Wikis, blogs, and Twitter

Yes, it’s true. Twitter can be useful.

I wrote this post for some friends that are trying to figure out which web technologies make the most sense for their collaboration.

Baseline map for international comparisons

The next time you see a nice color-coded GIS map of a statistic, you should think twice about the way the data are being presented. Countries’ size on the map is determined by their land mass, not their population. Though the shapes are familiar, any geographic projection subtly adds influence to some countries and steals it from others. Greenland is the famous example from grade school. The map conditions us to ignore countries with high population density, even major powers such as India and China, and to assume that countries with low population density are more important.

This unfamiliar shape should be the basis for comparisons of human statistics: wealth, income, health, literacy, the things that matter most.

This cartogram by Worldmapper shows country size in proportion to population, not land mass.

Source: Worldmapper.org

Spy uses subcontractors for access

Supply chain penetration is a vulnerability that has been in the news a lot recently. Corporations and governments know that IT systems hold the keys to the kingdom, but so far they have not been able to batten down the hatches of the supply chain. Corporations don’t want information about these types of problems to become public, so we should not look at these problems as some type of anomaly. These are just a few incidents that have made it into the press recently.

Iranian espionage case posted on ZDNet.

Following Pakistan’s recently introduced “Prevention of Electronic Crimes Ordinance 2008” according to which potential cyberterrorists would face the death penalty, a neighboring country, Iran, has recently executed an IT expert who confessed of being an Israeli spy for at least three years. After being recruited by Mossad during a business trip, Ali Ashtari, a trusted supplier of electronic and military equipment for the Iranian government, was allowing Israeli intelligence agents to backdoor the equipment he would later on install in Iranian military and government centers.

The benefits of cell phones in emerging markets

Why do cell phones have such an enormous economic impact in emerging markets? What are the economic impacts of cell phones in emerging markets? How big are the economic benefits of cell phones in emerging markets?

The marginal value of cell phones in emerging markets is particularly great precisely because the available substitutes are expensive, slow, unreliable, or just hard to figure out. Whereas in an economy with good infrastructure, cell phones can be replaced with land lines or email, an economy with only cell phones would otherwise have to rely on expensive and slow face-to-face visits, mail, radio air time, and print publications to replace the calls.