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This report highlights the role of information and communication technology (ICT) to prevent the effects of climate change related emergencies in Africa. The objective of the case study on Mozambique is to uncover the pattern of municipal ICT impact that may exist in other low capacity countries with similar political economy structures in connection with leveraging ICTs in public sectors. According to the report, geographic information systems (GIS) assist local governments in the identification of flood zones on maps, measurement of communities’ vulnerability and planning for new prevention infrastructure. The study concludes by suggesting measures to link Africa’s ICT boom in citizen-based mobile and internet usage with the rapid rise of public sector ICT phenomena as a promising means to plug service delivery gaps.

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This report finds that while China’s initiative is clearly a positive development, the process is in its infancy, and still has to overcome fundamental issues with China’s energy sector, its business culture, and its legislative and bureaucratic framework that may make this endeavor quite daunting. There is a substantial need for international expertise and technical support. The report also warns against setting expectations too high; while some people talk as if this were the magic bullet to start reducing China’s emissions, in reality it’s not certain that China will even set an absolute cap on emissions (rather than an emissions-intensity target), and any cap will likely allow for continued emissions growth, just slower growth. It also looks a briefly into the implications for global carbon markets, at China’s experience with pollutant emissions trading to date, and at major challenges that China needs to address to lay the groundwork for successful carbon markets.

[idsknowledgeservices-blog]

This benchmarking report presents a Global Benchmarking Study that will assess Belize's propensity to participate in and leveraging information and communication technologies for development and growth. It seeks to benchmark Belize against other emerging economies as well as developed economies of similar size and similar economic and political environment. It uses the latest development figures for 20 key performance indicators such as infrastructure, Internet usage, education, egovernment from a variety of international sources.

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This report is the result of research conducted in 2010 by the Information Society Unit of IPTS as part of the CROSSROAD Project – A Participative Roadmap for ICT research on Electronic Governance and Policy Modelling. Overall, the research aims to push the boundaries of traditional eGovernment research and help resolve the complex societal challenges Europe is facing by the application of ICT-enabled innovations and collaborative policy modelling approaches, which include the harnessing of collective intelligence, agent-based modelling, visual analytics and simulation, just to mention a few.

[idsknowledgeservices-blog]

This paper explores the potentially inclusionary and exlusionary implications of ICT for children through an examination of ICT policies and practices within UK schools. It begins by outlining the rhetoric of inclusion evident in UK government policy and by reflecting on how these discourses are mobilised in three case-study schools.

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In this commentary, the author argues that the alleged failure of the Copenhagen climate summit in December 2009, and in particular the role played by the developing countries, should be embraced as a political accomplishment opening up a moment of political opportunity. Admittedly Copenhagen was a political failure, albeit of a populist consensual policy practice that invokes the semi-scientific threat of an apocalyptic doomsday scenario to make everybody toe the line of the neo-liberal market economy. Now that we are at the point where this consensual policy approach has imploded under its own weight, the time is right to revive the climate and, by extension, the environment as a matter of genuine political concern that is open to struggle and contestation, in this way constituting an essential component of social change.

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This paper investigates the impact of ICT- and non-ICT capital, and of labour at different skill levels, on productivity and employment in the financial intermediation sector of twelve EU member countries plus the US and Japan. A stochastic possibility frontiers (SPF) approach is applied to assess the relation between the production inputs and to compute both time-varying and average inefficiencies. For the empirical analysis, annual data from 1995 to 2005 are employed that were obtained from recently released data contained in the EU KLEMS database. The results obtained shed some light on the relative impact of ICT- and non-ICT capital and labour inputs, and provide new insights about the structural dynamics between these factor inputs.

[idsknowledgeservices-blog]

This primer looks at the various definitions of cloud computing and at some of the reasons why organizations would want to implement cloud computing, such as cost-savings, increased speed and flexibility and higher performance. We will also look at the risks of cloud computingin areas such as availability, privacy and regulatory compliance. This paper also focuses on the various types of cloud computing, cloud infrastructure, the concept of virtualisation and the impact of cloud computing on organizations, looking forward to what the future holds, along with its impact on IT management.