Commerce Commission releases second issues paper on high speed broadband demand-side study

The Commerce Commission has today released the second of three issues papers relating to the uptake of high speed broadband ahead of a public conference in February 2012. The paper is in two parts and examines the potential demand for high speed broadband from the education and health sectors.

The paper was prepared by Ernie Newman, former Chief Executive of the Telecommunications Users Association of New Zealand.

Key conclusions reached in the paper include:

• There is already significant demand for connectivity in schools from students who use their own devices to do school research online, for social media and multimedia purposes, and for other educational purposes. This demand will increase as many schools require students to use school-provided devices as part of lessons.
• High speed broadband will open up opportunities for innovative ways of teaching, the revitalisation of rural schools, and better learning outcomes for all students – especially those who struggle with traditional teaching methods.
• New Zealand teachers are becoming as well qualified as those in comparable countries in the era of e-learning. Teacher training institutions will have to take a leadership role to ensure that New Zealand keeps pace with comparable countries.
• The health sector has yet to maximise on the transformation opportunities that the internet can deliver. Online Shared Care Records for every New Zealander by 2014 will significantly increase demand for high speed broadband.
• Initial demand from the health sector for high speed bandwidth is likely to come from District Health Boards, medical practices, pharmacies and related health services. Consumer demand will pick up later as people become more accustomed to using the internet to help manage their health and wellness.

Today’s paper follows a technical issues paper published on 19 December 2011. A final discussion paper will be released in February which will look at consumers’ willingness to pay for high speed broadband, and at content and applications.
The Commission encourages interested parties to comment on the issues papers either directly to the Commission by emailing telco@comcom.govt.nz, or via social media sites relating to the demand-side study: LinkedIn, Twitter (@FutureBroadband) and Facebook.
You can view a copy of the discussion papers on the Commission’s website at:www.comcom.govt.nz/high-speed-broadband-services-demand-side-study

Background

Ernie Newman is the former Chief Executive of the Telecommunications Users Association of New Zealand (TUANZ) and heads Ernie Newman Consulting Ltd.
The Commission is carrying out a high speed broadband services demand-side study to identify and inform on any factors that may impede the uptake of high speed broadband services in New Zealand. A copy of the terms of reference for the study can be found at: www.comcom.govt.nz/high-speed-broadband-services-demand-side-study
The study is conducted under Section 9A of the Telecommunications Act 2001, which empowers the Commission to conduct inquiries, reviews and studies into any matter relating to the telecommunications industry for the long-term benefit of end-users of telecommunications services within New Zealand.
The Future with High Speed Broadband: Opportunities for New Zealand conference will be held on 20 and 21 February 2012 in Auckland. Attendance is free and you can register at:www.futurebroadband.co.nz
The timeline for the high speed broadband services demand-side study is below.



Date	Activity
19 Dec 2011	Publication of Technical Issues Paper
24 Jan 2012	Publication of e-Learning/e-Health Paper
7 Feb 2012	Publication of Willingness to Pay/Content Paper
20-21 Feb 2012	The Future with High Speed Broadband: Opportunities for New Zealand Conference
9 April 2012	Publication of the Study Draft Report
4 May 2012	Due date for submissions on the Draft Report
28 May 2012	Publication of the Study Final Report

Original Article: 

http://www.comcom.govt.nz/media-releases/detail/2012/commerce-commission-releases-second-issues-paper-on-high-speed-broadband-demand-side-study

Phenomenal Explanation Of SOPA

"Just consume, don't produce, don't share."

The content industries don't want a distinction between what's legal and illegal, that bit them in the ass already, with the Home Recording Act of 1992, wherein it was declared legal to make your own mixtapes, even share them. That horrified them. So they changed their game, they decided to go after the sharing itself.

That's what SOPA and PIPA are all about.

And the way they're going to achieve their goal is to put the burden of policing upon Google and Yahoo and the other portals/search engines that provide links. If the cost of policing is high enough, they'll just outlaw the practice. Entirely.

There's a great analogy at the beginning of this clip. A story about a bakery in Brooklyn that allowed customers to bring in their kids' drawings so they could be imprinted upon cakes. Only one problem, kids like to draw cartoon characters, the ones they see in movies and on television. And this is copyright infringement. So what did the bakery do? Instead of having someone make a judgment as to the legality of each drawing, they outlawed the practice entirely. Now you can still get an image on your cake, but it has to be one of the authorized ones the bakery provides.

But maybe your kid drew a fish because he likes fish and he's never even seen "Finding Nemo". He can't get his fish on a cake because the bakery is afraid of infringement, they're not even gonna make that judgment. Google is gonna outlaw links to all sharing because it's just too damn expensive to figure out what's legal and what's illegal. So you'll just consume pre-approved content, manufactured by the usual suspect music and movie companies. You can't create your own because it might infringe and Google doesn't want to make the wrong decision and it takes too much money to make a decision, so you can create your music, but it won't be findable, the search engine can't take that risk.

And if you think the above is blown out of proportion, you don't understand how the content companies think.

They want control. The Internet is their worst nightmare. It allows anybody to create. And under the rubric of preventing you from mixing up your content with theirs, they want to outlaw sharing completely, they don't want you making music and movies, they just want you to buy theirs. This is the concept of scarcity that made them so much dough, this is the past they're trying to jet us all back into by crippling the Internet. As Clay Shirky says in this video, they want to "raise the cost of copyright compliance to the point where people simply get out of the business of offering it as a capability to amateurs."

They think we're dumb. They've got no idea the Internet is all about smart. They want us to believe in the nincompoops on "The Jersey Shore", not some egghead with degrees who's actually thought about all this and isn't in it for the short term money and fame.

TED talks are a burgeoning resource. The brand stands for intelligent insight. Take the time out to watch this presentation, you'll get it, you'll be horrified, you'll send it to all your friends.

P.S. You might be unable to do this under SOPA. For fear that you might be sharing copyrighted material, your ability to share at all could be crippled, because it would cost too much for the linking service to determine whether it's legal to share the content or not.

P.P.S. Read this story: http://bit.ly/z7NLLZ This is what they want, guilty until proven innocent.

An Interesting Blogpost on Access to ICT and Human Rights

Follow the link to visit the blog : http://gbiportal.net/2012/01/19/access-to-icts-human-rights-the-case-of-namibian-farmers/

Wikipedia Page on Community Informatics

Follow the link below to visit Wikipedia page about Community Informational

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_informatics

Low IQ & Conservative Beliefs Linked to Prejudice

There's no gentle way to put it: People who give in to racism and prejudice may simply be dumb, according to a new study that is bound to stir public controversy.

The research finds that children with low intelligence are more likely to hold prejudiced attitudes as adults. These findings point to a vicious cycle, according to lead researcher Gordon Hodson, a psychologist at Brock University in Ontario. Low-intelligence adults tend to gravitate toward socially conservative ideologies, the study found. Those ideologies, in turn, stress hierarchy and resistance to change, attitudes that can contribute to prejudice, Hodson wrote in an email to LiveScience.

"Prejudice is extremely complex and multifaceted, making it critical that any factors contributing to bias are uncovered and understood," he said.

Controversy ahead

The findings combine three hot-button topics.

"They've pulled off the trifecta of controversial topics," said Brian Nosek, a social and cognitive psychologist at the University of Virginia who was not involved in the study. "When one selects intelligence, political ideology and racism and looks at any of the relationships between those three variables, it's bound to upset somebody."

Polling data and social and political science research do show that prejudice is more common in those who hold right-wing ideals that those of other political persuasions, Nosek told LiveScience. [7 Thoughts That Are Bad For You]

"The unique contribution here is trying to make some progress on the most challenging aspect of this," Nosek said, referring to the new study. "It's not that a relationship like that exists, but why it exists."

Brains and bias

Earlier studies have found links between low levels of education and higher levels of prejudice, Hodson said, so studying intelligence seemed a logical next step. The researchers turned to two studies of citizens in the United Kingdom, one that has followed babies since their births in March 1958, and another that did the same for babies born in April 1970. The children in the studies had their intelligence assessed at age 10 or 11; as adults ages 30 or 33, their levels of social conservatismand racism were measured. [Life's Extremes: Democrat vs. Republican]

In the first study, verbal and nonverbal intelligence was measured using tests that asked people to find similarities and differences between words, shapes and symbols. The second study measured cognitive abilities in four ways, including number recall, shape-drawing tasks, defining words and identifying patterns and similarities among words. Average IQ is set at 100.

Social conservatives were defined as people who agreed with a laundry list of statements such as "Family life suffers if mum is working full-time," and "Schools should teach children to obey authority." Attitudes toward other races were captured by measuring agreement with statements such as "I wouldn't mind working with people from other races." (These questions measured overt prejudiced attitudes, but most people, no matter how egalitarian, do hold unconscious racial biases; Hodson's work can't speak to this "underground" racism.)

As suspected, low intelligence in childhood corresponded with racism in adulthood. But the factor that explained the relationship between these two variables was political: When researchers included social conservatism in the analysis, those ideologies accounted for much of the link between brains and bias.

People with lower cognitive abilities also had less contact with people of other races.

"This finding is consistent with recent research demonstrating that intergroup contact is mentally challenging and cognitively draining, and consistent with findings that contact reduces prejudice," said Hodson, who along with his colleagues published these results online Jan. 5 in the journal Psychological Science.

A study of averages

Hodson was quick to note that the despite the link found between low intelligence and social conservatism, the researchers aren't implying that all liberals are brilliant and all conservatives stupid. The research is a study of averages over large groups, he said.

"There are multiple examples of very bright conservatives and not-so-bright liberals, and many examples of very principled conservatives and very intolerant liberals," Hodson said.

Nosek gave another example to illustrate the dangers of taking the findings too literally.

"We can say definitively men are taller than women on average," he said. "But you can't say if you take a random man and you take a random woman that the man is going to be taller. There's plenty of overlap."

Nonetheless, there is reason to believe that strict right-wing ideology might appeal to those who have trouble grasping the complexity of the world.

"Socially conservative ideologies tend to offer structure and order," Hodson said, explaining why these beliefs might draw those with low intelligence. "Unfortunately, many of these features can also contribute to prejudice."

In another study, this one in the United States, Hodson and Busseri compared 254 people with the same amount of education but different levels of ability in abstract reasoning. They found that what applies to racism may also apply to homophobia. People who were poorer at abstract reasoning were more likely to exhibit prejudice against gays. As in the U.K. citizens, a lack of contact with gays and more acceptance of right-wing authoritarianism explained the link. [5 Myths About Gay People Debunked]

Simple viewpoints

Hodson and Busseri's explanation of their findings is reasonable, Nosek said, but it is correlational. That means the researchers didn't conclusively prove that the low intelligence caused the later prejudice. To do that, you'd have to somehow randomly assign otherwise identical people to be smart or dumb, liberal or conservative. Those sorts of studies obviously aren't possible.

The researchers controlled for factors such as education and socioeconomic status, making their case stronger, Nosek said. But there are other possible explanations that fit the data. For example, Nosek said, a study of left-wing liberals with stereotypically naïve views like "every kid is a genius in his or her own way," might find that people who hold these attitudes are also less bright. In other words, it might not be a particular ideology that is linked to stupidity, but extremist views in general.

"My speculation is that it's not as simple as their model presents it," Nosek said. "I think that lower cognitive capacity can lead to multiple simple ways to represent the world, and one of those can be embodied in a right-wing ideology where 'People I don't know are threats' and 'The world is adangerous place'. ... Another simple way would be to just assume everybody is wonderful."

Prejudice is of particular interest because understanding the roots of racism and bias could help eliminate them, Hodson said. For example, he said, many anti-prejudice programs encourage participants to see things from another group's point of view. That mental exercise may be too taxing for people of low IQ.

"There may be cognitive limits in the ability to take the perspective of others, particularly foreigners," Hodson said. "Much of the present research literature suggests that our prejudices are primarily emotional in origin rather than cognitive. These two pieces of information suggest that it might be particularly fruitful for researchers to consider strategies to change feelings toward outgroups," rather than thoughts.

Original Article: http://news.yahoo.com/low-iq-conservative-beliefs-linked-prejudice-180403506.html

40th Annual TPRC Call for Papers Announcement

TPRC,  the 40th Research Conference on Communication, Information and Internet Policy, is an annual conference on communication, information and internet policy that convenes international and interdisciplinary researchers and policymakers from academia, industry, government, and nonprofit organizations. Its purpose is to present original research relevant to policy making, share information about areas where research is needed, and engage in discussion on current policy issues. The conference program consists of presentations selected from submitted paper abstracts, student papers, and proposals for panels, tutorials, and demonstrations.

TPRC is now soliciting abstracts of papers, proposals for panels, tutorials and demonstrations, and student papers for presentation at the 2012 conference, to be held September 21-23, 2012 at the George Mason University Law School, in Arlington, Virginia. These presentations should report current theoretical or empirical research relevant to communication and information policy.

Contributions may be from any disciplinary perspective – the sole criterion is research quality. Topic areas in previous conferences have included competition, antitrust, and other market issues; broadband deployment and adoption; spectrum and wireless application policy; media, old and new; intellectual property, technology, and Internet law; privacy, security, identity and trust; governance and institutions; innovation and entrepreneurship; and distributional outcomes and social goals.

Submission opens on March 1, 2012 at http://www.tprc.org.  The deadlines are:

March 31, 2012: Main conference abstracts, and proposals for panels, tutorials and demonstrations. Acceptances/rejections will be provided by May 31, 2012. Complete papers for accepted abstracts will be due to TPRC on August 15, 2012.

April 30, 2012: Student papers. The student paper competition requires submission of completed papers rather than abstracts.  Acceptances/rejections will be provided by June 30, 2012.

Details about submission requirements and review criteria can be found on these web pages:

Conference Papers

Panels and Tutorials

Demonstrations

Student Paper Competition

NBN Based Telehealth Program for People Living with Cancer and Those Requiring Palliative Care

NBN based telehealth program for  people living with cancer and those requiring palliative care

A new $20.6 million telehealth program utilising the National Broadband Network (NBN) will provide new and innovative in-home telehealth services to older Australians, people living with cancer and those requiring palliative care.

The program will provide to eligible participants in NBN early rollout areas a range of services which will include having health indicators monitored remotely. Doctors will be able to take the patients blood pressure online while they are at home. The patient will also be able to receive medical consultations and health living support in the home.

The speed, ubiquity and bandwidth of the NBN will enhance the reliability of these services, ultimately transforming the way health care is delivered around Australia.

The existing telehealth program is already proving popular with Australian patients and doctors, making it easier for people to receive care and advice via videoconferencing when and where they need it. Since the government has introduced Medicare rebates for telehealth consultations, uptake has grown with more than 7,000 services provided by over 1,200 clinicians around Australia, mostly to rural and remote areas,

Telehealth is a cost effective, real-time and convenient alternative to the more traditional face-to-face way of providing medical care and advice. It removes many of the barriers, such as distance, time and cost, which prevent patients from accessing timely and appropriate healthcare services.

Over time, the NBN will provide an enhanced nationwide platform that allows homes, doctor surgeries, pharmacies, clinics, aged-care facilities and allied health professionals to connect to affordable, reliable, high-speed and high-capacity broadband.

By expanding telehealth services to older Australians still living in their own homes will help health professionals identify potential health problems earlier, reduce the need for older Australians to travel to receive treatment and increase access to healthcare services and specialists.

http://www.health.gov.au/internet/ministers/publishing.nsf/Content/mr-yr12-tp-tp008.htm

Paul Budde Communication Pty Ltd

5385 George Downes Drive

Bucketty NSW 2250, Australia

www.budde.com.au

Tel 02 4998 8144, Fax 02 4998 8247

email: paul@budde.com.au

Technology and Aging Conference (The Netherlands) and Abstract Submission Deadline

Only 10 days are left to submit your contribution to ISG*ISARC2012 World Conference with the newest developments in Gerontechnology, and Automation and Robotics in Construction, including business models and marketing.

Go to www.isg-isarc2012.org and submit your abstract (if you have not done this already).

With your free reader-account you have also access to those contributions that have already been accepted after successful peer-review:

http://www.futuresiteconferences.nl/index.php/isg-isarc/ISGISARC2012/schedConf/presentations

ISG*ISARC2012

June 26, 2012 – June 29, 2012

May we invite you to the biennial World Conference on technologies and technology use to serve the aging society (Gerontechnology), in combination with the yearly ISARC conference dedicated to Robotics and Automation in Construction?

ISG*ISARC2012 consists of 13 keynotes, 25 symposia, a maximum of both 36 leading-edge technology events, and 36 chaired oral sessions. In addition the GeronTechnoPlatform will have continuous video presentations and real-time virtual site visits.

Under the theme “Who is afraid of aging?” issues pertaining to the aging society are addressed, such as quality of life with leisure and pleasure, home care, life-long working, retrofitting existing buildings and infrastructures, and the associated new technologies, such as ICT, automation, robotics and governance in the construction industry. We start from the rights and needs of the  aging person living and working in built environments.

The event takes place in Eindhoven (The Netherlands) under the umbrella of the European Year for Active Aging 2012 .

Bush Radio-The Mother of Community Media in South (and Sub-Saharan) Africa

Backchat's Bassie Montewa doing an impromptu interview with the delegation

Members of the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Communications, the Media Development and Diversity Agency(MDDA), Sentech, Post Office and Universal Service and Access Agency of South Africa (USAASA) paid a visit to Bush Radioyesterday (19 January 2012).

Bush Radio’s Managing Director Brenda Leonard gave thecommittee members and MDDA a tour of the station and after that gave a short presentation on the state of community media in South Africa.

Chairperson of the committee, Sikhumbuzo Eric Kholwane being interviewed

Some of the challenges that Bush Radio highlighted in the presentation included: Sentech-transmission cost, SAMRO‘s-calculation of fees, SAARF‘s research methodology and accuracy, the funding structure of community media in South Africa, as well as issues around the advertising industry and the current state of development of the community media sector.

After the presentation Chairperson of the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Communications Sikumbuzo Eric Kholwane thanked Bush Radio for being a long and outstanding example of a community radio station.  He added that he is grateful that Bush Radio is still holding the fort, and a great example to coming generation.  

MPs and other members of the delegation listening to the Bush Radio briefing

Member of Parliament and Chief Whip of the Committee on Communications Annelize van Wyk said Bush Radio is a better example of a community radio. Van Wyk added that Bush Radioserves as a blueprint of what community radio stations need.


Original Article:http://bushradio.wordpress.com/tag/usaasa/

MP Wilma Newhoudt-Druchen (left) making notes during the briefing

How Citizen Mapmakers are Changing the Story of Our Cities

By Christine McLaren - resident blogger for the BMW Guggenheim Lab, a mobile think tank investigating solutions to urban problems. It launched this fall in New York and will travel next to Berlin, Mumbai, and six other cities over six years. 

We see them every day, popping up on our Twitter feeds, filtered through blogs, or even scattered throughout the New York Times: maps portraying not the usual locations or destinations, but data.

From people’s kisses in Toronto, to the concentration of pizza joints in New York, to the number of women who ride bikes, to the likelihood of being killed by a car in any given American city, the list of lenses through which we can now view our cities and neighborhoods goes on, thanks to data-mapping geeks.

“The map user has now become the map creator,” is how Fraser Taylor put it to me in an interview. The director of the Geomatics and Cartographic Research Centre at Carleton University, Taylor is one of the world’s leading cartographers, standing as the director of the International Steering Committee for Global Mapping and a member of the United Nations Expert Group on Global Geographic Information Management as well as a host of other major international mapping organizations.

He describes what’s going on as an enormous cultural shift from a previous era when the mapping of our cities (or countries, or world, for that matter) was placed mainly in the hands of government mapping authorities.

But even more importantly, Taylor says, we are also mapping new things—intangibles like social phenomena, feelings, impacts, and more.

“Individuals inside cities and elsewhere are creating maps for themselves and in fact giving us their own narrative of what a cityscape is about. They are telling us what is important to them, and they’re mapping the kinds of things that previously would not be mapped,” he says. “It’s becoming part of the creation of a culture of a city.”

The democratization of mapmaking is the result of a potent mixture of digital revolutions.

Combine the phenomenon of governments opening their data to the public with the new ability to crowdsource information. Then add the introduction of open-source mapping tools like OpenStreetMap, and the fact that within just around five years nearly every one of us has equipped ourselves with a mobile device with GPS technology.

Suddenly—boom—we’re seeing our cities laid out in front of us in an entirely new way. Every day.

But at some point, as with any technological revolution, it warrants taking a step back from the excitement and asking ourselves: what is it all good for?

Sure it’s fun, fascinating, and informative to see our city through these various curious lenses. We understand it in new ways, yes. But does it actually matter? Does it change our behavior, or it is just a toy?

In other words: Now what?

One glimpse of the potential this all holds can be found on Datablog, the Guardian blog dedicated entirely to data-based journalism. Datablog has mapped everything from the impact of cuts to housing benefits in the UK to government attempts to get Google to remove content or reveal data about its users, providing not only the maps and data sets but often the analysis necessary to understand the implications.

The impact of this became especially apparent during the riots that shook the United Kingdom in the summer of 2011. When UK Prime Minister David Cameron denied outright that the riots had anything to do with poverty, Datablog countered the claim with, well, data.

Overlaying the addresses of the defendants in the riots with concentrations of poverty, the website produced a map showing a much different picture: nearly 60 percent of those appearing in court lived within the top 20 percent of England’s most deprived areas.

“Ten years ago you would have had to be a major GIS (Graphic Information System) specialist to even approach to do that,” says Datablog editor Simon Rogers. Now anyone with basic computer skills could learn to do it at no cost.

Rogers says the key to making data maps work lies in layering. While one set of data on a map is interesting, two or more tell a story that really teaches us something.

Much like rioters’ addresses spread atop a poverty map illuminates a potential factor in criminal behavior, perhaps Torontonians’ kisses laid over a map of traffic congestion, open public space, or concentration of trees would tell us not only where we experience moments of intimacy, but why.

It suddenly puts citizens in a powerful position by giving them the ability to make demands from their governments based not on anecdotes but on more detailed facts and correlations than ever before—should they choose to.

“I think we’re now in a position where we [the media and the public] can really make a difference. When the rest of the world is desperate to know what this stuff means, we can be that bridge to the data,” says Rogers.

“Government-released information is brilliant. But at the same time the government is not going to analyze it for us. It’s not their job to do it. I think people have kind of stepped back a bit and are waiting for them to do it, and they’re not going to. It’s up to us to do that. It’s our job to hold them to account. It’s kind of impossible to lie on an issue that’s data-led, because someone will pick you up on it.”

And while Fraser Taylor is equally enthusiastic about the potential that crowdsourced and open-data mapping holds, he says that the biggest hurdle yet will be finding a way to convince governments and mapping agencies of the data’s reliability.

“As of yet there is still a resistance on the part of both government and national mapping agencies to this information. They’re always saying, ‘What is the quality of this information? Is this stuff reliable or not?’ But increasingly people are coming around to realize that there are ways of dealing with the so-called reliability issue and the accuracy issue in a way which can lead to an enrichment of society and an enrichment of their own products,” he says.

Taylor himself is currently working to develop a crowdsourcing framework that automatically creates metadata (data about the data), thus enabling the merging of crowdsourced data with that of authorities and hard science.

He points out that an increasing number of mapping agencies, including the national mapping agency of Canada, where he is based, are already looking at volunteered geographic information as a direct input into its official mapping.

There’s no doubt in Taylor’s mind that this is the beginning of a very new and exciting era—one that puts citizens in the position to understand and influence the politics of their cities as never before.

And as for those kissing maps? Are they worthwhile, too?

“Absolutely,” Taylor says. It’s all part of the historical narrative of our cities—one that will be more democratically recorded in this generation than ever before.

“The image of your society was once determined by those who had the power to determine what would be mapped, and what wouldn’t be,” he says.

“Today that is changing.”

This story was originally published on Lab|log at bmwguggenheimlab.org. © 2012 The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Used by permission. Image courtesy of voodooangel on flickr.