This article on using mobile technology for social good is part of the #Mobile4Good series & is made possible by Vodafone India.
Who says you cannot serve your country from far away? A group of NRIs is using technology to help people in rural India very effectively. From water scarcity to lack of electricity – they are busy solving these problems from thousands of miles away.
‘One phone call a day to keep problems away’ is the basic mantra with which Suresh Ediga, an NRI living in New York, has been working for people in rural India.
It was four years ago that Suresh came to know about CGNet Swara, a voice-based news portal, operational in Adivasi areas of states like Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Odisha, Telangana, Rajasthan, and Gujarat. CGNet Swara is basically a platform where people can report or listen to news on local issues by dialling a number. All the recorded messages are translated into Hindi and English and published on the website, where journalists, NGOs and other organisations can listen to them and help resolve the problems.
Immediately after going through the website some years ago, Suresh decided to help. He would take one issue every week, call up the concerned authorities in India, and would keep calling until some action was taken. After a few years of doing this, he decided to get more people on board so the impact could be larger.
Today, he leads a group of 12 NRIs who meet online once every week, discuss and decide which issues they will take up, and make all the necessary calls.
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Showing posts with label solutions. Show all posts
Showing posts with label solutions. Show all posts
Saturday, 13 February 2016
Thursday, 11 February 2016
Bridging the language divide
Tablets and smartphones have revolutionised the way in which we all work, and changed expectations of how everyone should be able to work. Modern workers need to communicate and share information, from any location, and from any mobile platform. Making potentially sensitive analytical and other scientific data available to the right personnel, in real time and in a suitable format, is no different, conceptually, at least. Yet in an R&D or life-science testing environment, data is likely to comprise multiple layers of information, coming out of multiple instruments from multiple vendors, which may all use different native software.
Interpreting data formats
BSSN Software recently launched its Seahorse Mobile Edition platform as a vendor-independent solution for delivering scientific data to mobile devices, supporting a wide range of analytical data types, from HPLC and mass spectrometry, to medical imaging, microplate readers and bioreactors. The platform effectively sits alongside the data source – for example, a scientific data management system (SDMS), which provides an interface with existing data repositories, and interprets the data format. ‘In today’s world of mobile working, it is really important for people to be able to access their analytical data wherever they are, perhaps to see what analytical results have been generated overnight, while they are on the train to work in the morning’, commented Burkhard Schaefer, BSSN president and lead architect of the AnIML data standard on which BSSN’s Seahorse family of software is built. ‘Users may want to flick through data from previous experiments to help decide on their next round of analyses, and they may not necessarily be in the laboratory or at a workstation when they need to be able to do this.’
Read the post
BSSN Software recently launched its Seahorse Mobile Edition platform as a vendor-independent solution for delivering scientific data to mobile devices, supporting a wide range of analytical data types, from HPLC and mass spectrometry, to medical imaging, microplate readers and bioreactors. The platform effectively sits alongside the data source – for example, a scientific data management system (SDMS), which provides an interface with existing data repositories, and interprets the data format. ‘In today’s world of mobile working, it is really important for people to be able to access their analytical data wherever they are, perhaps to see what analytical results have been generated overnight, while they are on the train to work in the morning’, commented Burkhard Schaefer, BSSN president and lead architect of the AnIML data standard on which BSSN’s Seahorse family of software is built. ‘Users may want to flick through data from previous experiments to help decide on their next round of analyses, and they may not necessarily be in the laboratory or at a workstation when they need to be able to do this.’
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Wednesday, 3 February 2016
Connecting everyone to the internet won’t solve the world’s development problems
By 9.30am today I will have skyped Malawi, emailed Ghana, Facebooked Nepal, paid a bill online and used the satnav on my mobile phone. It feels a long time since we first got colour TV at home and, years later, when I accessed the internet using a dial-up modem. When I recalled these moments to my son he yawned. Aged, 19, he doesn’t remember a time before ubiquitous connectivity.
According to a new report from the World Bank, more than 40% of the global population now has internet access. On average, eight in ten people in the developing world own a mobile phone. Even in the poorest 20% of households this number is nearly seven in ten, making cellphones more prevalent than toilets or clean water.
There is no doubt that the world is experiencing a revolution of information and communication technology, bringing about rapid change on a massive scale. But despite great expectations for the power of digital technologies to transform lives around the world it has fallen short and is unevenly distributed, with the most advantages going, as ever, to the wealthy. The World Bank argues that increasing connectivity alone is not going to solve this problem.
Read the full post
According to a new report from the World Bank, more than 40% of the global population now has internet access. On average, eight in ten people in the developing world own a mobile phone. Even in the poorest 20% of households this number is nearly seven in ten, making cellphones more prevalent than toilets or clean water.
There is no doubt that the world is experiencing a revolution of information and communication technology, bringing about rapid change on a massive scale. But despite great expectations for the power of digital technologies to transform lives around the world it has fallen short and is unevenly distributed, with the most advantages going, as ever, to the wealthy. The World Bank argues that increasing connectivity alone is not going to solve this problem.
Read the full post
Monday, 25 January 2016
What Purpose Do the Great Mathematical Problems Serve?
In 1939, a mathematics student at the University of California, Berkeley (USA) arrived late for class. Before the end of the lesson, he wrote in his notebook the two problems that the professor had written on the blackboard, assuming that they were the assigned homework. The student took a few days to deliver the solutions, since the task was more difficult than usual. A few weeks later, on a Sunday at 8 am, the student and his wife were awakened by the sound of someone banging on the door of their house. It was the professor, in a state of great excitement; those mathematical formulations written on the blackboard were not exercises for the class, but rather two famous problems of statistics that nobody had been able to solve, until then.
The student was the mathematician George Dantzig, who died in 2005, considered as the father of linear programming and known for his contributions in statistics, computer science and economic analysis. Dantzig himself recounted the story in 1986 in an interview with the magazine College Mathematics Journal. The episode illustrates the aura of legend that surrounds the great mathematical problems and their protagonists; the story is true, although some versions have embellished it, placing Dantzig in a final exam that only he was able to finish.
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The student was the mathematician George Dantzig, who died in 2005, considered as the father of linear programming and known for his contributions in statistics, computer science and economic analysis. Dantzig himself recounted the story in 1986 in an interview with the magazine College Mathematics Journal. The episode illustrates the aura of legend that surrounds the great mathematical problems and their protagonists; the story is true, although some versions have embellished it, placing Dantzig in a final exam that only he was able to finish.
Read the post
Friday, 24 May 2013
Five routes to more innovative problem solving
Tricky problems must be shaped before they can be solved. To start that process, and stimulate novel thinking, leaders should look through multiple lenses.
The flexons approach
Finding innovative solutions is hard. Precedent and experience push us toward familiar ways of seeing things, which can be inadequate for the truly tough challenges that confront senior leaders. After all, if a problem can be solved before it escalates to the C-suite, it typically is. Yet we know that teams of smart people from different backgrounds are more likely to come up with fresh ideas more quickly than individuals or like-minded groups do.2 When a diverse range of experts—game theorists to economists to psychologists—interact, their approach to problems is different from those that individuals use. The solution space becomes broader, increasing the chance that a more innovative answer will be found.
Obviously, people do not always have think tanks of PhDs trained in various approaches at their disposal. Fortunately, generating diverse solutions to a problem does not require a diverse group of problem solvers. This is where flexons come into play. While traditional problem-solving frameworks address particular problems under particular conditions—creating a compensation system, for instance, or undertaking a value-chain analysis for a vertically integrated business—they have limited applicability. They are, if you like, specialized lenses. Flexons offer languages for shaping problems, and these languages can be adapted to a much broader array of challenges. In essence, flexons substitute for the wisdom and experience of a group of diverse, highly educated experts.
To accommodate the world of business problems, we have identified five flexons, or problem-solving languages. Derived from the social and natural sciences, they help users understand the behavior of individuals, teams, groups, firms, markets, institutions, and whole societies. We arrived at these five through a lengthy process of synthesizing both formal literatures and the private knowledge systems of experts, and trial and error on real problems informed our efforts. We don’t suggest that these five flexons are exhaustive—only that we have found them sufficient, in concert, to tackle very difficult problems. While serious mental work is required to tailor the flexons to a given situation, and each retains blind spots arising from its assumptions, multiple flexons can be applied to the same problem to generate richer insights and more innovative solutions.
Networks flexon
Evolutionary flexon
Decision-agent flexon
System-dynamics flexon
Information-processing flexon
Putting flexons to work
We routinely use these five problem-solving lenses in workshops with executive teams and colleagues to analyze particularly ambiguous and complex challenges. Participants need only a basic familiarity with the different approaches to reframe problems and generate more innovative solutions. Here are two quite different examples of the kinds of insights that emerge from the use of several flexons, whose real power emerges in combination.
Flexons help turn chaos into order by representing ambiguous situations and predicaments as well-defined, analyzable problems of prediction and optimization. They allow us to move up and down between different levels of detail to consider situations in all their complexity. And, perhaps most important, flexons allow us to bring diversity inside the head of the problem solver, offering more opportunities to discover counterintuitive insights, innovative options, and unexpected sources of competitive advantage.
Read the full article
The flexons approach
Finding innovative solutions is hard. Precedent and experience push us toward familiar ways of seeing things, which can be inadequate for the truly tough challenges that confront senior leaders. After all, if a problem can be solved before it escalates to the C-suite, it typically is. Yet we know that teams of smart people from different backgrounds are more likely to come up with fresh ideas more quickly than individuals or like-minded groups do.2 When a diverse range of experts—game theorists to economists to psychologists—interact, their approach to problems is different from those that individuals use. The solution space becomes broader, increasing the chance that a more innovative answer will be found.
Obviously, people do not always have think tanks of PhDs trained in various approaches at their disposal. Fortunately, generating diverse solutions to a problem does not require a diverse group of problem solvers. This is where flexons come into play. While traditional problem-solving frameworks address particular problems under particular conditions—creating a compensation system, for instance, or undertaking a value-chain analysis for a vertically integrated business—they have limited applicability. They are, if you like, specialized lenses. Flexons offer languages for shaping problems, and these languages can be adapted to a much broader array of challenges. In essence, flexons substitute for the wisdom and experience of a group of diverse, highly educated experts.
To accommodate the world of business problems, we have identified five flexons, or problem-solving languages. Derived from the social and natural sciences, they help users understand the behavior of individuals, teams, groups, firms, markets, institutions, and whole societies. We arrived at these five through a lengthy process of synthesizing both formal literatures and the private knowledge systems of experts, and trial and error on real problems informed our efforts. We don’t suggest that these five flexons are exhaustive—only that we have found them sufficient, in concert, to tackle very difficult problems. While serious mental work is required to tailor the flexons to a given situation, and each retains blind spots arising from its assumptions, multiple flexons can be applied to the same problem to generate richer insights and more innovative solutions.
Networks flexon
Evolutionary flexon
Decision-agent flexon
System-dynamics flexon
Information-processing flexon
Putting flexons to work
We routinely use these five problem-solving lenses in workshops with executive teams and colleagues to analyze particularly ambiguous and complex challenges. Participants need only a basic familiarity with the different approaches to reframe problems and generate more innovative solutions. Here are two quite different examples of the kinds of insights that emerge from the use of several flexons, whose real power emerges in combination.
Flexons help turn chaos into order by representing ambiguous situations and predicaments as well-defined, analyzable problems of prediction and optimization. They allow us to move up and down between different levels of detail to consider situations in all their complexity. And, perhaps most important, flexons allow us to bring diversity inside the head of the problem solver, offering more opportunities to discover counterintuitive insights, innovative options, and unexpected sources of competitive advantage.
Read the full article
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