The Internet is a public space, and like any public space it is not without danger. But the scare stories are overhyped as the NYT story based on a USD 50 million research project shows:
Good news for worried parents: All those hours their teenagers spend socializing on the Internet are not a bad thing, according to a new study by the MacArthur Foundation.
“It may look as though kids are wasting a lot of time hanging out with new media, whether it’s on MySpace or sending instant messages,” said Mizuko Ito, lead researcher on the study, “Living and Learning With New Media.” “But their participation is giving them the technological skills and literacy they need to succeed in the contemporary world. They’re learning how to get along…
President-elect Barack Obama has named two telecom industry and policy veterans and a leader of Google’s philanthropy arm to craft the new administration’s high-tech policy priorities.
The policy working group on Technology, Innovation and Government Reform will “develop proposals and plans from the Obama Campaign for action during the Obama-Biden Administration,” according to the president-elect’s transition web site www.change.gov.
The authors of what could be sweeping changes in broadband rules, privacy and government transparency include:
–Blair Levin, a telecom investment analyst at Stifel Nicolaus and former chief of staff to Federal Communications Commission Chairman Reed Hundt. Levin is also seen among a short list of candidates to head the FCC in the new administration.
–Julius Genachowski, former chief counsel to Hundt at the FCC and a member of Obama’s…
Tags: Barack Obama, Blair Levin, Broadband, Department of Treasury, Federal Communications Commission, former law school classmate, Goldman, Google, Google Inc., high-tech policy priorities, IAC/InterActiveCorp, India, Indicorps, Julius Genachowski, Obama-Biden Administration, Obama-Biden Transition Project Advisory Board, policy working group, Reed Hundt, Rock Creek Vetnrues, Sachs and Co., Sonal Shah, Stifel Financial Corp., Stifel Nicolaus, telecommunications leaders, The Washington Post Company, transition web site www.change.gov, Washington Post.
Here are the summarised results from the telecenter operator survey done by LIRNEasia at the weCan workshop in October 2008. Sample was not representative, but large enough to get a general idea about the telecenter operations in Sri Lanka.
Out of a total of 147 operators surveyed, the bulk, 101 were from Nenasalas, the 500 odd telecenter network created under the World Bank funded e-Sri Lanka programme. 10 were from Sarvodaya multi-purpose telecenters and 6 from others (eg. public libraries) 30 have not specified the type of the telecenter.
Do telecenters in Sri Lanka make money? Yes. They report an average monthly income of Rs. 22,119. (=USD 201) This is associated with a relatively large standard deviation of Rs. 21,714 (= USD 197) indicating a variation within…
Tags: Broadband, Colombo, electricity, ICT Agency, ICTA, International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, Internet charges, Internet services, Nenasala, odd telecenter network, print services, printing series, Rs, Sarvodaya, Sri Lanka, survey, telecenter, telecenter network, telecentre, USD, VOIP, weCAN, World Bank, World Bank The.
Worldwide mobile messaging grew nearly 10 percent in the third quarter compared to the second quarter of the year, fueled by new trends in the messaging market, according to VeriSign, which provides Internet infrastructure services and delivers messages on behalf of carriers and content providers.
The company reported Tuesday that VeriSign enabled more than 58.3 billion messages per day during the third quarter of 2008. This was up from about 52 billion messages sent during the second quarter of 2008.
On average, this means that VeriSign facilitated the delivery of about 634 million messages per day during the third quarter, compared to 572 million messages a day in the second quarter. In the third quarter of 2007, the company helped move 280 million messages per day across…
A British Lord is to be prosecuted for alleged dangerous driving after it was claimed that he had sent a text message from his mobile phone, just moments before a fatal road accident. Lord Ahmed, a Labour peer in the House of Lords was involved in an accident on Christmas Day last year when it hit another motorist who was killed instantly.
Checks later carried out found that the same phone which was used to call the emergency services had also been used to send a text message just before the accident occurred. The RAC Foundation has been calling for urgent investment in a high-profile education campaign, designed to raise awareness among those young people who have grown up with mobile phones, that texting and driving…
ICTA today clarified that Sri Lanka’s Computer Literacy is far below the target of 60% under Mahinda Chinthana. Athula Pushpakumara, Head of Communication and Media at ICT Agency Sri Lanka, in an article to Divaina newspaper today claimed the 2007 figure of 16.5% has increased to 19.5% by the first quarter of 2008. No sources were provided.
The official Computer Literacy figure for 2006/7 by the Department of Census and Statistics is 16.6%.
In 2005 November, in his election manifesto ‘Mahinda Chinthana’ President Mahinda Rajapakse promised to take the necessary steps to increase Computer Literacy to 60% within three years.
Your operator promises you x Mbps. Are you sure he keeps promise? If not, what you miss?
LIRNEasia, has been researching on Broadband performance quality issues in Asia. One objective of our work is to create ‘EMPOWERED USERS’ armed with broadband performance information.
Our first milestone was to develop ‘Ashoka-Tissa’ methodology of Broadband testing. This was released at a seminar jointly organized with Institute of Engineers Sri Lanka on March 18, 2008.
Next move was to automate the test process. LIRNEasia has developed an Open Source based tester (named AT-Tester) with the help of a team from ITT-Madras. After few months of beta-testing now it is available on the net (including the source).
LIRNEasia plans to launch it in Sri Lanka on at a workshop jointly organized by Sarvodaya.
ATTENDENCE FREE (with…
We’ve covered the progress of the OLPC from time to time. The person leading the effort in China and South East Asia is an old and good friend, Tony Wong.
By now, Mr. Negroponte insists, enough of these learning machines are in the hands of children in the developing world to see results. The children, from 6 to 12 years old, are more passionate about learning and educators are reporting fewer problems with discipline and truancy. “It’s unequivocally working,” said Mr. Negroponte, the founding director of the M.I.T. Media Lab. “The issue is the economics.”
The full story is here.
A conference entitled, ‘Infrastructure Regulation: What works, Why, and How do we know?’, is being organized by LIRNEasia, together with the Institute of Water Policy, Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, Singapore and the University of Hong Kong, to be held from 26 - 27 February, 2009, at the University of Hong Kong.
Sponsored by the IDRC, Canada, the conference will bring together distinguished scholars and practitioners who are experts in the area to address essential issues in regulations through conceptual and empirical studies.
The conference will address the following questions: Does regulation work? What kind of regulation works? What kinds don’t work? Why do some forms of regulation work and not others? How do we know whether they work or not? How do we isolate the effects of different political, economic…
The download speeds that customers get in Chennai, Colombo and Dhaka are not very different, if you carefully examine the results of the October 2009 results of broadband QOSe using the Ashokatissa methodology jointly developed by IIT Madras and LIRNEasia. What differs is the level of truth in advertising. In Sri Lanka, everybody is lying. In India, they are closer to the truth.
The difference is regulation. In India, the regulator is proactive on this issue; in Sri Lanka, the regulator only worries about things like porn and imaginary towers. We cannot mandate truth in advertising; only engage in friendly moral suasion. In other words, we will try to shame the operators into calling their products by the right names: 512 Kbps instead of 2Mbps would be…
One of the main reasons for collecting and disseminating indicators data at the regional level is currency. By the time the ITU puts out its reports, two years have gone by, and the data are of historical value in these fast-changing times. Despite knowing all this, even we got tripped up this time. In attempting to release mobile and broadband benchmarks at the same time, we delayed the release of the mobile data collected and analyzed in early October and were overtaken by events. In the future, the data will be released without delay.
In early October, the relative positions of the four lowest-price countries (Bangladesh, Pakistan, India and Sri Lanka) had changed only slightly, with India becoming slightly cheaper than Pakistan and Sri Lanka falling…
Buddhists are duty bound to offers alms. Zarganar, one of Burma’s most popular comedians, did. But to the wrong monks, according to the Generals. They were protesting the government’s misrule. Among other things Zarganar will be charged with offenses under the Electronic Transactions Law. Burma is short on electronics, but apparently not on law on the subject:
Now, Zarganar has been charged with, among other offenses, violation of the Electronic Transactions Law, which carries a prison sentence of up to 15 years for using technology like the Internet to distribute information “detrimental to the interest of or that lowers the dignity of any organization or any person.”
The government has also charged many protesters with violating the Video Act, which carries a three-year prison sentence for “copying,…
Chanuka posted the story before the Economist, but it may still be worthwhile reading what the take is from the headquarters of free market thinking:
White space could be even bigger. The frequencies involved were chosen for television back in the 1950s for good reason: they travel long distances, are hardly affected by the weather, carry lots of data, and penetrate deep into the nooks and crannies of buildings. No surprise proponents have dubbed them “WiFi on steroids”.
Once the changeover from analog to digital broadcasting is complete, the television networks will no longer need the white spaces between analog channels to prevent interference from noise and other transmissions. Apart from digital broadcasts being far less vulnerable to interference, there’s now plenty of frequency-hopping technology around for…
Few weeks ago I wrote a column about a surreptitious attempt to impose a draconian regulatory regime on TV, cable, satellite and mobile broadcasting. A post in this blog discussed the implications for convergence. There was also a high-profile Sinhala language op-ed that contributed to framing the ensuing debate in relation to a 1997 Supreme Court decision and the recent cancellation of a radio license (rescinded when the owners joined the government party).
Now the Supreme Court has stayed the regulation. A victory, I guess. Congratulations to the litigants, who turned back yet another assault on media freedom. But . . . the Supreme Court is dispensing a strange kind of justice these days. When decisions are to our liking I guess it’s natural not to ask how…
One of the key actions required to make Mobile 2.0 real is to allow people to use voice commands instead of typed commands. Looks like Google has made a big leap:
Both Yahoo and Microsoft already offer voice services for cellphones. The Microsoft Tellme service returns information in specific categories like directions, maps and movies. Yahoo’s oneSearch with Voice is more flexible but does not appear to be as accurate as Google’s offering. The Google system is far from perfect, and it can return queries that appear as gibberish. Google executives declined to estimate how often the service gets it right, but they said they believed it was easily accurate enough to be useful to people who wanted to avoid tapping out their queries on the…
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