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Explains how from a muddle of product proliferation, emerges a dominant design. It begins by noting the interest that both consumers and producers have to standardize products. Then identifies the idea of a dominant design with that of a ‘consensus good’ and describes how this ‘consensus’ is reached in the market. Illustrations are drawn from several product‐case studies such as typewriters, computer operating systems, video cassette recorders, automobiles, and quadraphonic sound.

Tax administration has a special centrality within public management. The bureaucracies that collect taxes are closely watched over by the Treasury or finance ministry and by legislatures or their public accounts committees. Technologies for better tax collection have been eagerly adopted by modern tax bureaucracies. But so much has this been true that these agencies' current critical problems often centre on very large, ‘legacy’ computer systems. Developed early on in the history of government IT, these systems are now too massive to change and too mission-critical to lose. Re-modernization of legacy IT systems now poses a major challenge for Western governments. This chapter reviews the basic set-up of tax bureaucracies and tax systems the seven countries studied in this book; the operation of government IT markets in the tax sector; progress in e-taxation; and the state of the art in tax administration IT.

Chapter 1 tracks the design of the new computer music system in the computer music laboratory of the Institute. It presents the institutional setting of the Music LOGO project and tracks the early developments of the system carried out by the musician and the programmer. The design moves and transactions of the two developers are described in detail, focusing on their design conversations, the puzzles and problems they. Issues like the entry points to the music domain, the nature of the computer music interface, the making of new digital objects, multiple representations, and the design of a new computer music educational environment are dealt with.

This chapter studies the wicked nature of information security. It has always been unlikely that there will be a breakthrough in any one specific area of information security that will solve the problems that exist across the entirety of the field. An alternative approach has been to step outside the field of information security and examine information security problems from the perspective of other fields. The security of every computer system depends on a myriad of factors, including the technologies that are employed, the incentives of the users, and the environment in which those technologies and users reside. This means that there is a limit to how much each discipline within the field of information security can contribute to improving the security of any system, whether it be software security, network security, user education, passwords, or cryptography.

This chapter addresses how the human user of a computer is in a prime position to act in ways that could compromise the security of the entire system. It looks at the harmful technocratic paternalism at the heart of the field of information security. The RAND Corporation and the early researchers had expected that a computer operating system could impose its will on the users of the computer, in effect forcing them to be secure. That philosophy was adopted by those who worked in the field of information security in the subsequent decades and manifested as a revealed preference for technological solutions. However, with the rise of email and the web, the user and their decisions became crucial to the security of the overall system. The possibility that security could be accomplished through technology alone was revealed to be a machine fantasy. The security of a computer is beholden to the whims of the user, and those whims are driven by the chaotic influence of economic motivations and psychological factors.

This chapter describes AutoTutor as a computer system that holds conversations with people in natural language. This computer system attempts to interpret the language and emotions of the learner in an effort to be dynamically adaptive. AutoTutor also holds a mixed initiative dialogue by asking and answering questions, giving hints, filling in missing pieces of information and correcting misconceptions. This chapter addresses the question of whether it is possible to have a computer generate and interpret cognition, action, and emotions. It identifies some components of AutoTutor that are most naturally construed as symbolic and that might present some challenges to those who are pursuing an embodied theoretical framework. It clarifies the sense in which a representation is considered as being embodied or symbolic.

This chapter examines the origins and evolution of the open source software sector. It discusses the three distinct areas of open source development. These include the development of many of the key features of computer operating systems in the 1960s and 1970s, the formalization of rules for software development and the advent of the Internet in the 1990s which accelerated open source activity. This chapter also considers the pace of change in the open source community, the role of corporations and corporate contributors and cost concerns of open source program users.

This chapter deals with the Operational system of the Iraqi armed forces. It describes the Operations Division of the General Staff, its missions and responsibilities and its development, especially during the Iran-Iraq war, and the staff directorates subordinated to it—Operations, Planning, Organization and Armament and Equipment. It describes the field corps that were involved in this field—the Signal corps, the Technical Equipment (Electronic Warfare), the computer system and the Military Survey system that was responsible for mapping and their training systems. It deals also with the Military Intelligence and its important role in the operations system, its responsibilities, organization and functioning, especially during the war against Iran. Its cooperation with foreign intelligence services, and the functioning of the Military Security Directorate.

This chapter examines how Union Pacific Railroad's merger with Western Pacific Railroad and Missouri Pacific Railroad came together. The merger of two major railroads is a complex task because it means meshing two different cultures together and integrating departments, not to mention changes in personnel. Furthermore, two different sets of rules and procedures must be combined. For modern railroads a merger also means combining two separate computer systems on which operations depend. Putting Union Pacific and Missouri Pacific together required careful thinking and delicate diplomacy.

In July of 1969 the Apollo 11 spacecraft emerged from the dark side of the moon and the on-board camera panned through the vast emptiness of outer space. Against the backdrop of interstellar night hung the great ball of earth, with the intense blue of its oceans and the delicate ochres of its landmasses shimmering beneath the vibrant and translucent layer of its atmosphere. In the shock of this visual moment, distances between us contracted; boundaries and borders ceased to exist. But the impression that sent the adrenaline flowing through my veins was that the teeming billions of organisms writhing about under the protective layer of the atmosphere were not separate—they were interdependent, fluid, and interactive aspects of the one organic dance of the planet’s life. The preceding paragraph, an entry form my diary written a few days after images of the whole earth first appeared on television, cannot be classed as scientific analysis. But it is entirely consistent with what the new story of science has revealed about the relationship between human and environmental systems in biological reality. The large problem here is that the political and economic narratives that now serve as the basis for coordinating global human activities are premised on scientifically outmoded assumptions about this relationship in the old story of classical physics. And this problem is further complicated by the fact that the view of this relationship that is still widely viewed as scientific in Darwin’s theory of evolution is also premised on these scientifically outmoded assumptions. Darwin went public with his theory for the first time in a paper presented to the Linnean Society in 1848. This paper begins with the following sentence: “All nature is at war, one organism with another, or with external nature.” In The Origins of Species , Darwin is more specific about the character of this war: “There must be in every case a struggle for existence, either one individual with another of the same species, or with the individuals of distinct species, or with the physical conditions of life.”

This chapter provides a brief overview of Benford's law. It states Benford's law of digit bias and describes its history. The chapter then discusses the origins of Benford's law and gives numerous examples of data sets that follow this law, as well as some that do not. From these examples this chapter extracts several explanations as to the prevalence of Benford's law. Finally, the chapter closes with a quick summary of many of the diverse situations in which Benford's law holds, and why an observation that began in looking at the wear and tear in tables of logarithms has become a major tool in subjects as diverse as detecting tax fraud and building efficient computers.