”. The one difference that I see in the short LBO report on cooperation between India and Sri Lanka on telecom is that the word MOU has been replaced by agreement. But I hope I am wrong and that there will be real implementation.
For what LIRNEasia does, scholarly publishing with slow-paced peer review and print-on-paper publishing has not been the best fit. Our 2006 work got published in a 2008 book and our 2008 survey data got published in a special issue of a journal in 2011. But the question of assessing and ensuring quality is ever present and the natural answer is peer review. With peer review, delay is part of the package. Plus it can be a conservative force.
In their paper ‘The end of the net as we know it? Deep packet inspection and internet Governance‘, authors Ralf Bendrath and Milton Mueller explore the ways in which internet governance is responding to DPI. At present, the structure and dynamics of the internet is such that the intelligence is at the edge of the network, with only the header of the IP packet being referred to as it traverses the network. With DPI, service providers can scan the payload segment of the packet in real-time and handle in differently, based on pattern recognition. The article refers to 3 arguments that supports the internet’s end-to-end structure: Without DPI With DPI Technological Flexibility Efficient, Scalable Additional overheads Political Freedom Content is not a barrier Invasion of privacy, Opportunities for regulations on censorship Economical Openness Multiple ISPs compete on an equal playing field Increases the network’s ability to discriminate The authors model a framework for technology-aware policy analysis (based on the ACI, Actor-Centered Institutionalism framework) to understand the dynamics between actors, interests, political interactions, influence of institutions etc.
This was not a fight we were involved in, but were following with peripheral vision. For those who were in the thick of it, it must be a good day. For us too, because an open Internet benefits everyone. “Let us be clear,” the White House statement said, “online piracy is a real problem that harms the American economy, threatens jobs for significant numbers of middle class workers and hurts some of our nation’s most creative and innovative companies and entrepreneurs.” However, it added, “We will not support legislation that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet.
Conventional evaluation privileges short-term outcomes (if it gets to outcomes at all). This is unavoidable. As a teacher I used to think that the true results of my efforts would be seen five-ten-fifteen years down the road. But my university needed to know how good a teacher I was every quarter or every year, so remedial action could be taken or my good/bad teaching could be factored into my next pay raise or promotion. How my students did fifteen years later was the true test, but the time frame was wrong for what the university had to do.
The World Bank – Google collaboration seems a brilliant idea; key to its success is how national government react. But if even some cooperate . . . .
It took a little time, but a comprehensive report on the Bangkok launch of teleuse@BOP4 results has been published in the Nation (Thailand). The survey found that Thai users spent more than any other nationality on mobile phones, $93 on average compared to $50 or less elsewhere. Most of the phones they bought had radio connections, while 14 per cent had a Web browser and 5 per cent had touch-screens. Ninety-one per cent of the Thais said they’d used a mobile phone in the previous three months, up from 77 per cent in 2008. More than 90 per cent of the urban users made regular calls, compared to 80 per cent in the rural areas.
We cannot do what the Judge is asking Google, et al., to do. It’s tempting to suggest tech awareness classes for judges, but perhaps the more effective will be common sense classes: This week, a judge in New Delhi raised eyebrows when he said, according to a widely cited report by the Press Trust of India, that “like China,” India might be compelled to block certain Web sites that contained obscene or offensive material. The comments of the judge, Suresh Kait, came in response to a lawsuit, filed by a private citizen in the capital, New Delhi. The suit demands that Internet companies screen content before it is posted on sites like Facebook, Google or Yahoo, that might offend the religious sentiments of Indians.
Yesterday ICANN started receiving applications for new gTLDs with a very high hope to “discover the next big .thing”. You can also have a video
Yesterday ICANN started receiving applications for new gTLDs with a very high hope to “discover the next big .thing”. You can also have a video overview of the Next Big .Thing. This initiative of ICANN has already generated lot of interest from all...
Introducing competition in the Pacific is a challenge. With the exception of Paupa New Guinea, all the Pacific Island countries are so small and population so dispersed that telecom investors have very little interest. On top of this, these Pacific mar...
Introducing competition in the Pacific is a challenge. With the exception of Paupa New Guinea, all the Pacific Island countries are so small and population so dispersed that telecom investors have very little interest. On top of this, these Pacific mar...
According to LBO’s second write up on our teleuse results, the higher awareness of health information services in Sri Lanka can be explained by two factors: the mismatch between supply and demand in the government health-services sector and the existence since around 2000 of e Channeling, a multi-modal service that allows people to make appointments at private health facilities (and pay for them) over a mobile, over the Internet, through an intermediary at a local pharmacy and so on. I tend to give greater weight to the latter; government health services are rationed through congestion all over the world, not only in Sri Lanka. There is nothing like the service being available for awareness to rise. The study in 2011 by the LIRNEasia think tank said found that the use of mobile phones for services other than the basic voice function was still sparse among the poorest users compared with a previous survey in 2008. In Sri Lanka only six percent of users in the so-called bottom-of-the-pyramid (BOP) or poorest segment knew of banking services through mobile phones compared with 18 percent in India and 15 percent in Thailand.