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<DIV>Fellow OLPC Participants,</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Some of you may find this paper a very informative read: <A
href="http://www.icasit.org/ruth/telecom_diffusion.pdf">http://www.icasit.org/ruth/telecom_diffusion.pdf</A>.
Unfortunately, there does not appear to be an attempt, by any of the
organizations (including the U.N.) mentioned in this paper, to collect
information about Wi-Fi/mesh usage (e.g., number of connections). The
paper appears to be quite recent although it shows no date-of-publication
(probably because it was published as part of a group of papers). It will
be very interesting to see what happens to the level of Internet use in the OLPC
recipient countries over the next five to ten years. </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>This paper's analysis concerns itself mostly with
statistics/indices/weighted averages as applied to the Middle East and
Northern Africa (MENA) group of countries. The paper reports
that, according to Freedom House's Freedom Index classification scheme,
only Israel was classified as "free" in this group. Jordan and Morocco
were classified "partly free." The rest were classified as "not
free." One of the graphs in the article shows interesting relationships
between a country's Freedom Index and the more quantitative measures mostly
reported and discussed in the paper regarding the rate of adoption of
telecom infrastructure, in general, and the Internet in
particular.. </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Very well-written for a paper of this type. A good
lunch-time/train-time read.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Cheers,</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Brad</DIV>
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