A citistate isn't defined by political boundaries. Instead, it's organic. A citistate is reality -- a labor market, a commute-shed, a broadcast area, the circulation area of the lead newspaper. A citistate is what the economy does.
The world's lead citistates are its greatest metropolises -- New York, Tokyo, Paris, Hong Kong, Los Angeles and their global "command and control" competitors, spread from Chicago to Singapore. But every metro area that's set apart geographically -- a Houston, a Denver, a Burlington, Vermont -- qualifies as a citistate too.
Here's a definition for the lexicographers-- a nomination for 21st century dictionaries:
Citi\304state-- n. -- A region consisting of one or more historic central cities surrounded by cities and towns which have a shared identification, function as a single zone for trade, commerce and communication, and are characterized by social, economic and environmental interdependence. Hist. Similar to city states of antiquity (e.g. Athens, Rome, Carthage) or medieval times (e.g. the Hanseatic League), except that modern citistates engage in instant electronic communication and capital transfer, and are the chief recipients of world population growth.Citistates would have made little sense under the old paradigm of American thinking -- federal, state, local. But they emerge as the centerpiece of a new paradigm -- global, regional, and neighborhood. Citistates become the focus of how our world is now organizing itself.
As economic actors, major U.S. citistates compete in size with major world nations. In gross product, the New York region ranks 13th among the world's top economies, just ahead of Australia, Argentina and Russia. The Los Angeles citistate is bigger than Korea, Chicago greater than Taiwan or Switzerland, Washington ahead of Hong Kong, while Minneapolis-St. Paul exceeds Israel. And according to figures compiled by Standard & Poor's DRI division for the U.S. Conference of Mayors and National Association of Counties, the U.S.'s 314 metro regions are clearly the economic drivers, providing 84 percent of new jobs, 95 percent of high-tech jobs, 88 percent of the country's income.
Citistates' importance was enlarged through the 1990s by the rapid flowering of the Internet and the digital revolution. Both have accelerated economic expansion, triggering more global commerce. The challenge of the 21st century is to harness such forces, and civic will, for strategic regional planning. Because to compete in the emerging global economy, citistates have no choice: they must mobilize all their skills to protect their center cities, grow smarter, protect their air and water, achieve more social equity, train their workforces to excel in an increasingly competitive world marketplace.
The indicators in The New Economy Index are divided into three groups. The first group tracks some of the elemental stuctural changes that collectively mark the transition to the New Economy: industrial and occupational change, globalization, the changing nature of competition and economic dynamism, and progress of the information technology (IT) revolution. The second group examines the implications of this transition for working Americans: what is happening to incomes and economic growth, jobs, and employment dynamics. The third group assesses the nation's performance in terms of three main foundations for growth of the New Economy: the pace of transition into a digital economy, investment by business and government in technology and innovation, and progress on the development of education and skills.
Special collection of ruminations on Manuel Castells' "space of flows"
cyber-social-science, cybersociology, cyber-sociology, cyber-soc, cybersoc, cybersociety, cybergeography, cyberanthropology, cyberpsychology, cyber-psychology, psyber-psychology, cybereconomics, cyber-economics, cyber NEAR "cultural studies", sociology NEAR cyberspace, web-sociology, websociology, social-informatics, internet-economics, internet-history, ...
My list of possible keywords has been growing rapidly during this project, and I noted the lack of standardized terminology across academic disciplines. The reason for the predominance of keywords including 'cyber' is due to my attempt to exhaust this type of terminology before continuing on to different types of keyword combinations -- Social + (Internet, Informatics, Information Technology, Information Science, Networks ...).
Cities are geographic centres of people, activities and services. The urban form and layout of cities are familiar to most people. Consequently, the virtual city is being used as an interface metaphor to information and services on the WWW. Virtual cities provide an electronic hub of services, activities, information and people located at a single "place" on your computer screen, just like real cities are a focal point in geographic space.
In this article we shall begin by discussing the nature of virtual cities, before examining ways of creating, on the Web, three-dimensional models of the buildings for virtual cities. We will conclude by looking at current research into creating "true" virtual cities with realistic built form, useful information content and, importantly, a sense of urban life.
He called this structure a "navihedron," and in 1997 his operation was spun out of John Moores University into Amaze Ltd., a 100-employee Web design shop with offices on the banks of the Mersey. Last year Stringer published his concept on the Web, along with some prototypes, inviting other Web designers to try it.
Today about 2,000 navihedrons exist, visible at www.navihedra.com, but most are experimental. Many of Amaze's clients shun the navihedron in favor of traditional site design. Stringer, Amaze's "chief hypermedia architect," admits it will be a struggle to get the world to scrap the old browser. "We have 20,000 years of hierarchy in our systems. It goes back to kings and queens. Those sorts of hierarchical mechanisms in society are very strong in our psyche," he says.
(See my example.)
Stringer's experiment points up a growing dissatisfaction with the way the Web looks and works. Many critics blame the browser and are trying to develop an entirely new way of navigating the Internet. Excite at Home, the Web portal, runs a handful of skunkworks projects, including one aimed at creating three-dimensional Web interfaces. Microsoft is pursuing a 3-D design, as well. At the World Wide Web Consortium, scientists are working on a voice-driven browser.
Now Stringer, a Liverpool native who dropped out of school at age 16 and never attended college, is accelerating his crusade to one-up the browser. This summer Amaze releases its software free for any Web site to use, so long as it plugs Amaze on-screen. Later this year it will debut its own browser, free of charge and specially geared to run animation and video.
But displacing such a pervasive, if antiquated, software tool as the browser will be a huge challenge. First designed under the name Mosaic at the supercomputer lab of the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana in 1993, it inspired Netscape's Navigator and Microsoft's Explorer and is still the only game in town. Netscape, now owned by America Online, just introduced its sixth major release in six years, and it boasts such whiz-bang features as integrated messaging and search functions. But it's still essentially the same thing Marc Andreessen helped create.
The resulting data in the InternetPulse provides a logical performance map of the Internet. The InternetPulse matrix is updated every 15 minutes. Any time the delay between two networks exceeds a threshold, a color coded alert indicates the level of the performance problem. Users can drill down to see specifically where the delays are occurring by clicking on any of the color coded boxes in the display.
The numbers in the display represent latency between networks in milliseconds. The total in each box is the geometric mean of all the data points collected between the networks during the specified interval.
Hyperdemocracy today conjures up images of e-mail voting, widespread electronic referenda, and lively online town meetings and debates. It is even reasonable to predict that elected representatives themselves may eventually govern through wired, cyberspatial assemblies, accessed by computer while they remain in their remote electoral regions.
But just what is the complexity perspective in economics? That is not an easy question to answer. Its meaning is still very much under construction, and in fact the present volume is intended process & emergence to contribute to that construction process. Indeed, the authors of the essays in this volume by no means share a single, coherent vision of the meaning and significance of complexity in economics. What we will find instead is a family resemblance, based upon an interrelated set of themes that together constitute the current meaning of the complexity perspective in economics.
The feeling of being on the threshold of something materialises with the returnof space, although at the same time we dream of societies in which we can live in peace. Even those who fight against technology, wanting to lead us back into the wilderness and its immense spaces, dream of this. For example, the recently caught Unabomber shares with all net enthusiasts the hope of creating new, comprehensible communities in which the individual still has value. The Unabomber's attacks were directed against the anonymous structures of mass societies of the industrial age in order to return the possibility of autonomy to the individual on the margins of big cities and their big organizations. Even if his utopia consisted of "untamed nature" and flesh, whose importance gets recuperated in it, he also tried to revive the idea of the "frontier" and with it, the omnipresent obsession for individual freedom in an open space, an idea also widespread in cyberculture.
In this paper I use a recent concept from geographic modelling - proximal space - as the starting point for an exploration of the properties of space, in particular its effects on certain kinds of dynamic processes. Two possible representations of such a proximal model of space are introduced: graphs and cellular automata (CA), along with a brief consideration of some of the analytical techniques which have previously been used to investigate these representations.
Indicative of efforts currently directed at providing decision-makers more data rather than information contributing needed knowledge is the increasing number, type and capacity of telecommunications services being planned to support national security operations. Accelerating demand for telecommunications services (including larger volume capacity - called "bandwidth") frequently result in "stove-pipe" duplicative networks that restrict awareness of and access to information or require users to use duplicative systems. Uncoordinated (managed) responses to unbridled demands for such diverse telecommunications services will potentially result in overwhelming users with information they must sort through to obtain knowledge needed for effective efficient performance of assigned missions and functions.
What's needed is a new perspective on managing information resources to enable more cost-effective and efficient use of the technology to provide innovative and synergistic enterprise-wide information services offered by the technology to provide competitive advantages perceived by JOINT VISION 2010.
Therein lies the current challenge, addressed by this paper.
Our review of the current state of Internet indicators is followed by a look at infrastructure that complements the Internet. Again, we observe rapid growth accompanied by disparity and note the relationship between wired and wireless telephony, personal computers, and the Internet. The paper concludes with a discussion of the difficulties of measurement and a proposal for the formation of a decentralized community for regularly measuring the state of the Internet.
Just contemplating the speed of light, you can gauge a lot about the future of computer technologies. For example, electrons go nine inches a nanosecond. This essentially means that in the future, the smallest computers will be the fastest. If you have nine inches a nanosecond for the propagation of electromagnetic radiation, the computer that runs at 500MHz is going to have to be compressed to centimeters. This means that the speed of light dictates a world of pocket supercomputers, probably in the form of something like digital cellular phones that are as mobile as a watch, as personal as a wallet, that recognize speech, that navigate streets, that collect your paycheck, your mail. I think this kind of device will be the most common personal computer of the next era. It will connect to displays that are deployed around offices, public spaces and homes through infrared links.
It will be the key personal appliance. And this is really dictated by the speed of light. You can also tell by contemplating the speed of light that this will be a cellular system, not a centralized one. It takes 30 milliseconds to cross the country, 250 milliseconds to reach a geosynchronous satellite. The speed of light that once was considered the ultimate velocity has become the bottleneck for information technologies as they move up into your microwave domain that increasingly prevail in technology in a world moving from essentially electronics to spectronics. So, the speed of light dictates a cellular, supercomputer, distributed system, probably some kind of mesh resembling the Internet. And I think this is the destiny of the computer industry.
The Weaponry Revolution: New forms of weaponry have been developed which cannot win wars but which can obliterate civilization. We are recognizing only now that the great weapons have eliminated war as a method for resolving international conflicts. The ever-present threat of total destruction is tempered by the knowledge of the final futility of war. The need of a "warless world" is generally recognized, though achieving it will be a long and frustrating process.
The Human Rights Revolution: A universal demand for full human rights is now clearly evident. It continues to be demonstrated in the civil rights movement within the United States. But this is only the local manifestation of a worldwide movement toward the establishment of social and political regimes in which every individual will feel valued and none will feel rejected on account of his race.
We are particularly concerned in this statement with the first of these revolutionary phenomena. This is not because we underestimate the significance of the other two. on the contrary, we affirm that it is the simultaneous occurrence and interaction of all three developments which make evident the necessity for radical alterations in attitude and policy. The adoption of just policies for coping with cybernation and for extending rights to all Americans is indispensable to the creation of an atmosphere in the U.S. in which the supreme issue, peace, can be reasonably debated and resolved.
The following document addresses this need by defining and describing electronic public space, and presenting a model to ensure that Canadian communities retain some control over this strategic resource. It is a unique way to support the tools which will be essential to public participation in civic life in an increasingly privatized world.
The real-life effectiveness of economic sanctions, however, like all smart weapons, may not be so great upon deeper examination. This is especially true for unilateral economic sanctions sanctions implemented by a single, usually powerful, nation. If not carefully implemented, unilateral sanctions exhibit the worst characteristics of a prisoner's dilemma, with the sanctioning nation being cast in the role of the duped prisoner who serves the maximum sentence at the hands of his deceptive partner in crime. Rather than punishing the offending foreign country, unilateral economic sanctions that are not honored by other nations tend to shift trade from the sanctioning country to competing economic powers, who are sometimes responsive to different domestic pressures, often indifferent to the reason for the sanctions, and always happy to benefit from the self-inflicted wound of an economic rival. Unilateral sanctions, in other words, work best when other nations support them at which time, by definition, they no longer are unilateral.
This paper demonstrates that a state may exercise criminal jurisdiction over online activities originating elsewhere and that such jurisdiction is appropriate notwithstanding the potential conflict of criminal laws. Online gambling provides an excellent example of how the laws and policies of different states may collide. In some states, gambling is perfectly legal and socially acceptable; in many others, gambling constitutes a moral outrage and is vigorously suppressed by authorities. Online technology has circumvented territorial boundaries, and authorities in anti-gambling states are learning that every personal computer can provide local residents a direct link to a glittering "virtual casino" headquartered elsewhere. This paper focuses on gambling as the controversial activity, with emphasis on the facts of a recent case in Minnesota. It is hoped, however, that the principles of law and policy delineated in this paper can be applied to other online activities that are legal in one jurisdiction but not another.
Without doing too much injustice to the complexities of this most complicated set of questions, we can describe at least two divergent points of view. In one, the rise of cyberspace brings about the Twilight of the State, a kind of Wagnerian Staatendammerung. The institution of the nation-state itself, after a half millennium of dominance of the international political and legal arena, is relegated to the ash heap of history, done in--"disintermediated" some might say--by the increasing irrelevance of the physical borders and boundaries that simultaneously circumscribe and define its proper sphere of action.
The other view reports that the imminent death of the state is greatly exaggerated. After all, people possess an irreducible tangible reality, fixed in a material world and therefore subject to traditional forms of social control, including the entire legal apparatus of sovereign states. The Internet may well constitute a "revolutionary" technology, calling for different modes of state intervention and regulation; but just as the institution of the sovereign state adapted to earlier "revolutionary" communications technologies (the telephone, radio, television, and the like), so too will existing state institutions of governance and lawful control adapt to this one.
Dean Henry H. Perritt, Jr., articulates what appears to be an intermediate position. While he agrees with those in the first camp that the boundary-disregarding global network will produce dramatic changes in the international order, he argues that the institution of statehood itself will likely withstand this challenge. He suggests, however, that certain kinds of states, organized internally in particular ways that implement a particular vision of the source of their own power, will not.
In their 1997 book The Fourth Turning, they describe the nature (as opposed to the details) of a Secular Crisis: "Eventually, all of America's lesser problems will combine into one giant problem... Public choices will be newly simple, fitting within the contours of crisp yes/no choices... The splinterings, complexities and cynicisms of [the 1990s] will be but distant memories. The first glimpses of a new golden age will appear beyond -- IF ONLY THIS ONE BIG PROBLEM CAN BE FIXED" (emphasis by authors). And they liken the end stages of a Crisis to a typhoon, in the sense that "anything not lashed down goes flying; anything standing in the way gets flattened."
Part II builds on the logic presented in the previous arguments. If it was necessary to embrace a mixed economy on the national level, will such a move have to be made internationally? This section investigates the measures and growth of the global economy, finding an extended level of economic interdependence. In addition to the rise of the global economy, intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) have been expanding. What roles do IGOs play on the international scene and in the absence of an international political authority, do they supply the rules necessary for a market economy to succeed? Since IGOs are generally incapable of acting outside of the wishes of their respective members and have no ability to challenge national sovereignty, they do not.
Part III explains why an international political authority can be expected to be established in the context of a global economy. First, the global economy does not possess the basic rules and infrastructure a market must have if it is to avoid failure. Second, globalization is fast eroding the ability of individual nation-states to control externalities in their own spheres. Third, a global economy without a global government places Okun's tradeoff in a new context where the tradeoff disintegrates into a wholesale dismissal of notions of equality and equity. This is morally unacceptable.
Part IV examines the implications of an international political authority and questions the logical implication that this authority would/should take the form of a liberal democracy. If liberal democracies allow markets to determine social ends, and if the social ends markets produce are morally unsound, then fundamental questions must be addressed considering our conceptions of liberty and rights.
How do we explain this contradiction?
The Internet has emerged as the focus for much of the strongest hype and substance in debates on this new economy. It has become the defining economic event of the end of the 20th century - a fact reflected by the obsessive media attention and to the raw economic explosion of companies associated with it. The Internet is seen as the metaphor, even the embodiment, of the new information age, of a post-industrial economy, and of a new paradigm in workplace and company organization. Information in this view, rather than raw materials, has become the substance of commerce and the Internet is the highway of the new era. Most strikingly, the Internet is seen as the herald of the globalization of the economy and the triumph of a deregulated marketplace. In this vision, the economics of place has given way to telecommuting, global production and just-in-time delivery of goods and information from all points on the globe. In such a world, economic regions become an oxymoron as the economy becomes a matter of bits and e-mail in cyberspace, not transit and meetings in local space. The "Third Wave" in this scenario leaves economic regions as the archaic leftovers of the industrial age. Governments, those stalwart institutions tied to such geography, become impotent and unimportant in this new global information society.
What is the Information Superhighway? The World Wide Web? What is cyberspace? We are certainly living in interesting times, but nobody knows for sure where we are going. Whenever a new technology is introduced, it is quite common for the "expert" to be pessimistic. (A few famous quotations from the past are noted throughout the book). Either "it won't work" or "there's no market for it."
The techno-literate always overestimate the speed at which the public will adopt technology, while they underestimate the value of the human touch. Just because we can book a flight on our personal computers does not mean the demise of the travel agent, provided the agent offers service and sensible advice. But nobody should underestimate the public's ability to adapt to change.
Shackle goes on to ask the question if this is the case then how is the economist going to explain invention, development, evolution, irreversible change? When explaining the diffusion of the techno-economic paradigm associated with the adoption of online Information and Communication Technologies (Icts) this is precisely the analytical territory we are traversing. This task was not made any easier by the fact that there are no extensive time series data available examining changes in usage behaviour over time and more generally the problems conventional economic analysis faces in dealing with the shift in focus from tangible commodities towards knowledge intensive processes.
Most studies of technical change focus on the firm as the central unit of analysis; by contrast much of the empirical work of this study focuses on individual domestically based users which are an important source of micro-economic creativity relating to the use of innovative online technologies. The shrinking economies of scale afforded by recent innovations in ICTs have allowed these individuals to undertake increasingly complex micro-economic activity in their home environments. Questions of definition concerning what is a firm and if it is applicable to an individual undertaking economic activity in the household need to be further addressed.
What is also significant about this project is its rejection of technological determinism as a primary mode of analysis. It is clear that many social or socio-economic determinants are key variables in the process of technology and diffusion, therefore, socio-economic analysis of the relationship between technology, consumers, producers and providers must take account of these variables. These socio-economic variables are various and include, for example, legal, cultural, political and organisational variables. We do not discount the fact that technology has some deterministic role in the processes being examined; however, we seek to bring a more subtle and incisive analytical approach to this and other analyses by offering one that is also sensitive to social variables. This paper in particular focuses on the allocation of time during the adoption process and the relationship between time allocation and usage determinants.
Environmental criminology and routine activity theory provide a general framework for addressing these questions and the model of crime site selection developed by Brantingham and Brantingham suggests a specific approach for determining the most probable location of offender residence in cases of serial violent crimes. Research in this area represents a practical application of criminological theory to the real world of police investigation which not only can contribute useful information to law enforcement agencies, but may also open up possibilities for new and innovative investigative methodologies.
Secondly, in presenting an account of what the Gaia Hypothesis is all about, we look to provide some measure of documention concerning the history of the development of such a theory of the Natural Sciences, and in this area we cover the work and selected writings of Gregory Bateson and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.
Thirdly, we examine a broad range of constructive contribution and support to, and contemporary application of, this "Gaian world view" by various writers, scientists, researchers , critics and educationalists in the last few decades since the concept was introduced. In this section we have attempted to bring together therefore a wide range of existing reference information, web articles, interpretations and other commentary.
Since industrial society has been dominated by the Cartesian split between mind and matter and by the ensuing mechanistic paradigm for the past three hundred years, this new vision that finally overcomes the Cartesian split will have not only important scientific and philosophical consequences, but will also have tremendous practical implications. It will change the way we relate to each other and to our living natural environment, the way we deal with our health, the way we perceive our business organizations, our educational systems, and many other social and political institutions
In particular, the new vision of life will help us build and nurture sustainable communities - the great challenge of our time - because it will help us understand how nature's communities of plants, animals, and microorganisms - the ecosystems - have organized themselves so as so maximize their ecological sustainability. We have much to learn from this wisdom of nature, and to do so we need to become ecologically literate. We need to understand the basic principles of ecology, the language of nature. The new framework I present in my book shows that these principles of ecology are also the basic principles of organization of all living systems. I believe therefore that The Web of Life provides a solid basis for ecological thought and practice.
1.Framing the research question 2.Sampling 3.Statistics 4.Research design, particularly controlling threats to internal and external validity 5.Writing the report, i.e., the new format for citations.
I begin by outlining the radical ways in which complexity transforms the scientific understanding of time and provides notions that may be highly pertinent to the social sciences which has little noticed such sciences. Time will be shown to be irreducible, irreversible, asymmetrical and multiple.
Second, I consider how some components of complexity have entered social science through the globalisation paradigm. This paradigm in effect authorises certain complexity-innovations, especially those of non-linear interdependencies between peoples, places, organisations and technological systems across the world.
Third, however, I try to show that much work done on globalisation is insufficiently 'complex' in its analyses. Instead I develop the concept of 'global hybrids', networks and fluids roaming the globe in strikingly diverse temporal frames.
In conclusion, I consider how we should conceive of the emergent and apparently self-organising level of the global. Is the concept of 'global complexity' the best metaphor to capture the non-linear, unpredictable and interacting global hybrids that roam the globe?
- To promote innovative, creative, and collaborative research as well as critical reflection on learning and teaching of geography
- To facilitate the exchange of materials, ideas, and experiences about learning and teaching of geography and to stimulate international dialog
- To create an inclusive international community aimed at raising the profile and status of learning and teaching of geography
Communication which took several days or was virtually impossible can now be accomplished in a matter of seconds. In 10 seconds (or often less), we can have the world literally at out fingertips with the click of a mouse, the touch of a dial pad or the flick of a remote control. Places that were once unreachable can now be brought into our living rooms and even the most remote locations, such as Antarctica, are now accessible via electronic mail. Despite turmoil, technology has allowed communication to continue during events such as the 1991 Russian Coup and the Bosnia-Serbia War, where e-mail communication remained possible when other communication was not. This is the age of globalization.
Discussions of Gilder's concept of telecosm
Selected websites pertaining to geospatial data sources. - Lots more can be seen by entering keyword "geospatial" into your favourite search engine or into the "find" menu item of your browser to search this page itself.
The paper identifies key themes developing in this area of Web-based Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and provides case study examples of on-line public participation GIS (PPGIS) from inception to the final phase in a public participation process. It is shown that in certain UK planning problems and policy formulation processes, participatory on-line systems are a useful means of informing and engaging the public. This provides mechanisms for the exploration, experimentation and formulation of decision alternatives by the public in future planning processes and has the potential to bring the public closer to a participatory planning system.
The first section of the paper introduces the research problem, the data, and the analytical procedures. The second section presents the first set of results that focus on the variation in amount of commercial activity and the functional specialization of the node. This is followed by a less conventional analysis that examines the formats themselves. Are there characteristic combinations of store brand names that appear in certain kinds of communities, reflecting common location strategies by firms that seek out the same kind of markets? A final section summarizes the results and their implications for analysts, and for future research.
Reports on the real estate boom in "telecom hotels"
Our most likely adversaries will emerge from a process of human advancement, a cyclical shifting between order and chaos, which is at least a millennium old. Since the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, this process has been one of increasing law and order that led to prosperity for many Western nation-states, their public institutions, and their peoples. The cycle, which is the topic of this article, now may be shifting away from stability toward chaos, suggesting that the nation-state may be entering a period in which its usefulness as a concept for organizing societies will be severely challenged.
More than 80 percent of global trade still moves by sea, and the United States depends on the free and unimpeded movement of its share of that commerce. Further, with its power-projection land forces and seemingly unending international commitments, the United States and its allies depend on access to the seas to ensure their security.
The concept of unimpeded sea lines of communication underpins the very meaning of a national security strategy based on the twin premises of global enlargement and engagement. Yet one must ask whether US strategy adequately addresses the security of the various sea lines of communication and the associated chokepoints so essential to its own economic well-being and that of its principal allies. This article examines some historical and theoretical aspects of maritime chokepoints; assesses current issues and foreign policy concerns regarding their security, and evaluates US strategy as it relates to free access to sea lines of communication. The ability to guarantee an unimpeded flow of seagoing commerce remains for us, as it was for Walter Raleigh, a major geopolitical component of national power.
History teaches that at such rare moments when - for any of a number of reasons - barriers to entry drop, media often lend themselves to a wholly unaccustomed range of political causes and ideological perspectives. Is the Internet a case in point? Not a few critics and activists certainly think so. They can point to such phenomena as the National Public Telecomputing Network, or the Association for Progressive Communications - which collectively manages a variety of interlinked systems such as Peace Net, connecting activists round the world. Citing the Internet's utilization by insurgents in Chiapas, Mexico, Howard Frederick and others argue that "the advent of decentralizing communication technologies such as computer networking" marks the emergence of a significant new force in international relations, which "circumvents the hegemony of markets and of governments."
It would be curmudgeonly to scoff at such assertions; more important, it would be wrong. The Internet is far from impervious to alternative and oppositional activity; and we must try to keep it as open and accessible as it now is. Are we entitled, however, to abstract from the undoubted occasions when Internet access has furnished new leverage against social domination, toward a projected new era of decentralized, democratic interchange?
The proposed new commission intends to provide an international forum for the study of geographical aspects of emerging information societies. As such it will permit the broadening of discussion and participation on the one hand, while providing geographers with an organizational forum for the development and discussion of a most contemporary social and geographical trend. Needless to say that this subject lends itself easily to collaborative studies with economic and urban geographers, and, thus, the proposed commission will seek cooperation with other relevant IGU commissions and study groups.
... With developments in informatics, production cannot only be automated, but mass production can be replaced by production on demand. Distribution can be made "just-in-time," and inventories can be managed much more efficiently. No doubt there will be profound changes to production norms. But the organization of work will also be turned upside down, and little is known about how to deal with the consequences.
Then what is the definition of multimedia? It is too early to define the term because various multimedia are still in the incubation stage. In this papaer, I shall define multimedia as "a group of systems to create, store, process, dispatch and receive information by means of a variety of media in a variety of expressions; also a category of industry to develop in connection with such systems." In what follows I discuss multimedia from the viewpoint of effects and functions.
... After the multimedia revolution, users will place an order on-line or at the shop, and will designate all the specifications. Manufacturers will accept these orders on the basis of on-demand production. This is again a user-oriented market. The commodity will be user's brains, or on-line in the form of electronic catalogues, thus being a virtual commodity.
In response to these concerns, concepts from 'new' systems thinking are considered in this thesis. A distinction is made between two types of self-producing systems. Autopoietic (self-producing) systems are autonomous units with self-defined boundaries that tend to be centrally controlled, homeostatic, and predictable. Sympoietic (collectively-producing) systems do not have self-defined spatial or temporal boundaries. Information and control are distributed among components. The systems are evolutionary and have the potential for surprising change. Since they cannot be identified by boundaries, sympoietic systems must be identified by the self-organizing factors involved in their generation.
The contrast between the two system types provides a useful heuristic for identifying and conceptualizing many complex systems that are relevant to planning for sustainability. The different characteristics illustrate the need to apply different approaches in different situations. The characteristics also illustrate that many of the systems we must cope with are sympoietic, although they have mistakenly been interpreted as autopoietic.
A variety of examples including small groups, western science, and national parks are used to illustrate the concepts and their application. The latter examples, in particular, are used to consider the implications of these systems concepts for planning. Such critique is relevant to the systems of concern to planning as well as the planning systems themselves. In addition, the concepts illustrate possibilities for developing more appropriate approaches. Both critiques and possibilities are discussed.
This thesis is primarily conceptual and makes no attempt to draw definitive conclusions. Its primary value is in presentation and description of two contrasting lenses that provide alternative views of the world, forcing recognition of system properties often neglected. In addition, its value lies in the system concepts described, the consequent potential for conceptualization and critique of many intractable situations, and, perhaps most particularly, for the possibility of considering new directions to pursue.
When complete, it will review 14 key topics which link people and the environment. Each topic includes an Overview, Facts and Figures, Feature Articles, News Updates, Book and Film Reviews, a Glossary and Web Links.
The first seven of these themed sections, on Population and Human Development, People and Food and Agriculture, Population and Reproductive Health, People, Coasts and Oceans, People and Renewable Energy, People and Pollution and People and Forests, are now on-line. Others will be added shortly.
The website is being created by Planet 21, an editorially independent non-profit publishing company and British registered charity, with the support of our sponsors whose own websites are connected by live links on this home page.
Telling the story is Elisabet Sahtouris, Ph.D, an American/Greek evolutionary biologist, ecologist, futurist, consultant, and author of GAIA: The Human Journey from Chaos to Cosmos. She is a founding member of WISNet, the Worldwide Indigenous Science Network, a member of the Earth Parliament and of the Women's International Policy Action Committee on Environment and Development, among others.
This paper describes the use of historical aerial photographs to study changes in an inter-tidal environment, around Langstone Harbour and Chichester Harbour (U.K.), and discusses the advantages and limitations of this data source.
The unrestricted flow of goods and capital in a world without borders was said to be the best of all possible worlds, though when some observers pointed out that to be consistent with the precepts of their 18th century prophet, Adam Smith, proponents of the neoliberal doctrine would also have to allow the unrestricted flow of labor to create this best of all possible worlds, they were, quite simply, ignored.
Such inconsistencies could be overlooked since for over two decades, neoliberalism or, as it was grandiosely styled, the "Washington Consensus" had carried all before it. As one of its key partisans has nostalgically remarked recently, "the Washington Consensus seemed to gain near-universal approval and provided a guiding ideology and underlying intellectual consensus for the world economy, which was quite new in modern history."
Well, I've got a news flash. Money and personal satisfaction aren't mutually exclusive. Here's an even bigger shock: All programmers want to get paid for their work. Every single one of them. What distinguishes one type of programmer from another is the currency in which they want to be paid. Some want to be paid in recognition. Others want personal satisfaction. Some even want (gasp) money.
Rise of the Individual - Thoughts on the emergent role of the individual or free-agent in society and the economy.
The corporation of the late twentieth century was just a transitional form. It lasted more than one hundred years, but few corporations of that kind remain today. Now, looking back at the "dinosaur" era in which General Motors, Microsoft, and Sony stalked the earth, we are most aware of the tiny "mammals"-entertainment production companies, construction project teams, and consultant work-groups-which operated without much public notice back in the 1990s, only to become the prototypes of today's modern organization. Today, nearly every task is performed by autonomous teams of one to ten people, set up as independent contractors or small firms, linked by networks, coming together in temporary combinations for various projects, and dissolving once the work is done. When a project needs to be undertaken, requests for proposal are issued or jobs to be done are advertised, candidate firms respond, sub-contractors are selected, and workers are hired largely on an ad-hoc basis.
"We are now at the threshold of a new era, driven this time not by the technologies of production and transportation, but by the technologies of information, communication, and coordination,"says Thomas W. Malone, Patrick J. McGovern Professor of Information Systems at Sloan. "These technologies, guided by the organizational needs and human values that are important to us, hold the potential to completely transform the nature of work throughout the world."
The revolutionary changes in technology and work are already laying the groundwork for this historic shift in the exercise of political power. Sophisticated computers, robotics, telecommunications, gene splicing, and other Information Age technologies are fast replacing human beings in virtually every industry. Nowhere is this trend more apparent than in the manufacturing sector. The number of factory workers in the United States declined from 33 percent of the workforce to under 17 percent in the past 30 years, even as American companies continued to increase production and output, maintaining our country's position as the number one manufacturing power in the world.
I think I always knew in the back of my mind that I had a thesis to prove. But at first my plan was to review all of the scientific efforts that have been made to understand the global economy, without declaring any conclusions in advance. I wanted the outlines of a new and more adequate understanding of the global economy - one that would include and go beyond the knowledge and insight provided by all hitherto existing theories - to emerge gradually. I wanted my conclusions to state themselves, and to be proven by the sheer weight of the evidence. I wanted the reader to see for herself or for himself - guided of course by my lucid and impartial survey - that there is a better way to understand the economic predicament in which humanity now finds itself, and, consequently, a better way to get out of it.
On the other hand, socialism, in all its forms, is an economic system governed centrally by a political elite, who enjoy even more highly concentrated ownership and economic power. And in practice, socialism doesn't work. The world is full of examples of traditionally state-dominated economies which cannot meet their massive foreign debt obligations or compete effectively in the emerging global marketplace.
Logically, a "third way" would be a free market system which economically empowers all individuals and families through direct and effective ownership of the means of production - the best check against the potential for corruption and abuse.
A mistake made by many academics and economists today is to equate democracy and the market system with the top-down, Wall Street capitalist model, with its growing gap of wealth and power between the rich and the poor. That there is excessive corruption under capitalism and socialism, even where governments are democratically elected, should come as no surprise. Lord Acton warned us years ago about the inherent corruptibility of systems that concentrate power.
Capitalist theorists like Milton Friedman pay no attention to concentrated ownership of labor-displacing technology. Marxist theorists do, but conclude that the state should own and regulate all means of production. Keynesians offer a feeble synthesis between these two models of development based on the premise that maldistribution of ownership is acceptable. The so-called "Third Way" of Clinton and Blair follows the Keynesian model.
As recognized by Bill Greider in Chapter 18 of his new book previously cited, lawyer-economist Louis O. Kelso in 1958 fathered a real "Third Way." Kelso conceived a comprehensive systems approach to solving the structural problems faced by Russia, Indonesia and many other economies that have become dependent on those who today control money and credit. Kelso's 1958 book with renowned Aristotelian scholar Mortimer J. Adler centered on a profound theory of economic justice and clear vision of the impact of technology on human work, and how modern corporate finance has influenced the quality of work and thus the political and moral life of society.
Most scholars never got past the cover of the first Kelso-Adler book, which was unfortunately entitled The Capitalist Manifesto. Kelso, however, has gained international fame as the inventor of the Employee Stock Ownership Plan or "ESOP," one of the tools he developed to democratize access to money and credit. Remarkably, however, his larger vision and general theory have been trivialized and virtually ignored by academia and the mainstream media. This largely explains why economists cannot understand or solve the problems arising from economic globalization.
Kelso's revolutionary insights helped him to solve an economic enigma: How Say's Law of Markets - rejected both by Marx and Keynes - can achieve sustainable and balanced growth in a modern global economy. His legal background enabled him to see how the structuring of basic laws and institutions creates a system that either concentrates or decentralizes ownership and economic power, that encourages participation by all or which creates barriers to participation. Focusing on the means by which ordinary people could become owners of productive assets and participate more fully in the economic process, Kelso provided the systems theory and practical mechanisms, like the ESOP, for implementing expanded ownership around the world.
According to Dick Morley, president of Flavors Technology (Manchester, N.H.) and the keynote speaker at the Advanced Manufacturing Technology Conference held last month in Cleveland, Ohio, "Only one thing creates wealth - technology and the ability to use it. In ten years, computers will be 100 times more powerful than they are now, at one/tenth of the cost."
Morley, a well-traveled technology futurist, expounded on the Japanese view of manufacturing in the first decade of the this century:
- We'll see the end of mass production, with all manufacturing done at the point of consumption;
- Concurrently, we'll see the end of centralized factory manufacturing, and the rise of fully distributed manufacturing and personal manufacturing;
- EVERYTHING will be on the Information Superhighway.
Here I am concerned primarily with the ecosystem concept's effect on dispositions toward technologies. Environmental crises in the post-war period, such as nuclear fallout and chemical poisoning, prompted evaluations of technologies on the basis of their impact upon natural environments. The ecosystem was a comprehensive model of nature that integrated humans into the environment and accounted for the ecological effects of technologies, a model that could be employed to evaluate the relationship among people, nature and machines.
My thesis is that the ecosystem concept enabled critiques that distinguished between two orders of technology In the first case, critics of modern technologies used the ecosystem concept to make comprehensible, and to legitimate alarm over, the environmental threats posed by the Bomb, chemical pesticides and other technologies characterized by the physical force they exerted upon the world. It was used to position these modern technologies not as tools of progress but as agents of environmental corruption and threats to human survival. At the same time, the ecosystem concept served as a model of nature compatible with, even necessary to, the cybernetic technologies of the information age. These technologies were characterized by their ability to monitor their own internal and external states and adapt in response to changing conditions. They exhibited self-regulation through information feedback, a capability held to be fundamental to all complex self-organizing systems, natural or artificial. The ecosystem concept naturalized the features of cybernetic systemness characteristic of post-war information technologies and attributed them to nature on a macro scale.
There are some key limitations to research in this area. The first is that its approach is broad in scope and highly interdisciplinary. It covers a lot of material and includes work in the disciplines of economics, history, sociology, political science, education and international relations. The second major limitation - one engendered by its broad interdisciplinary approach - is that it is addressed more to a general audience than a specific academic community.
Despite these limitations, the findings in this paper should make a contribution to understanding of the opportunities and challenges for Africa in an era shaped by Globalization and the information economy.
In the strict sense, an organism is a physical entity, such as the human body; and the word is being used analogously when we apply it to an association, such as a social club or a political society or the economy. But the comparison is worthwhile, for it throws light on the nature of these groups. Let us apply it to the economic order.
Consider some characteristics of a physical organism which also apply, analogously, to the economy. 1. It is heterogeneous: it has many parts, each different from the others. 2. Each part has a special operation. 3. Each is so related to the other parts that its operation tends to the good of the whole body.
The economy has many parts in the sense of the millions of individuals who constitute it, and also in the sense that it is made up of many groups such as workers, investors, consumers. Each of these has a special part to play in the whole. This part tends, from its nature, to the good of the whole.
The social organism which is the economy is more than a mechanism, a machine. What is a machine? It is a human invention, a product of art, constructed from physical substances like metal and wood. Hans Andre, comparing a biological organism with a machine, says: "Whereas a machine functions by man and for man, the organism constructs itself by the forces which lie hidden within it".
The economy is from nature in the sense that it is required by human nature and its essential features are from human nature. And like a living body, it too "constructs itself by the forces which lie hidden within it".
Recording technology provides us with a very straightforward example. In 1877 Thomas Edison pioneered a form of analog sound recording. To record a sound, a membrane in a microphone is used to copy that wave onto some surface. To replay the sound, a needle is forced through the groove created by the recording process. This needle is attached to another membrane in a speaker. When the speaker membrane vibrates, the membrane sets nearby air molecules into oscillations and the original sound wave is recreated. The process is entirely analog. No numbers are involved, the process is completely mechanical, and there is infinite precision, but very limited accuracy and much room for error in the sound recording and reproduction process. Compact disk technology uses digital means to record and play sounds. The sound waves are read by a computer which analyzes each instance of the sound, and assigns it a numerical value. When the music is played back, it goes through another computer, which retranslates the numbers into the sounds that the numbers represent. Since they are recorded at such frequent tiny intervals, the lack of precision is not a problem, and we find digitally recorded music more accurate.
The above is, but one example. Because of digitization, linkages across forms emerge constantly. Industries for decades not related to each other suddenly find themselves in the same sector, and with it comes a redefinition of competitors. Thus we see Silicon Graphics Computer Systems (started as a graphics computer company) swallowing up Cray Computers (a number crunching supercomputer company), AT&T acquiring Digital Cable Network, Napster Inc. using MP3 technology to change the landscape of music industry, and other examples.
When a living system made up of many interacting, interdependent parts experiences unsustainable stress, that stress is perceived and an adaptive response is produced that tends to reduce the stress and preserve the health of the organism. An overheated animal will sweat, pant or seek shade, and its body temperature will fall. A system that responds to a stressful stimuli in a way that tends to reduce the stress constitutes a system of negative feedback. Rising temperature causes a change in a physiological process or behavior which in turn causes a decrease in the stress. The earth, as a complex system made up of many interacting, interdependent parts, resembles an organism in many ways, but at present it lacks a system of negative feedback that would lead to an adjustment in the system when human economic activity starts to exert unsustainable pressures on the larger ecosystem.
In any way, the possibilities of free utilization of the net cannot be destroyed - because the net is not a territory: it is irreductable to the law, and to any kind of domination. Probably we are exaggerating the effects of the Internet in the future transformation of the society. Probably the social and cultural effects of this phenomenon will not be so important, and the Net will not change so deeply the daily life and the social landscape. Probably this technology will be overwhelmed by new discoveries, will be abandoned or marginalized. But, in any case something very important has happened, thanks to the Networking revolution: a social paradigm has experimented, that will not be eradicated. The paradigm of rhyzomatic society, a proliferating web of temporary communities, sharing the same unlimited non-territory of the Cyberspace. The present shape of the Net may be a transient experimentation, but the direction is set towards new adventures in autonomy.
But as military strategist Colin Gray has observed, in international relations, "bad times return.\u2264A likely source of future bad times is the rise of China and the emerging anti-U.S. strategic axis between China and Russia.
Since no two occurrences are ever exactly the same, historical analogy is often a dangerous way to cast light on contemporary issues.But the similarities between the cases of Wilhelmine Germany, and Great Britain at the turn of the century and China and the United States today are so compelling that they cannot be ignored.
- When and how did the new geopolitics of the Persian Gulf start?
- What are the regional effects of the new geopolitics?
- What seems to be the key challenges and opportunities facing the Islamic Republic of Iran under the present conditions?
This discussion paper summarizes the debate, and suggests that the collapse of the Soviet Union might provide an opportunity to overcome past political differences and to get down to the real business of assisting developing nations. In this activity, information technology specialists such as journalists, librarians, and computer scientists might play key roles.
The NWICO debate flourished, or perhaps one might more aptly say, raged, throughout much of the 1970s and 1980s in the halls of the United Nations, and particularly within Unesco. NWICO proponents and opponents alike accepted the premise of a link between economic progress and the availability of information. However, liberal theorists maintained that national cultures and sovereignty were not threatened by information concentration, while structuralist and socialist analysts argued that they were. In particular, the NWICO proponents, mostly drawn from the ranks of non-aligned nations, claimed that Western ownership and control of both the news media and their distribution channels constituted a form of cultural dominance whose covert goal was capitalist economic expansion.
This argument, played out in fora such as the Non-Aligned Movement and Unesco conferences drew support from the Soviet Union, and hostility from Western administrations. It was partly due to fears of the growing "politicization" of UNESCO that the United States and Great Britain withdrew from that organisation in the mid 1980s.
This change in perspective becomes apparent when contrasting the use of organic thinking. Classical geography used the organism as the foundation for analogies and justifications for predation, e.g., "States are like animals, animals consume other animals, therefore states should consume other states." The New Geopolitics retreats from such syllogisms, recognizing instead that "organic-ness" refers to the ephemerality of states. Although they may seem permanent, states are not immutable fixtures on the world stage -- instead they are created, maintained, and abandoned. This view recognizes that states are made up of multiple, diverse elements and that the failure of any single element can prove just as injurious as invasion from another state. Thus, state failure can occur due to intra-national as well as transnational processes.
The critical geopolitical issue affecting the region is whether the Middle East will act as a stable supplier of oil and gas exports at market driven prices. This is not easy to predict in a region that has many intraregional and internal conflicts, serious economic problems, and major demographic problems. The Middle East is so heavily dependent on the income from energy exports that few nations will voluntarily limit their export revenues. War has had a major impact on energy exports in the past, however, and sanctions affect key exporters like Iran, Iraq, and Libya. New questions are also beginning to arise as to whether the Middle East can finance the energy development it needs without more privatization and much higher rates of foreign investment.
Others, like Edward Luttwak, asserted even before the collapse of the Soviet Union that the waning of the Cold War has reduced the significance of military power in international affairs. Summarizing a supposed consensus within the Western foreign policy community in the early 1990s, he posited a transition from geopolitics to geo-economics: "Everyone, it appears, now agrees that the methods of commerce are displacing military methods -- with disposable capital in lieu of firepower, civilian innovation in lieu of military-technical advancement, and market penetration in lieu of garrisons and bases." Luttwak's enthusiasms, however, fall far short of globalization boosters, like Keniche Ohmae, who envisions a near future world of borderless capitalism and "the end of the nation state." States, for Luttwak, are here to stay; they are "spatial entities structured to jealously delimit their own territories." They are "inherently inclined to strive for relative advantage against like entities on the international scene." As bureaucracies, they are "impelled by the bureaucratic urges of role-preservation and role-enhancement to acquire a 'geo-economic' substitute for their decaying geopolitical role." Thus the coming geo-economic age will not be one of harmonious global interdependence, but rather an age of continued state rivalry where "the logic of conflict" will be expressed in "the grammar of commerce."
Within the past year, a number of forces have converged to suggest the socially constructive potential of software whose design code can be freely accessed and modified by computer users. It is a complex story that is still unfolding and known chiefly in computing/Internet circles. As we will explain in Section I, a growing grassroots movement on a global scale is challenging proprietary models of software development by generating superior, more reliable software that is far cheaper and even free. ...
To the layperson, it may not be immediately apparent why the new software movement holds rich promise. This proposal seeks to explain why its surprising emergence into the mainstream in 1998 is so significant and how, with timely and strategic assistance, open code software could evolve into a powerful new platform for the reinvigoration of the non-commercial civic sector in American society. By radically empowering computer users, it could help rejuvenate our democratic culture, improve education, catalyze a more consumer-responsive economy and ensure fairer, open governance of the Internet.
To reap the full potential of the open code revolution, we propose creating H20, an independent nonprofit organization to help foster the development and usage of the new software. We use the metaphor of water, H20, to emphasize that software is increasingly indispensable to life, at least an enfranchised civic, political, economic and social life. If software is to truly improve these domains, it must be capable of circulating freely so that it can nourish the fundamental values of an open society: democratic participation, social equity, equal opportunity and educational achievement, among others. Openness is a virtue in software development not just because it tends to produce superior product, but equally because it fortifies free market competition and democratic principles.
This essay explains why open code software is so important, especially for various non-technical constituencies, and how a new organization - H20 - could help promote new development and usage of open source code software. This document is deliberately aimed at the layperson as much as the computer sophisticate because a new and broader conversation must be started, one that considers the far-reaching implications of open code software for how we shall govern ourselves, improve education, foster innovation and economic growth, and protect the sovereign interests of citizens and consumers. This text, then, is intended for anyone interested in these realms as well as for influential leaders of the foundation community who could catalyze some powerful changes by fostering the development of open source code software.
Whatever its utility as political prescription, this philosophy has usefully directed attention to the complex and variegated institutional field through which the great bulk of any society is actually organized. Marx had no time for these institutions of civil society, which he regarded as epiphenomena of the essentially very simple structures through which a society and its citizens were defined. But civil society is now strikingly popular throughout the world and across the political spectrum, whether as a counterbalance to the overreaching of the state, as an integral constituent of democracy, or as the real and only substance of a free society.
These different examples of discourses of deterritorialization are, of course, sweepingly superficial representations of the complexity of boundaries, territory and the world map at the century's end. Seriously flawed as conceptualizations of the contemporary world, the confident hyperbole of these discourses nevertheless has considerable ideological power and rhetorical force. This paper seeks to problematize such discourses of deterritorialization in a general way by examining one of the more precise articulations of the phenomenon of deterritorialization, the so-called 'end of geography' in the domain of financial markets. On the face of it, the case of global financial integration would seem to be a particularly strong instances of deterritorialization. Rather than understanding the issue, however, as a mere confirmation of an unproblematized deterritorialization, this paper makes three arguments about deterritorialization discourses generally using the case of global finance. The first argument is that discourses of deterritorialization are ideological discourses that do not describe actuality but seek to discursively constitute and represent certain complex tendencies as both inevitable and positive developments in contemporary capitalist society. Discourses of deterritorialization, in other words, are part of the self-interpretation of contemporary informationalized capitalism. They combine elements from many longstanding Western discourses (con)fused in a contradictory and unstable unity. For example, digital culture discourses combine a strong humanistic inheritance emphasizing human freedom, liberation and fulfillment; a capitalist discourse concerning the virtues of open and transparent markets, and a discourse of technophilia which celebrates technological systems as wondrous entities which enhance human capacities and capabilities.
The most revealing finding in the latest survey, made by the Laredo Group for StarMedia, in which 22,000 Internet users were interviewed between December 1999 and January 2000, is that 90 percent of respondents feel that the Internet is already breaking down the barriers between Latin American countries. This may not be all that surprising, but it should give food for thought to those who claim that Brazilians have no cultural affinity with Argentines, that Argentines have little in common with Chileans, etc. And there is more: two-thirds of the respondents said that the Internet was going to fuel economic and political changes in Latin America - proving that, in the common perception, the world is to be restructured not in a future revolution, but in the present. And the revolution is driven by the power of the Internet as a compelling new business media, in a geographically unlimited economy.
The process is already well under way, and the manner in which universities fulfil their core functions will change fundamentally over the next decade. The danger is that universities, with huge investments in capital stock and a culture of process-oriented decision-making, will respond slowly to the opportunities that beckon.
But respond they must. Just as banking, communications, law and other services have become borderless processes, so will the knowledge industry. Universities in North America, Europe and Australia are already offering degree programs direct to students beyond the boundaries of the nation state. Using the new communications technologies, they can advertise, enrol and teach individual students in any country and without a physical presence.
Economic imperatives are driving nations closer together to the extent that many of the traditional indicators of national performance, such as long-term unemployment and exchange rates, are virtually irrelevant. The globalisation of economies means that many events and indicators within national boundaries are outside the control of national governments.
The potential demand for international higher eduction - for a cosmopolitan understanding as well as local knowledge - is immense. Economics and technology have effectively brought an end to autarky; practically all societies participate, and compete, in the international arena. Human needs are defined more generously - educational equity now implies the need for mass higher education, preferably of a high quality.
Australia, Canada, Japan and the United States have well-developed higher education and training systems which are vast repositories of knowledge. Yet in the Asia Pacific region - the fastest growing region in human history - there are severe skills shortages because national governments do not have the resources to invest in the infrastructure required for a huge expansion of education and training systems. Trade in educational services is a logical outcome. We have the technology to replace the short-term migration of students by a whole range of less expensive and socially less disruptive learning situations. While the impact of the new technologies is inevitable, they are not necessarily uniformly beneficial. One danger is the risk of cultural dominance of the Western world and its inability to appreciate the sensitivities and values of other cultures.
This study is about evaluating the theoretical concept of space in the context of cyberspace, a term that was introduced by William Gibson in his classical science fiction novel Neuromancer. This 'collective hallucination', as Gibson puts it, has had an enormous impact on the academic interest of social and cultural scientists during the final years of the second millennium. I approach the issue both through theoretical evaluation and qualitative empirical evidence. It is essential to recognise that at the moment, in the postmodern reality, the life spans of individual studies, especially in the field of rapidly changing information technology, are often very short. However, the purpose of this research is to evaluate the 'cyberspaces' of today and critically examine the factors behind the visible in order to present a geographical idea of space in the electronic world.
The purpose of the VASAB project is:
- support the development of networks for co-operation in the Baltic Sea Region
- provide a practical forum for the transfer of competence to the countries in transition to democratic market economies
- improve the level of information in BSR countries on current trends and problems in other countries of the region
- assess important infrastructure projects to receive international financial contributions
- promote spatial planning in the participating countries and regions.
The world is moving toward a new order for the twenty-first century. In this book I discuss this paradigm shift to the evolving new world order from several perspectives: 1) the shift from Eurocentricism to the symbiosis of diverse cultures, from Logoscentrism and dualism toward pluralism, toward a symbiosis of plurality of values; 2) from anthropocentrism to ecology, the symbiosis of diverse species; 3) a shift from industrial society to information society; 4) a shift from universalism to an age of the symbiosis of diverse elements; 5) a shift from the age of the machine to the age of the life principle.
The ambition of this book is to suggest that symbiosis is the keyword for predicting and interpreting, from these various perspectives, the new world order that will appear in the twenty-first century.
He stated categorically that all of the pedagogical material necessary to deliver resources through a computer was already in hand; our task was merely to translate the material already assembled for various courses into the appropriate format for electronic delivery -- say, over the World-Wide Web. To him, the only issue raised by the Web was that it changed the way a student gained access to material; use of the Web had virtually no pedagogical implications for the nature of the material.
I was horrified.
Is that all that the new medium of the Web has to offer us as teachers: translation and redistribution; new access to fundamentally old stuff? Surely there is something more to this revolution. Alas, the typical response of the majority of faculty members and university administrators I have encountered in my wanderings is the same as that of the director of distance education: The Web merely changes access, not pedagogy.
Curiously, that is just a fresh face on an old issue: How do people react to the opportunities presented by each new medium of communication? Indeed, the behavior we are seeing now was described back in the 1960s by Marshall McLuhan, who noted that new technologies are always used to do old tasks at first, until some driving force causes those technologies to be used in new ways.
Globalisation, increased competition, shorter time to market and pressure to innovate are some of the drivers for organisations to adopt a knowledge-based culture. One of the consequences of this is the need to change organisational structures and behaviour: creating VNTs for specific purposes is one way of achieving the necessary organisational change. This brief article aims to explore VNTs as a viable form of organisational structure for enterprises committed to adopting a knowledge-based culture and to provide some hints and tips for establishing successful VNTs.
Emergence of the Intelligent Environment and Pervasive Computing
Editor aside: Identification of "context" requires skill in pattern recognition - "seeing" implications of the cross-currents of social and technological trends. Some of these are: collapse of hierarchy in many different areas: political, military, business, etc.; proliferation of networks in diverse contexts; appearance and spread of wireless devices of all kinds and their interconnection; apparent increasing violence in electronic games, TV programming, educational institutions, domestic situations, ethnic frictions, neo-national movements; empowerment of the individual and the linking of individuals into work teams.
Bandwidth is the railway that transports intellectual capital. However it is more than this, it is in effect tied up in a symbiotic relationship with that capital, as it facilitates its creation. Once an area has access to bandwidth, it is on the network, and now becomes a more economically viable venue for the creation of ideas and innovation, able to participate in the new economy. The degree of this participation will have a direct relationship with the quantity of bandwidth available for access. This is why Enterprise Ireland, a state development body, is creating a number of digital business parks in Cork, Limerick and Galway, that will be connected onto a broadband network. By putting these rural areas on the network they have connected into the new economy, with the aim of attracting start-ups in digital media, e-business and software. Cisco systems is now the largest company in the world in terms of market capitalisation; this is because they are market leaders in the production of\u2020 networking technology. The network is becoming the economy.
With still greater complexity and scale of the system, it becomes crucially important to assure that the agents focus on the right tasks, form reasonable expectations of the utility of various goods and services, and set up stable and mutually beneficial relationships with each other. These focusing and utility assessment mechanisms have been traditionally provided by individual experiences and unmediated sharing of knowledge, similar to value exchange mechanisms before the appearance of money. Further progress of signaling instruments depends on availability of standardized semantic descriptions of quality and utility of various resources, and needs and abilities of different agents. It also requires efficient methods of data acquisition, aggregation and analysis, and low-cost communication and processing tools.
We are presenting an example of such a collection of signaling instruments. The suggested model of a "hyper-economic" system combines flows of globally aggregated scalar information on prices with mechanisms for sharing knowledge about situational utilities of groups of resources. The project presents methods for combining value and utility signaling mechanisms, introduces non-scalar representations of common experiences analogous to derivative financial instruments and researches their efficiency in different types of economics environments.
New digital environments flout our expectations in dramatic and essential ways, and will force us to reconsider many of our views on multi-agent systems. The internal structure of a computing environment is significantly different from that of the physical space. There is no concept of premium location here, or differential rent. Software systems differ in methods of agent replication and deployment, transaction costs, and many other essential characteristics from both natural and artificial physical environments. To take advantage of the peculiarities of multi-agent computing systems, we need new architectures with new, adaptive regulatory and resource-allocation mechanisms.
Anthropologists have documented that cultural advancements usually result in people working more, not less. For example, studies in the 1960's of the !Kung people, a hunter-gatherer society in Africa, showed that they worked roughly half as much as people in industrialized societies. The !Kung worked only about twenty hours per week, or three hours per day, for their subsistence. Their other chores, such as building shelters, making tools and cooking, added up to another twenty-some hours per week for a total of 40+ hours per week. By contrast, those of us in industrial cultures work about 40 hours per week at a job and 40 hours more at home and after work (commuting, shopping, cooking, washing, cleaning, fixing), for a total of roughly 80 hours per week.
The key drivers identified are:
(l) Demographics. (2) Natural resources and environment. (3) Science and technology. (4) The global economy and globalization. (5) National and international governance. (6) Future conflict. (7) The role of the United States.In examining these drivers, several points should be kept in mind:
- No single driver or trend will dominate the global future in 2015.
- Each driver will have varying impacts in different regions and countries.
- The drivers are not necessarily mutually reinforcing; in some cases, they will work at cross-purposes.
The Methodology
Global Trends 2015 provides a flexible framework to discuss and debate the future. The methodology is useful for our purposes, although admittedly inexact for the social scientist. Our purpose is to rise above short-term, tactical considerations and provide a longer-term, strategic perspective. Judgments about demographic and natural resource trends are based primarily on informed extrapolation of existing trends. In contrast, many judgments about science and technology, economic growth, globalization, governance, and the nature of conflict represent a distillation of views of experts inside and outside the United States Government. The former are projections about natural phenomena, about which we can have fairly high confidence; the latter are more speculative because they are contingent upon the decisions that societies and governments will make.
The drivers we emphasize will have staying power. Some of the trends will persist; others will be less enduring and may change course over the time frame we consider. The major contribution of the National Intelligence Council (NIC), assisted by experts from the Intelligence Community, has been to harness US Government and specialists to identify drivers, to determine which ones matter most, to highlight key uncertainties, and to integrate analysis of these trends into a national security context. The result identifies issues for more rigorous analysis and quantification.
This global climate politics -- apparently so recent -- is in fact the outcome of a long history. Over the last fifty years, a relatively small group of researchers at a handful of institutions developed extremely complex computer models that simulate global climate, or the average state of Earth's atmosphere over long periods. Without these models, the causes and extent of climate change probably would not be known, and the political issue of global warming would not exist.
The models could not have been developed without computers, and they could not be calibrated or validated without global data. At the same time, such data would never have been gathered had not computer models become available. Without the models, detailed global weather data could not have been processed or understood. Near-term, human-induced ("anthropogenic") climate change could not have been tracked.
Political contexts affected these developments -- and were affected by them -- differently in different periods. 1950s weather models were constructed in hopes of Cold War military advantage, including weather and climate control as possible weapons of war. In the 1960s, international collaborations for data collection served as part of a trust-building agenda propagated by "scientific internationalists." With the rise of the environmental movement in the early 1970s, global climate change began to achieve recognition as a policy issue, but remained primarily a scientific research problem. In the early 1980s, politicized global atmospheric issues such as nuclear winter and ozone depletion received widespread attention. These paved the way for anthropogenic global warming to become an important public policy issue beginning in 1988. Since then, global climate change has been among the most hotly debated science-based policy issues in the international arena.
This paper argues for an interactive future.
Section 2 of this discussion paper covers the importance to the goal of universal access, of the true relationship between the importance of implementing accessible design solutions and compatibility with low bandwidth. Section 3 examines the critical issues of telecommunications deployment and elucidates the complex and critical issues around peering and the next generation Internet. Section 4 looks at the importance of e-commerce to emerging economies. Section 5 provides further recommendations with a comment on legal barriers. Section 6 provides the Final Conclusions.
It is the Internet Society's hope that this discussion paper will serve as a precursor to actions undertaken by UNESCO for developing policies and formulating basic principles for a broad, modern concept of universal access for the twenty first century.
Although I tell myself that I have not produced a course that could be distributed or delivered asynchronously, I have thought a lot about how Web materials can impact higher education and continuing education. Mechanically, it is relatively easy to. Deciding how to take advantage of the Web and avoid a "broadcasting" or formal lecture style, however, proved harder than I originally thought. Part of the dilemma seemed to be tied up in the question of why should I bother to use the Web.
According to Dick Morley, president of Flavors Technology (Manchester, NH) and the keynote speaker at the Advanced Manufacturing Technology Conference held last month in Cleveland, Ohio, "Only one thing creates wealth - technology and the ability to use it. In ten years, computers will be 100 times more powerful than they are now, at one/tenth of the cost."
Morley, a well-traveled technology futurist, expounded on the Japanese view of manufacturing in the first decade of the next century:
- We'll see the end of mass production, with all manufacturing done at the point of consumption;
- Concurrently, we'll see the end of centralized factory manufacturing, and the rise of fully distributed manufacturing and personal manufacturing;
- EVERYTHING will be on the Information Superhighway.
The global message was that technology alone is not enough to create an information society with a chance for everyone. Inclusiveness must be encouraged and Europe is achieving this goal. Old social problems such as unemployment and new ones like the digital divide must be solved. Lack of general awareness leads to exclusion and skill shortages slow down technology development. But as well as posing problems , technology gives us the means to solve them. Technology can bring education to everybody, strengthen democracy and help everyone into a global society. The leisure industry is also important and IST 2000 did not forget games, culture and entertainment.
Many discussions focused in the New Economy. ICT can bring business transformation, changing work environments and global economy; changes with unique prospects for strengthening competitiveness but bringing questions about privacy, security and accessibility and the fundamental issues of education and training. ICT can improve skills and knowledge creating an educated and knowledgeable workforce, a fundamental requirement for a successful economy. Creating competitive advantage from intangible assets was recognised but so was the need to measure the value of intangible assets such as knowledge.
Gaston Zongo addressed the theme of building the Information Society for all but wondered how people in a remote African village could be included in a society that truly was for all. But there are already real examples of how this revolution is coming about such as e-mails being sent in connection with buying sheep for the family back home, teleworking already being used in Africa to support work on the Paris Metro and the provision of a teleservice in Senegal transcribing the minutes of Canadian courts. The three main issues currently facing Africa are capability building, the weak development of local content and the sustainability of CT projects.
To do these things, you'll need an instrument like the Chatpen that contains technology developed by Anoto. (By 2003, other Anoto-enabled pens, including Pilot rollerballs and a characteristically elegant offering from Montblanc, will be available.) You'll also need a supply of the special paper that Anoto has christened digital paper. It won't be hard to find, and it won't cost much more than standard copy stock. Unlike Xerox PARC's electronic paper or MIT/E Ink's Immedia, Anoto's technology employs real paper and commonly available inks. By the time Chatpens appear in office-supply shops and mail-order catalogs this fall, digital paper sporting the Anoto logo will be turning up everywhere.
- In what way does hypertext reflect the human mind? By committing ourselves deeper to cyberspace reality, are we going towards traditional and universal human ideals or against them? In what way is hypertext like the mind?
- What creates hypertext space? What are virtual roads and highways? What mechanism creates a navigation stop zone or parking space? Do hypertext edifices need maintenance?
- How do people find things in hypertext? Does it take training? How do people navigate or get around in hypertext? How do they use hypertext?
- What is the social or philosophical significance of hypertext? Does it have a spiritual connection?
Explorations of aspects of an open source economy
Living capital, which has the special capacity to continuously regenerate itself, is ultimately the source of all real wealth. To destroy it for money, a simple number with no intrinsic value, is an act of collective insanity -- which makes capitalism a mental, as well as a physical pathology.
To create a world in which life can flourish and prosper we must replace the values and institutions of capitalism with values and institutions that honor life, serve life's needs, and restore money to its proper role as servant. I believe we are in fact being called to take a step to a new level of species consciousness and function.
Inventor Gene Kirila believes his system for producing molded plastic products may usher in a new era. Formerly the CEO of Pyramid Composites and now head of GK Ventures, Kirila is co-inventor with Robert McCollum of VEC cells. VECs are transportable factories for manufacturing molded parts. They run a patented manufacturing process whose operating system is best described as a controlled process-in-a-box. VEC cells provide operators with computer controls and simple visual and audio instructions that guide operators through the molding process. Because the software can be upgraded and controlled centrally over the Internet, VEC cells can deliver a consistent process regardless of where they are located or who is operating them.
The "emergency-aid program" of the mayor was unanimously supported by all parties. But now? Could it be possible that a "commoner" who had attended school only until his 12th birthday, and who never studied any kind of economics, know better than all experts, politicians and interlectuals? Had an unknown, who didn't even have a doctor title, found "the source of knowledge", "the magic recipe", said to be impossible to find?
The people of the neighboring community Kirchbichl laughed at the W\u02c6rgl inhabitants who wanted to produce their own money. A small miracle happened, however, that was to astonish the world.
For a contrary view, see the next item:
To synthesize the complex and discordant perspectives on 2020 and beyond, participant groups constructed independent glimpses of the world of 2020 from which common salient features were extracted. Fourteen groups sifted through the data and developed brief presentations depicting their ideas about the operating environment of 2020. A senior group of participants evaluated the substantive merits of each projection and elicited the common, highly likely assumptions. The group then forged a consensus world view, which was presented to all participants and iterated several times. The SPACECAST 2020 world view captured the most likely environment for US activity related to space in the future and became the planning basis for the study's concept and technology generation and assessment.
In this article, I will use "informational privacy" as shorthand for the ability to control the acquisition or release of information about oneself. I will argue that both the state and the private sector now enjoy unprecedented abilities to collect personal data, and that technological developments suggest that costs of data collection and surveillance will decrease, while the quantity and quality of data will increase. I will also argue that, when possible, the law should facilitate informational privacy because the most effective way of controlling information about oneself is not to share it in the first place.
The MAI, for example, specifically targets the ability of place-bound governments to require transnational corporations to modify their corporate behavior so they do not adversely affect the quality of the environment or the social sphere. Instead, the TNCs want to move politics offshore, so that the important decisions, like the quality of the food you eat, will be decided by unelected technocrats working for the World Trade Council.
The second point concerns the idea that TNCs are extremely centralized. Although s were, the rise of the digital economy has enabled them to change their structure to something more akin to an internetworked enterprise. For example, a car company which has its shares traded world wide on the net of global stock exchanges decides to build cars in Mexico to be sold in Asia from which a portion of the profits go to pensioners living in the Midwest whose pension fund had invested in the company. Considering the trend to move towards the virtual corporation structure, I would venture to say that where the TNCs have gained their competitive advantage is that they have, for the moment, outflanked place-bound governments by moving from centralized control structures to ones that embrace the concept of distributed control.
Anyone who works at a big company, or even a medium-size one, knows that this vision of the "virtual corporation" is a stretch. Like hammers, conveyor belts and computers, corporations are tools that mankind uses to create more from less. Until we've abdicated our eagerness for efficiency -- not likely, even in the expanse of an entire millennium -- corporations will remain fixtures of economic life.
But they will change -- and how. For one, the emerging global economy means that a company working according to the standards and practices of one region will have to adapt to the realities of the next. For another, there will be more industries built on knowledge rather than physical stuff. And companies that rose to eminence by inventing or exploiting the technologies and social trends of the past century will find themselves having to repeat the act but with altogether different methods. As business heads into the next millennium, will big corporations get bigger, or will smaller cyber-entrepreneurs become the wave of the future? The big will get bigger through mergers and acquisitions, like the recent CBS-Viacom and Exxon-Mobile deals in the United States. With barriers to entry declining, entrepreneurs will play an increasingly large role in our economic future.
In the future, corporations will define more of their value by intangibles -- the creativity of their designers (Intel Corp. comes to mind), the proficiency of their software architects (as at Sun Microsystems Inc.), the knowledge of marketers (Procter & Gamble Co., for instance) and even the strength of the internal culture (as in the case of Hewlett-Packard).
Today, 50 years later, we are witnessing the rise of the "virtual state" and the emergence of a different kind of warfare through the use of smart bombs, laser-guided munitions, and information warfare weapons. This post-Cold War revolution in military affairs has shifted national security concerns from nuclear weapons use and deterrence to information weapons and deterrence involving both nation states and individuals and groups not attached to governments.
Leon Trotsky once remarked "You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you." We want to forget about the twin threats of political totalitarianism and nuclear annihilation that haunted humanity throughout the Cold War. The fact that in any given year approximately 30 wars of various sizes are raging on the planet from Chechnya to Chiapas seems far removed for most Canadians. Nonetheless, despite recent tensions in Iraq, the threat of war seems to have a quaintly archaic ring.
But whether we are interested in war or not, military strategists are preparing for the next information age war. The world of information warefare is a world where logic bombs, computer viruses, Trojan horses, precision-guided munitions, stealth designs, radio-electronic combat systems, new electronics for intelligence-gathering and deception, microwave weapons, space-based weapons, and robotic warfare are being discussed, developed and deployed.
The "modern" world view, dating back at least to Descartes' publication in 1637, is one in which rectangular, quantitative, "masculine", rational, scientific, individualist (e.g., evolutionary) thinking takes precedence. Over four centuries this modern view has edged out more "feminine", nurturing, human, spiritual, holistic, and social ways of "knowing" and being especially in Western Europe and the USA.
It appears that the "modern" era started to crumble on many fronts quite clearly during the 1960s and early 1970s when it also hit its peak, one might argue, with the landing of a man on the moon. The sixties and early seventies encompass a host of events and movements: civil rights movement, anti-war protests, environmental concerns (Silent Spring in 1962), E.F. Schumacher's "Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered" (1973), women's movement, etc.
The period to follow the modern era is the "postmodern" - note that the timescale here is centuries and so the postmodern period is only beginning and the coming century is likely the first fully postmodern!
By "postmodern economics" Brandt thus implies all that is to be expected from an economics which is in service to a postmodern society; progress toward such an ecomonics must go hand-in-hand with the progress of postmodernism in general.
Today, as society faces similar challenges, Karr's words still make sense. The human race has seen more technological change in this century than it has in the entire course of its existence, yet some aspects of human nature remain constant.
TUCOWS Macintosh Geography - This section contains programs to help you learn where in the world that country, ocean, canal, desert, etc. is located.
- Social aspects of emerging technology
This is the real cutting edge. These sites contain information on the ramifications the Net will have for our society and how it has, and will, shape it. - Information on legislation that will affect the Net
We've come this far without much government intervention, but with the Net's increasing visibility it is being subjected to ever more legislation. These sites are concerned with informing users of events that concern the Net. - Security and Privacy on the Net
As we use networks to communicate ever more critical information, issues concerning privacy and secure transmission crop up. Here you can find links to sites with encryption software, and others with basic security tips.
This document describes a research and development project called the Tele-Manufacturing Facility (TMF). The TMF is creating an automated rapid prototyping (RP) capability on the Internet. It is undertaking the necessary research and development to ensure that it is viable for engineers and scientists to use over long distances. One portion of the effort is the connection itself and how to allow users to easily submit jobs and have the system automatically maintain a queue. Another effort is to reduce the need for human-checking of RP part files. Rapid prototyping STL files are notorious for containing geometric and topological flaws. Special attention is being paid to automatically checking for such flaws in STL files, and in many cases, automatically fixing them.
This thesis is based on studies such as a municipality's comprehensive plan presented on the Internet and uncertainty in analysis result. In these studies it is shown that:
New citizen categories are reached if plans are presented also via the Internet. New categories of users create an increased demand on presentation methods. E.g. to be able to assess uncertainty in an analysis result Monte Carlo simulation can be a useful tool.
The future Internet GIS is dependent of the evolution in many different fields, such as component-based program development, distributed systems, new hardware platforms, new types of services, standardisation etc. In this thesis some of the basic and emerging Internet related technologies are described. Current trends and are pointed out and exemplified. Previous studies are described and put into relation from different aspects with the growing area of Internet GIS. The terminology b2b (business-to-business), b2c (business-to-consumer) and g2c (government-to-citizen) from the e- business area are used to categorise different areas of use of Internet GIS.
Among other conclusions that can be drawn in this thesis are for example that the development of GIS products in general is changing from having been technology-driven to becoming user-driven. Today's Internet GIS is mostly oriented towards map presentation. The future Internet GIS will most probably contain increased functionality, e.g. analysis capabilities. New types of mobile hardware platforms will probably create a demand for new types of GI services on the Internet, e.g. based on the current location of the user. Internet GIS within all the sectors b2b, b2c and g2c will most probably continue to grow in the future. When a wide variety of users and their hardware platforms access GI services on the Internet, important questions about data quality management, semantic interoperability and perception must be asked.
- 2001 Guide to Web Mapping
- Geography Connects Cyberspace with the Real World
- User Needs Drive Web Mapping Product Selection
- Map the Redwoods, Save the Redwoods
- GIS 2001 Branches Out in Vancouver
The recent dissemination of a spatial analytic perspective in the social sciences (outside of the discipline of geography) is often attributed to the rapid spread of GIS technology to the desktop and the availability of a vast array of geographically referenced socio-economic data. This has led to the use of GIS for data organization and visualization as well as increasingly in an inductive approach to exploring data for meaningful patterns and structures (exploratory spatial data analysis). While these have undeniably been important factors, an equally crucial aspect has been the need to operationalize "new" theoretical constructs that explicitly incorporate space in the analysis of human (economic) behavior. Many of these concepts are similar (though not always acknowledged) to the models proposed by economic geographers and regional scientists in the 1960s, and stress the importance of location, neighborhood, region and spatial (social) interaction. Current examples in economics are the emphasis on spatial externalities and regional clusters (e.g., Krugman, Arthur, Porter), theories of interacting agents and interdependent decision making (e.g., Pollak, Ioannides, Durlauf, Brock, Brueckner), the importance of social interaction and group effects (e.g., Akerlof, Aoki) and neighborhood effects (Borjas). Similar examples can be cited in recent work in other social sciences, such as sociology, political science and criminology. Unlike their antecedents of the 1960s, description and discussion of these theories appears in the "core" journals of the mainstream disciplines, such as the American Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy and Econometrica for economics.
- What are these changes and their causes?
- What can you do to avoid being capsized by these economic currents?
- What processes and decisions will optimally leverage your product and sales cycles?
- current state of the Internet
- trend toward complex, interconnected systems
- increased concern for information integrity and information survivability
- adaptive, self-correcting systems
- new approaches in survivability research
- the need for increased public awareness
- defense in depth and decentralization
- survivability: the future of security technology
- There is no fully virtualized enterprise nor fully digitalized industry. Leading economic sectors that are highly digitalized require strategic sites with vast concentrations of infrastructure, the requisite labor resources, talent, buildings. This holds for finance but also for the multimedia industries which use digital production processes and produce digitalized products.
- The sharpening inequalities in the distribution of the infrastructure for electronic space, wheter private computer networks or the Net, in the conditions for access to electronic space, and, within electronic space, in the conditions for access to high-powered segments and features, are all contributing to new geographies of centrality both on the ground and in electronic space.
- Commercialization of public networks and hierarchical concentrations of power in private networks are producing what I think of as cyber-segmentations--instantiations of dynamics of inequality and of power.
The intention of this paper is to re-orient the manner in which digital archives are thought about, and in so doing contribute to the enhancement of the design, implementation, and use of digital archives. The language that is often employed to describe digital archives tends to emphasize the ways in which they differ from traditional archives. While the technological advances that digital archives entail certainly warrant the drawing of such distinctions, I argue that relevant distinctions may also be drawn between the archiving of digital information and the digitization of archival information. I focus on three examples of digital archives: the Digital Earth Project (http://www.digitalearth.gov/), the Digital Imaging the Media Technology Initiative (http://images.library.uiuc.edu/), and the Chicago Imagebase Project(http://www.uic.edu/depts/ahaa/imagebase/).
- first, a brief reflection on the historical setting over three decades and the legacy left by the pioneers;
- secondly, a series of contemporary applications that demonstrate the common threads among GIS procedures and applications, and
- finally, some thoughts on trends that provide new ways of linking mapped data, processing and spatial reasoning.
This paper uses the three examples to illustrate the creative destruction of the built environment of ports that reflect the temporal crises in capital accumulation. Firstly, new technology in the form of containerisation from the mid-1970s. Secondly, the realignment of ports globally due to takeovers from both multi-national shipping lines and terminal operators. And, thirdly, the spectacle of waterfront redevelopments. These examples illustrate that "the wider processes of capital accumulation and maritime technological transformation are ...the primary driving forces for change". However, given this situation, there remains an important role for labour within this process in influencing the direction of port development internationally.
What made him and other leading persons in the profession think about economic geography? Definitely not the tradition of location theory. Krugman is most unkind about it. In his preface he writes: "Although the intellectual tradition of location theory is both wide and deep, what is taught is usually a very narrow set of geometric tricks involving triangles and hexagons."
Like any new theory, this one was triggered by external and internal forces. The internal force was that arriving at location theory was just the next logical step in the new trade theory which had developed during the eighties, and to which Krugman made major contributions. One of the starting points of the new trade theory was to explain trade between countries not differing significantly with respect to endowments. Hence, the theory had to give an endogenous explanation of regional specialisation patterns. From there it was only a small step to introduce a true spatial dimension by allowing for positive transport costs.
Ireland's economy can be characterised as one which is small and open. A large percentage of Ireland's economic activity takes place in the international sector, through exports and imports. In this paper we will examine different schools of trade theory and their respective explanations of differential industrial development between countries and regions. We will examine to what extent these theories can describe Irish experience to date. We will conclude by drawing out the implications for Irish trade and industrial policy in the future. In general what we show is that 'lumpiness' in the spatial concentration of industry is consistent both with the theories of international trade and the theories of industrial development.
The Four-hour Day Foundation exists to assemble a particular coalition of people prepared to question the fundamental assumptions of how we labor and how we distribute our immense wealth. Two percent of Americans now grow all of our food and then some. Another thirty million or so do all the mining, manufacturing, and construction. If this minority can produce our modern cornucopia, then the four-hour day is within easy reach. If we can rearrange world politics so as to honestly collaborate with other nations, anything is possible.
Besides their economic significance in terms of production losses, these epidemics have disrupted international trade. A questionnaire was designed to poll OIE Member Countries in order to gauge their capacity for disease forecasting. The questionnaire revealed a wide disparity among member countries in the flow of disease information from farm to national headquarters. For notifiable disease information seems to take up to a week for most countries, except in Europe where disease notification was reported as taking less than a day.
Computer supported, quantitative epidemiology, including risk analysis, disease modelling, GIS-based disease mapping, decision support systems and disease forecasting emerged as an area of deficiency in most national veterinary planning. A hierarchical system for a global early warning system against epidemic diseases is therefore proposed. FAO, through the EMPRES programme, has started to embark on such a concept to be developed in close collaboration with the OIE and other organisations. It is also apparent that a prerequisite for an efficient global early warning system is the capacity at the national level to collect data in a harmonised manner and to process such data. Regional organisations, OIE and FAO Commissions and international agencies can help in capacity development of the national veterinary authorities of member countries in these disciplines. It is also proposed that national veterinary authorities should incorporate concepts of emergency preparedness at an early stage in their plans for progressive control programmes of infectious diseases.
In fact, the very definitions that determine the nature and purpose of intelligence analysis and production will give way to a much broader understanding of the process. Where today intelligence is something governments collect, analyze and "produce," tomorrow it will just as likely refer to the process by which public and private sector competitors monitor, assess, warn and manage.
The future will also see the pluralization of data sources. While there has been an increasing reliance upon open sources, the future will see that reliance grow even more dramatically as more and more organizations collect and analyze data of special importance to their military, political, economic and social missions. The very nature of open source data will itself change as governments, companies, and global, international, national, and local news organizations produce more and more data -- in order to extract more and more descriptive, explanatory and predictive-estimative information. The open <---> closed source continuum will remain intact as the players along the continuum change. In the 1950s nearly all of the "closed" players were governmental focusing on military capabilities and intentions; by the 21st century national, multinational and global corporations (and other economic "alliances") will find themselves all along the continuum. "Private" data collections -- used for special analytical purposes -- will emerge as the public and private news organizations grow in number and capability. The other published media will continue to serve as reservoirs of information, reservoirs that will yield intelligence wholes greater than the sum of their parts.
At the heart of the data, information and knowledge bases, and the analysis and production of finished public and private sector intelligence, will be information technology.
This paper examines the trend in open source analysis and production and the role that information technology -- very broadly defined -- can play in the intelligence analysis and production process. It assumes that information technology has come of age and that opportunities now exist for relatively conservative applications of extremely powerful methods, tools and techniques. The paper deals with the range of information technology that might support the analysis and production process as well as some especially promising tools and techniques. It concludes with a set of recommendations for future investments in the technology, methodology and analysis.
- the problem of uncertainty which arises in the absence of information
- the technology available to address it
- methods available to apply the technology, and
- the current state-of-play in Australia and overseas.
...the technology is enabling companies to extend their operations and enlarge their profits while reducing their workforce and the pay and security of those who remain by contracting out work to cheaper labour around the globe and replacing people with machines.
The Real Time Economy
ECOLOGY and economics should push in the same direction. After all, the "eco" part of each word derives from the Greek word for "home", and the protagonists of both claim to have humanity's welfare as their goal. Yet environmentalists and economists are often at loggerheads. For economists, the world seems to be getting better. For many environmentalists, it seems to be getting worse. These environmentalists, led by such veterans as Paul Ehrlich of Stanford University, and Lester Brown of the Worldwatch Institute, have developed a sort of "litany" of four big environmental fears:Human activity is thus defiling the earth, and humanity may end up killing itself in the process. The trouble is, the evidence does not back up this litany.
- Natural resources are running out.
- The population is ever growing, leaving less and less to eat.
- Species are becoming extinct in vast numbers: forests are disappearing and fish stocks are collapsing.
- The planet's air and water are becoming ever more polluted.
Fifty years of development experience have yielded four critical lessons. First, macroeconomic stability is an essential prerequisite for achieving the growth needed for development. Second, growth does not trickle down; development must address human needs directly. Third, no one policy will trigger development; a comprehensive approach is needed. Fourth, institutions matter; sustained development should be rooted in processes that are socially inclusive and responsive to changing circumstances.
These insights are central to how the World Bank envisions its work in the 21st century and to the way in which it proposes to tackle the principal development challenges ahead. In addition to reducing poverty, these challenges include issues of food security, water scarcity, aging populations, cultural loss, and environmental degradation.
Much of that information is openly available, but much of it is not. Intelligence agencies attempt to fill the void. Their capabilities are costly. At times their activities are a source of embarrassment, even consternation. But they continue to provide information crucial to U.S. interests. Over the last five years, conflicts have been avoided, wars shortened, agreements reached, costs reduced, and lives saved as a result of information produced by U.S. intelligence agencies.
The Commission concludes that the United States should continue to maintain a strong intelligence capability. U.S. intelligence has made, and continues to make, vital contributions to the nation's security. Its performance can be improved. It can be made more efficient. But it must be preserved.
The following will outline:
- DIA's vision for the future of Defense Intelligence,
- the guiding philosophy that helps us shape a new DIA,
- the methods we use to create the climate and organizational structure in which we wish to operate, and
- a description of the caliber of people we need to bring DIA into the 21st Century.
The physical separation that comes with modern mobility of labour has increased our need for electronic communications. These electronic media, and their mystifying digital technology have created the perfect climate for surveillance. The British digital telephone exchanges are called 'System-X'. I still haven't met anyone who can explain what its capabilities are. With the advent of digital mobile phones we can be listened to in the street and also tracked by satellite - although there is little substantiated evidence for this it is well within the technologies available. So that's what the Global Positioning System satellites were for!
The other necessary ingredient is our ignorance. Only when we don't know we may be being listened to will we blurt out all those things we wanted to stay private.
Phone, fax and email can be listened in to and always be aware that the telephone is a microphone whether or not you're talking on it. Even when the receiver is down it can still pick up and transmit to the police, domestic Military intelligence and/or 'security services' what you are saying.
Within numerous of the defining problematics of the late twentieth century -- problematics such as globalization, governance, and geography -- unruliness appears as a mantra to some and as a paradigmatic and spectral condition to others. In and of itself, the concept of "unruliness" is not a secret cipher to our contemporary global political economy. It expresses no hidden essence nor does it offer divine revelation, a mastering concept based on a god's eye view (the position of a Mackinder) from which to make sense of the messy complexity of our world at the end of the millennium. Like all concepts, its multiple uses are delimited con-textually. Our interest in it is as a path of entry into the problematics of ungovernable globalization, turbulent governance, and disorderly geography, problematics where "unruliness" registers in ways which divulge certain lines of power and disclose ironic contradictions in the structural trends and tendencies re-configuring the rules of the globe. In this sense, the unruly is, for us, a question and not an answer, a open line of inquiry and not a closed definitive description. So it is, too, for the essays that make up this volume which engage the unruly problematics of globalization, governance, and geography in different places, contexts, sectors, and institutional sites. Rather than describe each essay in detail or discipline all in the name of a forced thematic singularity, we wish to use this introduction to articulate the multiple problematics they negotiate, articulating as we go along the particular sites of power addressed by the various chapters in the volume. Our goal in this volume is not to survey the global political economy we work within from some transcendent "geographical perspective" but, instead, to engage with the polymorphous unruliness of our world to gain a greater understanding of its shifting tectonics of power and the faultlines they generate.
The central feature of the idea of globalization is that many contemporary problems cannot be adequately studied at the level of nation-states, that is, in terms of each country and its inter-national relations. Instead, they need to be conceptualized in terms of global processes. Some have even gone so far as to predict that global forces, by which they usually mean transnational corporations and other global economic institutions, global culture or globalizing belief systems/ideologies of various types, or a combination of all of these, are becoming so powerful that the continuing existence of the nation-state is in serious doubt. This is not a necessary consequence of most theories of globalization.
The argument of this paper is that much of the globalization literature is confused because not all those who use the term distinguish it clearly enough from internationalization, and some writers appear to use the two terms interchangeably. I argue that a clear distinction must be drawn between the inter-national and the global. The hyphen in inter-national is to distinguish (inadequate) conceptions of the 'global' founded on the existing even if changing system of nation-states, from (genuine) conceptions of the global based on the emergence of global processes and a global system of social relations not founded on national characteristics or nation-states. This global system theory is the framework for my own research.
Those were the days. At the time, it was widely believed that the Internet would help undermine authoritarian regimes, reduce governments' abilities to levy taxes, and circumvent all kinds of local regulation. The Internet was a parallel universe of pure data, an exciting new frontier where a lawless freedom prevailed. But it now seems that this was simply a glorious illusion. For it turns out that governments do, in fact, have a great deal of sovereignty over cyberspace. The Internet is often perceived as being everywhere yet nowhere, as free-floating as a cloud\343but in fact it is subject to geography after all, and therefore to law.
The idea that the Internet was impossible to regulate dates back to when its architecture was far simpler than now. All sorts of new technologies have since been bolted on to the network, to speed up the delivery of content, protect networks from intruders, or target advertising depending on a user's country or city of origin. All of these technologies have mundane commercial uses. But in some cases they have also provided governments with ways to start bringing the Internet under the rule of local laws.
One thing is clear. While entirely of human design, the emerging network appears to have more in common with a cell or an ecological system than with a Swiss watch. Many diverse components, each performing a specialized job, contribute to a system that is evolving and changing at an incredible speed. Increasingly, we are realizing that our lack of understanding of the Internet and the Web is not a computer-science question. Rather it is rooted in the absence of a scientific framework to characterize the topology of the network behind it.
The works of Heiner Benking - Heiner Benking is a map-maker, model-builder, and planner who has worked in development, environment, technology, management consulting, and the automation-, data- and communication industry.
First, we examine the use of Solid and Geometric Modelling for visualising urban planning and urban design. This report documents and compares examples of the use of Virtual Reality Modelling Language (VRML) and proprietary WWW based Virtual Reality modelling software. Examples include the modelling of Bath and Glasgow using both VRML 1.0 and 2.0. The use of Virtual Worlds and their role in visualising urban form within multi-user environments is reviewed. The use of Virtual Worlds is developed into a study of the possibilities and limitations of Virtual Internet Design Arena's (ViDA's), an initiative undertaken at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, University College London. The use of Virtual Worlds and their development towards ViDA's is seen as one of the most important developments in visual communication for urban planning and urban design since the development plan.
Secondly, the role of photorealistic media in the process of communicating plans is examined. The process of creating photorealistic media is documented, and examples of the Virtual Streetscape and Wired Whitehall Virtual Urban Interface System are provided. The conclusion is that, although the use of photo-realistic media on the WWW provides a way to visually communicate planning information, its use is limited. The merging of photorealistic media and solid geometric modelling in the creation of Augmented Reality is reviewed. Augmented Reality is seen to provide an important step forward in the ability quickly and easily to visualise urban planning and urban design information.
Third, the role of visual communication of planning data through GIS is examined in terms of desktop, three dimensional, and Internet based GIS. The evolution to Internet GIS is seen as a critical component in the development of virtual cities that will allow urban planners and urban designers to visualise and model the complexity of the built environment in networked virtual reality.
Finally, a viewpoint is put forward of the Virtual City, linking Internet GIS with photorealistic multi-user Virtual Worlds. At present there are constraints on how far virtual cities can be developed, but a view is provided on how these networked virtual worlds are developing to aid visual communication in urban planning and urban design.
Rather than being constantly green, the cells on its surface will contain pigments controlled by the action of something akin to a nervous system. Like the skin of a cuttlefish, the cells will turn color to form words and images as directed by a connection to the Internet of the day. Given the speed with which the cuttlefish changes its pigment, these pages may not change fast enough to display moving images, but they will be fine for the written word. Each page will be slightly thicker than the paper Spectrum is now printed on, making room for control elements (the nervous system) and circulation of nutrients. When a page ages, or is damaged, it will be easily recycled. It will be fueled by sugar and light.
The Wireless Age - Wireless technology has taken the world by storm. The growth of the wireless phone market is nearly as impressive as the Internet explosion itself. Consider that, outside of North America, more people use wireless phones than surf the Web. Combining the two seems irresistible. These papers discuss the implications for society, business and government.
Entire text of the book may be read here.
The ability to create a unique concentration of local skills, of local technology, of local infrastructure, of local suppliers in the relevant fields gives the ingredient for competitive success... The homogenising force of a shrinking world, with computer technology available to all, will make it essential for firms to be different from their rivals. Such differences, especially in economic vitality, appear to be established at home.
The crisis of accumulation has long been tracked by Marxist economists such as Paul Sweezy. Recently key extensions have been added by eco-Marxist James O'Connor. But radicals also need to take note of the important contributions of Alvin and Heidi Toffler and their three waves theory. The Tofflers describe agricultural society as the first wave and industrial society as the second wave. They have added new insights into the nature of changes in the economic base where knowledge has become the most important tool of production. This became possible because of the revolution in the means of production, or information technologies. Toffler calls this information society the third wave, or what we'll call information capitalism.
Discussions of teleworking or telecommuting.
- Physical labor is becoming relatively less important in the information economy, resulting in a growing disparity in wages paid to thosewith differing levels of education.
- The population is aging in most countries of the developed world, and there will be fewer working-age people to support traditional retirement lifestyles. This means that retirees will need additional training to continue being productive throughout their lives.
- Skills that used to serve a lifetime now become obsolete in a few years, and people of all ages will continually need to refine and expand their knowledge and skills.
Learning processes are inherently interactive in nature and generally characterised by uncertainty. Most new knowledge is related to problem-solving, often on a trial-and-error basis, and as such it is normally arrived at incrementally. The interactive processes of solving problems, where the needs of one party becomes the driving force for action of another, contain both codified and tacit elements. Indeed, we argue that in an era when codified knowledge is globally disseminated faster than ever before, tacit, and spatially much less mobile, forms of knowledge are becoming more important as a basis for sustaining competitive advantage.
Regional capabilities can be seen as the combination of the human and physical resources available, the structures established in the region through time, and the regions specific institutional endowment as it is shaped by the previous rounds of knowledge creation. By embodying knowledge useful for particular classes of activities the institutional endowment reinforce the parth-dependent nature of regional economic development.
There is considerable intuitive appeal to the notion that something is indeed different. Microsoft seems to be a very different kind of enterprise than General Motors. But what precisely are those differences and which ones are important? How can management or investors tell whether a given enterprise has them, and to what degree? Furthermore, if the principles of knowledge management are being used within an enterprise, how does one know how well they are working?
To answer such questions I have found it helpful to think of commercial enterprises as existing and operating in a "space", which I call Information Space. In this space industrial age enterprises, such as General Motors of the 1950\u03c0s, exhibit different characteristics, and therefore occupy a different region, than information age enterprises, such as Microsoft.
Information Space, as I define it, is quantifiable. In order to characterize its nature, (navigate through it, as it were) I have developed a number of new tools and techniques. These are presented here. In particular, the concept of Information Intensity is introduced as a metric for differentiating between an Industrial Enterprise and the new information age form, which I call a Knowledge Enterprise. And the notion of IT Efficiency is presented as a way to determine how well a Knowledge Enterprise is performing.
These two concepts, Information Intensity and IT Efficiency, comprise the two dimensions of Information Space. Some eight hundred large U.S. companies have been analyzed to produce a characterization of its nature. To provide an intuitive basis for understanding Information Space, I begin with a review of the high-level, qualitative characteristics of the Knowledge Enterprise.
Because of the complexity of the myriad undertakings now under way, and because the general public understands little of their implications, the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) decided to focus its 1994 Annual Meeting Technical Session on the revolution in the information infrastructure. The intent of the meeting was to obtain the views of a diverse set of speakers whose current activities and future plans cover a broad range of approaches to the subject. The symposium addressed three broad questions:
- What technical and economic factors will determine the standards of and marketplace demand for products and services?
- What roles are government and private investment, demonstration projects, and regulation and regulatory reform likely to play in the development of the infrastructure during the next decade?
- What are the problems and promises for people's lives and organizations' work as video and data communications approach and surpass the interactivity of telephones?
As we turn our attention for a moment, and look at the globalization of industry and commerce that is now an ongoing affair --- one in full swing --- we can see how the Myth of E-Progress is also about the increasing collectivization of the economies and technologies of distinctly different sectors. This all means that the new socialization process is not a political affair; it is economic! It is not the least bit ironic that the capitalists that railed against Socialism are themselves the ones who are initiating a new Capitalist-style Socialism. Again, a political engine does not power the new socialization; it is economically powered and driven. We are newly socialized around economies, capital, and commerce. What politics and ideology could not accomplish, economics and markets are. The major emblem for this new socialization of power and capital is, no doubt, the multinational corporate structure. These newly decentered/globalized institutions are subsuming all other interests under their own; which is economic growth and progress. The rogressive dictates of the new socialization process require the localization of capital in order to power the engines of progressivism. The decentered, multi-national corporate power structure is the localization of capital heretofore unseen on such a scale.
Following this first stage system are presented two more application scenarios according to increasing levels of penetration and increased reliability of the network. The medium-term application is the provision of mobile Internet access to allow consumer and business services. The long-term application is the ability to perform automated transactions. Envisioned in this long-term scenario is the ability to do area-wide road pricing to reduce congestion levels and influence land-use decisions.
Technology options and design choices for privacy protection are discussed including voluntary participation, incentivized participation, blackout zones, aggregation of data, non-identifiable data, and anonymous routing protocols. Centralized toll tables and transactions are shown to reduce privacy but increase convenience as opposed to distributed toll tables and in-vehicle transactions. Insitutional implemention through Federal ITS funding of a State-run public-private partnership is suggested to maximize mutual benefit. Given these options for handling the issues, the staging presented, and the flexibility, coverage, and application benefits of the system, the conclusion is that such a network would be suitable for mitigation of urban traffic congestion.
- What was the role of Southern Appalachia in the in the capitalist world-economy?
- Through what transport systems was this mountainous terrain articulated with global commodity chains?
- Who were the Appalachian agents who organized the flow of commodities from and into this mountainous periphery?
- How did class conflict over transport infrastructure deepen capitalist inequalities in the region?
- How did transport lag deepen the peripheralization of this region?
Discussion at the workshop focused on some of the most fundamental and pressing geographical concerns, namely the accelerating pace of change in our world, and our inability to understand the dynamic linkages between the physical and social processes that drive such change. Workshop participants noted that while considerable effort has revealed a great deal about the physical and human sub-systems of our world, the integration of these sub-systems is not well-grounded scientifically, and thus our ability to forecast future geographies - future landscapes of physical resources, of economic activity, of environmental pressure and human migration, and of poverty, famine and political dislocation - remains poor. The importance of accurate forecasts of our changing world is clear and such a goal demands coordinated and sustained efforts on behalf of geographers and other scientists. To this end, the participants of the workshop identified a Center for Forecasting Geographic Change as the most compelling infrastructure need within the Geography and Regional Science Program.
To better understand such causes, this study uses lateral pressure theory to account for politics within and among nations. However, whereas lateral pressure has traditionally sought to explain the onset of war, this study extends the theory's initial application to the environment by specifying additional connections between the social and natural environments.
Global deforestation, this study's litmus of environmental lateral pressure, is tested against domestic GNP, population growth, and a new variable, trade connected GNP, which accounts for the trade effects among nations. This model specifically addresses the ongoing debate between economists and evironmentalists over the costs and benefits of free trade. Economists defend free trade citing evidence that domestic GNP increases, spurred on by the gains from trade, reduce environmental degradation because rich countries can better afford to address such concerns. This study replicates these results, but then it tests trade effects directly and finds that they add to rather than detract from global deforestation. Moreover, these trade effects are consistently more significant, stable, and influential than the countervailing domestic GNP effects.
The components of this social process termed decision-making are data, decision models, the decision environment and people; more data leads to more information, and decision models go a step further by transforming information into knowledge of consequences. By understanding how the rational actor uses a GIS to transform information into knowledge and the changes in the decision environment due to the introduction of the technology one would be able to improve GIS design, which in turn will lead to better decision-making, the ultimate objective for having the technology in the first place.
This paper builds upon a case study in the Northeastern Brazilian State of Maranh\u201eo on the use of GIS for transportation planning, outlining the design considerations in terms of decision models (how and to what extent data are transformed into knowledge and actually used to improve the decisions being made) and including a discussion of the modifications of the decision environment due to the introduction of the technology, caused by the modifications of the interactions between the various decision-makers and the multiple bounding structural elements (political, resource limitations, institutional and social).
Endogenous growth theory simply means economic growth from within a system, usually a nation-state. There are a couple of reasons for the rise of endogenous growth models. The first one is the fact that the economies and output of industrialized countries is so much higher now than it was a century ago. Economics needed some kind of theory or model to account for that, and technological growth was a good explanation. As Romer states, "Output per hour worked in the US today is 10 times as valuable as output per hour worked 100 years ago." Most of that is due to technological change; other reasons include the growth in human capital (ie. the development of an effective labour force -- itself arguably the product of new education technologies).
Look to history. The English longbow plied by yeomen ended the military power and social reign of knights. "Shining" armor fell to a taut string, a cured piece of wood, and a tipped arrow. The military dynamic of the Middle Ages - knight, squire, and armorer - ceased.
Air power launched from carriers (knights of the sea) in World War II determined who ruled the waves. Today, low-flying missiles like the Exocet are the naval equivalent of the longbow for developing nations facing nuclear-powered aircraft carriers.
Rogue nations can run espionage/terrorist rings with a few individuals using laptop computers, (the hacker's longbow) bringing down entire networks. A networked war turns the Internet's ability to connect anyone to everyone, anywhere, on its head.
For most of our history, technology has driven a process of concentration urbanization and increasing scale based on the production of things or objects, the Industrial model. Societally this has meant a migration to a few large cities, the increasing use of industrial models for many of our public institutions, such as schools and the delivery of healthcare, and the weakening of the powers and responsibilities of local communities and the smaller provinces.
In response, Government policy has increasingly focused on urban areas, on large projects, big business and industrial jobs as the engines of the economy. Government itself began to operate on an industrial model as did our institutions of learning and healthcare.
Power and responsibility was progressively given up by the community and by individuals to the centre both in government and in business. A culture of dependency began to erode the founding model of self sufficiency. A sense of "chaotic individualism" (Rohlen) began to replace the sense of being part of an interdependent community.
For many of the years following the second world war this seemed to have been a very successful strategy. However the laws of diminishing returns seem to have caught up with us. The unfortunate and unintended byproducts of this process have been the development of social dependency and a great fiscal crisis.
Now it seems that technology is driving an opposite process of dispersion and is creating a new type of economy based on the development of ideas and their application.
It is important to understand that the underlying rules concerning ideas are opposite to most of those that govern objects. (Romer) The new rules are not simply a linear evolution from the old rules. They are in opposition to the old rules and therefore drive completely new assumptions.
In summary, they involve a shift in cost and emphasis from production to design, the value of sharing rather than in protecting information, the value of linkages & networks, the shift from mass production to mass customization, the need for organizational agility, the need for horizontal infrastructure rather than vertical integration and silos, the requirement for a large pool of ingenuity rather than simply a pool of labour, the need for continuous learning, the need for intellectual capital rather than simply financial capital, the need to be able to finance uncertainty rather than assets.
The replacement of low-level intellectual functions by electronic devices -- the bank machine, autonomous robotic devices, the "electronic pilots" commercial aircraft, security devices, automation of services, automated and flexible manufacturing, global information systems, etc. - This is changing productivity and the nature of work.
The capacity to make enormous bodies of knowledge instantly available to individuals linked through the electronic networks and the creation of learning networks, that cross existing geo-political boundaries. This is changing our approach to learning and our education institutions.
The opportunity to interact through virtually instantaneous global networks for a variety of functions ranging from education and training to entertainment, financial markets and business and military activities.
Virtually instantaneous global transmission to individuals in all regions through news media and other institutions of "information", whether objective or biased. This could change values, beliefs and cultures.
The prosperity of regions, the nature and concepts of work, income equity, values, cultures and social and political systems will change as a result of this technological revolution. If we look at how Home Sapiens has coped with other deep and broad technological revolutions, there may be some insights that might be relevant to how we cope with the "chips for neurons" revolution. What is clear is that social policies and institutions in Western countries that helped sustain political freedom and civic societies for the developed economies of this century are not sustainable in the face of the forces unleashed by today's techno-economic revolution.
The answer is what might be called a "constellation organization": A number of autonomous but linked companies, business units, or other organizations orking together to achieve a new level of networked mutual support. A collection of interdependent, self-governing units sharing everything from corporate services to venture capital to customers to ideas to business models to supply chain relationships. A whole greater than the sum of its parts, managed very differently from a traditional industrial era company.
In an information agency that seeks to answer questions, rather than simply supply information, strategies involve communications as the core technology. Direct interaction with the environment enables assertive delivery of relevant news and information, as well as feedback from the community on questions perceived as relevant to specific places, times, cultural values, and social conditions. By incorporating a dynamic work environment ready to take on this challenge, this organization can begin to create and discover connections between various community members and the world of information.
Coulombe notes that, despite Canada's huge size and geographic diversity, many disparities between rich and poor regions were gradually removed between 1950 and the mid-1980s through the "convergence phenomenon," whereby human and physical capital tend to accumulate more quickly in regions where they are relatively scarce. Interregional transfers, Coulombe argues, played their part by helping to finance improvements (in the form of better education and training) in human capital in the poorer regions, especially Atlantic Canada. This, in turn, helped to attract financial and physical capital into those areas. Since the mid-1980s, however, the catch-up process generated by the convergence of capital seems to have exhausted its effects, and the disparities that persist reflect not only the industrial structure of the regions but also the institutional and political context. The downside of fiscal federalism, Coulombe argues, is that, by financing the delivery of health care, education, and income support by the poorer provinces at levels comparable to those found in richer provinces, it encourages Canadians to remain in low-productivity regions. Individuals who cannot find work in their home province need not, therefore, move to benefit from adequate public services.
This poster was based on a famous magazine cover depicting the "New Yorker's view of the world," and which has been replicated hundreds of times for various cities, states, and regions. The obvious joke and subtle truth of these posters is that the residents of cities see their homes as all-encompassing and overwhelmingly important despite the tiny fraction of the earth's surface they occupy. Such biased representations of the earth's surface might not be a bad thing. If you spend ninety percent of your life in one city, or as is more often the case, in one borough of a city, such a slanted map would be much more practical than the traditional map of the world showing great stretches of uninteresting ocean and inaccessible deserts. Whether a map is useful or accurate depends on your interests: Are you looking for a streetcar stop, or are you sailing around Cape Horn in a thirty-foot sloop?
From these analyses, it was found that the station below the STP showed degraded water quality such as higher levels of bacteria, lower dissolved oxygen, higher biological oxygen demand (BOD) and higher levels of total phosphorus than the station above the STP. The third station, located approximately eleven kilometers downstream from the STP did not exhibit the expected improvements in some of the selected parameters when compared to station two due to the existence of several non-point sources of organic contamination. Trends over time for the three stations are described for bacteria, dissolved oxygen, BOD, and total phosphorus. Additional water quality studies involving diurnal dissolved oxygen surveys and the collection and analysis of benthic macroinvertebrates are recommended to complement the data currently gathered on the Credit River by the Provincial Water Quality Monitoring Network (PWQMN).
The revolution's effects on human health may be the most startling as breakthroughs improve both the quality and length of human life. Biotechnology will also enable us to identify, understand, manipulate, improve, and control living organisms (including ourselves). Information technology is already revolutionizing our lives, especially in the developed world, and is a major enabler of other trends. Materials technology will produce products, components, and systems that are smaller, smarter, multi-functional, environmentally compatible, more survivable, and customizable. In addition, smart materials, agile manufacturing, and nanotechnology will change the way we produce devices and improve their capabilities.
The technology revolution will not be uniform in its effect across the globe but will play out differently depending on its acceptance, investment, and a variety of issues such as bioethics, privacy, economic disparity, cultural invasion, and social reactions. There will be no turning back, however, since some societies will avail themselves of the revolution, and globalization will change the environment in which each society lives.
It has rapidly become possible for a small group of knowledgeable and skilled individuals to create chaos, wreak havoc, destabilize, and potentially destroy what is currently referred to as 'Western Civilization.'
Infowar, the ability to destroy or disrupt these networks, has become a major security challenge. Individuals, terrorists, or foreign countries capable of penetrating these infosystems could wreak havoc with our national defense and civilian infrastructures. How does the Law of War and other international law limit this new form of warfare? That question provides the focus for this paper, which raises many issues with no clear legal precedent. In this new arena, the author advocates applying existing law to fill gaps as they are identified, while trying to develop and adapt the law to the changed environment.
Fourth Generation Warfare - Roughly speaking, "fourth generation warfare" includes all forms of conflict where the other side refuses to stand up and fight fair. What distinguishes 4GW from earlier generations is that typically at least one side is something other than a military force organized and operating under the control of a national government, and one that often transcends national boundaries.
The terrorist attacks killed over six thousand people, citizens of more than sixty nations. Such attacks, if left unchecked, threaten the safety of people all around the world. Thus these heinous crimes are clearly an attack, not just against the United States, but against all of humanity, and should be investigated by the United Nations World Court in the Hague as crimes against humanity. Warrants should be issued for the arrest of those responsible, and the international community, under the auspices of the United Nations, should be authorized to bring these criminals to justice. This approach is being used successfully to hold Slobodan Milosevic accountable for the atrocities he and his supporters committed in Yugoslavia.
Regional Science methods have great potential for attacking the urban problems in the developed world. The urban centers in these countries are facing serious problems of transportation, housing, environment, social and municipal services. The problems will remain. In the developing world, there is great regional disparity between rural and urban areas. This has mainly arose due to years of colonial rules, poor natural environment, severe climatic conditions, niggardly endowment of resources, past social and cultural developments and restrictive religious practices. All of these factors confine the production within the maximum possible frontier leading to low output. Frequently, the vicious circle of low output, high propensity to consume, low savings and capital investment result for a country. Industrialization usually started in a few port cities and it became highly polarized. Due to lack of development, migration from the villages to the cities created huge slums. This problem of development is complicated by ethnic, language and religious strife. Regional Science, properly reformulated, can be of immense value for policy decisions.
The idea of a Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) has firmly captured center stage in the US post-Cold War policy debate. Along with the related notions of information war and asymmetric warfare, the RMA concept has set the terms for discussing America's future security challenges and military requirements. The implications for defense policy are profound -- and yet there is little consensus on the meaning of these concepts, their inter-relationship, or their implications. The character, pace, and scope of the RMA remain at issue. Indeed, even the extent to which the concept of military revolution describes current, real-world trends remains unresolved. It is not surprising therefore that RMA-related concepts have been employed in support of widely divergent approaches to defense modernization. Of equal concern is the failure thus far of the RMA discussion to adequately address the likely implications of a RMA for arms control, diplomacy, alliance relationships, and international law.
The RMA Debate page aims to broaden the discussion of today's putative military revolution and refocus it on outstanding issues. We will facilitate access to the best full-text resources and online research about the RMA that the Web has to offer, featuring both advocates and skeptics of all stripes. Rather than seeking consensus we will pursue its prerequisite: an open and vigorous public debate. In this spirit we call attention especially to our collections of critical commentary: Program Assessments, Second Thoughts on the RMA, and RMA Outside the West.
Network has become a new basic point for the development and prosperity of a country and nation, at the same time, it is also pregnant with a new crisis for them. Experts have pointed out: Only by establishing an independent national information network while making use of the internet and instituting the pattern of "one country, two networks", can the security interest of our country and nation be guaranteed under the new opening situation. Globalization or an "earth village" does not at all mean universal harmony in the world.
- investigate the economic, social, and political forces that shape application and use of information technology (IT), and the impact of IT on economy and society.
- be a catalyst for research and analysis of IT and its impacts through workshops, collaborative projects, and dissemination of findings.
- translate current research and analysis of IT into undergraduate and graduate courses and materials.
- develop an international network of policy makers, researchers, and industry representatives to analyze the impact of IT from a wide range of disciplinary, social, and political perspectives.
- apply Michigan State University's land grant mission to address compelling social and economic issues arising from IT policy design and application.