« Telecommuting Challenges | Main | Boston Digital Divide Meetup this Wednesday »
March 15, 2005
Technology Review's Special Issue on World Changing Ideas
The latest issue of MIT Technology Review magazine focuses on world changing ideas -- innovative approaches to ICTs, R&D, and high tech in general from different parts of the world.
They profile tech trends in around half a dozen countries. Amongst the most interesting are the articles on Brazil, which includes information CDI's telecentre work and other digital divide projects, and South Africa, which covers R&D, local language content and open source.
Meanwhile, the issue includes a series of world maps that identify each country as high, medium or low in a range of metrics related to ICTs and the digital divide. Here are the maps:
Since the maps don't have a text version, I've taken the liberty of typing up the top five rankings of the most relevant maps.
Top R&D spending as a percentage of GDP
1. Israel
2. Sweden
3. Finland
4. Japan
5. Iceland
Top ICT spending per capita
1. US
2. Switzerland
3. Mexico
4. Denmark
5. Sweden
Most Mobile Phone Users per 1000 People
1. Luxembourg
2. Israel
3. Italy
4. Iceland
5. Sweden
Internet Use Per 1000 people
1. Sweden
2. South Korea
3. US
4. Canada
5. Denmark
Highest Cost of Internet Access
1. Central African Republic
2. Sudan
3. Haiti
4. Gabon
5. Republic of the Congo
Personally, I wish the maps weren't divided into rather vague rankings (how "high" is high? What does "low" mean?), but they still make for interesting representations on the relative state of ICTs around the world.... -andy
Posted by acarvin at March 15, 2005 1:56 PM
Listen to a computer-generated podcast of this article
