Seymour E. Goodman

Information technology for local administration support: the governorates project in Egypt

Experience with information technology (IT) implementation in the local administrations of less developed countries (LDCs) has been largely disappointing. Conventional wisdom suggests that such implementation efforts are usually inappropriate to the information-poor environments of many LDCs. This study describes the Governorates Project in Egypt, which seems to have been an encouraging exception to such wisdom. The project, which was initiated in 1987 by the Egyptian Cabinet’s Information and Decision Support Center (IDSC), represented a significant administrative and technological innovation because it sought to implement an IDSC in each of the 27 governorates of Egypt. The purpose of each governorate IDSC was to provide computer-based information and decision support to the governor and other local administrators.

International perspectives: computing at the top of the world

M IC H A EL S C H R Ö TE R Starting near sea level in the tropical jungles along its southern border with India and moving northward, Nepal rises steeply to almost 30,000 feet in the Himalayas and contains eight of the 10 tallest mountains in the world, including Mt. Everest (Saragmatha). Beyond these it is downhill to the 15,000-foot Tibetan Plateau and the other Asian giant, China. Although Nepal’s landlocked position at the top of the world helped protect it from some of the worst impositions by foreigners elsewhere in Asia (but has not spared it from the troubles of others, as exemplified by refugee migrations from Tibet and Bhutan), isolation has deemed Nepal a Least Developed Country (LDC), as classified by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP). In the late 1990s, Nepal’s per capita GNP was U.S.

Cyberspace across the Sahara: computing in North Africa

210; of the country’s roughly 21 million people, 80% were engaged in agriculture; 42% of the population was under 15 years of age. Only 39% of the population is literate, with large variations according to gender, region, and ethnic community. In what is potentially the “Saudi Arabia of hydroelectric power,” only 15% of Nepali households have electricity. Nepal is a parliamentary democracy under a constitutional monarchy (that for a short time had the peculiar distinction of electing a MarxistLeninist government). Some Maoist guerrilla activities and domestic police excesses aside, Nepal has been spared the massive internal bloodshed that too often characterizes other LDCs with internal ethnic divisions. It is not seriously threatened by its giant neighbors. Not many LDCs have a long history of such stability. Nepal is one of many historically poor and geographically isolated countries now looking to

Little engines that could: computing in small energetic countries

Spanning 7.2 million square kilometers from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea, and encompassing the Great Saharan Desert and Nile River Valley, North Africa embraces Mauritania, Western Sahara, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt. Charting the development of information technology (IT) is as challenging as traversing the souks, the labyrinthine ancient marketplaces.

Computing in India: an Asian elephant learning to dance

How do very small countries, here defined as having fewer than 10 million people, find places for themselves in the information technologies (IT) arena? Does success require accommodation in the global IT regime that often seems dominated by the U.S. and Japan? Do the little countries scurry around, like birds among the lions and other predators looking for scraps? Are they relegated to second tier “appropriate technologies,” or do they operate in the mainstream?

An Internet diffusion framework

To many, India is a land of religious and ethnic conIlict, entrenched and corrupt bureaucracies, and Hollywood-fueled visions of resplendent maliarajahs and palaces in a sea of teeming poverty. Indeed,media coverage of recent events have sustained these images: the 1991 assassination of ex-Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, violent separatist movements in the Punjab and Kashmir, the 1992 stock market scam which implicated top government officials and nearly derailed initiatives to liberalize the economy, the demolition in late-1992 of the Babri Mosque of Hindu religious extremists and the widespread violence that followed.

Introduction to the Design and Analysis of Algorithms

Over the years, we covered the globe with cities then linked them with railroads, highways, telephone lines, power grids, canals, and so forth. We are now deploying the Internet, and several organizations and projects are tracking this global diffusion [4]. This column describes one such project, the MOSAIC Group (www.agsd.com/ mosaicgroup.html) study of the global diffusion of the Internet. The global diffusion of the Internet is of interest to infrastructure planners and policy makers. As Ithiel de Sola Pool pointed out, telecommunication infrastructure planning is implicit social planning. Policy makers may see the Internet as an opportunity, a threat, or both, but none can ignore it— infrastructure and society are inextricably interdependent. While this is the case for all nations, we are particularly motivated by the hypothesis that a relatively small networking investment may have a significant impact in developing nations [1]. While support for policy makers is our primary motivation, we must also confess to a degree of unabashed curiosity in tracking the spread of the Internet around the world. In tracking the diffusion of the Internet, one must choose a balance between breadth and depth. One of the first chroniclers of

Sufficient conditions for a graph to be Hamiltonian

Introduction to the Design and Analysis of Algorithms. By S. E. Goodman and S. T. Hedetniemi. New York, McGraw‐Hill, 1977. xi, 371 p. 23·5 cm. £13·45.

The Soviet Bloc's Unified System of Computers

Abstract Three sufficient conditions for a graph to be Hamiltonian are given. These theorems are in terms of subgraph structure and do not require the fairly high global line density which is basic to the Posa-like sufficiency conditions. Line graphs of both Eulerian graphs and Hamiltonian graphs are also characterized.

The Internet in India: better times ahead?

During the past ten years the Soviet Bloc has designed, developed, and put into production a series of upward-compatible third-generation computers known as the Unified System or Ryad This family is effectwely a reverse engineering of the IBM S/360 system. Although backward by current Western and Japanese standards, the Umfied System is of considerable technological, political, and economm importance. This paper is an at tempt to present a comprehensive survey and analysis of the Ryad project.