The increase of smuggled mobile phones in prisons across America has prompted the Government Accountability Office investigating any links between the high cost of landline phone calls and mobile phone use. It has been found that the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) charges high on landline calls as it uses the funds to pay for inmate wages and other amenities, rather than those costs coming from the State as would happen in most countries. The BOP charges inmates $0.06 per minute for local calls and $0.23 per minute for long distance calls, with no connection charge.
I’ve been asked about how we choose our research topics. Intuition, I answer. Lot of discussion among the team and intuition. How did we choose the case studies for the research on agricultural value chains? Here, the team assembled a lot of data too.
We have worse postal services in our region. They do not have hard budget constraints, so they keep going. But the future looks bleak for those that do have hard budget constraints: Mail volume has plummeted with the rise of e-mail, electronic bill-paying and a Web that makes everything from fashion catalogs to news instantly available. The system will handle an estimated 167 billion pieces of mail this fiscal year, down 22 percent from five years ago. It’s difficult to imagine that trend reversing, and pessimistic projections suggest that volume could plunge to 118 billion pieces by 2020.
The end game in m health: medical monitors implanted in the body, wirelessly connected to doctors and nurses who can take remedial action. Not really something researched in Nuwan Waidyanatha’s m health projects, but still worth keeping an eye on: “If the technology delivers as promised,” Mr. Casey says, “then we believe that’s when we’ll move from sensors on people diagnosed with a disease to literally everybody.” Professor Rogers is a co-founder of MC10, an electronics company in Cambridge, Mass., that is aiming to turn the epidermal monitor prototype into a commercial product in 2013.
In our current emergency communication research aiming to enable interoperability between Freedom Fone and the Sahana Disaster Management System for disseminating Common Alerting Protocol messages and receiving Situational Reports over voice channels, we came a cross the situation where the 2N UMTS modem license had silently expired. During our silent-test this weekend, in preparation for a drill this week, we noticed that the license had abruptly expired. Unaware of the licensing dependency, the Sarvodaya Hazard Information Hub staff were scratching their heads trying to figure out what had happened. Even though the problem was identified, given that it is the weekend, getting any immediate support from the vendor is questionable. This project: FF4EDXL follows from LIRNEasia’s HazInfo and Biosurveillance research.
Our world is still overwhelmingly populated by feature phones, but it won’t be long before smartphones take over (only question is when). Just yesterday we were discussing how GPS enabled smartphones, if given to government officials or even private sector people, can overcome the problem of them actually going to the places they’re supposed to go to (the example was the agriculture extension officer who does not go to the actual place where the plants are, but gives instructions from the office or the road). So here’s an update on the smartphone wars: The competition is only going to grow more heated. Android doesn’t just use different carriers, different manufacturers, and different software than the iPhone; it represents a different vision for the entire mobile industry. Apple exerts complete control over the iPhone.
One of the most significant ICT applications in the world is being pioneered in India: the Unique Identifier. “What we are creating is as important as a road,” said Nandan M. Nilekani, the billionaire software mogul whom the government has tapped to create India’s identity database. “It is a road that in some sense connects every individual to the state.” For its proponents, the 12-digit ID is an ingenious solution to a particularly bedeviling problem.
False warnings and evacuations are a serious problem in disaster risk reduction. Too many, and people will not behave properly when the danger really comes. The debate appears to be joined in relation to the preparations made to face Hurricane Irene: Should those whose job it is to prepare for the worst be punished because the worst didn’t happen? What determines your judgment of politicians’ reaction is what happens to you. Those washed out from North Carolina to New Jersey to Vermont don’t think government overreacted.
The retirement of Steve Jobs from active management at Apple has been commented on by many. Paul Saffo’s comment about the reconceptualization of the Internet experience resonates with much that LIRNEasia has been talking about. The other point about not anchoring innovation on how consumers actually live their lives is more problematic. As the NYT says: Mr. Jobs did not so much see around corners; he saw things in plain sight that others did not.
The government has not backed off on the discriminatory and anti-poor “market competition factor” that was subject to a detailed critique when announced. Per Mhz spectrum charge has been set on the basis of their market share or ‘market contribution factor’ (MCF) which was previously known as ‘utilisation factor’ in the draft licensing guideline of the BTRC. According to the policy of the MCF prescribed by the telecom ministry, if an operator has more than 20 percent market share, it will have to pay additionally, while an operator with less than 20 percent share will pay at a reduced rate. The MCF for Grameenphone now stands at 1.48, Banglalink 1.
Irene was far from our areas of interest, but not far from the newspapers we read. Looks like mobile networks performed well; while fixed had trouble. Wireless phone networks held up well against Hurricane Irene despite widespread losses of power. Many people who lost electricity were able to communicate using e-mail and social networks, thanks to battery-powered mobile devices. As cleanup crews and homeowners began to assess the scope of the damage on Sunday, wireless phone companies were reporting that the storm’s effect on their networks was minimal and that most customers did not experience cellular disruptions, despite the high winds and ferocious rains.
Citizens got panicked when an earthquake rocked New York last week. They immediately started calling family and friends from mobile phones. This is how everyone reacts during emergency worldwide. Thanks to the proliferation of mobile phone. Mobile networks of New York, however, failed soon after getting overloaded with so many simultaneous calls.
We know, from our experience with teleuse@BOP surveys, that getting an accurate fix on levels of income and assets (poverty) is not easy. An experiment in Indonesia suggests that asking the village to decide is superior, because it is almost as accurate as the standard method which uses household assets and generates greater buy-in (less complaints). One thing I did not get from the writeup was relative cost. Convening a community meeting is not costless. Neither is the asset-based method.
Reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was a rite of passage for college students (should still be). The key point I took away from it was the need to focus on quality. My most favorite economics book is Exit, Voice and Loyalty, by Albert Hirschman. Also a discourse on quality. Perhaps because I read Zen at an impressionable age .
Jeffrey Sachs is a superstar. His advice contributed to the mess in post-Communist Russia, but that did not hinder him in any way from dispensing advice elsewhere (I met him when came to Sri Lanka in 2002; after I told him what we had done or were doing on telecom, he moved on to dispense advice on other topics). His opinion matters much. He has described the mobile as the single most transformative technology for development. He expands on this statement in an interview on AllAfrica.
My colleague who made the previous post had neglected to look at the cause of the so-called spike in inactive SIMs. The cause is a change in definition, plain and simple. The market revaluation has been triggered by rule changes in the activity period allowed for prepaid users and the effect of mandatory SIM registration. Previously, users would see their services terminated if they had not recharged their prepaid cards or placed/received a call within a period of 180 days. In 2010, that period was reduced to 90 days and, recently, the TRAI has reportedly reduced the period to just 20 days.