In writing the paper, I was asked to suggest what I think are some of the most important policy actions that need to be taken.  These are summarised below:

1. Although ICTs and the Internet do indeed have the potential to help transform the lives of poor people, technologies have generally always been used primarily by those in power to maintain their positions of power.  Hence, we must begin by making a firm commitment to ensuring that we will enable the poorest and most marginalised to have similar connectivity to that through which the world’s richest now benefit.
2. Regulation must be made to work efficiently and effectively, so that the market can indeed deliver for as many people as possible.  This requires that regulators adopt a fair pricing policy, not seeking to reap too many additional financial benefits for governments, but rather placing primary emphasis on the means through which as many people as possible can access commercially available Internet connectivity.
3. In some contexts, Universal Service (or Access) Funds can provide a means whereby states can direct additional resources specifically to the needs of poor and marginalised communities.  However, to date, many such funds have failed to deliver on their expectations, and they remain unpopular among companies providing telephony and broadband services who see them primarily as a tax that reduces their potential to deliver services more cheaply than could be provided by the state or civil society.
4. Effective multi-stakeholder partnerships between states, the private sector, civil society and international organisations are an essential element in delivering connectivity to the poorest and most marginalised communities. Such partnerships are not easy to implement, but given the complexity of the technologies, the diversity of interests involved, and the need for financial investment, they remain essential.
5. The need for collaboration and co-operation between international initiatives designed to support broadband for all.  Duplication of effort is wasteful of precious resources, and seeking to reinvent the wheel means that many lesson from previous failures are not sufficiently learned.
6. There needs to be a passion amongst the world’s leading researchers to design innovative solutions that are focused particularly on reducing the costs of access to the Internet as well as provision of electricity, rather than reaping the maximum profits from so doing.
7. One of the reasons for the high cost of Internet access in many of the poorest countries is that companies have sought to extract high short-term returns on investment.  Investing in what were previously seen as public sector utilities is a challenging business, but ultimately governments have the responsibility for ensuring that all of their peoples can have access to and benefit from such utilities, and must therefore play a significant role in their support.
8. Without reliable sources of electricity, any use of ICTs is impossible.  Innovative solutions to the provision of electricity, particularly in rural areas are thus an essential precursor for Internet access.
9. Finally, Internet access that is affordable by the poor, together with the electricity necessary to power it, are not enough by themselves.  Digital resources and peer communities that deliver on and support the content and communication needs and aspirations of poor people and marginalised communities must be developed and made as widely accessible as possible.

Clearly, there are many more actions that need to be taken, but I do think that these can make a significant difference, albeit in different measures and balance in different countries.  I hope that one of the outcomes of the Forum will be that everyone present can commit to taking real action to enable the world’s poorest and most marginalised to benefit from the potential of the Internet.

The Royal Monastery of Santa Maria de Poblet in La Conca de Barberà just to the north of Reus and Tarragona, and some 130 kms west of Barcelona, is one of a group of Cistercian monasteries founded in Catalunya in the 12th century, shortly after the conquest of the province by the Catalan-Aragon monarchy.  Others  include the monasteries of Vallbona de les Monges in l’Urgell and Santes Creus in L’Alt Camp.  One day I must walk the Ruta del Coster that joins them all up!

The monastery of Santa Maria de Poblet itself had become very run down by the early 19th century.  The confiscation of church lands in 1835 and the consequent expulsion of the monks led to further decay, and it has only been in recent years that some of its character has been restored.  A community of monks returned to the monastery in 1940, and in 1991 it was declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO.  Since then it has attracted increasing numbers of visitors, many of whom are drawn there by its magnificent setting among woods and streams sheltered by the Prades mountains.

In 2010 a new modern guesthouse, the Hostageria de Poblet, was built within the old walls of the monastery, and it provides a simple, minimalist place to stay. For those who like quiet, hidden away places, set amidst vineyards and rolling hills, the Hostageria is most definitely worth a visit.  As their brochure notes, “There are no televisions in the rooms to respect the silence and the living dynamics of the monastery”.  That having been said, the guesthouse does have Internet access for those who do not want to escape the modern technological world completely!  Currently, the Spring price for a double room varies between $49 and $59, which makes them really excellent value for money.

The Hostageria also has a restaurant that serves delicious local food – but do note that the lunch menu is much more extensive than that available in the evenings.  Alongside the restaurant is a culinary school, designed to provide both a theoretical and practical training for people living in the comarca of Conca de Barberà.  The Spring menu offers three courses for €20, with a typical choice being

• Torradeta d’escalivada i formatge de cabra gratinat
• Llom de bacallà a la mel a l’estil dels monjos de Poblet
• Iogurt del monjos amb gelat de nata i xarrop de grosella

The monastery also has its own wines, developed in collaboration with the Cordoniú Group. Nine hectares within the walled enclosure were planted in 1989 with Pinot Noir grapes, chosen in memory of the Cistercian wine makers of Burgundy.  Although Pinot Noir is not widely grown in Catalunya, the wines from the monastery, include the 100% Pinot Noir Abadia de Poblet, as well as a lesser wine known as Intramurs, which is a blend of Cabernet Sauvignon, Tempranillo and Merlot, and both are definitely worth tasting while staying there.

Whilst it was a cloudy day, and the images do not do full justice to the visual impact, especially around the small village of Flores, these pictures do convey something of the dramatic change they have made to the landscape.  Moreover, standing next to them one can also most definitely appreciate the noise impact they have – no longer are these hilltops a place of silent reflection, tempered only by the song of birds and the occasional dog barking in the villages nearby!

This raises very real questions about how landscapes are valued, and the politics of energy.  There have been many attempts to place a ‘value’ on landscape change, but these have mostly focused on somehow trying to calculate an economic cost of the change, often in terms of the loss of income.  Thus, if an area has previously gained an income from tourism, and the landscape change means that this is reduced, then it is clearly possible to estimate such a loss.  Other measures draw on the amount that people would actually pay not to have a change imposed on a landscape.  However, it is actually extremely difficult to place any kind of economic value on the emotional impact of a landscape change.  This area of Catalunya is at the heart of the Ruta del Cister, the triangle of Cistercian monasteries that were built there from the 12th century onwards.  The impact of the wind turbines has completely transformed the peace and tranquility of the landscapes, in a way that no simple economic measure can ever grasp.  Although some people might  think that these human feats of engineering have an attraction of their own, representing progress that no medieval Cistercian nun or monk could ever imagine, I find the juxtaposition of these two cultures concerning and depressing.

Reflecting on this dramatic transformation, I started to think further about the two kinds of power that this transformation represents.  On the one hand, the wind turbines represent the physical power of a new means of producing electricity.  However, each turbine actually only produces relatively little power. Estimates vary hugely, but as a general figure it is often argued that one turbine can produce enough energy for around 500 households a year – depending on the efficiency at which they function.  All the turbines in the images above therefore produce really rather little electricity, but at a very significant change to the landscape.  This transaction reflects a second kind of power, political power, since it illustrates yet another way through which a largely urban population exploits rural areas for their own interests.  This despoliation of the landscape is nothing other than a means through which the urban bourgeoisie seeks to maintain its ever increasing patterns of consumption.

Surely it would be much ‘fairer’ for the environmental cost to be paid by those living in urban areas, by for example constructing new styles of energy efficient housing and taxing air conditioners, rather than destroying the rural landscapes that they rarely visit, either physically or in their imaginations!

]]> http://unwin.wordpress.com/2013/02/22/valuing-the-impact-of-wind-turbines-on-rural-landscapes-conca-de-barbera/feed/ 3 unwin http://unwin.wordpress.com/2013/01/27/great-new-book-on-evaluating-communication-for-development/ http://unwin.wordpress.com/2013/01/27/great-new-book-on-evaluating-communication-for-development/#comments Sun, 27 Jan 2013 09:02:09 +0000 unwin http://unwin.wordpress.com/?p=2926 Continue reading →]]> I have always had huge admiration for the work (research and practice) that Jo Tacchi does.  It is therefore great to see her latest book, written together with June Lennie, published at the end of last year: Evaluating Communication for Development:a Framework for Social Change (Routledge, 2012).

As the publisher’s blurb notes, “Evaluating Communication for Development presents a comprehensive framework for evaluating communication for development (C4D). This framework combines the latest thinking from a number of fields in new ways. It critiques dominant instrumental, accountability-based approaches to development and evaluation and offers an alternative holistic, participatory, mixed methods approach based on systems and complexity thinking and other key concepts. It maintains a focus on power, gender and other differences and social norms. The authors have designed the framework as a way to focus on achieving sustainable social change and to continually improve and develop C4D initiatives. The benefits and rigour of this approach are supported by examples and case studies from a number of action research and evaluation capacity development projects undertaken by the authors over the past fifteen years.

The Collective was established above all else to bring together colleagues who are committed to undertaking the highest possible quality of research in the interests primarily of poor people and marginalised communities.  Its work is premised on the assumption that ICTs can indeed be used to support poor people, but that we need to work tirelessly to overcome the obstacles that prevent this happening.

In 2007, we were delighted that the Collective and Centre was given the status of the UNESCO Chair in ICT4D, and although I am now only an Emeritus Professor at Royal Holloway, I am very privileged that for the time being I retain this title while also serving as Secretary General of the Commonwealth Telecommunications Organisation.  It is great to be able to draw on my past research and teaching experience in this new role, to help governments across the Commonwealth use ICTs effectively and appropriately for their development agendas.

Then, in 2009 Royal Holloway, University of London, formalised the position of the ICT4D Collective by creating a new multidisciplinary research centre on ICT4D, that brought together expertise primarily from the schools and departments of Geography, Computer Science, Management and Mathematics (Information Security), with contributions also from colleagues in Earth Sciences, Politics and International Relations, and Information Services.  This provides really excellent opportunities to develop new research at the exciting boundaries between disciplines.

Over the eight years of the existence of the ICT4D Collective, we have focused on a wide range of activities, but have particularly sought to serve the wider interests of all researchers and practitioners working in the field of ICT4D.  We were thus delighted to host the 2010 ICTD conference, which brought more than 500 colleagues to our campus, and we were immensely grateful to the generous sponsorship from global institutions that enabled us to provide scholarships for people to attend from across the world (pictured above).  We have also focused much attention on supporting doctoral researchers, and it is excellent to see them now flourishing in their subsequent careers.

Most recently, under new leadership, the Centre is continuing to thrive, and has launched an exciting ICT4D strand within its established Master’s programme on Practising Sustainable Development.  In 2012, a Branch of the UNESCO Chair in ICT4D was also established at Lanzhou University in China, reflecting the growing collaboration between our two institutions, and recognising the huge importance that China is increasingly playing not only in terms of the practical implementation of ICT initiatives, but also into research in this area.

A huge thank you to all who suggested that the ICT4D Collective and Centre should be recognised in this way.  It is a massive spur to us all to keep up the work that we have been doing, and to share it more effectively with all those interested in, and committed to, using ICTs to support poor people and marginalised communities.

The top 20 ranking of Think Tanks in Science and Technology from the 2012 Global GoTo Think Tank Report is given below:

1. MIT Science, Technology, and Society Program (STS) (United States)
2. Max Planck Institute (Germany)
3. RAND Corporation (United States)
4. Center for Development Research (ZEF) (Germany )
5. Information and Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) (United States)
6. Battelle Memorial Institute (United States)
7. Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED) (United States)
8. Institute for Future Technology (IFTECH) (Japan)
9. Consortium for Science, Policy, and Outcomes (CSPO) (United States)
10. Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D) (United Kingdom)
11. Science and Technology Policy Research (SPRU) (United Kingdom)
12. Institute for Basic Research (IBR) (United States)
13. Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) (South Africa)
14. African Technology Policy Studies Network (ATPS) (Kenya)
15. Bertelsmann Foundation (Germany)
16. International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) (Austria)
17. Energy and Resources Institute (India)
18. The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) (India)
19. Santa Fe Institute (SFI) (United States)
20. African Center for Technology Studies (ACTS) (Kenya)

1. Perspectives on the Internet and Web as objects of study
2. Living in a network society
3. Creating and working in a global network economy
4. Communication, power, and influence in a converging media world
5. Governing and regulating the Internet.

Two of the real strengths of the book as an introduction to the field of Internet studies are the very readable style of most of the chapters, and the comprehensive bibliographies that accompany them.

I was delighted to have been asked to write the chapter on the Internet and Development, which Bill suggested should be sub-titled “a critical perspective”!  As I write in the summary, “This chapter explores research on the complex inter-relationship between the Internet and ‘development’, focusing especially on the effects of the Internet on the lives of some of the poorest people and most marginalised communities.  Much of the literature on Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D) suggests that the Internet can indeed bring very significant benefits in the ‘fight against poverty’ (see, for example, Weigel and Waldburger 2004; Rao and Raman 2009; Unwin 2009), but other research is marshalled in this synthesis to challenge this assumption.  In essence, I argue that the expansion of the Internet serves very specific capitalist interests, and that unless conscious and explicit attention is paid to designing interventions that will indeed directly serve the needs of the world’s poorest people, then the Internet will only replicate and reinforce existing structures of dominance and control. This argument supports the need for more research that challenges taken-for-granted assumptions about the Internet and development”.

In essence, the Internet is not some benign force for good as is so often supposed.  Instead it is being shaped and reshaped by a relatively small group of people with very specific interests.  It is absolutely essential that those committed to trying to ensure that digital technologies are used to serve the interests of all peoples in the world, and particularly the poorest and most marginalised, do indeed continue to challenge many of the all too often taken for granted assumptions that the Internet is necessarily automatically a force for positive “development”.

I thought I knew most of the various recommendations concerning password and PIN security, and that I had indeed followed them.  However, no digital system is ever completely secure, and the level of sophistication now being used by those intent on stealing identity data, particularly with respect to banking information, is becoming very much more sophisticated.

There are many well known organisations providing advice and recommendations, such as Sophos, Symantec and Kaspersky Lab, but there are rather few places where all of this information is brought together in a single place.  The level of insecurity, and the apparent disinterest among vast numbers of people in doing much about their digital security is not only surprising, but is also deeply concerning.  So, in this posting, I have tried to bring together some of the more interesting observations that have recently been made about passwords and PIN numbers, in order to try to persuade people to take action on this really rather important topic!

Most popular PIN codes and iPhone passcodes
There are numerous articles on the most popular PIN codes – in other words the ones that no-one should actually use! One of the best is Daniel Amitay‘s experiment, where he used Big Brother’s passcode set up screen as a surrogate to estimate iPhone passcode usage, and discovered that the top ten codes listed below represented 15% of all passcodes used:

1. 1234
2. 0000
3. 2580
4. 1111
5. 5555
6. 5683
7. 0852
8. 2222
9. 1212
10. 1998

None of these are surprising, given that they represent easily remembered structures around the keypad. The passcode 1998 features because it is a year of birth and as Amitay goes on to point out other birth years also feature highly among passwords.

What is perhaps even more worrying is that research by Sophos in 2011 suggested that 67% of consumers do not even use any passcode on their ‘phones, so that a passer-by can access all of the information on the ‘phone without even having to bother to hack the code.

Four digit codes are also commonly used by banks to enable customers to access money through cashpoint machines (ATMs).  Research summarised by Chris Taylor (on Mashable) notes that 27% of people use one of the top 20 PINs for their banking, with the most popular number (1234) being used by a massive 11%.  The top 20 PIN codes he lists are as follows:

1. 1234 (10.7%)
2. 1111 (6.0%)
3. 0000 (1.9%)
4. 1212 (1.2%)
5. 7777 (0.7%)
6. 1004 (0.6%)
7. 2000 (0.6%)
8. 4444 (0.5%)
9. 2222 (0.5%)
10. 6969 (0.5%)
11. 9999 (o.5%)
12. 3333 (0.4%)
13. 5555 (0.4%)
14. 6666 (0.4%)
15. 1122 (0.4%)
16. 1313 (0.3%)
17. 8888 (0.3%)
18. 4321 (0.3%)
19. 2001 (0.3%)
20. 1010 (0.3%)

Chris Taylor goes on to comment that although there are 10,000 possible combinations of four digits, 50% of people use the most popular 426 codes!  As he says, “Pick up an ATM card on the street, and you have a 1 in 5 chance of unlocking its cash by entering just five PINs. That’s the kind of Russian Roulette that’s going to be attractive to any casual thief”.

There is therefore  really quite a high probability that even without watching someone enter their PIN number and then stealing the card, or using sophisticated technology to ‘crack’ someone’s PIN code, criminals would have a pretty good chance of accessing someone’s bank account just by using the most popular codes above.  The implication for users is clear: use a PIN code that is not among the most common!

Passwords
The situation is scarcely better with passwords that people use for their online digital activities. Numerous surveys have all pointed to the same conclusion, that a very small number of passwords continue to be used by large numbers of people.  These change a bit over time, and vary depending on cultural context and country, but the message is clear.  Even without sophisticated programmes to crack passwords, those wishing to access personal information can achieve remarkable success just by trying to use the most common passwords!  The most common passwords, in other words those to be avoided, are listed below:

A slightly more sophisticated approach is that adopted by those wishing to break into networks by testing them automatically against a much larger number of different passwords.  One of the best publicised accounts of this was the Conficker worm, which used the passwords in the chart below to try to access accounts (Sophos, 2009):

Again, this clearly indicates that considerable care needs to be taken in choosing passwords, and ensuring that they are at the very least more complex than those listed above.

Tips to reduce the risk of fraud through mobile devices and digital technologies
Much has been written about sensible advice for reducing the risk of fraud through mobile passcodes, banking PINs and online login passwords.  Such tips will never eliminate really determined people from hacking into your identity, but a few simple steps can at least make it more difficult for the less determined.  These include:

• Always secure your ‘phone with a PIN code, or better still a password (iPhone users can do this simply in Settings>General>Passcode Lock).  This will help to prevent all of your contacts, photos, e-mails and other personal information being accessed immediately by anyone who picks up your ‘phone.
• Reduce the time before your ‘phone automatically locks so that it is as short as possible, preferably no more than a minute
• Always use complex passwords, that preferably include lower case and upper case letters, numbers and special characters
• Use passwords that are at least 8 characters and preferably more than 12 characters in length
• Frequently change your passwords at random intervals, so that possible hackers are unaware when to expect changes
• Use different passwords for different accounts, so that if one password is ‘broken’ this will not permit access to your other accounts
• Think about using a service that tests the strength of a proposed password (such as The Password Meter, Microsoft’s password checker, or Rumkin’s strength test) – for the hyper-security-conscious person, it is probably best to do this from a computer other than your own!
• Never, under any circumstances give your passwords or PIN codes to other people

Ultimately, passwords and PIN numbers are just part of a wider defence needed against digital theft.  Human action, be it using the ‘phone in an unsafe public place or unfortunately responding to a phishing attack, is still the cause of much digital grief.  As I write, Sophos has just for example reported a phishing attack through a security breach on the Ethiopian Red Cross Society’s website purporting to be a Google Docs login page.

If the worst happens, and you do lose a ‘phone there are at least two important things to do:

• Ensure you have software on the ‘phone that can enable you to track it (as with the Find My iPhone app, or for Android ‘phones there are apps such as Sophos’ Mobile Security app)
• If there is no chance of getting the ‘phone back, then remotely delete all of its content as swiftly as possible, remembering that if it has been backed up on a laptop or cloud facility, then all of the data can be restored at a later date.

Working together, and sharing good practices in personal digital security we can do much to help reduce digital identity theft.

1. First, critical thinking is something hugely positive. It should be very far from the negative caricature summarised above.
2. It is a way of creating new knowledges, rather than simply encouraging the regurgitation of accepted truths.  All too often, universities across the world today focus on teaching students accepted truths that they then learn and regurgitate in examinations, rather than liberating them to think for themselves.
3. Critical thinking is therefore hugely creative, a way of encouraging people to craft new ideas that will hopefully better explain, or help us to understand, the world in which we live.
4. It is fundamentally concerned with questioning and challenging accepted norms and arguments, weighing them up both through the power of reason and logic, but also through empirical experience to see which, for the moment, can continue to be accepted as approximations to some truth.
5. My notions of critical thinking derive heavily from my engagement with the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School, and especially the writings of Jürgen Habermas (notably Theorie und Praxis. Sozialphilosophische Studien, Neuwied, 1963, and Erkenntnis und Interesse. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main, 1968).  In particular, for me, Critical Theory provides two important underpinnings for critical thinking: its emphasis on the interests behind all knowledges, and its focus on emancipation.
   • There is no such thing as value free science.  All science or knowledge, is created by individuals, or groups of sentient people, for particular purposes.  We must therefore understand these interests, and indeed our own interests, if we are to reach agreement on the extent to which such ideas can be accepted as accounting for any particular observations of reality.  Critical thinking is in part about understanding the interests underlying any claim to knowledge.
   • The ultimate purpose of critical thinking is about emancipation, both for the individual thinker, but also perhaps more importantly for the wider community of which that thinker is a part.
6. Critical thinking is self-reflective, requiring a conscious consideration of how and why a particular set of thoughts comes into being.  In this sense, it is an ancient tradition, going back at least to Socrates, but being developed by scholars such as Dewey (Moral Principles in Education, SIU Press, 1909), and more recently Glaser (An Experiment in the Development of Critical Thinking, Columbia University, 1941) and Ennis (Critical Thinking, Prentice Hall, 1996).
7. Critical thinking is committed to action. This, again, derives in part from my own commitment to Critical Theory, but it emphasises that thinkers must also be actors.  Unless knowledge is shared, in a sense liberated from the confines of the thinker’s own body, then its creation is a purely selfish, indeed arrogant process.  If society permits some of its members to be set apart for thinking (most usually in universities), then it is incumbent on those thinkers to ensure that the outputs of their thinking are indeed used for the betterment of society.
8. Critical thinking involves serendipitous rigour (about which I have written elsewhere).  We need both to be rigorous in ensuring that we create places for serendipity, and likewise be rigorous in how we respond to serendipitous occurrences.  Serendipity is essential to the creative aspect of critical thinking.
9. Critical thinking requires clarity of method.  I do not want to be prescriptive in defining any single particular set of methods, not least because many such lists already exist (Glaser, 1941; Fisher, Critical Thinking: An Introduction, CUP, 2001), but most of these focus on the importance of reason, logic, judgement, argument, inference and analysis.
10. Finally, for me critical thinking is fundamentally about those who are privileged enough to be thinkers, using their thinking skills to enhance society and not just selfishly for themselves; it is, in particular, to use such thinking to help and enable the poorest and most marginalised individuals to improve their lives.  This is not just about action (point 7 above), but about action committed to a particular social and political cause.

There are, of course, many other aspects of critical thinking, but reflecting on that conversation in Berlin, these seem to me to be the most pertinent responses. Let me conclude, though, with a quotation from Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf (Penguin, 1966, p.21), “‘Most men will not swim before they are able to.’ Is that not witty? Naturally, they won’t swim! They are born for the solid earth, not for the water. And naturally they wont think. They are made for life, not for thought. Yes, and he who thinks, what’s more, he who makes thought his business, he may go far in it, but he has bartered the solid earth for the water all the same, and one day he will drown”.  I used this years ago as the introduction to one of my chapters in The Place of Geography and it still seems as pertinent now as it did then!