The money comes from everyone with a telecom connection in the US. And the government has trouble pushing it through. Five billion USD is a lot of money to keep unspent. Here, we’ve been griping about India’s USD 4 billion and Brazil’s USD 4 billion plus. The E-Rate program has been faulted for inadequately allocating money in the fund, which is provided through a tax on consumers’ phone bills, a monthly charge between 50 cents and $1.
The ethic of reciprocity is perhaps the most fundamental principle governing human interaction. I once studied this in some depth for the purpose of teaching interconnection of all things. My favorite was Rabbi Hillel’s formulation: “That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the whole Torah; the rest is the explanation; go and learn it.”—Talmud, Shabbat 31a, the “Great Principle” So now, Russia wants the ethic of reciprocity applied to the metadata, the collection of which President Obama said was no problem at all.
US law enforcement is pushing smartphone makers to install a kill switch to deter theft. This is even more important in developing Asia where the value of a smartphone is even higher relative to monthly earnings. We have not had much success with IMEIs deterring theft of feature phones, despite widespread efforts in Pakistan, India and elsewhere. Hopefully, the solution to smartphone theft will be more effective: “It is totally unacceptable that we have an epidemic of crime that we believe can be eliminated if the technological fixes that we believe are available are put into place,” Mr. Schneiderman said.
MapBox has released its JavaScript code for the public to use in visualizing the recent Moore tornado impact. Simply slide your mouse over the area in the map below. Exerpt from mapbox blog – “Thanks to open aerial imagery provided by the U.S. Government and our MapBox.
“Sahana software is being used to support the collection and fulfilment of requests for assistance and volunteers from the neighborhoods hardest hit by Hurricane Sandy: the Rockaways in Queens, Coney Island and Red Hook in Brooklyn, Staten Island and communities along the New Jersey coast. Sahana allows organizations to more effectively prioritize and dispatch resources to where they are needed most.” … click to read more. Sahana Software Foundation (SSF) is currently seeking funds to support the Hurricane Sandy relief operations in and around New York City, as well as to support other programs. SSF estimates a need of at least $40,000 to support Hurricane Sandy operations for three months.
A significant number of base stations (around 20% or lower) in the Hurricane Sandy affected areas are supposed to have gone down, mainly due to electricity problems. I am sure the systems here in South Asia are a lot more robust in this aspect because our baseline expectations of the reliability of the electricity networks is much much lower. So our operators have way more backup capabilities. But anyway, a disaster is an extraordinary event. Bad things happen; all that we can do is minimize risks, not eliminate them.
Apparently a gap that cannot be bridged has opened up in smartphone sales thanks to sub USD200 smartphones from Huawei and others. let us be thankful the gap is only in smartphones. Smartphones are so popular here that it’s difficult to avoid seeing one, and in China, these devices are poised to become even more widespread. This year, China will account for 26.5 percent of all smartphone shipments, compared to 17.
Lots of ideas for people thinking up new applications for agriculture, anywhere. FarmLogs, however, uses the pricing format of software-as-a-service start-up: a free trial, no setup fees, and monthly plans based on the size of operations. Costs range from $9 a month for the smallest farm to $99 a month for farms of more than 2,000 acres. Farmers’ income arrives unevenly, in big lumps over the course of a year rather than in a steady monthly stream. That could make it hard to persuade farmers who are now using notebooks or spreadsheets for record-keeping to add a new and recurring expense category, software-as-a-service, even if the amount is tiny when compared with annual income.
Al Jazeera reports that a lot of server farms got knocked out by bad weather in the US. Instead of making us rethink the cloud, this suggests that we need more redundancy, preferably with server farms on the other side of the world. Sean Ludwig, from VentureBeat, wrote in a blog post, “The outage underscores the vulnerabilities of depending on the public cloud versus using your own data centers.” The outages on Amazon’s cloud server come two weeks after a similar incident when a number of popular websites hosted by Amazon went down. A report into the incident by Amazon found that a configuration error was made during a routine upgrade.
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.
LIRNEasia conducts large-sample surveys. We explain that they are scientific surveys because random sampling is used. Sometimes we don’t emphasize it enough. But apparently we should. A US Representative has exhibited his ignorance by announcing that random is not scientific.
Pakistan was early in trying to deal with this problem. And now the US is getting in on the act. Over the last year, roughly one out of three robberies nationwide have involved the theft of a cellphone, according to an F.C.C.
We heard, back in 2005, that the Pakistan Telecom Authority and the Nigerian Communication Commission had calculated how much direct and indirect employment had been created by the telecom industries. Further inquiries revealed that the methods used were suspect and that the studies would not float under rigorous review. The difficulties are exemplified by the prepaid card value chain, where a whole series of resellers are involved in selling value and almost none are engaged solely with mobile. Now the NYT reports an attempt by Apple to quantify its job creation within the US. Apple has made its first attempt to quantify how many American jobs can be credited to the sale of its iPads and other products, a group that includes the Apple engineers who design the devices and the drivers who deliver them — even the people who build the trucks that get them there.
Assailing the shutting off of mobile networks in Egypt and Libya and then allowing the same to be done by the Bay Area Rapid Transit Authority was hypocritical. But American hypocrisy has limits. They have launched a public-comment process to define the terms. When will we see such actions in the developing world? The Federal Communications Commission is reviewing whether or when the police and other government officials can intentionally interrupt cellphone and Internet service to protect public safety.
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.
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.