A ten-year longitudinal study of the impact of national, state, and local programs that address issues of digital divide and digital inclusion in Austin, Texas.
The 1990s brought surprising industrial development in emerging economies around the globe: firms in countries not previously known for their high-technology industries moved to the forefront in new ...Information Technologies (IT) by using different business models and carving out unique positions in the global IT production networks. In this book Dan Breznitz asks why economies of different countries develop in different ways, and his answer relies on his exhaustive research into the comparative experiences of Israel, Taiwan, and Ireland-states that made different choices to nurture the growth of their IT industries.
The role of the state in economic development has changed, Breznitz concludes, but it has by no means disappeared. He offers a new way of thinking about state-led rapid-innovation-based industrial development that takes into account the ways production and innovation are now conducted globally. And he offers specific guidelines to help states make advantageous decisions about research and development, relationships with foreign firms and investors, and other critical issues.
Government information systems are big business (costing over 1 per cent of GDP a year). They are critical to all aspects of public policy and governmental operations. Governments spend billions on ...them - for instance, the UK alone commits L14 billion a year to public sector IT operations. Yet governments do not generally develop or run their own systems, instead relying on private sector computer services providers to run large, long-run contracts to provide IT. Some of the biggest companies in the world (IBM, EDS, Lockheed Martin, etc) have made this a core market. The book shows how governments in some countries (the USA, Canada and Netherlands) have maintained much more effective policies than others (in the UK, Japan and Australia). It shows how public managers need to retain and develop their own IT expertise and to carefully maintain well-contested markets if they are to deliver value for money in their dealings with the very powerful global IT industry. This book describes how a critical aspect of the modern state is managed, or in some cases mismanaged. It will be vital reading for public managers, IT professionals, and business executives alike, as well as for students of modern government, business, and information studies. Available in OSO: http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/oso/public/content/management/9780199296194/toc.html
Militaries with state-of-the-art information technology sometimes bog down in confusing conflicts. To understand why, it is important to understand the micro-foundations of military power in the ...information age, and this is exactly what Jon R. Lindsay's Information Technology and Military Power gives us. As Lindsay shows, digital systems now mediate almost every effort to gather, store, display, analyze, and communicate information in military organizations. He highlights how personnel now struggle with their own information systems as much as with the enemy. Throughout this foray into networked technology in military operations, we see how information practice—the ways in which practitioners use technology in actual operations—shapes the effectiveness of military performance. The quality of information practice depends on the interaction between strategic problems and organizational solutions. Information Technology and Military Power explores information practice through a series of detailed historical cases and ethnographic studies of military organizations at war. Lindsay explains why the US military, despite all its technological advantages, has struggled for so long in unconventional conflicts against weaker adversaries. This same perspective suggests that the US retains important advantages against advanced competitors like China that are less prepared to cope with the complexity of information systems in wartime. Lindsay argues convincingly that a better understanding of how personnel actually use technology can inform the design of command and control, improve the net assessment of military power, and promote reforms to improve military performance. Warfighting problems and technical solutions keep on changing, but information practice is always stuck in between.
This open access book constitutes selected papers presented during the 30th Irish Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science, held in Munster, Ireland, in December 2022. The 41 ...presented papers were thoroughly reviewed and selected from the 102 submissions. They are organized in topical sections on machine learning, deep learning and applications; responsible and trustworthy artificial intelligence; natural language processing and recommender systems; knowledge representation, reasoning, optimisation and intelligent applications.
Today we are witnessing dramatic changes in the way scientific and scholarly knowledge is created, codified, and communicated. This transformation is connected to the use of digital technologies and ...the virtualization of knowledge. In this book, scholars from a range of disciplines consider just what, if anything, is new when knowledge is produced in new ways. Does knowledge itself change when the tools of knowledge acquisition, representation, and distribution become digital? Issues of knowledge creation and dissemination go beyond the development and use of new computational tools. The book, which draws on work from the Virtual Knowledge Studio, brings together research on scientific practice, infrastructure, and technology. Focusing on issues of digital scholarship in the humanities and social sciences, the contributors discuss who can be considered legitimate knowledge creators, the value of "invisible" labor, the role of data visualization in policy making, the visualization of uncertainty, the conceptualization of openness in scholarly communication, data floods in the social sciences, and how expectations about future research shape research practices. The contributors combine an appreciation of the transformative power of the virtual with a commitment to the empirical study of practice and use.
Over the last several decades, employers have increasingly replaced permanent employees with temporary workers and independent contractors to cut labor costs and enhance flexibility. Although ...commentators have focused largely on low-wage temporary work, the use of skilled contractors has also grown exponentially, especially in high-technology areas. Yet almost nothing is known about contracting or about the people who do it. This book seeks to break the silence.
Relations between the public and holders of political authority are in a period of transformative flux. On the one side, new expectations and meanings of citizenship are being entertained and ...occasionally acted upon. On the other, an inexorable impoverishment of mainstream political communication is taking place. This book argues that the Internet has the potential to improve public communications and enrich democracy, a project that requires imaginative policy-making. This argument is developed through three stages: first exploring the theoretical foundations for renewing democratic citizenship, then examining practical case studies of e-democracy, and finally, reviewing the limitations of recent policies designed to promote e-democracy and setting out a radical, but practical proposal for an online civic commons: a trusted public space where the dispersed energies, self-articulations and aspirations of citizens can be rehearsed, in public, within a process of ongoing feedback to the various levels and centers of governance: local, national and transnational.
Digital India Thomas, Pradip Ninan
2012, 2018-12-24, 2012-07-11, 20120101
eBook
Digital India is a case study-based, critical introduction to the theory and practice of the digital in social change. The volume--with its chapters on telecommunications, software, mobile telephony, ...e-governance, ICT4D, software patenting, public sector software and cultural piracy--offers an entry point into an understanding of the contested nature of the digital in India via an analysis of theory and practice.