As the global information infrastructure evolves, the field of communication has the opportunity to renew itself while addressing the urgent policy need for new ways of thinking and new data to think about. Communication Researchers and Policy-making examines diverse relationships between the communication research and policy communities over more than a century and the issues that arise out of those interactions. The book provides primary material in the form of reports on such relationships spanning time periods, subject matter, policy issues, decision-making venues, and governments.
How can Europe, the United States, and Japan stop the technological, trade, and financial war on which they have increasingly and wastefully embarked? How can they direct the development and uses of science and technology and the economy in the interests of the well-being of the 8 billion people who will inhabit the planet in 2010-2020? Limits to Competition boldly frames international political economy and globalization debates within the new overarching ideology of competition and offers a balancing voice.
Information and computer technologies are used every day by real people with real needs. The authors contributing to Shaping the Network Society describe how technology can be used effectively by communities, activists, and citizens to meet society's challenges. In their vision, computer professionals are concerned less with bits, bytes, and algorithms and more with productive partnerships that engage both researchers and community activists. These collaborations are producing important sociotechnical work that will affect the future of the network society.
Media have been central to government efforts to reinforce sovereignty and define national identity, but globalization is fundamentally altering media practices, institutions, and content. More than the activities of large conglomerates, globalization entails competition among states as well as private entities to dominate the world's consciousness. Changes in formal and informal rules, in addition to technological innovation, affect the growth and survival or decline of governments.
In December 1998, Energy Secretary Bill Richardson announced that the U.S. planned to begin producing tritium for its nuclear weapons in commercial nuclear power plants. This decision overturned a fifty-year policy of keeping civilian and military nuclear production processes separate. Tritium, a radioactive form of hydrogen, is needed to turn A-bombs into H-bombs, and the commercial nuclear power plants that are to be modified to produce tritium are called ice condensers.
Until the 1980s, it was presumed that technical change in most communications services could easily be monitored from centralized state and federal agencies. This presumption was long outdated prior to the commercialization of the Internet. With the Internet, the long-forecast convergence of voice, video, and text bits became a reality. Legislation, capped by the Telecommunications Act of 1996, created new quasi-standards such as "fair" and "reasonable" for the FCC and courts to apply, leading to nonstop litigation and occasional gridlock.
In the "information age," information systems may serve as both weapons and targets. Although the media have paid a good deal of attention to information warfare, most treatments so far are overly broad and without analytical foundations. In this book Gregory Rattray offers a comprehensive analysis of strategic information warfare waged via digital means as a distinct concern for the United States and its allies.
The rapid growth of the Internet and the World Wide Web is transforming the way information is accessed and used. New models for distributing, sharing, linking, and marketing information are appearing. This volume examines emerging economic and business models for global publishing and information access, as well as the attendant transformation of international information markets, institutions, and businesses. It provides those in the public, private, and nonprofit sectors with a practical framework for dealing with the new information markets.
When most people think of hazardous waste trading, they think of egregious dumping by U.S. and European firms on poor countries in Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean. But over 80 percent of the waste trade takes place between industrialized nations and is legal by domestic and international standards. In Waste Trading among Rich Nations, Kate O'Neill asks why some industrialized nation voluntarily import such wastes in the absence of pressing economic need.
A great deal of research has focused on the role of governments, nongovernmental organizations, and advocacy groups in promoting environmental ideologies. Researchers and activists have generally assumed antienvironmental and antiregulatory stances on the part of corporations. Exporting Environmentalism is the first book to examine industry's transnational promotion of environmental ideas and practices. The book also challenges and complements other theoretical approaches to the study of international environmental politics.
