The blind person who tries to make an online purchase. The young girl who cannot speak due to a cognitive disability. The man confined to his home due to permanent injury. The single mother with a long-term illness who struggles to feed her family.

With one in seven people worldwide currently living with a disability, the term "outcast" covers numerous scenarios. Digital outcasts rely on technology for everyday services that many people take for granted. However, poorly designed products risk alienating this important (and growing) population.

Through a "grass roots" approach to innovation, digital outcasts are gradually taking action to transform their lives and communities. This emerging trend provides exciting learning opportunities for all of us. Citing real-world case studies from healthcare to social science, this book examines the emerging legal and cultural impact of inclusive design.
Gain a better understanding of how people with disabilities use technology

Discover pitfalls and approaches to help you stay current in your UX practices

Anticipate a future in which ambient benefit can be achieved for people of all abilities and backgrounds

ICT Acceptance, Investment and Organization: Cultural Practices and Values in the Arab World is a unique source of information outlining the importance of Information Communication Technology (ICT) adoption and diffusion. This book covers the Arab world's strong need for access to information systems, while still paying close attention to their culture and localization of practices. These values and beliefs are not only linked to factors such as language, governance and religion, but also influenced by cultural, political and legal issues. These are important factors that could have a far-reaching impact on their overall success or failure.

Culture and Technology in the New Europe presents the insights of an international group of academic researchers and media practitioners who examine the impact of technology on East Central Europe, South-Eastern Europe, the Newly Independent States and the Russian Federation. Drawing from the expertise of authors from and working in the region, the book addresses concerns that the New Europe faces at the eve of the Third Millennium and a decade after the fall of communist rule. Such concerns include access to information and communication technology and the culturally-specific discourses articulated through media and technology. While the book focuses on information and communication reforms, and the development of a participatory democracy are examined. The book is distinguished by diverse studies ranging from the problems of Cyber Hate from and about the New Europe, to online activism in war-torn Kosovo, Bosnia, Croatia and Yugoslavia, to how digital media art articulates new cultural and creative freedoms once silenced by the Soviet regime. Finally, the book looks to the future of media, technology and communication in the New Europe, particularly the gaps between post-socialist nations and those more technologically advantaged, and how these gaps can be narrowed or eradicated in the Third Millennium.

Advancing technologies play an important role in the interactions between health, education, and socioeconomic policies. The subsequent outcomes between these areas require a better understanding and assessment in order to pursue further efficient coordination. ICTs for Health, Education and Socioeconomic Policies: Regional Cases discusses the benefits that can be gained from the interactions between health, education, and socioeconomic areas. Providing a regional focus on the Southern Mediterranean, Middle Eastern, and Arab economies, this book is essential for researchers, scholars, developers, policy makers, and graduate students interested in these specific regions and studies.

Technology faces rapid advancements every year, and each year, its uses in various facets of society increase and become more profound. Every discipline has adopted technology in some capacity. From FinTech in the business realm to phygital churches in the realm of religion, innovation is applicable everywhere. It is essential that professionals study how to use these advancements to their advantage and also to examine their impact on society and its multitude of sectors. Analyzing Multidisciplinary Uses and Impact of Innovative Technologies discusses the many uses and impacts of innovative technology in society. It guides the reader through these emerging technologies and provides examples and strategies on how they are used. This book further specifically analyzes the many ways these innovations have impacted different sectors such as education, medicine, and media. Covering topics such as pharmacovigilance, assistive technology, and sustainable tourism, this premier reference source is an essential resource for government officials, community leaders, business leaders and managers, museum managers, hospital administrators, rehabilitation professionals, psychiatrists, faculty and administrators of education, students of higher education, researchers, and academicians.

Empirical studies of life science research and biotechnologies in Asia show how assemblages of life articulate bioethics governance with global moralities and reveal why the global harmonization of bioethical standards is contrived.

In a series of illuminating lectures, Joseph A. Seiss presents a clear picture of astronomical occurrences and inspirations to be found in the Biblical New Testament and Gospels. A superbly insightful Bible commentary, this book contains seventeen lectures, each of which focuses upon a specific astronomical occurrence in the New Testament. Events which draw specific influence from the constellations of the stars are charted, with each star sign identified as important to separate events depicted in the scriptures of the gospels. The nativity of Jesus Christ, wherein the Star of Bethlehem appears to the three wise men, is perhaps the most obvious incident of the astronomical. However, Seiss demonstrates that the stars above are richly significant and play a role in many of the most famous tales of the Bible. For example, when Seiss recounts the story of St. Peter's fishing, he compares the sign of Pisces, which was already widely known in the Biblical era.

Among the many technical innovations that were introduced after World War II, none left as strong an impression on the public as the atom bombs that destroyed two Japanese cities in August 1945. People spoke of the 'atomic age' that had now begun, as if this technological innovation would, all by itself, shape a new world. The atomic age was described as one that might soon end in the destruction of human civilization, but from the beginning, utopian images were attached to it as well. Nuclear technology offered the promise of applications in medicine, agriculture, and engineering, and nuclear power could theoretically provide an unlimited supply of energy. This book demonstrates and attempts to explain how the popular media represented nuclear power, in its military and non-military forms. It focuses on the first two decades of the 'atomic age, ' when national governments, military strategists, scientists, and the public attempted to come to terms with a technology that so drastically seemed to change the prospects for the future. Popular magazines, comics, newspapers, public exhibitions from across the world are examined to compare representations of nuclear power in different countries and to trace divergences, convergences, and exchanges.

In his most powerful book to date, award-winning author TimothyFerris makes a passionate case for scienceas the inspiration behind the rise of liberalismand democracy. Ferris showshow science was integral to the AmericanRevolution but misinterpreted inthe French Revolution; reflects on thehistory of liberalism, stressing its widelyunderestimated and mutually beneficialrelationship with science; and surveysthe forces that have opposed scienceand liberalism--from communism andfascism to postmodernism and Islamicfundamentalism. A sweeping intellectualhistory, The Science of Liberty is a stunninglyoriginal work that transcends theantiquated concepts of left and right.

This volume examines emotions and emotional well-being from a rich variety of theological, philosophical and scientific and therapeutic perspectives. To experience emotion is a part of being human; but what are emotions? How can theology, philosophy and the natural sciences unpack the nature and content of emotions? This volume is based on contributions to the 15th European Conference on Science and Theology held in Assisi, Italy. It brings together contributions from scholars of various academic backgrounds from around the world, whose individual insights are made all the richer by their juxtaposition with those from experts in other fields, leading to a unique exchange of ideas.

This volume concerns decision making in informatics and is suitable as a basic introduction to the field--the technology, the industry, the applications, and the key issues. It deals with the critical question of how to make choices in this rapidly expanding and pervasive field. The author suggests that to date there have not been any valid methods to assess the future social impact of technological development. Therefore, this volume puts forth a new descriptive and normative model of technological choice and offers a critical analysis of efforts to improve decision making through technological assessment or risk analysis.

Now in paperback, the critically acclaimed "Yellow Dirt," "will break your heart. An enormous achievement--literally, a piece of groundbreaking investigative journalism--illustrates exactly what reporting should do: Show us what we've become as a people, and sharpen our vision of who we, the people, ought to become" ( "The Christian Science Monitor" ).
From the 1930s to the 1960s, the United States knowingly used and discarded an entire tribe of people as the Navajos worked, unprotected, in the uranium mines that fueled the Manhattan Project and the Cold War. Long after these mines were abandoned, Navajos in all four corners of the Reservation (which borders Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona) continued grazing their animals on sagebrush flats riddled with uranium that had been blasted from the ground. They built their houses out of chunks of uranium ore, inhaled radioactive dust borne aloft from the waste piles the mining companies had left behind, and their children played in the unsealed mines themselves. Ten years after the mines closed, the cancer rate on the reservation shot up and some babies began to be born with crooked fingers that fused together into claws as they grew. Government scientists filed complaints about the situation with the government, but were told it was a mess too expensive to clean up.
Judy Pasternak exposed this story in a prizewinning "Los Angeles Times" series. Her work galvanized both a congressman and a famous prosecutor to clean the sites and get reparations for the tribe. "Yellow Dirt" is her powerful chronicle of both the scandal of neglect and the Navajos' fight for justice.

The advent of the Information Society is marked by the explosive penetration of information technologies in all aspects of life and by a related fundamental transofmation in every form of the organization. Researchers, business people and policy makers have recognized the importance of addressing technological, economic and social impacts in conjunction. For example, the rise and fall of the dot-com hype depended a lot on the strenght of the business model, on the technological capabilities avalable to firms and on the readiness of the socity and economy at large sustain a new breed of business activity. However, it is notoriously difficult to examine the cross-impacts of social, economic and technological aspects of the Information Socity. This kind of work requires multidisciplinary work and collaboration on a wide range of skills. Social and Economic Transformation in the Digital Era addresses this challenge by assembling the latest thinking of leading researchers and policy makers. The book covers all key subject areas of the Information Society an presents innovative business models, case studies, normative theories and social explanations.

The history of the modern sciences has long overlooked the significance of domesticity as a physical, social, and symbolic force in the shaping of knowledge production. This book provides a welcome reorientation to our understanding of the making of the modern sciences globally by emphasizing the centrality of domesticity in diverse scientific enterprises.

This collection of essays addresses whether all nations will actively participate in building the information superhighway or whether the Internet will reflect global technological inequalities. The writings are grouped in four major sections, which examine theoretical issues on cyberglobalization, politics in the electronic global village, global economic issues in cyberspace, and national identities and grassroots movements in cyberspace. Contributing scholars represent a wide spectrum of disciplines from political science, economics, and communications to sociology, anthropology, and philosophy. A number of methodological and theoretical perspectives direct the writings. Collectively, the essays point toward an emerging technology that exhibits innate qualities characteristic of the classic notion of cultural imperialism.

This edited collection, with its timely approach to the implications of the Internet for global relations, will appeal to communication, sociology, and political science scholars. The interdisciplinary approach will also attract students and educators from such fields as anthropology, philosophy and economics. To aid in further research, select bibliographies follow each essay.

This book explores the absent and missing in debates about science and security. Through varied case studies, including biological and chemical weapons control, science journalism, nanotechnology research and neuroethics, the contributors explore how matters become absent, ignored or forgotten and the implications for ethics, policy and society.The chapter 'Sensing Absence: How to See What Isn't There in the Study of Science and Security' is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license via link.springer.com.

How are the new electronic technologies transforming business here and abroad -- indeed, the entire world economy -- and what new strategies must business develop to meet the challenges of this transformation? Economist, writer, and communications executive Maurice Estabrooks provides a readable, comprehensive survey of how businesses are using microchips, computers, and telecommunications to reshape the entire world of work -- its cultures, organization, and economic systems. With insight and impeccable scholarship he provides concrete evidence of the emergence of artificially intelligent, cybernetic, network-based entities that are creating new linkages between businesses, markets, and technology itself -- linkages that will profoundly affect the way businesses create and implement their corporate survival and growth strategies in the future.

Drawing on the work of economic theorist Joseph Schumpeter, Estabrooks shows how Schumpeterian dynamics have played a key role in the breakup of AT&T and the Bell System, and in the deregulation of telecommunications, broadcasting, banking, finance, and other economically critical industries. What has emerged, he maintains, is an increasingly integrated, global information- and software-based services economy. Optical fibers, satellites, and wireless communications systems have already made possible the development of electronic superhighways, but in doing so they have also initiated a massive redistribution of economic power and wealth throughout the world, the implications of which are only now being understood. Historical, analytical, descriptive, Estabrooks' book will speak not only to academics and others who observe world transformations from relatively theoretical perspectives, but also to corporate and other executives whose organizations, and certainly their personal work lives, will be changed dramatically by the developments he describes in practical day-to-day situations.

This book focuses on a key issue today: the role of values in technology, with special emphasis on ethical values. This topic involves the analysis of internal values in technology (as they affect objectives, processes, and outcomes) and the study of external values in technology (social, cultural, economic, ecological, etc.). These values - internal and external - are crucial to the decision making of engineers. In addition, they have increasing relevance for citizens concerned with the present and future state of technology, which gives society a leading position in technological issues. The book follows three main lines of research: 1) new perspectives on technology, values, and ethics; 2) rationality and responsibility in technology; and 3) technology and risks. This volume analyzes the two main sides involved here: the theoretical basis for the role of values in technology and a practical discussion on how to implement them in our society. Thus, the book is of interest for philosophers, engineers, academics of different fields and policy-makers. The style used lends itself to broad audience.

As e-government policies and procedures become widely practiced and implemented, it is apparent that the success of technology in e-government hangs on its consistentency with human practices. Human-Centered System Design for Electronic Governance provides special attention to the most successful practices for implementing e-government technologies. This highly regarded publication highlights the benefits of well designed systems in this field, while investigating the implications of poor practices and designs. This book is beneficial for academics, researchers, government officials, and graduate students interested and involved in design of information systems within the context of e-government.

This book presents the most serious and comprehensive study, by far, of American public perceptions about the meaning of space exploration, analyzing vast troves of questionnaire data collected by many researchers and polling firms over a span of six decades and anchored in influential social science theories.It doesn't simply report the percentages who held various opinions, but employs sophisticated statistical techniques to answer profound questions and achieve fresh discoveries.

Both the Bush and the Obama administrations have cut back severely on fundamental research in space science and engineering. Understanding better what space exploration means for citizens can contribute to charting a feasible but progressive course. Since the end of the Space Race between the US and the USSR, social scientists have almost completely ignored space exploration as a topic for serious analysis and this book seeks to revive that kind of contribution.

The author communicates the insights in a lucid style, not only intelligible but interesting to readers from a variety of backgrounds."