TechPlus+ | Technology & Development Redux
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Financial Inclusion and Democratizing Finance – II
Read more: Financial Inclusion and Democratizing Finance – IIWhere are the banks? It seems paradoxical that the mainstream history of micro-finance/financial inclusion does not consider banks. After all, banks are supposed to “bank the unbanked.” So banks are not only missing from such a narrative. They are also missing in action on the ground. In principle, banks are the institutions that should cater…
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Financial Inclusion and Democratizing Finance – I
Read more: Financial Inclusion and Democratizing Finance – IFrom Noise to Signal A couple of weeks ago, El Salvador’s CryptoPopulist President shared on social media news about an international “Bitcoin” meeting his country was hosting starting May 16. He also listed the names of the 44 entities participating in the event. Not surprisingly, key countries were conspicuously absent. Regardless, the Crypto hype press…
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Open Data and Big Pharma
Read more: Open Data and Big PharmaIn 1980, the U.S. Congress passed the Bayh-Dole Act that modified patent and trademark law by allowing universities and small businesses to own inventions created under the funding of the Federal Government. Its core idea was to expedite the commercialization of innovations as the country, according to bill supporters, was seemingly falling behind Japan and…
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The Environment and “Socialist” States
Read more: The Environment and “Socialist” StatesThirty-six years after it first broke the news for the wrong reasons, Chernobyl is back in the headlines thanks to the horrible and absurd Russian invasion. Sixteen months before the well-known Soviet nuclear meltdown of 1986, a plant located in Bhopal, India, owned and run by a private U.S corporation, released a lethal gas into…
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ICTs and Development Theories – II
Read more: ICTs and Development Theories – IILinking ICTs to development External researchers and experts poking for the first time into ICTD might assume that the field has, 30 years after its birth, a cohesive theory on how ICTs impact development. Unfortunately, that is not the case. If ICTD was a digital platform, we could conclude that its middleware seems to be…
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ICTs and Development Theories – I
Read more: ICTs and Development Theories – IICTD overview The field of ICTD first saw the light over 30 years ago1 Selected references are provided at the end of the 2nd part of this post. Its overall scope is ambitious as it covers several sectors and thematic areas. Indeed, ICTD comprises three core elements: ICTs, development – yet another large and complex…
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More Bitcoin Inequality
Read more: More Bitcoin InequalityWhile still prone to seemingly unpredictable dynamics, Bitcoin’s price seems to have found a new center of gravity in the last year. Since February 2021, the Cryptocurrency has oscillated around 4ok per unit, give or take. It peaked at 67.5k last November and then went down to 35k just a couple of months ago. At…
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State Capacity and Digital Technologies – I
Read more: State Capacity and Digital Technologies – ITo the Moon and Back It was my elder sister’s 25th birthday when Apollo 11 landed on the moon. We watched the unprecedented event on B&W TV – our grandma openly expressing total skepticism. We then went out for a family celebration. Funny, I still vividly remember the restaurant where we dined, which, needless to…
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Hacking Public Policy Making with AI
Read more: Hacking Public Policy Making with AIModern Evidence-based Policy Making (EBPC) has been around for 25 years, imported into the mainstream from the health sector and its success with randomized controlled trials. The latter has now spread to many other sectors and research areas. A few years back, a couple of economists won the so-called Nobel prize for wholeheartedly embracing such…
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Blockchain Adoption in the Public Sector – II
Read more: Blockchain Adoption in the Public Sector – IIRegulatory frameworks are usually perceived as counter-productive and even nefarious by innovators, pundits and followers. Together they will go out of their way to stop them, arguing that their impact on innovation is lethal, as discussed in a previous post. One could say that such a view finds more ground on ideology than on actual…
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Blockchain Adoption in the Public Sector – I
Read more: Blockchain Adoption in the Public Sector – IOver ten years after its creation, the hype on Blockchain Technology (BCT) continues to dominate the scene compared to actual implementation. However, that does not necessarily imply it has remained immune to change. At the very onset, Cryptocurrencies, led by Bitcoin, were the main attention magnets. Not surprisingly as, after all, the goal of its…
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Best Films – 2021
Read more: Best Films – 2021The pandemic has been a blessing in disguise, to a point. Many films continued to be available online at the start of the year, but as vaccines increased and panic subsided, theaters started to reopen, albeit not at lightning speed. So while I certainly did not rush back to the big screens, films began to…
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Global Wealth Distribution
Read more: Global Wealth DistributionGDP (Gross Domestic Product), the statistic most frequently used to measure wealth creation in terms of goods and services, has been the subject of critical review for the last 25 years. Green National Accounting (GNA) and the ensuing Green National Product (GNP) have been suggested as an alternative that captures the impact of capitalist development…
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A Fuzzy Das Kapital Word Cloud
Read more: A Fuzzy Das Kapital Word CloudA few months ago, the top U.S. General was summoned by a Congressional Committee to explain why “Critical Race Theory” was being taught in the military. The General’s response built on the idea that the better one knows the enemy, the higher the chances of winning. Fighting unknowns is just like shooting in the dark,…
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Digital Government and Social Leaders
Read more: Digital Government and Social LeadersAs part of an online course on Digital Government for Social Leaders, I was asked to develop a script for a five-minute animation where an Avatar will introduce the topic and entice the leaders to embrace it as part of their political agendas. The animation introduces the short course and is complemented by a more…