The i-REACH Project in Cambodia

The i-REACH project in Cambodia is an ambitious three year initiative building two pilot e-communities in rural Cambodia.  Begun on May 2006, funded by IDRC of Canada, and managed by the Ministry of Commerce Cambodia, the goal is to deploy a range of ICTs, including telephony, internet, videoconferencing, radio and video, to bring social and economic benefits to villagers, eventually leading to the creation of community-owned ICT enterprises. Although already somewhat behind schedule, a solid team is in place in each pilot, the communities are mobilising around the initiative, and a range of services are on the point of launch

Cromwell's Edinburgh press and the development of print culture in Scotland

Alasdair Mann, the noted scholar of book culture in early modern Scotland, has suggested that a significant change had occurred in Scotland's relationship with the printed word by the late seventeenth century. This study sets out to explain how the interregnum served as a ‘watershed’ during which a consumer demand was created for popular print and how this in turn necessitated a significant increase in the production and distribution of printed material. Beginning with the sale of the press and patent of Evan Tyler to the London Stationers’ Company in 1647, the article charts the key factors that transformed Scotland's printing industry from the production of official declarations and works for foreign markets to the production of polemical texts for a Scottish audience. These developments also witnessed publication of the first serial news journal and the growth of a competitive market for up-to-date printed news. More than just an anomaly that flourished during a decade of occupation, these fundamental changes altered Scotland by introducing the large-scale consumption of chapbooks and printed ephemera, thereby initiating the nation's enduring print culture

Nation and archipelago

This chapter explores John Milton's Observations upon the Articles of Peace with the Irish Rebels (1649), a 25,000-word treatise that is a touchstone text for a turning point in British and Irish history, a telling account of the tensions between colonialism and republicanism, and a tipping point in Milton's thinking around Archipelagic interdependence – the tied fates of the nations that make up the emerging British state. This multi-authored work, exemplary in its many-sided depiction of a pivotal point in the history of the three Stuart kingdoms of England, Ireland, and Scotland, depicts different national and religious communities responding to the execution of Charles I on January 30, 1649. Milton's commission was to address the “complication of interests” in Ireland in the wake of the killing of the king. His protean polemic captures the contradictions of a poet against empire countering a challenge to metropolitan government from a complex planter society

An in-depth study of the ICT ecosystem in a South African rural community: unveiling expenditure and communication patterns

There is no doubt of the contributions made by mobile phones and mobile network operators in increasing access to communications in rural areas of developing countries. Yet how affordable is this ubiquitous access in such an ICT ecosystem? Using data from two stratified random surveys conducted in a South African rural community, this paper provides a unique in-depth picture of the expenditure and communication patterns of its dwellers. Results show a high access ratio of people using mobile phone services weekly and a high proportion of disposable income dedicated to a very constrained set of mobile phone services. Factors such as mobile phone charging and the extra charges added by airtime resellers contribute to increase the communication costs. This data and its analysis can be used by the following: regulators and government agencies to better design their policy implementations to provide universal service and access; competing industry players to understand the dynamics within rural communities to better target their products; civil society organizations to a constitutional right

Report on telecentre survey

This comprises a brief report on the Survey of telecentres undertaken from June to October 2010