Information Technology in Rural Areas: Waiting for the Revolution

This report tracks recent state-level employment changes in a set of 35 industries that research suggests have been materially affected by advances in information technologies. THe industries are grouped into two categories: those producing IT goods and services, and those consuming IT goods and services. The study looks for recent evidence that these IT-related industries are changing how they make location decisions, with a special emphasis on the prospects for rural areas in attracting these types of firms.

Expensive classrooms, poor learning: The imperatives of reforming school construction in Egypt

Egyptian schools suffer from systematic deficiencies that affect student learning, attendance, health, and dignity. These include a discrepancy between needs and actual construction projects, very poor maintenance, and massive school shortages leading to high density, overcrowding, and multiple-shift schools. Egypt’s average classroom density of 47.5 students/classroom in the primary stage is higher than the average in countries such as India and China. More than 75% of Egyptian students are in classrooms that have over 40 students. Such high classroom densities have a strongly negative impact on learning, especially at the critical primary stage. Not only does Egypt’s high average classroom density obscure large variations across the country, it also hides the problem of multiple-shift schools, where more than one school population uses the same facilities. Only one third of Egyptian public school students attend single-shift schools: the remaining 12.7 million children (of whom 7 million are in the primary stage) have to cope with overcrowded classrooms. They also have a smaller window of learning time and are often deprived of classes considered less essential like arts, music, and physical education. These conditions directly contribute to poor learning and student dropout, as well as seriously undermining equality within the system. These inadequate learning conditions, compounded by sanitary and maintenance problems, disproportionately affect those students who are already disadvantaged. Official estimates point to the need to construct 250,000 new classrooms at a cost of 130 billion Egyptian pounds (EGP) ($7.3 billion).1 This massive construction campaign must be guided by a restructuring of Egypt’s current school construction system under new parameters that will ensure better quality, lower costs, and less resource waste. School shortages and high construction costs are driven by the way in which the system is designed and managed; restrictive and unnecessary requirements increase construction costs while undermining the allocation of land for schools. Highly centralized procurement procedures contribute to high costs, resource waste, and allegations of corruption plague almost every step of the school construction process. Whereas some aspects of school construction in Egypt may be unique, many of the problems associated with the system are shared by other countries. Drawing on both the local context and relevant international data, this paper provides a comprehensive analysis of this under-researched topic, suggests alternative indicators that should be used to better enhance school construction efforts, and puts forward six key policy recommendations for reforming school construction. The recommendations are all part of a necessary restructuring of the regime of school construction and the main entity responsible for it, the General Authority for Educational Buildings (GAEB)

Digitized Products: Challenges and Practices from the Creative Industries

Recent digital technologies like the Internet of Things and Augmented Reality have brought IT into companies’ core products. What were previously purely physical products are becoming hybrid or digitized. Despite receiving a lot of recent attention, digitized products have only seen a slow uptake in businesses so far. In this paper, we study the challenges that keep companies from realizing the desired impacts of digitized products and the practices they employ to address these challenges. To do so, we looked at companies from a set of industries that are highly affected by digital transformation, but at the same time hesitant to move to a more digitized world: the creative industries. Based on a literature review and twelve interviews in creative industries, we developed a conceptual model that can serve as a basis for formulating testable hypotheses for further research in this area

Read/Write Digital Libraries for Musicology

The Web and other digital technologies have democratised music creation, reception, and analysis, putting music in the hands, ears, and minds of billions of users. Music digital libraries typically focus on an essential subset of this deluge—commercial and academic publications, and historical materials—but neglect to incorporate contributions by scholars, performers, and enthusiasts, such as annotations or performed interpretations of these artifacts, despite their potential utility for many types of users. In this paper we consider means by which digital libraries for musicology may incorporate such contributions into their collections, adhering to principles of FAIR data management and respecting contributor rights as outlined in the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation. We present an overview of centralised and decentralised approaches to this problem, and propose hybrid solutions in which contributions reside in a) user-controlled personal online datastores, b) decentralised file storage, and c) are published and aggregated into digital library collections. We outline the implementation of these ideas using Solid, a Web decentralisation project building on W3C standard technologies to facilitate publication and control over Linked Data. We demonstrate the feasibility of this approach by implementing prototypes supporting two types of contribution: Web Annotations describing or analysing musical elements in score encodings and music recordings; and, music performances and associated metadata supporting performance analyses across many renditions of a given piece. Finally, we situate these ideas within a wider conception of enriched, decentralised, and interconnected online music repositories

Monitor Newsletter August 24, 1987

Official Publication of Bowling Green State University for Faculty and Staffhttps://scholarworks.bgsu.edu/monitor/1886/thumbnail.jp

Monitor Newsletter August 24, 1987

Official Publication of Bowling Green State University for Faculty and Staffhttps://scholarworks.bgsu.edu/monitor/1886/thumbnail.jp

Open Peer to Peer Technologies

Peer-to-peer applications allow us to separate out the concepts of authoring information and publishing that same information. It allows for decentralized application design, something that is both an opportunity and a challenge. All the peer-to-peer applications, in various ways, return the content, choice, and control to ordinary users. Tiny end points on the Internet, sometimes even without knowing each other, exchange information and form communities. In these applications there are no more clients and servers, instead the communication takes place between cooperating peers. There are many applications nowadays which are being labeled as peer-to-peer. A way to examine the distinction of whether an application is peer-to-peer or not is to check on the owner of the hardware that the service runs on. Like Napster, if the huge part of the hardware that Napster runs on is owned by the Napster users on millions of desktops then it is peer-to-peer. Peer-to-peer is a way of decentralizing not only features, but costs and administration also. By decentralizing data and therefore redirecting users so they download data directly from other user's computers, Napster reduced the load on its servers to the point where it could cheaply support tens of millions of users. The same principle is used in many commercial peer-to-peer systems. In short peer-to-peer cannot only distribute files. It can also distribute the burden of supporting network connections. The overall bandwidth remains the same as in centralized systems, but bottlenecks are eliminated at central sites and equally importantly, at their ISPs. Search techniques are important to making peer-to-peer systems useful. But there is a higher level of system design and system use. Topics like trust, accountability and metadata have to be handled before searching is viable

A Quantum Kernel Learning Approach to Acoustic Modeling for Spoken Command Recognition

We propose a quantum kernel learning (QKL) framework to address the inherent data sparsity issues often encountered in training large-scare acoustic models in low-resource scenarios. We project acoustic features based on classical-to-quantum feature encoding. Different from existing quantum convolution techniques, we utilize QKL with features in the quantum space to design kernel-based classifiers. Experimental results on challenging spoken command recognition tasks for a few low-resource languages, such as Arabic, Georgian, Chuvash, and Lithuanian, show that the proposed QKL-based hybrid approach attains good improvements over existing classical and quantum solutions.Comment: Submitted to ICASSP 202