This paper shows that an exogenous increase in accessibility of local language content leads to an increase in demand for internet connectivity among native speakers. Internet connectivity provides enormous improvements in quality of life as well as opportunities for the newly connected, yet recent attempts to connect the current `next billion' in places such as sub-Saharan Africa have not met expectations. In places where infrastructure has come online and prices have gone down, the expected consequent increase in usage was not observed. The introduction of the Setswana language in the South-African Google Search website was a spillover of the Botswana Google search website being translated from English to Setswana. This exogenous improvement in the accessibility of Setswana-language content has resulted in a substantial increase in the number of native Setswana speakers coming online and owning personal computers. It has also led to increased usage of the Setswana language online, creating a positive-feedback loop. This suggests that connecting the fourth billion will require a greater focus on the demand-side of connectivity, specifically by means of local content.

We analyse three corpora of US English text found online. We find that the blogs and news corpora are similar, the twitter corpus is different. We propose that this is the result of the 140 character limit of Twitter messages.

Analysis of US Storm Data

Morris and Shin (1998) finds that the introduction of a risk factor leads to a unique equilibrium in their model of self-fulfilling currency attacks. The currency attack model thus has the surprising feature, with the introduction of perception distortion, the multiple equilibria region seems to solve to a unique equilibrium. It is our contention that this is not a surprising result, it a consequence of the second-order effect, where the risk factor replaces a previous existent, Knightian uncertainty. Previously, speculators had no expectations on other speculators expectations. Here, the risk factor replaces uncertainty, this is the main driver of the surprising result of the paper. Also, the new quantified-risk region only solves a certain part of the multiple equilibria region, not the whole of it. Lastly, if we replace the somewhat strange assumption of a bounded uniform distribution of risk perceptions, with the more orthodox, normal distribution, we cannot derive the same result.

Cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin have an enormous potential as a transaction mechanism, giving users control of their own holdings and making transactions instant and costs negligible. Two commonly heard issues with cryptocurrencies are, deflation and wasteful mining. It can be shown that these issues are not pervasive, when the cryptocurrency economy as a whole is considered. Cryptocurrencies derive their value only from being an efficient transaction mechanism, if they appear to become overvalued (causing excessive mining), other cryptocurrencies will arise. This will increase the total number of cryptocoins (between all cryptocurrencies), which will drive down the price, and limit excessive mining.

An application of the gravity model to the interactions of failed states.