RE: report on Leveraging ICT for the Base of the Pyramid

Hi once more.  I made a goof; there is a slight problem with mixing spaces and a symbol such as "." or "-"  in terms of spacing, but not probably an insurmountable one.

> From: cewcathar@hotmail.com
> To: maxf@webfoundation.org
> CC: boyera@w3.org; public-mw4d@w3.org
> Subject: RE: report on Leveraging ICT for the Base of the Pyramid
> Date: Wed, 5 Oct 2011 10:34:12 -0400













> Hi8.

>> Date: Wed, 5 Oct 2011 11:20:56 +0200
>> From: maxf@webfoundation.org
>> To: cewcathar@hotmail.com
>> CC: boyera@w3.org; public-mw4d@w3.org
>> Subject: Re: report on Leveraging ICT for the Base of the Pyramid
>> 
>> Hi all,
>> 
>> Thanks for a very interesting discussion, which I'm catching up on late, 
>> unfortunately. Couple of comments below.
>> 
>> > 3. Regarding how to best reach rural, international farmers, I don't
>> > quite agree with you that SMS text broadcasts of crop prices for
>> > different markets, if encoded with symbols in a graph-like format, would
>> > be much less accessible to rural farmers than voice information.
>> >
>> > (You say under "Technology,"
>> > "E.g. a sms-based agriculture service in ‘Direct Access’ is unlikely to
>> > reach all farmers given the ability of farmers to use SMS")
>> > * * *
>> > My Example (a possible way to reach farmers via SMS):
>> >
>> >
>> > RICE (currently the only suitable symbol is U+1F35A at
>> > http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U1F300.pdf which might not be
>> > supported by the SMS system so a pix of rice might have to be broadcast
>> > before the SMS data; this is a drawback):
>> 
>> Indeed. I just did a small test texting: "1F332 FISH CAKE WITH SWIRL 
>> DESIGN [??] and 1F35A COOKED RICE [??]" (from Skype) to various devices:> Do you mean 1F365 instead of 1F332?  (The latter is an evergreen tree; in any case I cannot make sense of the symbols 1F35A and > 1F365, and your symbol for "fish" below is at least as useful.)> http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U1F300.pdf
>> 
>> - iPhone: displays 1F35A but not 1F332
>> - Samsung Galaxy Tab (Android): displays neither
>> - Motorola V220 (from around 2003): neither
>> - Nokia xpressmusic (from around 2006): neither - doesn't even recognise 
>> UTF-8 and displays 2 blocks for each character.
>> 
>> So I think we can discard fancy unicode symbols for a while. Probably 
>> not a problem for currency symbols though, which are (I suspect) 
>> optional in most cases.
>> > Yes the symbols seem to be the wrong way to go with cell phones for the present; I hope you are right about the currency symbols.  > In which case these could be used to form graphs:
> Rice (in tenths of dollars?  but $= $.10 would be confusing though something might be worked for some other currency symbols; I don't > have the symbol for cents on my mini keyboard or would have used that)
> 1.  Town1 $$$$$> 2.  Town2 $$$$$$> 3.  Town3 $$$$$


>> ASCII art is also quite difficult in that the content of SMSs is 
>> displayed in variable-length fonts, and thus the text wraps in 
>> unpredictable ways. Ironically, it used to be easier before, when phones 
>> had monospaced fonts.
>> 
>> So all is left are one-line ASCII pictograms. Eg, Fish <º)))><
>> 
>> I suspect that, to people with low reading skills, "F" is just as good a 
>> symbol for fish than <º)))><. > You are probably right; that's a nice fish but, as it's not formed using a continuous line in a single character space, it's not that useful > perhaps.  I do agree that "F" may be just as recognizeable initially, and actually the whole word, "Fish" might even be very recognizable to > those who deal in it.
> What about:   
<º)))><  Fish  ?  (Now can someone do rice?)
> As far as images go, I was hoping only for the bar graphs showing cost differences (described above) plus visual rough maps showing > the approximate distance and direction of villages from the cell phone location.  I've noticed variable width characters too and yes those > can be a problem; of course a repeated "." or "-: showing the distance between towns in miles would be "monospaced," and if each > town were represented by a number then that would be all that could vary (and, for the digits 1-9, mine are monospaced on this mini; > but those are European digits of course; I'd have to try others . . . ).
I looked again at some stuff I did in notepad, in a Yahoo text file online, in a cut-and-paste text input online, and at facebook; and of course you are right; mixing spaces and a symbol (such as a "." or "-" could be a problem unless these alternated to completely fill a graph; alas I'm way over my allotted character limit and so should change my scale here:
. . . . . 1. . . . . . . .   . . . . . . . . . . . . . .    . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.    . . . . . . . . . . . . . .    . . . . 3. . . . . . . . .    

. .  = 1 kilometer1. Town12. Town23. Town3
There is some problem however with adding numbers to the mix, since these do not display quite the same other places, and can give the map ragged edges, but the differences are minor.)
Best,
--C. E. Whiteheadcewcathar@hotmail.com 
>> But I'm not an expert and only a proper
>> field study would show that. >> However if some people who are 
>> number-literate only and who can reportedly do MPESA banking just by 
>> knowing which key to press to get to their account balance, I can 
>> imagine that decoding symbols that aren't pictograms is not impossible, 
>> and is the only way to use SMS-based services.
>> 
>> Opinions from a specialist in low-literacy most welcome.
>> > (I'm not that; I have a linguistics degree and have studied literacy, mainly writing/reading and bilingual writing/reading but am hardly a > specialist in this area I don't think.  I could not comment on 3rd world farmers and what symbols they are familiar with; from travel not > study I know that many people worldwide, at least those who work away from home, are familiar with symbols indicating prices though > a graph of some sort makes comparison easier.  Also of course, whatever symbols/etc are used these should be tested on local farmers > to see if they are "intuitive" I would guess.)
> Best,
> --C. E. Whiteheadcewcathar@hotmail.com
> Max.
> 
>