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Books > Computing & IT > Social & legal aspects of computing > Impact of computing & IT on society
This visionary book presents an interdisciplinary and cogent approach to the issue of Internet governance and control. By examining five critical areas in which the tension between freedom and control is most palpable--fair competition and open access, free expression, intellectual property, privacy rights, and security--Spinello guides the reader on a tour of the emerging body of law and public policy that has attempted to control the anarchy of cyberspace. In so doing, he defends the credo of Internet self-regulation, asserting that the same powerful and flexible architectures that created the Internet as we know it today can be relied upon to aid the private sector in arriving at a workable, decentralized regulatory regime. Except in certain circumstances that require government involvement, self-regulation is not only viable but is a highly preferred alternative to the forced uniformity that centralized structures tend to impose. Beginning with an exploration of the Internet's most important values, including universality, free expression, and open access, as well as its promise as a democratizing force, Spinello considers how we can most effectively preserve those values and fulfill that promise while curtailing the social harms that vex Internet users. How do we arrive at the right mixture of technology and policy so that the Internet does not lose its promise as a liberating technology? In examining this question, Spinello evaluates such architectures of control as filters and rights management protocols, which attempt to keep out unwanted information and protect intellectual property, respectively. He explores how these and other technologies can be designed and used responsibly so that online social order can be sustained with a minimal amount of government intervention.
What happens when a new social technology is imposed on the established social technology of the school? This book presents an unusual application of critical cultural analysis to a series of empirical case studies of educational uses of information and communication technologies (ICTs). Drawing on research conducted over a ten-year period in three different regions of the Anglo-American “developed” world, it examines themes arising from the struggle for the social spaces and emerging cyber spaces of schooling; the role of identity projects in educational change; and the paradoxes which arise from these processes. The resulting analysis offers a rich--and sobering--perspective on the rush to technologize classrooms.
This volume honors the professional life of Jacques Berleur known for his extensive work within the IFIP community to expose the nature of the ethical dilemmas of a society increasingly reliant on complex ICT infrastructures, to raise awareness of the social challenges this poses, and to influence action compatible with the ethical values of western democracy. This volume is composed of five sections, and covers the following topics in detail:
Confronting the digital revolution in academia, this book examines the application of new computational techniques and visualisation technologies in the Arts & Humanities. Uniting differing perspectives, leading and emerging scholars discuss the theoretical and practical challenges that computation raises for these disciplines.
This reference book shows how the Zero Outage method leads to more stability in operations, more reliability in projects and, ultimately, to greater customer satisfaction. It explains why clear standards for platforms, processes and personnel are essential for ensuring high ICT quality from end to end and what to look out for during changes - the most common cause of IT outages. Readers also learn how to resolve errors as quickly as possible and permanently eliminate them, and why industry-wide collaboration will only be possible with a shared standard of quality. This book is a practical introduction to making your ICT world even more failsafe and efficient. The authors share key knowledge in quality management and offer an exclusive insight into their extensively tested and continually enhanced formula for success: the Zero Outage approach.
This is the first book to describe how Autonomous Virtual Humans and Social Robots can interact with real people, be aware of the environment around them, and react to various situations. Researchers from around the world present the main techniques for tracking and analysing humans and their behaviour and contemplate the potential for these virtual humans and robots to replace or stand in for their human counterparts, tackling areas such as awareness and reactions to real world stimuli and using the same modalities as humans do: verbal and body gestures, facial expressions and gaze to aid seamless human-computer interaction (HCI). The research presented in this volume is split into three sections: *User Understanding through Multisensory Perception: deals with the analysis and recognition of a given situation or stimuli, addressing issues of facial recognition, body gestures and sound localization. *Facial and Body Modelling Animation: presents the methods used in modelling and animating faces and bodies to generate realistic motion. *Modelling Human Behaviours: presents the behavioural aspects of virtual humans and social robots when interacting and reacting to real humans and each other. Context Aware Human-Robot and Human-Agent Interaction would be of great use to students, academics and industry specialists in areas like Robotics, HCI, and Computer Graphics.
This is a review of the current and future consequences of the information revolution. It draws on an international authorship, as well as members of the Georgia Faculty Program on the Information Revolution. Porter and Read look at the implications of the revolution in five areas of human activity: business and financial capital; the workplace and human capital; academia and publishing; politics, internationalism and citizenship; and the "information society", public and private. In a final section, predictions are offered as to how the information technology revolution will evolve in the future and how human society might continue to ride the IT wave and adapt in its wake.
Electric Dreams turns to the past to trace the cultural history of computers. Ted Friedman charts the struggles to define the meanings of these powerful machines over more than a century, from the failure of Charles Babbage's "difference engine" in the nineteenth century to contemporary struggles over file swapping, open source software, and the future of online journalism. To reveal the hopes and fears inspired by computers, Electric Dreams examines a wide range of texts, including films, advertisements, novels, magazines, computer games, blogs, and even operating systems. Electric Dreams argues that the debates over computers are critically important because they are how Americans talk about the future. In a society that in so many ways has given up on imagining anything better than multinational capitalism, cyberculture offers room to dream of different kinds of tomorrow.
This book gathers visionary ideas from leading academics and scientists to predict the future of wireless communication and enabling technologies in 2050 and beyond. The content combines a wealth of illustrations, tables, business models, and novel approaches to the evolution of wireless communication. The book also provides glimpses into the future of emerging technologies, end-to-end systems, and entrepreneurial and business models, broadening readers' understanding of potential future advances in the field and their influence on society at large
This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the 11th IFIP WG 6.11 Conference on e-Business, e-Services and e-Society, I3E 2011, held in Kaunas, Lithuania, in October 2011. The 25 revised papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. They are organized in the following topical sections: e-government and e-governance, e-services, digital goods and products, e-business process modeling and re-engineering, innovative e-business models and implementation, e-health and e-education, and innovative e-business models.
Applying multimodal textual analysis to the languages and images of
online communication forms, Kay Richardson shows, from an applied
linguistic perspective, how the Internet is being used for global,
interactive communication about public health risks. Detailed case
studies of the possible risks posed by SARS, by mobile phones and
by the vaccination of babies against childhood diseases are
situated within the context of research on computer-mediated
communication, as well as within the broader social context of
globalization and discourses of risk and trust.
Collaborative Networks for a Sustainable World Aiming to reach a sustainable world calls for a wider collaboration among multiple stakeholders from different origins, as the changes needed for sustainability exceed the capacity and capability of any individual actor. In recent years there has been a growing awareness both in the political sphere and in civil society including the bu- ness sectors, on the importance of sustainability. Therefore, this is an important and timely research issue, not only in terms of systems design but also as an effort to b- row and integrate contributions from different disciplines when designing and/or g- erning those systems. The discipline of collaborative networks especially, which has already emerged in many application sectors, shall play a key role in the implemen- tion of effective sustainability strategies. PRO-VE 2010 focused on sharing knowledge and experiences as well as identi- ing directions for further research and development in this area. The conference - dressed models, infrastructures, support tools, and governance principles developed for collaborative networks, as important resources to support multi-stakeholder s- tainable developments. Furthermore, the challenges of this theme open new research directions for CNs. PRO-VE 2010 held in St.
This book explores how new communication and information technologies combine with transportation to modify human spatial and temporal relationships in everyday life. It targets the need to differentiate accessibility levels among a broad range of social groupings, the need to study disparities in electronic accessibility, and the need to investigate new measures and means of representing the geography of opportunity in the information age. It explores how models based on physical notions of distance and connectivity are insufficient for understanding the new structures and behaviors that characterize current regional realities, with examples drawn from Europe, New Zealand, and North America. While traditional notions of accessibility and spatial interaction remain important, information technologies are dramatically modifying and expanding the scope of these core geographical concepts.
Advice involves recommendations on what to think; through thought, on what to choose; and via choices, on how to act. Advice is information that moves by communication, from advisors to the recipient of advice. Ivan Jureta offers a general way to analyze advice. The analysis applies regardless of what the advice is about and from whom it comes or to whom it needs to be given, and it concentrates on the production and consumption of advice independent of the field of application. It is made up of two intertwined parts, a conceptual analysis and an analysis of the rationale of advice. He premises that giving advice is a design problem and he treats advice as an artifact designed and used to influence decisions. What is unusual is the theoretical backdrop against which the author's discussions are set: ontology engineering, conceptual analysis, and artificial intelligence. While classical decision theory would be expected to play a key role, this is not the case here for one principal reason: the difficulty of having relevant numerical, quantitative estimates of probability and utility in most practical situations. Instead conceptual models and mathematical logic are the author's tools of choice. The book is primarily intended for graduate students and researchers of management science. They are offered a general method of analysis that applies to giving and receiving advice when the decision problems are not well structured, and when there is imprecise, unclear, incomplete, or conflicting qualitative information.
As the computer industry moves into the 21st century, the
long-running Advances in Computers is ready to tackle the
challenges of the new century with insightful articles on new
technology, just as it has since 1960 in chronicling the advances
in computer technology from the last century. As the
longest-running continuing series on computers, Advances in
Computers presents those technologies that will affect the industry
in the years to come.
This book is a valuable resource for the increasing body of researchers and practitioners in the field of geospatial technologies. Written by leading researchers and experts it is designed in such a way that technical achievements and challenges of geospatial computing applications are followed by various applications developed for society. As such, they serve as a bridge between technologists and solution developers, which is critical in the context of developing countries. There have been significant advances in geospatial technologies in India in the last decade, including advances in spatial data infrastructures, geocomputation and spatial databases, and innovative applications in natural resource development. Ranging from LIDAR standards, to data integration using ontologies, and mobile computing, such progress enhances the utility of the technology for both urban and rural development. This book discusses these achievements and considers the way forward.
This work examines how vast amounts of personal information are finding their way into corporate hands. It argues that once there, this data can be combined and used to develope electronic profiles of individuals and groups that are potentially more detailed and intrusive.
We are extremely pleased to present a comprehensive book comprising a collection of research papers which is basically an outcome of the Second IFIP TC 13.6 Working Group conference on Human Work Interaction Design, HWID2009. The conference was held in Pune, India during October 7-8, 2009. It was hosted by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing, India, and jointly organized with Copenhagen Business School, Denmark; Aarhus University, Denmark; and Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati, India. The theme of HWID2009 was Usability in Social, C- tural and Organizational Contexts. The conference was held under the auspices of IFIP TC 13 on Human-Computer Interaction. 1 Technical Committee TC13 on Human-Computer Interaction The committees under IFIP include the Technical Committee TC13 on Human-Computer Interaction within which the work of this volume has been conducted. TC13 on Human-Computer Interaction has as its aim to encourage theoretical and empirical human science research to promote the design and evaluation of human-oriented ICT. Within TC13 there are different working groups concerned with different aspects of human- computer interaction. The flagship event of TC13 is the bi-annual international conference called INTERACT at which both invited and contributed papers are presented. Contributed papers are rigorously refereed and the rejection rate is high.
"Internet Today!" is, as the name implies, a survey of the
components and facilities of the Internet; it is also a guide to
its use, including a discussion of some features of the Internet,
followed by exercises designed to create competence in both
understanding and implementing the features.
The essays in this volume explore the new power struggles created
in China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong through information technology. The
contributors analyze the interaction between the development of
information technologies and social logic on the one hand and
processes of unification and fragmentation on the other. They seek
to highlight the strategies of public and private actors aimed at
monopolizing the benefits created by the information
society-whether for monetary gain or bureaucratic consolidation-as
well as the new loci of power now emerging. The book is organized
around two main themes: one exploring societal change and power
relations, the second examining the restructuring of Greater
China's space. In so doing, the book seeks to shed light on both
the state formation process as well as international relations
theory.
This important book collects together Peter Nijkamp's work on spatial-economic markets, particularly housing and labour markets, and the increasing impact of information technology on mobility and the location of firms, residents and job seekers.The first part deals with applied modelling and theoretical advances in housing market dynamics and research. The papers address issues such as the implications of household dynamics for relocation decisions, migration movements in Europe, and the driving forces for migration decisions of ethnic groups. The second part focuses on the spatial labour market, dealing with recruitment channel and search channel choices by job seekers and firms, vacancy durations and the opportunities offered by ethnic entrepreneurship for improving the chances of ethnic groups. The third part comprises an analysis of spatial mobility flows and interaction patterns and the final part emphasises the scope and effect of information technology in transport. This includes the effect of real-time information on the behaviour of car drivers, the effect of telematics devices on public transport users, the importance of telematics for the freight transport sector and the adoption mechanisms of ICT users and their related policy implications. This collection will be essential reading for scholars and students interested in the housing and labour markets and the impact on both of developments in IT and transport.
Personal computers have made life convenient in many ways, but what
about their impacts on the environment due to production, use and
disposal? Manufacturing computers requires prodigious quantities of
fossil fuels, toxic chemicals and water. Rapid improvements in
performance mean we often buy a new machine every 1-3 years, which
adds up to mountains of waste computers. How should societies
respond to manage these environmental impacts?
These proceedings contain the papers of IFIP/SEC 2010. It was a special honour and privilege to chair the Program Committee and prepare the proceedings for this conf- ence, which is the 25th in a series of well-established international conferences on security and privacy organized annually by Technical Committee 11 (TC-11) of IFIP. Moreover, in 2010 it is part of the IFIP World Computer Congress 2010 celebrating both the Golden Jubilee of IFIP (founded in 1960) and the Silver Jubilee of the SEC conference in the exciting city of Brisbane, Australia, during September 20-23. The call for papers went out with the challenging motto of "Security & Privacy Silver Linings in the Cloud" building a bridge between the long standing issues of security and privacy and the most recent developments in information and commu- cation technology. It attracted 102 submissions. All of them were evaluated on the basis of their significance, novelty, and technical quality by at least five member of the Program Committee. The Program Committee meeting was held electronically over a period of a week. Of the papers submitted, 25 were selected for presentation at the conference; the acceptance rate was therefore as low as 24. 5% making SEC 2010 a highly competitive forum. One of those 25 submissions could unfortunately not be included in the proceedings, as none of its authors registered in time to present the paper at the conference. |
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