Now here's an interesting development (in Icelandic). A player in the game Eve Online, which has a very economical bent, opened a bank and convinced players that they would receive interest on their virtual savings with the bank. After a few months the banker stole all of the money and took off. The amount stolen is 790 billion ISK (the currency in the game - happens to be the international abbreviation for the Icelandic Krona as well - needless to say the game is made by Icelandic company CCP), a very sizable sum of virtual cash.
I recently posted a lengthy blurb about globalization where I wrote about Scholte's notion of globalization as "supraterritoriality" and how it remains tied to traditional territoriality. But, I also suggested that this may be changing as we see more and more virtual valuables being exchanged. The interesting thing about the Eve Online case is that ISK's and other virtual valuables are exchanged in the real world. It has been estimated that the money stolen in the game may be worth up to 12 million real ISK (ca. US$175,000). Will the fraudulent banker try to cash in on the crime in the real world or will he/she keep the cash in its more valuable virtual form? If the latter, is there anything territorial about this supraterritoriality?
Update: I guess this news has been circulating on the web for a few days. For versions in english - Slashdot has something on it, as does ArsTechnica.
I came across an entry on the APC.ORG blog site the other day about the lack of submarine fibre cables to and from the African continent. They point to an interesting map of submarine cables throughout the world and point out the difference between the African continent and other parts of the world. While the difference is quite dramatic, I'm afraid the problem is more complex and serious than is implied.
Obviously, the map being referred to is very stylistic and perhaps not the most informative representation of the data. For instance, one thing that is not at all clear from this map is that Northern Africa, on the Mediterranean Sea, is probably the best connected part of the continent. But, more seriously, the map fails to show that the problem is not merely the lack of connections to and from the continent, it is in how those connections are managed inside and outside the continent. For instance, let's consider Australia. On the map we can see that Australia does not appear to be significantly better connected than Africa (if we accept that the map is not accurately portraying submarine cables linking to Northern Africa). Yet, Australia is number 11 on the Network Readiness Index, far higher than any African country (Tunis is number 31).
For a more complete picture of the connectivity issues in Africa see the two articles linked to in this post.
Newsweek-International Edition this week (Aug. 21-28, 2006) has several reports about higher education. The main piece is about newly published rankings of universities throughout the world. Among the factors used to determine the rankings are number of international faculty and students. Several follow-up articles discuss internationalisation from various points of view. One of the articles is written by Tony Blair and is a reiteration of what is increasingly being heard throughout Europe, asking how universities can maintain their autonomy and increase the revenues. As I'm sure most people know, most European universities are bound by law to offer free or nearly free education. Allowing them to charge tuition requires changing the laws and this is a difficult task since there are still many people with the support of fairly strong political parties that oppose university tuitions. The question then is how can universities increase their revenue without charging tuition? As I read the articles, some of which argue for a more business-like approach to the operation of universities, I started thinking about universities as businesses. That led to me thinking about the outsourcing boom in global business today. Not just the obvious much talked about outsourcing like call centres in India, etc., but more about the intricate relationship building that Friedman talks about in The World is Flat. Friedman describes how a single project may be outsourced and re-outsourced so that in the end the product is produced in components all over the world using expertise being developed within specific regions. It finally dawned on me that with modern ICTs the same thing can be done with a lot of the scientific research that goes on within universities and research centres. Basically, pass the data around and have the analysis done where the expertise is greatest. Obviously, this does already happen to some extent, but I'm talking about boiling it down to simple business - send us your data and tell us what you want done with it and we'll send you the results. As I thought more about this I started asking myself whether this might even be formulated as viable knowledge-building development aid - outsource data processing to universities in developing countries. Think of it as an affordable way to involve universities in developing countries in research being carried out at top universities while building relationships with other universities world-wide.
Being prone to bouts of severe realism, I thought, this can't be such a bright idea that no one thought about it before! So off I went on the Internet in search of similar ideas and lo and behold - UK to outsource research to India. This could offer some very interesting possibilities...