Category: Information and Communications Technology

Formula for Milking the Digital Divide

They don’t really intentionally kill babies just to make more money, do they? They wouldn’t, would they?

Well, I don’t really know.

Infant or baby formula was developed in the developed world when women began to join the work force and did not have the time to breast-feed their babies. What a wonderful great invention it was. Convenience for the mother, and great nutrition for the baby.

Developed as an alternative to breast-feeding, the industry promoted it aggressively in the developed world. On the way back from the hospital after the birth of a baby, the industry gave as a “gift” all that you need to feed the baby formula—the bottles and the bottle bag–and gave just enough “free” formula so that the mother stops lactating because of lack of nursing. Once the mother goes down that formula road, there is no turning back.
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Saving Private Information

I just googled “information” and got 5,930,000,000 hits, or nearly 6 billion hits in 0.06 seconds.

Compared to someone sitting at home about 20 years ago, my access to information from within the comfort of my home is a few orders of magnitude higher. Hal Varian and Peter Lyman at UC Berkeley estimated that the rate of production of information was two exabytes, or two billion billion bytes in 2001. That information could take a stack of floppy discs about 2 million miles high. That rate must have gone up and I can reasonably assert that for this year we will need a stack 3 million miles high to contain all our NEW data. Thankfully we don’t use floppy discs and depend on hard-drives.
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Why is connectivity expensive in India?

Why exactly is connectivity so expensive in India? For instance, these days in Pune I pay Tata Indicom Rs 880 (US$20) a month for 64kbps (max) speed. Compare that to 5 years ago I used to get 256 kbps unlimited usage ADSL connectivity in Berkeley CA for only about $20 a month. One can naively ask why I don’t get 256 kpbs unlimited usage for say Rs 200 a month in Pune today?

OK, just to frame the question a little better, let me state that I recognize that prices depend on the underlying costs and on the degree of competition in the market. First, underlying costs. There are technical costs and there are statutory/regulatory/government imposed costs. Technical costs in India cannot be more than the technical costs in the rest of the world. Equipment costs approximately the same, modulo local taxes and import duties. Of course, average fixed costs vary depending on scale, and I do recognize that there are scale economies. So that is one factor that needs consideration: the scale of the operation. Perhaps the BB market is so small that some variant of average cost pricing makes the prices so high.
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The Age of Superfluous Information — Part 2

Sorting and searching through information are uniquely human activities because only humans have an external store of information which needs to be accessed and acted upon. The notion of acting on information stored externally is not associated with non-human animals.

The larger the stock of information, the more expensive it is to search through it to locate the precise bit that is relevant at any particular instance. To make the task of searching more tractable, ordering the information in some fashion—called sorting—becomes paramount. Computer scientists have worked on the problem of sorting and searching for decades with phenomenally successful advancement in our understanding in this regard.
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The Age of Superfluous Information

“There is no more dangerous mistake than the mistake of supposing that we cannot have too much of a good thing.” Thus spake George Bernard Shaw. Excess is as damaging as shortage in most things that are considered good. More is better but only up to a point of satiation. Beyond the satiation point, the marginal utility of a good is negative, as an economist may put it. Particular instances of that generalization are not hard to find.

Food, for instance, is a good that in excessive quantities is a bad as the success of the dieting industry so starkly demonstrates. Yet tens of millions poor people around the world dying of malnutrition and starvation every year is the horrible demonstration of the problem at the other extreme.

The same holds for information. Continue reading “The Age of Superfluous Information”

Fixing the holes (Incentives edition)

Never underestimate the power of incentives, is what my economics guru used to say all the time. Economics is at its most generalized form the study of incentives. Positive analysis involves digging below the surface to uncover the incentives of the concerned economic agents (people) with the aim of explaining why things are they way they are. It is not just out of intellectual curiosity that one wishes to figure out why things are way they are. It is only the first step to the ultimate goal of obtaining a more desireable outcome. Of course, determining what is a desireable outcome involves value judgements and therefore dependent again on the concerned economic agents and necessarily subjective. But there is nothing subjective about the incentive schemes that need to be implemented in moving from the present state to the desired future state.
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The World is (Information) Fat: Followup

One of the rewards of writing a blog is the occasional detailed comment that readers (yes, this blog has more than one casual reader) send in. One such comment was elicited by my earlier post “The World is (Information) Fat.”

Uday wrote in: Continue reading “The World is (Information) Fat: Followup”

It is a connected world

The magical thing about the world is that it is connected. Not just at the physical level, it is connected in the abstract level at which we comprehend the world. Physical connectivity of course is clearly evident. Above our heads, the weather system is global as is the hydrosphere which then connects all the continents. That is geograhical connectivity. Then there is biological connectivity. Every one of us shares common ancestors. We are all cousins, a few dozen times removed at most since we share common ancestors. It is sobering to realize that Sorenson of Norway is a cousin to Mugusha of Zaire although their family resemblence is not immediately apparent. But that relatedness between all humans is just the tip of the iceberg. Continue reading “It is a connected world”

The World is (Information) Fat


“Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it.”
— Samuel Johnson quoted in Boswell’s “Life of Johnson.”

If you come to think about it for a moment, what we really want is knowledge, not information. (Recall what the business school guru said: what people want is not a quarter-inch drill but rather a quarter-inch hole.) The good news is that there is a lot of information out there. The better news is that the cost of accessing that information has been dropping exponentially. But the bad news is that the cost of searching through the vast stock of information to satisfy your knowledge needs is increasing.
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If only, Lord, if only …

Years ago I used to watch a British comedy series called Bless Me, Father on public television. The setting was a church in a small town in England and the stories revolved around the parish priest and his young curate. In one of the episodes, the curate asks, “Father, why do you spend so much time with the rich in our parish? Don’t you think that the poor need our help more than the rich?” The father replies: “No, the rich need us more. They don’t even have the comfort of the illusion that money is the answer to all their problems.”

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