Sunday, November 20, 2005

Artists' forum, the Left speak up for Kushboo / Found dead in U.S. / The great digital divide

Artists' forum, the Left speak up for Kushboo
DPI leader denies that his party and PMK are behind agitations

http://www.hindu.com/2005/11/20/stories/2005112013270100.htm

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Found dead in U.S.
New Delhi: Nayyar Pervez, son of the former MP, Syed Shahabuddin, was found
dead in a hotel room in the United States. He was a professor in Columbia
University.
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THE SHASHI THAROOR COLUMN
The great digital divide
Today, the dividing lines between the rich and the poor, between the North
and the South, are the fibre-optic and high speed digital lines.

"But access to the Internet is of little value if the information that it
contains is ... in a language you don't understand, or if it fails to deal
with the life and death questions ... ."

MILES TO GO: New technologies are shrinking the world, but a huge percentage
of the world population has been left out.
WHEN these words appear I shall just have attended the World Summit on the
Information Society in Tunis, a serious attempt to grapple with the
challenges of our information-technology-driven times - the digital divide,
the governance of the Internet, the hope that the new technologies can drive
development. But the information revolution, unlike the French Revolution,
is at present one with much liberté, some fraternité and no égalité. It is
yet to deliver the goods, or even the tools to obtain them, to many of those
most in need.
Today, the dividing lines between the rich and the poor, between the North
and the South, are the fibre-optic and high speed digital lines. If "digital
divide" is an over-used phrase, it represents a reality that cannot be
denied. Fifteen per cent of the world's population controls around 80 per
cent of the world's telephones and about 90 per cent of access points to the
Internet, and they are 13 times more likely to own personal computers than
the rest. And the rest are the 85 per cent of the world's population living
in low and lower-middle income countries.

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