Bandwidth connectivity is extremely low in many parts of the world, often delaying or even preventing people from accessing information. Although connectivity has increased by a factor of 10 or 15 over the last decade, average webpage size and number of objects has simultaneously increased by a factor of 60. This has resulted in what Subramanian terms an "unusable web"; the addition of video, audio and images has created huge web pages that take minutes or even hours to load in low connectivity worlds.

In his talk, Subramanian describes a range of techniques that he and his colleagues are developing to enhance information access in three scenarios of poor connectivity. These techniques illustrate the type of technologies being devised by a new group in Computer Science termed "Computing for Development." The focus of this group is on the design, implementation and evaluation of new computing innovations that enable global social and economic development. Since first world technology can often be a bad fit, this group instead seeks technologies that are locally appropriate, cost-effective, and easy to use.

The first low-connectivity scenario Subramanian discusses is that facing rural mobile users, who rely on low-end mobile devices and can thus only access voice and SMS services. To address the massive need for SMS services for this scenario, Subramanian and his colleagues have developed an SMS-based protocol stack for mobile applications that makes it possible to compress large quantities of information. The so-called UjU stack enables the compression of information into a 140-byte stack, while an affiliated UjU Create App interface enables anyone to create their own apps and forms. These forms are essentially turned into structured records (tables) that can be filled out and transmitted through a short message on a mobile phone. To date, UjU has already been used for microfinance applications in Mexico, mobile health data collection in India, and other applications in Ghana. Subramanian and his colleagues are also rolling out a live SMS search engine in Kenya and a data-over-GSM voice stack to support data connectivity over cellular voice.

Shared low bandwidth networks present a second low-connectivity scenario. In this scenario, an example of which might be a school where 2 Mbps of connectivity is used by 400 students, Subramanian suggests that a completely new Web architecture is needed. He and his colleagues have deployed an early version of such a system called Rural Café User Interface. Typically, a web browser sends dozens of requests when it is loading a particular page, since each site draws content from various sources and advertisers. Rather than being able to attempt to load as many windows and pages as possible, which results in even slower access, every user in Rural Café has a queue of what their search requests are. Users can search for anything at any point, but the interface acts as a planning tool by reporting how long (in seconds or minutes) the user would have to wait to load any particular site. The queue is persistent, so it doesn't change depending on how many new windows users try to open. This system is already being deployed in a few schools and universities in Kenya and India.

The third scenario is that of schools that have computer access, but no connectivity. To address this problem, Subramanian proposes the use of "vertical search engines" or contextual information portals that deliver a vertical slice of the Web in a hard-disk and provide an offline searchable and browse-able Internet. The portals are locally searchable and composed of many web-based services. Since the portals allow the user to search the local cache for the information they need rather than the URLs themselves, many local requests can be handled without browsing, supposing the local cache is strong and based on local interests and content. This is a good tool for either improving download times for people who have limited connectivity, or for enabling access for information for people without any connectivity at all. So far, the system has been piloted as an information tool for students and teachers in five schools with computers but no connectivity around Nairobi, Kenya.

The central premise underlying Bussell's discussion this week is the reality that public service provision is often flawed in the developing world. Reforming public services entails significant efforts to increase the quality of public service, and there have been two important recent trends in this space: privatization and public-private partnerships and increased use of information and communication technologies (ICTs). The one-stop services model (which has been adopted globally in various forms, from Singapore's eCitizen Centre to Germany's Buergerbuero or "Citizen's Bureau"), exemplifies current trends.

In her research, which focuses primarily on the case of India, Bussell asks the following questions: why do or don't governments reform public service delivery? And when governments decide to implement reforms, why do they or don't they employ ICTs in these reforms?

The Indian strategy to public service reform has been to create stand-alone, one-stop citizen service centers. These centers are computerized and frequently have private-sector participation. Aside from these typical characteristics, there is significant state-level variation on several points, including timing of policy adoption, quantity and type of services, degree of automation, and ownership and management models.

Bussell discusses a variety of hypotheses that offer insight into the potential factors influencing the character of Indian reforms. First, she notes that politicians faced mixed electoral incentives for and against reforms. After all, there is evidence that eServices can improve service characteristics and reduce corruption. On the other hand, reforms may also reduce politicians' opportunities to amass funds to run for re-election. After all, bureaucratic discretion and opaque processes enable the siphoning of funds and bribe taking in service delivery. Politicians use "transfer authority" over bureaucrats to access bribes. More transparent services, due the implementation of reforms, threaten this access to bribes. At the same time, reform may also offer new opportunity for rents. Private partnerships to run centers entail new contracting processes. Larger-scale bribes may be available from ownership and management negotiation.

Based on these mixed direct and indirect incentives, Bussell predicts that reform will require expected net benefits to ruling politicians. States with higher petty corruption should implement policy reforms later. Meanwhile, states with higher grand corruption might lead to more partnerships with private sector.

So what factors actually explain variation in when different Indian states adopted reform? According to Bussell's research, the level of corruption was the most statistically significant variable affecting the timing of reform adoption. However, whether or not there was a coalition government in power was also significant. This means that an increase of 1 point out of 10 in the state's corruption level led to a 63% decrease in the chance of a reform being adopted in a given year. The quantity of services covered varied widely in the sample of states from less than 10 to more than 40 services. On average, moving from a state with below average corruption to a state with above average corruption causes a drop of 14 in the number of services covered.

In addition to examining the variation in reform adoption across Indian states, Bussell also looks at the consequences of reform. Despite reforms in the state of Karnataka, to give one example, demand for services continues to outstrip supply. Visitors to Nemmadi (privately-run computerized centers) were able to access services faster, while paying less money, making less visits, spending less time waiting at each visit, and seeing a reduction (on average) in the number of days before receiving the service. Despite quantitative improvements in average efficiency, however, perceived efficiency actually declined. Now, there is a 7-day minimum for service delivery and a 21-day maximum. Although average has declined as a consequence of these new requirements, it is now impossible to bribe officials in order to achieve service delivery in one day.

According to Bussell, these results bring up some interesting policy implications. First, it is important to consider the institutional incentives underlying the established model in order to ensure that reforms are effective. The incentives faced by both top politicians and street level officials must be taken into account. Second, it may be best to design policies that establish a strong, if narrow, initial model. After all, growing citizen demand affects electoral benefits and the calculations of politicians. Third, more research must be done regarding the various factors that influence policy outcomes. According to cases in South Africa and Brazil, there is some evidence that differences in electoral competition can affect policy outcomes. In South Africa, for instance, less electoral competition has led to less incentive to reform. More research will help to clarify the factors of importance in public service reform implementation.

In today's networked information economy, Yochai Benkler suggests, the most important inputs into the core economic activities of the most advanced economies are, for the first time, widely distributed in the population. Examples of decentralized or peer production are increasingly common, with Wikipedia just one among the list of notable examples. In contrast to the old model, in which all parties needed large-scale capital investment to influence the public space, Benkler suggests that today's networked public sphere has fewer barriers to entry. The groups that have traditionally influenced the public sphere include commercial interests (representing the power of money), government (which influences through funding, access, and threats, representing the power of power), parties, citizens, and a final group of civil society actors (i.e. professional values, journalism and universities). In Benkler's view, these categories of power have been destabilized by the spread of new means of social sharing and exchange. Today, authority, quality and accreditation are separate to capital due the addition of many new groups and platforms, including examples such as the following:

• Pro Publica, American Independent Media
• New highly visible blogs
• Sunlight Foundation
• Wikileaks
• Large-scale participatory platforms for politically active participants
• Citizen journalism, camera phones, and footage

Benkler notes that many critiques have arisen to the argument that the Internet democratizes. For example, some claim that new parties can talk on the Internet, but no one will necessarily hear them. Not only is very little attention actually paid to politics online, but links between sources are also very concentrated. Additionally, there is the question of whether the blogosphere simply offers a new version of elitism, in which the top bloggers come from similar backgrounds to those who formerly dominated the public sphere.

However, Benkler argues that the Internet does make the public sphere more democratic after all. The structured web offers more visibility to more people, in accreditation and filtration clusters. Speakers on the periphery can be identified by major sites and broadcast iteratively to higher-level visibility. On Daily Kos, for example, people are able to bring posts of interest forward onto the home page. All of this occurs with relatively little financing.

In their 2010 paper, Benkler and Shaw explored patterns among the top 155 political blogs, applying link analysis and other methods to explore differences between bloggers on the political left and on the political right. They found that the left adopts enhanced platforms much more quickly and has more flexible content boundaries--a measure of how easy it is for bloggers on the periphery to have their content taken up. While the right has more sole-author blogs, the left has more user blogs available and more large-scale collaboration (exemplified by blogs with more than 20 writers). The authors found that there was no single effect of "Liberation Technology" in this case, in that the left and right showed divergent practices. While Benkler concedes that a link analysis is only so useful without full content analysis, he also notes that the results are consistent with social cognition literature on the differences between people on the left and the right. Another explanation, however, comes from the theory that there was more need for the left to embrace the blogosphere in 2002; when technology first became available, the right dominated the government, news, and already had a platform for discussion in churches. Seeking a new forum for discussion and debate, the left seized on the blogosphere as a solution.

During his time as UK Ambassador to North Korea from 2006 to 2008, John Everard frequently studied the bustling official and unofficial markets in the capital city of Pyongyang. The markets are places to purchase everything from food to domestic wares to even luxury goods, and they are probably also centers for the exchange of information. Everard concludes that the North Korean government warily tolerates the markets due to their economic importance, and that they serve as "both an ideological and a political challenge to the regime." He shared his observations at a talk held at the Korea Economic Institute of America (KEI) on February 2, 2011. Full audio and video recordings of the event are available on the KEI website, as well as a copy of Everard's presentation slides and his paper "The Markets of Pyongyang." Everard is the 2010-2011 Pantech Fellow with the Stanford Korean Studies Program.

Any mention of climate policy was noticeably missing from President Obama's recent state of the union address. This is unfortunate because every day of inaction on climate policy by the United States government is another day that American consumers must pay substantially higher prices for products derived from crude oil, such as gasoline and diesel fuel. Moreover, a substantial fraction of the revenues from these higher prices goes to governments of countries that the US would prefer not to support.

So, what is the cost of a single day of delay? US crude oil consumption is approximately 20m barrels per day and roughly 12m barrels per day are imported. An oil price that, because of climate policy uncertainty, is $20 a barrel higher than it would otherwise have been implies that US consumers pay $400m per day more, of which $240m per day is paid to foreign oil producers. Dividing these figures by the United States population implies that every US citizen is paying about $1 per day more for oil - and more than half of that may be going to an unfriendly foreign government.

Why does this climate policy price premium exist? It is not due to a dearth of readily available technologies for producing substitutes for conventional oil. A number currently exist that are economic at oil prices significantly below current world prices of $80-90 per barrel. Several even have the potential to scale up to replace a large fraction of US oil consumption.

Tar sands and heavy oils, gas-to-liquids and coal-to-liquids are all available to produce substantial amounts of conventional oil substitutes at average costs at or below $60 per barrel. If these technologies were currently in place throughout the US, the world price of oil would not exceed that price, because any attempt by conventional oil suppliers to raise prices beyond that level would immediately be met by additional supply from producers of oil substitutes.

But if these technologies are financially viable at current world oil prices, then why don't they exist in the US? That's because they require massive up-front expenditures to construct the necessary production facilities. These fixed costs, plus the variable costs of production, must be recovered from sales over the lifetime of the project - and future climate policy can substantially increase the variable costs of these technologies.

Climate policy uncertainty impacts of the economic viability of these technologies because of the increased carbon intensity of the gasoline and diesel fuel substitutes they produce. Almost double the greenhouse gas emissions result per unit of useful energy produced and consumed relative to conventional oil. Therefore, if the US decided to set a significant price for carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions at some future date, either through a cap-and-trade mechanism or carbon fee, investors in these technologies would immediately realise a massive loss - because they would have to pay the price fixed for all of the CO2 emissions that result from producing and consuming these oil substitutes.

To understand this point, suppose that a technology exists to convert coal to an oil substitute that is financially viable at an oil price of $60 per barrel and that this technology produces double the CO2 per unit of useful energy relative to oil. At a $90 per barrel oil price, this technology could be unprofitable for a modest price of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions because of its substantially higher carbon intensity. For instance, at a $100 per ton price of CO2 emissions - which is roughly twice the highest price observed in the European Union's emissions permit trading scheme - the total cost per barrel of oil equivalent, including the cost of the additional emissions, could easily exceed $90 per barrel.

A solution to this investment impasse is a stable, predictable price of carbon into the distant future. Although there is currently a regional cap and trade mechanism for CO2 emissions in the Northeast US, permit prices in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) have been extremely modest - less than $5 per ton of CO2. California also plans to implement a cap-and-trade mechanism in 2012. No significant coal-mining activity takes place in the participating RGGI states or in California. But such regional cap-and-trade programmes are unlikely to set prices for CO2 emissions for a long enough time and with sufficient certainty to encourage investment in facilities to produce conventional oil substitutes. In other words, despite regional experiments with cap-and-trade, it is the national climate policy uncertainty that remains the major factor in preventing these investments.

If prospective investors in the major fossil fuel-producing regions of the US knew the cost of the CO2 emissions associated with these alternative technologies over the lifetime of each alternative fuel project, they would be able to decide which projects are likely to be financially viable at that carbon price. Particularly for coal-to-liquids, much of this investment would take place in the US because of the massive amount of available domestic coal reserves. This investment would also provide much-needed new domestic high-wage jobs.

New sources of supply of conventional oil substitutes would reduce oil prices, create new jobs in the United States and reduce the amount of money sent to governments, whose interests are counter to the US. Finally, this price of carbon would raise much-needed revenues for the US government and stimulate investment in lower carbon energy sources, such as wind, solar and biofuels. A modest, yet stable long-term price of carbon might even stimulate so much investment in conventional oil substitutes and low-carbon energy sources that the long-term net effect of this carbon price could be lower average energy prices across all sources.

The investments in these technologies need not result in higher aggregate CO2 emissions. For example, coal-to-liquids produces a concentrated CO2 emissions stream that is ideally suited to the deployment of carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technology. Consequently, a carbon price high enough to make CCS financially viable, yet reasonable enough to make this technology competitive with conventional oil, would address both concerns.

If there are concerns that committing to a modest carbon price may be insufficient to address climate concerns, this commitment could be stipulated only for investment projects initiated within a certain time window. The US government could reserve the right to increase this CO2 emissions price for projects initiated after that period. This logic has not escaped the Chinese government, where General Electric and Shenhua, a major Chinese coal producer, recently announced a joint coal gasification project, which is financially viable because the Chinese government can provide the necessary climate policy certainty.

The choice is stark: either we can continue to wait to implement the perfect climate policy, and in the meantime pay higher prices for oil, and watch countries like China that are able to provide climate policy certainty to investors move forward with this new industrial development; or we could commit to a modest climate policy and so unleash the new technologies and new jobs made possible by this more favourable investment environment.