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Books > Computing & IT > Social & legal aspects of computing > Impact of computing & IT on society
Cyberspace is no longer a mystery. It has become irrevocably intertwined with everyday life, facilitating everything from reading the news and paying the bills to ordering birthday presents. We are in the midst of a revolution in mass communication, and there now exists the technology for creating new forms of community, empowering citizens, and challenging existing power structures. But will such changes occur? In this fascinating book Michael Margolis and David Resnick ponder the effects of cyberspace on American Politics. Our political system tends to normalize political activity, and thus, the Internet's vast potential could be lost, rendering it just another purveyor of ignored information. This broad examination begins with a history of cyberspace and moves through discussions of parties, political interest groups, candidates, mass media, information dissemination, and commercial uses of the Internet. Politics as Usual offers an innovative and exciting look into previously ignored aspects of the Internet and American politics.
This book is primarily a summary of research done over 10 years in multimedia and virtual reality, which fits within a wider interest of exploiting psychological theory to improve the process of designing interactive systems. The subject matter lies firmly within the field of HCI, with some cross-referencing to software engineering. Extending Sutcliffe's views on the design process to more complex interfaces that have evolved in recent years, this book: *introduces the background to multisensory user interfaces and surveys the design issues and previous HCI research in these areas; *explains the basic psychology for design of multisensory user interfaces, including the Interactive Cognitive Subsystems cognitive model; *describes elaborations of Norman's models of action for multimedia and VR, relates these models to the ICS cognitive model, and explains how the models can be applied to predict the design features necessary for successful interaction; *provides a design process from requirements, user and domain analysis, to design of representation in media or virtual worlds and facilities for user interaction therein; *covers usability evaluation for multisensory interfaces by extending existing well-known HCI approaches of heuristic evaluation and observational usability testing; and *presents two special application areas for multisensory interfaces: educational applications and virtual prototyping for design refinement.
The National Science Foundation funded the first Coordination Theory and Collaboration Technology initiative to look at systems that support collaborations in business and elsewhere. This book explores the global revolution in human interconnectedness. It will discuss the various collaborative workgroups and their use in technology. The initiative focuses on processes of coordination and cooperation among autonomous units in human systems, in computer and communication systems, and in hybrid organizations of both systems. This initiative is motivated by three scientific issues which have been the focus of separate research efforts, but which may benefit from collaborative research. The first is the effort to discover the principles underlying how people collaborate and coordinate work efficiently and productively in environments characterized by a high degree of decentralized computation and decision making. The second is to gain a better fundamental understanding of the structure and outputs of organizations, industries, and markets which incorporate sophisticated, decentralized information and communications technology as an important component of their operations. The third is to understand problems of coordination in decentralized or open computer systems.
As the Internet develops, on top of earlier urban communications, facilities and media, it is becoming the site of urban communications on an unprecedented scale. Exploring the history of the Internet, from pre-conception to the possibilities of an internet-based future, The Internet City explores ways in which the Internet and urban life intersect. The book interprets how the contemporary city is becoming fully based on Internet technologies in all of its major dimensions: the daily activities of urbanites and urban companies, the operations of urban systems, and the functioning of upcoming driverless vehicles. With particular focus on the ways in which people routinely consume urban services via the Internet, Aharon Kellerman examines how they are simultaneously present in physical and digital spaces. Urban geographers and urban planners will benefit from the detailed information on how the cityscape will be altered in the near future by the introduction of internet-based autonomous vehicles. City policy makers will also find this a useful tool to explore how and why policies may need to be updated in accordance with the rising importance of the Internet in the urban sphere.
The rapid transformations of the internet have brought about extraordinary changes in the portability and speed of information transfer. These changes present significant opportunities that are yet to be fully recognised by the performing arts community. This paper identifies contemporary developments and explores their impact on the performing arts and their future potential for collaboration, growth and engagement. It also highlights areas of conflict, such as current copyright and intellectual property legislation, issues of site administration, privacy and quality control and speaks to some of the leading experts in the field of social media and the performing arts in Australia.
The movement toward greater openness represents a change of philosophy, ethos, and government and a set of interrelated and complex changes that transform markets altering the modes of production and consumption, ushering in a new era based on the values of openness: an ethic of sharing and peer-to-peer collaboration enabled through new architectures of participation. These changes indicate a broader shift from the underlying industrial mode of production a productionist metaphysics to a postindustrial mode of consumption as use, reuse, and modification where new logics of social media structure different patterns of cultural consumption and symbolic analysis becomes a habitual and daily creative activity. The economics of openness constructs a new language of presuming and produsage in order to capture the open participation, collective co-creativity, communal evaluation, and commons-based production of social and public goods. Information is the vital element in the new politics and economy that links space, knowledge, and capital in networked practices and freedom is the essential ingredient in this equation if these network practices are to develop or transform themselves into 'knowledge cultures'. "The Virtues of Openness" investigates the social processes and policies that foster openness as an overriding educational value evidenced in the growth of open source, open access, and open education and their convergences that characterize global knowledge communities. The book argues that openness seems also to suggest political transparency and the norms of open inquiry, indeed, even democracy itself as both the basis of the logic of inquiry and the dissemination of its results."The Virtues of Openness" examines the complex history of the concept of the open society before beginning a systematic investigation of openness in relation to the book, the open text and the written word. These changes are discussed in relation to the development of new open spaces of scholarship with their impact upon open journal systems, open peer review, open science, and the open global digital economy."
Security and Privacy Issues in Internet of Medical Things addresses the security challenges faced by healthcare providers and patients. As IoMT devices are vulnerable to cyberattacks, and a security breach through IoMT devices may act as a pathway for hackers to enter hospital networks, the book covers a very timely topic. The incorporation of blockchain in the healthcare environment has given birth to the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT), which consists of a collection of healthcare systems that espouse groundbreaking technologies. Systems consist of inter-linked sensors, wearable technology devices and clinical frameworks that perform explicit, secure machine-to-machine and cloud platform communications. The significance of IoMT in the field of healthcare is undoubtedly a win-win situation for patients through technology enhancements and a collection of analytics that helps in better diagnosis and treatment. Due to higher accuracy levels, IoMT devices are more reliable in reporting and data tracking and help avoid human errors and incorrect reporting.
Bhuvan Unhelkar takes you on an all-encompassing voyage of environmental sustainability and Green IT. Sharing invaluable insights gained during two battle-tested decades in the information and communication technologies industry, he provides a comprehensive examination of the wide-ranging aspects of Green IT-from switching-off monitors, virtualizing data centers, and optimizing processes to bringing attitude change through training and the use of green metrics for reporting. Combining extensive research, literature review experimentation, and decades of practical consulting experience, Green IT Strategies and Applications: Using Environmental Intelligence is your complete reference for undertaking a successful Green IT transformation. The environmentally responsible business strategies described in this book include motivators and drivers, transformation phases, management of risks, measuring and reporting of carbon, compliance with the ISO14000 family of standards, and the crucial nexus between Lean and green-resulting in what can be called Environmental Intelligence. This environmentally conscious IT reference delves beyond the corporate responsibilities of organizations in a market-driven economy to demonstrate the importance of carbon management as an integral part of good business management. Increasing profits, reducing costs, applying innovations in business, adhering to government standards, process management, and the socio-cultural aspects of business are all masterfully intertwined with Green IT issues. This book is equipped with case studies from different industrial sectors, including hospital (service), packaging (product), and telecom (infrastructure). It provides a complete suite of strategies, applications, tools, and techniques that will enable you to establish company-wide environmental strategies, a green value system, and the forward thinking required to properly position your organization for the low-carbon economy on the horizon.
History of Computing: Learning from the Past Why is the history of computing important? Given that the computer, as we now know it, came into existence less than 70 years ago it might seem a little odd to some people that we are concerned with its history. Isn't history about 'old things'? Computing, of course, goes back much further than 70 years with many earlier - vices rightly being known as computers, and their history is, of course, important. It is only the history of electronic digital computers that is relatively recent. History is often justified by use of a quote from George Santayana who famously said that: 'Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it'. It is arguable whether there are particular mistakes in the history of computing that we should avoid in the future, but there is some circularity in this question, as the only way we will know the answer to this is to study our history. This book contains papers on a wide range of topics relating to the history of c- puting, written both by historians and also by those who were involved in creating this history. The papers are the result of an international conference on the History of Computing that was held as a part of the IFIP World Computer Congress in Brisbane in September 2010.
Intended for researchers and practitioners in interaction design, this book shows how Bayesian models can be brought to bear on problems of interface design and user modelling. It introduces and motivates Bayesian modelling and illustrates how powerful these ideas can be in thinking about human-computer interaction, especially in representing and manipulating uncertainty. Bayesian methods are increasingly practical as computational tools to implement them become more widely available, and offer a principled foundation to reason about interaction design. The book opens with a self-contained tutorial on Bayesian concepts and their practical implementation, tailored for the background and needs of interaction designers. The contributed chapters cover the use of Bayesian probabilistic modelling in a diverse set of applications, including improving pointing-based interfaces; efficient text entry using modern language models; advanced interface design using cutting-edge techniques in Bayesian optimisation; and Bayesian approaches to modelling the cognitive processes of users.
Intended for researchers and practitioners in interaction design, this book shows how Bayesian models can be brought to bear on problems of interface design and user modelling. It introduces and motivates Bayesian modelling and illustrates how powerful these ideas can be in thinking about human-computer interaction, especially in representing and manipulating uncertainty. Bayesian methods are increasingly practical as computational tools to implement them become more widely available, and offer a principled foundation to reason about interaction design. The book opens with a self-contained tutorial on Bayesian concepts and their practical implementation, tailored for the background and needs of interaction designers. The contributed chapters cover the use of Bayesian probabilistic modelling in a diverse set of applications, including improving pointing-based interfaces; efficient text entry using modern language models; advanced interface design using cutting-edge techniques in Bayesian optimisation; and Bayesian approaches to modelling the cognitive processes of users.
Social media platforms hold vast amounts of biographical data about our lives. They repackage our past content as 'memories' and deliver them back to us. But how does that change the way we remember? Drawing on original qualitative research as well as industry documents and reports, this book critically explores the process behind this new form of memory making. In asking how social media are beginning to change the way we remember, it will be essential reading for scholars and students who are interested in understanding the algorithmically defined spaces of our lives.
Networks powered by algorithms are pervasive. Major contemporary technology trends - Internet of Things, Big Data, Digital Platform Power, Blockchain, and the Algorithmic Society - are manifestations of this phenomenon. The internet, which once seemed an unambiguous benefit to society, is now the basis for invasions of privacy, massive concentrations of power, and wide-scale manipulation. The algorithmic networked world poses deep questions about power, freedom, fairness, and human agency. The influential 1997 Federal Communications Commission whitepaper "Digital Tornado" hailed the "endless spiral of connectivity" that would transform society, and today, little remains untouched by digital connectivity. Yet fundamental questions remain unresolved, and even more serious challenges have emerged. This important collection, which offers a reckoning and a foretelling, features leading technology scholars who explain the legal, business, ethical, technical, and public policy challenges of building pervasive networks and algorithms for the benefit of humanity. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
This book presents examples of and the latest simulation studies on artificial societies and populations, highlighting innovative implementations of various models of artificial societies and populations using a new, C++-related simulation tool. It demonstrates that the prey-predator models-including spatial distribution, moving patterns, limited renewable food, fear, gregarious (herd) instinct, clustering, epidemics, and competition-are more complex than other publications have suggested, and highlights the great discrepancy between agent-based and conventional continuous models. The book also discusses the modeling and simulation of self-organization and interactions between organizations, including terror organizations, offering fascinating insights into organizational dynamics. The book provides a broad range of examples and comparisons with the classical dynamics approach, showing readers how to construct models of complex systems. It starts with descriptions of the behavior of interacting individuals and also includes important information on the macro-behavior of the whole system.
From famed automotive journalist Jason Torchinsky comes a witty insider's guide to self-driving cars, the automated future, and the road ahead. Self-driving cars sound fantastical and futuristic and yet they'll soon be on every street in America. Whether it's Tesla's Autopilot, Google's Waymo, Mercedes's Distronic, or Uber's modified Volvo, companies around the world are developing autonomous cars. But why? And what will they mean for the auto industry and humanity at large? In Robot, Take the Wheel, Torchinsky, cofounder of The Autopian and former senior editor of Jalopnik, star of Jason Drives, and producer of Jay Leno's Garage, gives a colorful account of the development of autonomous vehicles and considers their likely implications. He encourages us to think of self-driving cars as an entirely new machine, something beyond cars as we understand them today, and considers how humans will get along with these robots that will take over our cars' jobs, what they will look like, what sorts of jobs they may do, what we can expect of them, how they should act, ethically, how we can have fun with them, and how we can make sure there's still a place for those of us who love to drive, especially with a manual transmission. This vibrant volume brimming with insider knowledge, humor, and original artwork pushes us to reconsider our understanding of cars, raises fascinating ethical questions, and compels us to act now to shape the automated future.
This book provides practical information about web archives, offers inspiring examples for web archivists, raises new challenges, and shares recent research results about access methods to explore information from the past preserved by web archives. The book is structured in six parts. Part 1 advocates for the importance of web archives to preserve our collective memory in the digital era, demonstrates the problem of web ephemera and shows how web archiving activities have been trying to address this challenge. Part 2 then focuses on different strategies for selecting web content to be preserved and on the media types that different web archives host. It provides an overview of efforts to address the preservation of web content as well as smaller-scale but high-quality collections of social media or audiovisual content. Next, Part 3 presents examples of initiatives to improve access to archived web information and provides an overview of access mechanisms for web archives designed to be used by humans or automatically accessed by machines. Part 4 presents research use cases for web archives. It also discusses how to engage more researchers in exploiting web archives and provides inspiring research studies performed using the exploration of web archives. Subsequently, Part 5 demonstrates that web archives should become crucial infrastructures for modern connected societies. It makes the case for developing web archives as research infrastructures and presents several inspiring examples of added-value services built on web archives. Lastly, Part 6 reflects on the evolution of the web and the sustainability of web archiving activities. It debates the requirements and challenges for web archives if they are to assume the responsibility of being societal infrastructures that enable the preservation of memory. This book targets academics and advanced professionals in a broad range of research areas such as digital humanities, social sciences, history, media studies and information or computer science. It also aims to fill the need for a scholarly overview to support lecturers who would like to introduce web archiving into their courses by offering an initial reference for students.
A Financial Times 'Best Thing I Read This Year' LONGLISTED FOR THE FT & MCKINSEY BUSINESS BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD Google. Amazon. Facebook. The modern world is defined by vast digital monopolies turning ever-larger profits. Those of us who consume the content that feeds them are farmed for the purposes of being sold ever more products and advertising. Those that create the content - the artists, writers and musicians - are finding they can no longer survive in this unforgiving economic landscape. But it didn't have to be this way. In Move Fast and Break Things, Jonathan Taplin offers a succinct and powerful history of how online life began to be shaped around the values of the entrepreneurs like Peter Thiel and Larry Page who founded these all-powerful companies. Their unprecedented growth came at the heavy cost of tolerating piracy of books, music and film, while at the same time promoting opaque business practices and subordinating the privacy of individual users to create the surveillance marketing monoculture in which we now live. It is the story of a massive reallocation of revenue in which $50 billion a year has moved from the creators and owners of content to the monopoly platforms. With this reallocation of money comes a shift in power. Google, Facebook and Amazon now enjoy political power on par with Big Oil and Big Pharma, which in part explains how such a tremendous shift in revenues from creators to platforms could have been achieved and why it has gone unchallenged for so long. And if you think that's got nothing to do with you, their next move is to come after your jobs. Move Fast and Break Things is a call to arms, to say that is enough is enough and to demand that we do everything in our power to create a different future.
Written in clear, accessible prose, the "Fourth edition of "Computer Ethics"" brings together philosophy, law, and technology. The text provides an in-depth exploration and analysis of a broad range of topics regarding the ethical implications of widespread use of computer technology. The approach is normative while also exposing the student to alternative ethical stances.
With a new afterword that brings the book's stories up to date, including law enforcement's dramatic seizure of the online black market Silk Road. Once considered a borderless and chaotic virtual landscape, the Internet is now home to the forces of international law and order. It s not just computer hackers and cyber crooks who lurk in the dark corners of the Web the cops are there, too. In The Internet Police, Ars Technica editor Nate Anderson takes readers on a behind-the-screens tour of landmark cybercrime cases, revealing how criminals continue to find digital and legal loopholes even as police hurry to cinch them closed. From the Cleveland man whose natural male enhancement pill inadvertently protected the privacy of your e-mail to the Russian spam king who ended up in a Milwaukee jail to the Australian arrest that ultimately led to the breakup of the largest child pornography ring in the United States, Anderson draws on interviews, court documents, and law-enforcement reports to reconstruct accounts of how online policing actually works. Questions of online crime are as complex and interconnected as the Internet itself. With each episode in The Internet Police, Anderson shows the dark side of online spaces but also how dystopian a fully ordered alternative would be. "
This book provides perspectives on how South Asian -- often, more specifically, Indian -- diasporas inhabit techno-mediated environments through their economic and socio-cultural activities. The themes examined include religion, caste, language, and gender in online communities and call centers, and the roles of these factors in the global economy, Bollywood online and offline, digital music, websites for arranging marriages, and so on. The book attempts to map -South Asia in relation to global technospaces produced through and as a consequence of economic globalization efforts."
The modern world is developing at a pace where few can thoroughly keep track of its progress. More advancements in technology, evolving standards of education, and ongoing cultural and societal developments are leading to a need for improved pathways of knowledge discovery and dissemination. Knowledge-Intensive Economies and Opportunities for Social, Organizational, and Technological Growth provides emerging research exploring how academic research can represent both a bold response to the problems society faces today and a source of alternative solutions to those problems. This publication is derived from the basic understanding that education plays the role of the key enabler in the process of navigating these contemporary challenges. Featuring coverage on a broad range of topics such as e-service exploration, progressive online learning in urban areas, and advances in multimedia sharing, this book is ideally designed for consultants, academics, industry professionals, policymakers, politicians, and government officials seeking current research on the impact of information technology and the knowledge-based era.
Searching for Trust explores the intersection of trust, disinformation, and blockchain technology in an age of heightened institutional and epistemic mistrust. It adopts a unique archival theoretic lens to delve into how computational information processing has gradually supplanted traditional record keeping, putting at risk a centuries-old tradition of the 'moral defense of the record' and replacing it with a dominant ethos of information-processing efficiency. The author argues that focusing on information-processing efficiency over the defense of records against manipulation and corruption (the ancient task of the recordkeeper) has contributed to a diminution of the trustworthiness of information and a rise of disinformation, with attendant destabilization of the epistemic trust fabric of societies. Readers are asked to consider the potential and limitations of blockchains as the technological embodiment of the moral defense of the record and as means to restoring societal trust in an age of disinformation.
Searching for Trust explores the intersection of trust, disinformation, and blockchain technology in an age of heightened institutional and epistemic mistrust. It adopts a unique archival theoretic lens to delve into how computational information processing has gradually supplanted traditional record keeping, putting at risk a centuries-old tradition of the 'moral defense of the record' and replacing it with a dominant ethos of information-processing efficiency. The author argues that focusing on information-processing efficiency over the defense of records against manipulation and corruption (the ancient task of the recordkeeper) has contributed to a diminution of the trustworthiness of information and a rise of disinformation, with attendant destabilization of the epistemic trust fabric of societies. Readers are asked to consider the potential and limitations of blockchains as the technological embodiment of the moral defense of the record and as means to restoring societal trust in an age of disinformation.
Research on cybercrime has been largely bifurcated, with social science and computer science researchers working with different research agendas. These fields have produced parallel scholarship to understand cybercrime offending and victimization, as well as techniques to harden systems from compromise and understand the tools used by cybercriminals. The literature developed from these two fields is diverse and informative, but until now there has been minimal interdisciplinary scholarship combining their insights in order to create a more informed and robust body of knowledge. This book offers an interdisciplinary approach to research on cybercrime and lays out frameworks for collaboration between the fields. Bringing together international experts, this book explores a range of issues from malicious software and hacking to victimization and fraud. This work also provides direction for policy changes to both cybersecurity and criminal justice practice based on the enhanced understanding of cybercrime that can be derived from integrated research from both the technical and social sciences. The authors demonstrate the breadth of contemporary scholarship as well as identifying key questions that could be addressed in the future or unique methods that could benefit the wider research community. This edited collection will be key reading for academics, researchers, and practitioners in both computer security and law enforcement. This book is also a comprehensive resource for postgraduate and advanced undergraduate students undertaking courses in social and technical studies. |
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