"Speak safe" introduces reporters, journalists and bloggers to simple yet effective practices for maintaining control of important information and communications. Thirteen short chapters, of two to four pages each, provide basic knowledge about issues such as safe emailing, surfing, Wi-Fi, data dele
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tion, the risks of sharing data online, or mobile phone safety. Several online resources are introduced, where additional information, tutorials and software can be found." (CAMECO Update November 2013)
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"This technical report seeks to understand the impact of improved access to information technology on farmers’ agricultural production and marketing practices in sub-Saharan Africa, with a specific focus on Niger. Related research suggests in that access to mobile telephony can reduce communicatio
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n and search costs, thereby increasing rural households’ access to price and labor market information. Reducing information asymmetries should, in theory, allow households to better respond to shocks. We find that increased access to a mobile phone via an adult education program increases the diversity of crops planted, particularly marginal cash crops grown by women. This also increases the likelihood that these cash crops are grown, but does not increase the farm-gate price received." (Abstract)
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"Getting SMS campaigns right is not simple. The right content, delivered at the right time in the right context, is critical. Adding the right kind of interaction to campaigns can make them more engaging, and increase their power in encouraging positive change. Positive behavior change campaigns sho
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uld also ideally be measurable - this is never easy, but when your recipients are difficult to access physically, as is often the case with SMS campaigns, this becomes more challenging. This guide seeks to introduce some key points to think about when planning to use SMS for behavioral change campaigning." (Introduction)
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"This report presents a comprehensive and multidimensional overview of the Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) sector in Afghanistan, covering developments and intersections across the areas of Internet and telecom infrastructure; policy, services, accessibility and affordability; key
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players and operators; and legal and regulatory governance frameworks." (Foreword)
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"Eager to assist, organize, and structure our lifestream logistics, new corporate actors offer communicative freedoms based on commercial user-as-product philosophies of expression. But we now design our own interfaces to face our others, our algorithmic others. Our collective reflection on nature a
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s machinic assemblage has yielded functional foods and the financialization of agriculture. But networked selves already develop other ecologies, reclaiming social machines as technologies of the common, unearthing the conflicts covered in disaster-driven environmentalities whose horizon is delimited by energy security and resource efficiency. Both helped and hindered by the ontological resonances of the common, these ecologies remain fragile, not yet structured by a politics of rights, animated by an interest in the autonomy of things. As nature continues to seep across the curriculum, research and education struggle to keep track of the corrosion of their institutional frameworks. Powered by a cartographic vision unconstrained by the statist political imagination, the study of supply chains has already become a paradigmatic form of transdisciplinarity, moving across the boundaries of life and labor, tracking every speck of dust on the scratch-free screens of our mobile economies as a reminder of the complexities of mutual constitution. The question of depletion is the question of the institution, of what it means when subjects and objects join in a refusal of roles in the great games of reification. No accident, perhaps, that philosophies of play are back, not quite a renaissance of aesthetic experience, but an affirmation of the openness of objective and subjective constitution. Of these and other knowledges so created, there can no longer be an encyclopedia; a glossary, perhaps. This is its initial iteration, its entries conjoined by a logic of connotation and constellation." (Page 5)
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"This book brings together several key anthropologists working with digital culture to demonstrate just how productive an anthropological approach to the digital has already become. Through a range of case studies from Facebook to Second Life to Google Earth, Digital Anthropology explores how human
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and digital can be defined in relation to one another, from avatars and disability; cultural differences in how we use social networking sites or practise religion; the practical consequences of the digital for politics, museums, design, space and development to new online world and gaming communities. The book also explores the moral universe of the digital, from new anxieties to open-source ideals. Digital Anthropology reveals how only the intense scrutiny of ethnography can overturn assumptions about the impact of digital culture and reveal its profound consequences for everyday life." (Publisher description)
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"This paper reviews recent events and legal developments related to the Internet and social media in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. They include legislation extending libel laws to online communications, blocking of oppositional and independent websites, and punishi
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ng journalists who report or comment for online media." (Introduction)
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"Despite the massive uptake of mobile phones by agricultural producers, there are few quantitative studies that provide hard evidence of a link between technology and poverty reduction. Those studies that have explored this, however, found that farmer access to market information through radio, mobi
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le phones and internet resulted in higher farm-gate prices and a better bargaining position with local traders. To make good on the promise of ICT transformation, however, the paper suggests that organizations from the public and private sectors will need to create new types of partnerships and business networks with the millions of smallholder farmers in the developing world. Some general recommendations for ensuring these technologies contribute to sustainable and equitable development include: promote investment policies that give communications companies incentives to cross subsidize investments from higher profit areas to expand infrastructure into less commercial rural areas; support income levies within the commercial communications markets so that a percentage of profit is made available for public goods services; in more remote areas combine wireless technologies with electrical power sources that can be used by communities to support other vital sectors, such as health and education; promote and support the development of content in local languages to improve the accessibility and inclusiveness of ICT applications." (Executive summary)
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