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

Hi again. 

> Date: Thu, 6 Oct 2011 12:10:31 +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
> 
> On 05/10/11 16:34, CE Whitehead wrote:
> 
> >  > 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
> 
> Yes, sorry. I got my codepoints wrong.
> 
> >  > - 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 $$$$$
> > 2. Town2 $$$$$$
> > 3. Town3 $$$$$
> 
> That's a clever idea. Its usefulness depends on how widely the prices 
> differ, of course, and what's the granularity needed to make decisions 
> about which town provides the best distance/profit ratio.
>Yes, it's useful if prices differ though the info may have to be broadcast more than once/day as prices can change over the day.
> >  > 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?)
> >Distinguishing rice and the grains remains a problem; I'd want farmers to be able to choose the grains they want broadcasts for too.
> > 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 . . . ).
> 
> 1-9 digits are clearly variable-width on the old phones I have here. But 
> indeed using a single character 'horizontal histogram' alleviates that. 
> You still have to be careful about line wrapping, though. So essentially 
> you have to assume the smallest number of characters per line among the 
> phones your users own.Thanks for this information.(The map grid is awful; I did not even consider showing roads on it.)
> 
> >  > 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.)
> 
> That's good enough expertise for me! There isn't much research on this 
> that I can find, unfortunately. Lots of papers on how to tackle 
> illiteracy through the use of SMS, but not much on how to design SMS 
> services for illiterate people (who have more important things on their 
> minds than to start learning to read). It seems the solution lies in 
> using IVR for now, and perhaps Web access on the phone, when that 
> becomes available and usable.
> Knowing that farmers are poor, having done a month or two of temp. labor with laborers from Mexico (most from Northern Mexico, but some from the South where small farmers are going out of business), my guess is that cheaper is better and that's the advantage of SMS broadcasts, but yes IVR (interactive voice) might be nice for reading aloud the first SMS broadcast and explaining how to use it (thus farmers would see how the numbers on a grid map referred to towns listed by name in the "map key" -- since the grid map looks awful; you are right; but cheaper is better I think)(If you are looking for research, places you might look included the number of linguists who have developed alphabets for speakers of endangered languages, or have adopted our Romanized writing system for people that people were able to use to read fairly quickly apparently; a Romanized system was adapted for the languages of South Sudan:http://books.google.com/books?id=0p-CAAAAIAAJ&q=inauthor:%22Arturo+Nebel%22&dq=inauthor:%22Arturo+Nebel%22&hl=fr&ei=H8eNTuqZBtK3tgfHtaihDA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCwQ6AEwAAI know there was some interest in this the University of Texas (Arlington, but probably Austin as well; I don't know if any of this work will touch on the technology-reading or symbols-reading issue but someone might know something.I think Haskins Laboratories focuses primarily on children in the U.S. and in things like the relationship between dialect and reading and more but you can also look there to see if anything  interests you:http://www.haskins.yale.edu/research.html;also, again for U.S. children, there is Shirley Brice Heath's "Ways With Words" -- a good read if nothing else -- which notes that different cultural values can lead to different approaches to reading; regardless people do learn to read some from reading prices on tags and numbers on phones; in fact that may be a primary way in some communities; not sure how it affects their reading development though)Alphabet developers I believe look at the interaction between syntax and tone patterns; or grammatical endings on words and vowel harmony; the other end I suppose is the symbols used to encode this phonology; I suppose where the cell phones come in is they provide an introduction to these symbols; sorry I wish I could be of more help.)
Best,
--C. E. Whiteheadcewcathar@hotmail.com

> Cheers,
> Max.