2,259 research outputs found

    Job Creation Through Building the Field of Impact Sourcing

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    Provides an overview of the field of impact sourcing - using business process outsourcing to create sustainable jobs for the lowest-income populations. Offers case studies, examines models, outlines challenges, and presents an action agenda

    clicktatorship and democrazy: Social media and political campaigning

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    This chapter aims to direct attention to the political dimension of the social media age. Although current events like the Cambridge Analytica data breach managed to raise awareness for the issue, the systematically organized and orchestrated mechanisms at play still remain oblivious to most. Next to dangerous monopoly-tendencies among the powerful players on the market, reliance on automated algorithms in dealing with content seems to enable large-scale manipulation that is applied for economical and political purposes alike. The successful replacement of traditional parties by movements based on personality cults around marketable young faces like Emmanuel Macron or Austria’s Sebastian Kurz is strongly linked to products and services offered by an industry that simply provides likes and followers for cash. Inspired by Trump’s monopolization of the Twitter-channel, these new political acteurs use the potential of social media for effective message control, allowing them to avoid confrontations with professional journalists. In addition, an extremely active minority of organized agitators relies on the viral potential of the web to strongly influence and dictate public discourse – suggesting a shift from the Spiral of Silence to the dangerous illusion of a Nexus of Noise

    Impacts of information technology (IT) outsourcing on organizational performance: A firm-level empirical analysis

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    There is a wealth of knowledge linking Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) to human development, but Africa’s leaders have not used it well to develop its human capital. The continent has the lowest global levels of ICT diffusion and human development. This paper proposes a way of developing Africa’s vital access to knowledge through ICT, by reviewing and using the human development record of South Africa to develop a research framework for a human development – based ICT development strategy. The framework comprises a research-based bottom-up participative action program that responds directly to the specific information needs of the country’s socioeconomically marginalized communities, the so-called “Bottom of the Pyramid” (BOP), by ensuring their maximum participation in the research and development process. The proposed framework draws liberally from the vast accumulated knowledge about human development and its principal tool, the ICTs, especially from Asia where similar development activities are delivering impressive results. The multi-cultural and multi-lingual characteristic of South African society, including its recent sociopolitical history, presents numerous challenges for balanced human development, but also unique opportunities to build an effective model for improving the usefulness of ICTs for human development in the country and by extension, in Africa as a whol

    Journal of Asian Finance, Economics and Business, v. 4, no. 1

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    Vortex of the Web. Potentials of the online environment

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    This volume compiles international contributions that explore the potential risks and chances coming along with the wide-scale migration of society into digital space. Suggesting a shift of paradigm from Spiral of Silence to Nexus of Noise, the opening chapter provides an overview on systematic approaches and mechanisms of manipulation – ranging from populist political players to Cambridge Analytica. After a discussion of the the juxtaposition effects of social media use on social environments, the efficient instrumentalization of Twitter by Turkish politicans in the course of the US-decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital is being analyzed. Following a case study of Instagram, Black Lives Matter and racism is a research about the impact of online pornography on the academic performance of university students. Another chapter is pointing out the potential of online tools for the successful relaunch of shadow brands. The closing section of the book deals with the role of social media on the opinion formation about the Euromaidan movement during the Ukrainian revolution and offers a comparative study touching on Russian and Western depictions of political documentaries in the 2000s

    Fintech urbanism in the startup capital of Africa

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    From innovations in mobile money to bookkeeping devices, the burgeoning of financial-technologies (fintech) in the Global South has been critiqued by scholars concerned with financialization, datafication, and recently, neo-coloniality. While sympathetic to these concerns, this paper argues for a more descriptive, ambivalent, and urban reading of the implications and stakes of this fintech boom. Using Cape Town as a case study, we explore how the city has become and positioned itself as a/the capital of fintech innovation in Africa. With two detailed vignettes that look respectively at the recent histories of business process offshoring in the city and at the cycles of experimentation that via Cape Town bring fintech to the rest of the continent, we make three arguments. First, that the urban state has been instrumental in shaping how fintech lands in cities and how the infrastructures which support it develop. Second, that diverse cultural economies of experimentation engender the worlding practices through which local fintech ecosystems operate. Overall, we suggest that paying attention to these different ways in which fintech is enabled and mobilized by the urban state opens a necessary research agenda into the ambivalence of financial innovation in Africa

    Telecommunication Economics

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    This book constitutes a collaborative and selected documentation of the scientific outcome of the European COST Action IS0605 Econ@Tel "A Telecommunications Economics COST Network" which run from October 2007 to October 2011. Involving experts from around 20 European countries, the goal of Econ@Tel was to develop a strategic research and training network among key people and organizations in order to enhance Europe's competence in the field of telecommunications economics. Reflecting the organization of the COST Action IS0605 Econ@Tel in working groups the following four major research areas are addressed: - evolution and regulation of communication ecosystems; - social and policy implications of communication technologies; - economics and governance of future networks; - future networks management architectures and mechanisms

    Assessing the African mobile telephony boom : the impact of the mobile phone and its relationship to the digital divide

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    Includes abstract.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 78-81).This dissertation provides an overview of the boom in mobile telephony in Africa, experienced in terms of exceptional and increasing subscriber growth. It provides a description of the mobile telephony boom, as well as its social political and economic impacts. It investigates what effect mobile telephony has had on the bridging of a broader digital divide, conceived of in terms of inequalities in access to information and communication technologies between Africa and the rest of the world, as well within Africa itself. It concludes that the boom in mobile telephony has had far-reaching impacts on the continent at all levels of African society. In particular, mobile phones have had a significant economic impact on the continent, which the author argues has been from the bottom up -affecting greatly the base of the economic pyramid and the informal sector. Mobile telephony has however not made a significant impact in the bridging of the digital divide conceived of in terms of access to the internet. A broader digital divide still exists which mobile telephony may not provide the tools to bridge

    Methods for revealing and reshaping the African Internet Ecosystem as a case study for developing regions: from isolated networks to a connected continent

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    Mención Internacional en el título de doctorWhile connecting end-users worldwide, the Internet increasingly promotes local development by making challenges much simpler to overcome, regardless of the field in which it is used: governance, economy, education, health, etc. However, African Network Information Centre (AfriNIC), the Regional Internet Registry (RIR) of Africa, is characterized by the lowest Internet penetration: 28.6% as of March 2017 compared to an average of 49.7% worldwide according to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) estimates [139]. Moreover, end-users experience a poor Quality of Service (QoS) provided at high costs. It is thus of interest to enlarge the Internet footprint in such under-connected regions and determine where the situation can be improved. Along these lines, this doctoral thesis thoroughly inspects, using both active and passive data analysis, the critical aspects of the African Internet ecosystem and outlines the milestones of a methodology that could be adopted for achieving similar purposes in other developing regions. The thesis first presents our efforts to help build measurements infrastructures for alleviating the shortage of a diversified range of Vantage Points (VPs) in the region, as we cannot improve what we can not measure. It then unveils our timely and longitudinal inspection of the African interdomain routing using the enhanced RIPE Atlas measurements infrastructure for filling the lack of knowledge of both IPv4 and IPv6 topologies interconnecting local Internet Service Providers (ISPs). It notably proposes reproducible data analysis techniques suitable for the treatment of any set of similar measurements to infer the behavior of ISPs in the region. The results show a large variety of transit habits, which depend on socio-economic factors such as the language, the currency area, or the geographic location of the country in which the ISP operates. They indicate the prevailing dominance of ISPs based outside Africa for the provision of intracontinental paths, but also shed light on the efforts of stakeholders for traffic localization. Next, the thesis investigates the causes and impacts of congestion in the African IXP substrate, as the prevalence of this endemic phenomenon in local Internet markets may hinder their growth. Towards this end, Ark monitors were deployed at six strategically selected local Internet eXchange Points (IXPs) and used for collecting Time-Sequence Latency Probes (TSLP) measurements during a whole year. The analysis of these datasets reveals no evidence of widespread congestion: only 2.2% of the monitored links experienced noticeable indication of congestion, thus promoting peering. The causes of these events were identified during IXP operator interviews, showing how essential collaboration with stakeholders is to understanding the causes of performance degradations. As part of the Internet Society (ISOC) strategy to allow the Internet community to profile the IXPs of a particular region and monitor their evolution, a route-collector data analyzer was then developed and afterward, it was deployed and tested in AfriNIC. This open source web platform titled the “African” Route-collectors Data Analyzer (ARDA) provides metrics, which picture in real-time the status of interconnection at different levels, using public routing information available at local route-collectors with a peering viewpoint of the Internet. The results highlight that a small proportion of Autonomous System Numbers (ASNs) assigned by AfriNIC (17 %) are peering in the region, a fraction that remained static from April to September 2017 despite the significant growth of IXPs in some countries. They show how ARDA can help detect the impact of a policy on the IXP substrate and help ISPs worldwide identify new interconnection opportunities in Africa, the targeted region. Since broadening the underlying network is not useful without appropriately provisioned services to exploit it, the thesis then delves into the availability and utilization of the web infrastructure serving the continent. Towards this end, a comprehensive measurement methodology is applied to collect data from various sources. A focus on Google reveals that its content infrastructure in Africa is, indeed, expanding; nevertheless, much of its web content is still served from the United States (US) and Europe, although being the most popular content source in many African countries. Further, the same analysis is repeated across top global and regional websites, showing that even top African websites prefer to host their content abroad. Following that, the primary bottlenecks faced by Content Providers (CPs) in the region such as the lack of peering between the networks hosting our probes and poorly configured DNS resolvers are explored to outline proposals for further ISP and CP deployments. Considering the above, an option to enrich connectivity and incentivize CPs to establish a presence in the region is to interconnect ISPs present at isolated IXPs by creating a distributed IXP layout spanning the continent. In this respect, the thesis finally provides a four-step interconnection scheme, which parameterizes socio-economic, geographical, and political factors using public datasets. It demonstrates that this constrained solution doubles the percentage of continental intra-African paths, reduces their length, and drastically decreases the median of their Round Trip Times (RTTs) as well as RTTs to ASes hosting the top 10 global and top 10 regional Alexa websites. We hope that quantitatively demonstrating the benefits of this framework will incentivize ISPs to intensify peering and CPs to increase their presence, for enabling fast, affordable, and available access at the Internet frontier.Programa Oficial de Doctorado en Ingeniería TelemáticaPresidente: David Fernández Cambronero.- Secretario: Alberto García Martínez.- Vocal: Cristel Pelsse
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