e-commerce usage as a metric of internet penetration

I have just tweeted a link to piece in the Santiago Times, an English language newspaper in Chile to the effect that internet sales have jumped massively in the last twelve months in Chile.

At first sight this might seem odd, but internet sales are a valuable metric for internet adoption in a country - if people start using the internet for their daily business, it means that home internet connections are widespread and of reasonable quality.

In the case of Chile that’s hardly surprising - good banks, reasonable infrastructure and the rest.
Sri Lanka, is another example - last year when I visited, the internet was available more or less everywhere, with public subscriber wifi services in the major centres, but while there were ATMs everywhere it was still very much a cash based society - large wads of scruffy, worn, banknotes being required for most transactions. This wasn’t because there were no credit or debit cards, it’s just that the society had not yet made the transition from cash to plastic.

In the case of Sri Lanka where small change is always a problem with not enough coins or low value notes to go around, debit cards would certainly help solve the problem of small change at the supermarket checkout, and to be fair the banks were all enthusiastically promoting the use of plastic in place of cash.

When looking at internet use in areas where development has lagged there tends to be an assumption that countries will repeat the west’s path. I rapidly became disabused of this both in Turkey and Morocco at the end of the 1990’s when it was clear that mobile phones had replaced rather than supplemented the traditional inadequate phone network - who needs wires when you have a mobile.

Just as with 3G data in Sri Lanka - rather than build fixed infrastructure everywhere go for a lower cost option and add fixed infrastructure as required.

In other words if you don’t have a significant legacy infrastructure you can skip forward.

I don’t doubt that in remoter areas of Chile internet access was poor - the fact that the government invested in broadband links for schools shows a deliberate intention to counteract digital disenfranchisement in rural areas. An increase in ecommerce means that the internet is spreadng out of schools and businesses and into the home and that infrastructure is improving and access is more affordable.

It would be interesting to see comparable figures from Peru, which has also experienced a period of recent economic growth but has large remote areas on the altiplano ...

Linux initiatives in Latin America

Following on from my quick and dirty virtual box builds of Huayra and Canaima I thought I’d try and pull together some information on Linux adoption in Latin America.

Pulling together the information turned out to be a little more difficult than I expected but the first pass is now online via my wiki site.

I’ll be working on it and updating it as I have time …

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Disambiguation and Altmetrics

Elsewhere, I’ve posted about the fact that as part of the day job, we’ve developed a prototype solution to create ORCID identifiers for researchers programmatically, rather than the researcher having to go to ORCID.org to create one individually.

Why did we do this?

In a word disambiguation. Increasingly funding bodies require eveidence of activity and as the nature of scholarly publication changes this increasingly includes grey literature, conference presentations, exhibition catalogues and the like.

And people are just not consistent in the name they use. They change their surnames due to marriage (or divorce), they abbreviate their forenames, use a different forename informally from formally, they reverse their surname/forename order because they publish in a Hungarian excation report, they adopt an informal western sounding name to use among their peers, but publish under their formal Asian name, etc etc.

Names basically are completely useless as a consistent and persistent identifier. While most people use only a small set of variations on their name, the sum of all the possible variations is amazing.

ORCID solves this problem. As a sixteen digit number it is totally free of cultural biases, and also too big to be easily remembered. It even covers the problem of what to do about these cultures who refer to someone by another name once they have passed on (To explain: the Greeks and Romans had a belief that someone only lived on the afterlife as long as their name was remembered - this is why they put names on headstones, and indeed why we do the same thing. They are not unique in this belief, but a number of other cultures have an equally deep seated beleif that referring to someone by the name they used when they were alive encourages their ghost to hang around an annoy people.)

So ORCID works as an identifier, and it would be possible to build a database of other parallel identifiers to allow us to say that name or that identifier maps to a particular ORCID identifier and that would lets us measure impact.

We then have to deal with altmetrics. Altmetrics is a move to try and measure the chatter around a researcher and by implication the degree of influence. This is an area fraught with difficulty, but there is also a problem - most influence measurers are self selecting - you have to sign up to Klout or ImpactStory or some other service.

This requires that individuals do this, which means that they have to be sufficiently interested and invested in the process to do so. And being human some will and some won’t and some will have to be induced with carrots.

At the moment though there are precious few carrots. There is also half an assumption that people keep their personal blogging and tweeting free from their personal tweeting and blogging.

I suspect this is not the case. I started with one blog and then split it out. My twitter feed reflects my interests - some work based and technical, others to do with my interests in history and archaeology.

And this gives us a problem. How do we know which blog or tweet counts for impact?

We don’t. We can’t.

We can ask people to nominate particular rss feeds, be they tweets or blogs but that’s as far as it goes, and that brings us back to motivation.

And once we’ve solved that problem we ahve the interesting problem attaching twitter handles blog authors to names.

Some people, like me are fairly boring and predictable in their choice of handle, in my case it’s usually dgm or moncur_d or more rarely moncurdg.

Outliers like dougM are usually the result of some wierd automatic allocation rule.

Other people have flights of fantasy - it’s a bit like the problem of Asian researchers who adopt a western style pseudonym - sometimes it’s a rendering of the meaning of their name, sometimes it’s something that sounds like their formal Asian nae, and sometimes it’s completely random.

Essentially this means one of two things - we either have a year zero for altmetrics where everyone agrees that we all link our blog and twitter handles to something like our ORCID id’s, or we have a mess. If we have a mess altmetrics will only ever give us a partial measure of impact.

I’m betting on a mess …

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3G routers revisited

A couple of months ago I blogged about the fun I had with intsalling a 3G router as a backup to our then flaky home adsl link.

That worked well - since then we’ve given our previous ISP the flick having finally found someone else prepared to provide a service over our flaky fixed infrastructure.

The end result is we now have a stable, if slower service. When I said I’d trade speed for stability I was absolutely right - predictable and reliable beats fast - suddenly things you could never guarantee before just work - such as reading the paper online rather than a physical copy - at breakfast.

Since we changed over the link has flipped over to the 3G backup link only two or three times - which means leaving it as a prepaid 3G service with a long expiry makes sense, rather than paying a monthly service fee.

This however presented us with a problem. One thing that J and I do quite often is go bush and rent a holiday cottage or two. These mostly come without internet, and increasingly we end up taking a laptop and a tablet or two on holiday. None of these have a 3G connection out of the box, and tethering to phones can be a pain.

Previously we’ve just taken a netbook and a usb stick with us, but this can be a little restricting - some sites like some news and weather sites are better accessed via their tablet app than directly over the web.

The solution is of course a portable 3G router, which gives us a portable wifi network and we can preconfigure all the devices we are likely to take with us.

I managed to find a recently discontinued slimline D-link module on ebay for 18 bucks, and an unlocked 3G modem for $25.

I chose the Huawei E173 as it has a connector for an external aerial, and being the same model as my original 3G modem I know it performs well on the Optus network.

Rather than Virgin, I went with Amaysim this time as they offer this 5 cents a meg deal which means that you don’t need to keep buying credit and throwing it away while the unit is sitting idle. 5c/MB is of course extremely expensive for data, but of course what one does is buy short expiry credit when you need it, and then let it lapse at the end of the trip and only add more credit when you need it. Buying an unlocked unit also means that I can change ISP if someone else offers a better deal.

After the fun I’d had with the TP-Link unit I expected some configuration gymnastics, but not this time. Popped in the SIM, plugged the modem into the router, clicked on the default Optus configuration (Amaysim resells Optus bandwidth) and there we were - solid cerise and a connection - and whatsmyip confirmed the connection. Ten minutes max to configure.

Now last weekend was a long weekend, and we had a few days away. I meant to take the unit with us for a field test, but when I opened the geek box - the plastic box full of phone chargers, camera chargers, and all the other tech gubbins we take with us, I discovered I’d forgotten to pack the psu for the portable router - and nothing else I had in the box was compatible.

So, the field test will have to be next time …

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Canaima

Following on from my look at Huayra, I thought I'd take a look at Canaima, another Latin American linux distribution that has some push behind it.

Canaima is a Venezuelan government sponsored Linux distribution. They've recently announced a technology agreement with Huayra, which is why I thought I'd take a look.

Canaima turns out to be just another Debian GNU/Linux distro, with a few localised applications for email and web access but otherwise, utterly standard.

All the options exist for an english language installation (and indeed all the other languages supported by Debian) Under virtualbox it complained that it lacked the correct graphics drivers to start gnome properly, but running the linux updater fixed that.

The applications software that ship with the distro are more or less what would be expected - Libre Office, Gedit, evince and the rest, the only real departures being a locally customised web browser based on iceweasel, and a locally customised email client.

The value proposition for adopting Linux is of course no licensing fees for applications or operating system, which potentially simplifies managing upgrades and distributions, as well as encouraging a local software industry.

I find the no licencing cost option particularly interesting. Apple have of course recently released mavericks as a no cost upgrade in an effort to standardise the operating system environment across their user base. And when I used to be concerned with managing desktop services, licencing, and the cost of upgrades, was always a major concern.

Interestingly, according to wikipedia, the Venezuelan government has also sought to get vendors to certify their hardware for use with the operating system, which would form the first step in building an ecology around its use as well as providing some assurance to hardware purchasers that the hardware was compatible.

I, of course, have not visited either Argentina or Venezeula, so cannot comment on the actual extent of the adoption of Huayra or Canaima, but these are both interesting initiatives both educationally and technologically ...

Huayra ...

There’s been a lot of chatter about the adoption of open source in Latin
America, including the adoption of linux based distributions in education.
So I decided to try one.



I chose Huayra, a distribution sponsored by the Argentine Government.

Huayra arose out of an Argentine government initiative to distribute netbooks to all secondary school  students in Argentina. Huayra was designed to provide a common standard operating system across all computers to standardise the provision of training and support.

On a more personal note, I chose a Spanish language distribution over a Portuguese language based distribution from Brazil for the simple reason that my sketchy scratchy
peninsular Spanish is way better than my near non existent Portuguese.

The Spanish version of Wikipedia describes Huayra as:

Huayra GNU/Linux es un sistema operativo desarrollado por el Programa
Conectar Igualdad de Argentina. Huayra está basado en GNU/Linux, es una
metadistribución de Debian. Liberado con la Licencia GNU/GPL, Huayra es
software libre.
Su desarrollo está a cargo del Centro Nacional de Investigación y Desarrollo
de Tecnologías Libres (CENITAL) de Argentina, dependiente de la ANSES y toma
en consideración las necesidades tanto de estudiantes como de docentes y
otros actores involucrados en el programa Conectar Igualdad.
Huayra toma su nombre del vocablo Quechua que significa Viento.

Which Google translate renders as

Huayra GNU / Linux is an operating system developed by the Equal Connect
Program Argentina. Huayra is based on GNU / Linux, is a meta-distribution of
Debian. Released with the GNU / GPL license, Huayra is free software. Its
development is undertaken by the National Centre for Research and
Development of Free Technologies (ZENITH) of Argentina, under the anses and
takes into consideration the needs of both students and teachers and others
involved in the Equal Connect program. Huayra is named after the Quechua
word that means wind

It’s available as a 2.2GB live CD download. The download was not particularly
fast but that’s only to be expected given the network topology between Australia
and Argentina.

The live CD booted reasonably fast under Virtualbox and had all the usual
educational tools - nothing more and nothing less. As you’d expect everything
worked - it did exactly what it said. The colour scheme might not have been what
I would have chosen, but that was my only criticism.

However it was a little slow - so I decided to install it to Virtual Box to
make a proper virtual machine to give it a fairer trial. Installation was fairly
unambiguously labelled Instalar en tu disco which was fairly obvious.

Installation followed the fairly standard GNU/Linux pattern - select the
keyboard, work out which software modules required and download any not present.

And that’s where the wheels came off. I was intending this to be a full review
with screenshots but during the installation process Huayra decided it needed to
download some wireless drivers, which given it was doing it from a topologically
remote repository stopped the installation dead - not Huayra’s fault of course -
there was no reason for the designers to expect that anyone from outside of
Argentina would try installing it.

However it did stymie my giving it a fair trial - however even the live cd
version showed its potential as a way of providing a comprehensive software
environment with little or no licencing overhead - something ideal for giving
students access to the internet, especially where they do not necessarily have
access to the latest hardware, or the budget to pay for a comprehensive
migration to a more recent version of Windows.

No, Google wasn't down yesterday ...

Yesterday afternoon, Google services died on me. Gmail went away, docs went offline. Everything was out, even the apps status page that tells you if there’s an outage.

I immediately tweeted to see if anyone was seeing this, and got back responses whichshowed it was out for everyone on campus, though no one offcampus seemed to be seeing problems.

It was, to quote a colleague, as if the aliens had landed.

Now Google was not out, and was not feeling indisposed. What had happened was more interesting.

A router between here and Googleland had decided it was over forwarding packets to Google and had decided to send them someplace else. For some reason monitoring did not pick up on the error and fail over to a secondary route (or router).

Why this happened is still under investigation.

However this does neatly highlight a problem with outsourcing everything to the cloud. Not only do the cloud providers have to do their thing, the infrastructure also has to - it’s no good if your cloud provider never goes down if you infrastructure does.

Which on a sparsely populated continent on the bottom of the world increasingly means infrastructure and links to overseas data centres.

Bascally, even if we can minimize latency, adjacency still counts, or to put it more simply, using more adjacent services ie those on the same continent reduces the admittedly small risk of the internet going away, if only for a few minutes …

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