No Arabic abstract
This paper focuses on the effectiveness and efficiency of IT initiatives in rural areas where topology creates isolation to developmental activities. A village is selected for the study and information is gathered through interviews of village dwellers. These collected responses are then analyzed and a gaps model is proposed.
This study delves into the research question: how does gender influence smartphone ownership and autonomy in using the internet among the youth in rural India? This paper explores the influence of local culture on smartphone ownership and autonomy through an ethnographic study among rural Indian youth by analysing the intersection of gender with other identity axes. The findings show that young peoples smartphone ownership and autonomy is shaped by their social and cultural setting, and could lead to various inequalities in their internet usage. This study shows that gender paves way for various disparities with regard to smartphone ownership and internet usage. Decolonisation of the understanding of smartphone ownership and internet usage patterns of the youth in the Global South suggests a reconsideration of the user experience designs and platform policies.
Measuring close proximity interactions between individuals can provide key information on social contacts in human communities. With the present study, we report the quantitative assessment of contact patterns in a village in rural Malawi, based on proximity sensors technology that allows for high-resolution measurements of social contacts. The system provided information on community structure of the village, on social relationships and social assortment between individuals, and on daily contacts activity within the village. Our findings revealed that the social network presented communities that were highly correlated with household membership, thus confirming the importance of family ties within the village. Contacts within households occur mainly between adults and children, and adults and adolescents. This result suggests that the principal role of adults within the family is the care for the youngest. Most of the inter-household interactions occurred among caregivers and among adolescents. We studied the tendency of participants to interact with individuals with whom they shared similar attributes (i.e., assortativity). Age and gender assortativity were observed in inter-household network, showing that individuals not belonging to the same family group prefer to interact with people with whom they share similar age and gender. Age disassortativity is observed in intra-household networks. Family members congregate in the early morning, during lunch time and dinner time. In contrast, individuals not belonging to the same household displayed a growing contact activity from the morning, reaching a maximum in the afternoon. The data collection infrastructure used in this study seems to be very effective to capture the dynamics of contacts by collecting high resolution temporal data and to give access to the level of information needed to understand the social context of the village.
Remote sensing techniques have been used effectively for measuring the overall loss of terrestrial ecosystem production and biodiversity due to the forest fire. The current research focuses on assessing the impact of forest fire severity on terrestrial ecosystem productivity using different burn indices in Uttarakhand, India. Satellite-based land surface temperature (LST) was calculated for pre-fire (2014) and fire (2016) year using MODerate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) to identify the burn area hotspots across all eco-regions in Uttarakhand. In this study, spatial and temporal changes of different vegetation and burn area indices i.e Normalized Burn Ratio (NBR), Burnt Area Index (BAI), Normalized Multiband Drought Index (NMDI), Soil Adjusted Vegetation Index (SAVI), Global Environmental Monitoring Index (GEMI), Enhanced Vegetation Index (EVI), Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI)were estimated for both pre-fire and fire years. Additionally, two Light Use Efficiency (LUE) models i.e Carnegie- Ames-Stanford-Approach (CASA) and Vegetation Photosynthesis Model (VPM) were selected to quantify the terrestrial Net Primary Productivity (NPP) in pre-fire and fire years across all biomes of the study area.The present approach appears to be promising and has a potential in quantifying the loss of ecosystem productivity due to forest fires. A detailed field observation data is required for further training, and testing of remotely sensed fire maps for future research.
Bulk email is a primary communication channel within organizations, with all-company emails and regular newsletters serving as a mechanism for making employees aware of policies and events. Ineffective communication could result in wasted employee time and a lack of compliance or awareness. Previous studies on organizational emails focused mostly on recipients. However, organizational bulk email system is a multi-stakeholder problem including recipients, communicators, and the organization itself. We studied the effectiveness, practice, and assessments of the organizational bulk email system of a large university from multi-stakeholders perspectives. We conducted a qualitative study with the universitys communicators, recipients, and managers. We delved into the organizational bulk emails distributing mechanisms of the communicators, the reading behaviors of recipients, and the perspectives on emails values of communicators, managers, and recipients. We found that the organizational bulk email system as a whole was strained, and communicators are caught in the middle of this multi-stakeholder problem. First, though the communicators had an interest in preserving the effectiveness of channels in reaching employees, they had high-level clients whose interests might outweigh judgment about whether a message deserves widespread circulation. Second, though communicators thought they were sending important information, recipients viewed most of the organizational bulk emails as not relevant to them. Third, this disagreement was amplified by the success metric used by communicators. They viewed their bulk emails as successful if they had a high open rate. But recipients often opened and then rapidly discarded emails without reading the details. Last, while the communicators in general understood the challenge, they had a limited set of targeting and feedback tools to support their task.
In the global move toward urbanization, making sure the people remaining in rural areas are not left behind in terms of development and policy considerations is a priority for governments worldwide. However, it is increasingly challenging to track important statistics concerning this sparse, geographically dispersed population, resulting in a lack of reliable, up-to-date data. In this study, we examine the usefulness of the Facebook Advertising platform, which offers a digital census of over two billions of its users, in measuring potential rural-urban inequalities. We focus on Italy, a country where about 30% of the population lives in rural areas. First, we show that the population statistics that Facebook produces suffer from instability across time and incomplete coverage of sparsely populated municipalities. To overcome such limitation, we propose an alternative methodology for estimating Facebook Ads audiences that nearly triples the coverage of the rural municipalities from 19% to 55% and makes feasible fine-grained sub-population analysis. Using official national census data, we evaluate our approach and confirm known significant urban-rural divides in terms of educational attainment and income. Extending the analysis to Facebook-specific user interests and behaviors, we provide further insights on the divide, for instance, finding that rural areas show a higher interest in gambling. Notably, we find that the most predictive features of income in rural areas differ from those for urban centres, suggesting researchers need to consider a broader range of attributes when examining rural wellbeing. The findings of this study illustrate the necessity of improving existing tools and methodologies to include under-represented populations in digital demographic studies -- the failure to do so could result in misleading observations, conclusions, and most importantly, policies.