Search Results

This chapter provides a history of the development of the Internet in terms of its infrastructure, applications, and sources of inspiration. In doing so, it portrays the chief personalities, ideas, visions, and concerns forming the context in which the Internet was created. Amongst the persons portrayed are Paul Baran, Paul Otlet, Vannevar Bush, Joseph Licklider, Vinton Cerf, and Tim Berners-Lee. The chapter also provides a simple explanation of the Internet's technical basis, including explanations of protocols, e-mail, the Domain Name System, and World Wide Web.

If teaching is omnipresent in our knowledge societies, we know little about its evolutionary origins and we can hardly predict the outcome of today ever faster speed of information transfer made possible by the emergence of information and communication technologies used in wiki, e-mail, or web 2.0. To explore these issues, this chapter reformulates the ‘why teach’ question by asking: Why should an individual invest resources in transmission of information to another individual? A qualitative difference between teaching and other forms of altruism associated with material exchanges is that information copy number increases during teaching, allowing information to spread autocatalytically. Models are introduced where such autocatalytic transfer of information can modify the behaviours of individuals and thus impact their production of public good altering the shared environment. The chapter then discusses the evolutionary causes and ecological consequences of such dynamical processes that can be observed in organisms as diverse as bacteria and humans.

This chapter considers how a cultural insistence on confined space emerges in direct proportion to the manifest range or intensity of female networking. Beginning with the tradition of the locked room mystery and its disturbing misogynistic tendencies, the chapter analyses the isolating effects of technologies from telephones to e-mail when deployed in the name of romance or safety. A brief philosophical detour yields a curious opportunity in the epistemology of artificial intelligence as established by the so-called Turing Test, where the locked room required by the test’s controls creates an unanticipated space of gender ambiguity and desire. This dynamic returns in the pseudonymous e-mail choreography of You’ve got Mail, only to be shut down by gothic forces in thin disguise. The chapter comes finally to consider the gendered inversion of space in Bound as an impressive, if still troubling, escape from the space of crime.

The internet is the single largest and most diverse resource available to clinical neuropsychologists and remains a powerful ally for any patient focused practitioner. It is useful not only because it provides convenient access to a vast array of clinical and scientific information, but also because it allows disparate individuals to widen the informal networks that provide the bedrock of mutual co-operation and education that characterizes contemporary clinical science. This chapter provides practical advice so the internet can be used effectively, whilst giving an outline of the additional ethical considerations that internet communication presents. Topics discussed include personal safety and privacy, e-mail communication and etiquette, using the web, effective use of internet software, and ethics of internet communication.

This chapter focuses on keitai, its adoption and social effects, and presents arguments on the role of keitai in developing new supportive relationships, highlighting three supportive dimensions including emotional, financial, and instrumental. A comparison between the advantages of personal computer (PC) e-mail and keitai e-mail in developing diverse ties is presented with a focus on the ability of PC e-mail to type long and involved messages quickly. The chapter examines the Yamanashi study, which helps to explain whether keitai and PC e-mail quantity are associated with supportive and diverse ties formation. It concludes that if young Japanese people used only keitai to access their e-mails, it would hamper their chances of developing the diverse ties that PC email can offer.

This chapter focuses on the function of mobile phones as writing machines that, together with e-mails, do not only convey phonetic writing but also ideograms. It first outlines a phenomenology of the mobile phone to emphasize the allegiance, rather than the opposition, between the phone and the writing machine. It then clarifies what writing means and how it differs from orality, as well as the relations that govern the electronic text and the hypertext. It also argues that writing is not only the common denominator of e-mail, the World Wide Web, and the mobile phone but also television, radio and letters.

This chapter offers suggestions on how to use data for worker center growth. Strong organizations know the importance of good data and invest people, money, and time into creating effective data systems. Regardless of budget, a worker center must begin collecting data at every opportunity, including people’s names, postal addresses, e-mail addresses, and phone numbers, as well as information at all training events, demonstrations, presentations, and public forums. Data collection and management can help an organization build power. This chapter first considers the kinds of data to manage as well as common data programs such as simple e-mail programs, very basic database programs, and good online databases. It then outlines what a good data management system can do to a work center and explains how to clean and update data. It also looks at additional resources for managing data.

In the previous chapters, the point has been made that dental caries is controllable by the patient regularly disturbing the biofilm, the use of fluoride, especially in toothpastes, and a sensible, but not draconian diet. The success of these strategies depends on the patient, but patients may choose not to comply with the health advice given to them. Many know they should not smoke, should lose weight, and take more exercise, but choose not to alter their behaviour. Altering a patient’s behaviour may be key to caries control, and for this reason all members of the dental team should be interested in strategies to modify behaviour. Motivation is about unlocking the desire within another to make a useful change in behaviour. Good communication is one of the foundations for motivation. Compliance is not likely where patients do not understand, or cannot remember the message. However, people do not change their behaviour just because someone tells them, however clearly, that this is a good idea. Motivation comes from within and cannot just be instilled. It should also be remembered that motivation to change is something that comes gradually, with most people feeling ambivalent about change. Someone who is ambivalent may see a reason to change, but may also see a reason not to change. When we try to persuade someone who is ambivalent to change, the danger is they will resist, giving voice to the counter-argument as to why they cannot change. Actually, the best way to achieve change is if the patient, rather than the health professional, says why and how they should change. In other words, it is their idea and we are there to support it. Despite all these difficulties, good communication can make all the difference in achieving behaviour change and, for this reason, this chapter will now take a detour to discuss aspects of communication. Communication is made up of more than just the actual words used to convey information. The tone used conveys the speaker’s emotions and attitudes, and so-called non-verbal communication or body language can be just as important as the actual words.

This chapter focuses on how the intimacy of people with their communication devices results in attitude changes. It discusses the role of mobile phones, e-mail, text messages, and online interaction in modern day life. Communication technology helps people stay connected with one another despite not being physically present in the same place. However, the drawback seems to be that people give priority to people who are online rather than people who are physically present with them. The chapter explores the attachment of people with the Internet, which provides experiences that break the monotony of work, whether professional or personal. It further discusses the use of online role playing games by adolescents, creating different personas for themselves, and making changes that they would like to make in real life.

The Introduction outlines the history and reception of poets’ letters from the Romantic period to the present day, what many epistolary critics might gloss as a journey from ‘the golden age of letter writing’ to the apparent eclipse of letter writing by e-mail. It also discusses the different ways in which letters have been represented and utilized by biographers and literary critics, as well as by prominent theorists such as Bakhtin and Derrida.

It was a nice rock, as rocks go—a substantial chip of rose-colored quartz gleaming with flecks of crystal—but not the sort of stone that might grace a starlet's ring finger. Even so, curators at the American Museum of Natural History in New York had given it the kind of showroom treatment Tiffany's might lavish on its rarest diamond solitaire: a special exhibit case, dramatic spot lighting, and even a name designed to stir the imaginations of onlookers. The rock was a 350,000-year-old hand ax. The Spanish archaeologists who discovered it called it Excalibur. And they claimed it was the earliest known evidence of the dawn of the modern human mind. Found among the skeletal remains of 27 primitive men, women, and children, the ax might be the earliest known funeral offering, its discoverers contended. If so, it was 250,000 years older than any other evidence that such early human species honored their dead. As a reporter, I was in a bind. Discovery of the rock offered an opportunity—the potential news hook—for a fascinating story. But it posed a series of thorny questions that I had to resolve before I could, in good conscience, publish a story about the find. They are the questions that arise with every newsworthy scientific development. They center on the validity of the work, its importance to the general public, and whether independent scientists can vouch for it. There also are practical considerations. How much of a reporter's time is it worth? How quickly can the story be turned around? Is there enough material for a graphic? Can we get a photograph? How much space does it deserve? Does it have a chance of getting on page one? The claim being made by the Spanish archaeologists was certainly provocative and, no doubt, sincere. But how reliable was it? The study of human origins is a field defined by the paucity of evidence and conflicting scientific claims. As one distinguished paleo-anthropologist told me wryly, “The dividing line between reality and paleo-fantasy is very narrow.” Acting as a gatekeeper to sort the sense from scientific nonsense, a science writer ordinarily can spend almost as much time chasing down a misleading claim as publicizing valid work.

This chapter focuses on the surrealist poetry of robot spam. Writing on his blog Beyond the Beyond, Bruce Sterling—futurist and sci-fi novelist—noted how spambots are “evolv[ing] into...Surrealist poet[s]” in order to trick anti-spam programs. In 2002, spam hunters escalated hostilities in the arms race between spam-zapping programs and junk-mail programmers by making use of a statistical method called a Bayesian filter to rank words according to their likelihood of turning up in a piece of junk e-mail. Spambots countered via camouflage whereby they inserted random words or letters into headers and tacking what is known as a “word salad” onto the end of the e-mail. As anti-spam programs add the mutated comeons to their indexes of spamwords, spambots are forced to mutate still further. In time, their solicitations are reduced to alphanumeric gobbledygook. Spam scans the dream life of consumer culture and gives the Dadaists and the Burroughsian cut-up squad a run for their money when it comes to machineage avant-gardism.

Many social theories are based on generative mechanisms that are directly relevant to the emergence and coevolution of human networks. Ironically, as Monge and Contractor (2001) demonstrate, many published network studies fail to acknowledge or explicitly identify the social theories and generative mechanisms that motivate their research. In much of the rest of this book we examine a number of social theories in order to identify their generative mechanisms. These mechanisms can be used in conjunction with others to populate the multitheoretical, multilevel framework for the realization of communication and other networks described in chapter 2. For example, the theory of social capital suggests that people who try to exploit social holes will do so by seeking to improve their structural autonomy. On the other hand, theories of social exchange suggest that individuals and organizations forge ties by exchanging material or information resources. Of course, it is quite possible that people do both at the same time, thus requiring a multitheoretical framework. If this were the case, we would develop multitheoretical hypotheses. These would predict that statistical p* analysis of observed networks would reveal significant components for structural autonomy, mutuality, and reciprocation. Further, we would expect that other possible network components, such as transitivity and cyclicality, which are generative mechanisms in other theories, would not be statistically significant in the realization of this particular observed network. In this chapter we examine theories of self-interest and theories of mutual interest, the latter sometimes called theories of collective action, in order to identify their theoretical mechanisms. The self-interest theories are the theory of social capital, specifically Burt’s theory of structural holes, and transaction cost economics. The theory of collective interest that we examine is public goods theory. Social theorists have long been fascinated by self-interest as a motivation for economic and other forms of social action (Coleman, 1986). Theories of self-interest postulate that people make what they believe to be rational choices in order to acquire personal benefits. The strong form of this theoretical mechanism, originally postulated by Adam Smith, is “rationality.” It stipulates that people attempt to maximize their gains, or equivalently, minimize their losses.

I am the only person in my university building who wants no part of the university’s free e-mail and who does not surf the Internet, which makes me the last holdover from the days when conversations by voice, dusty books, and rectangular white envelopes with colored stamps in the upper right corner were our primary means of communication. Nevertheless, rumors of the new and wonderful electronic inventions reach me often—from my wife and children and especially from my students. Like the seven golden cities of Cibola, the Internet beckons; if I had the energy of Coronado, I would seek it out and master it. Being lazy, I sit in my office with nothing more modern than an automatic pencil, a telephone, and an aging Macintosh Centris equipped only with Microsoft Word 5.1,and think about what I am missing. I imagine the chat rooms, for instance, abuzz with scintillating conversations, the twenty-first century equivalent of the salon of Madame deStaël or that celebrated Oxford club where J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis read to each other from their latest manuscripts. I know that chat rooms are not really rooms, but in my mind I can see one clearly: the lustrous walnut paneling, the floor-to-ceiling mullioned windows framed by the thick pleats of burgundy velvet drapes, the comfortable arm chair supholstered in rich mahogany leather, and next to one of the chairs—my chair—a small Louis Quatorze table holding a Waterford snifter with a generous dollop of Napoleonic brandy. Sometimes the rooms are contemporary in style, with walls consisting of giant liquid-crystal sur-faces that shimmer with ever-changing, abstract splashes of color o bold, functional patterns of steel-like beams intricately linked, endlessly dissolving and reconnecting. In place of chairs there are convivial arrangements of very large, “smart” cushions that rapidly mold them-selves to the contours of the body regardless of whether one wishes to sit or recline. And the conversations! Here must be the ultimate purpose for which language was invented, especially my language, English, with its unparalled wealth of words.

Over a billion people don’t have access to a safe water supply. And a third of the world’s population lacks basic sanitation with the result that more than 2 billion human beings are afflicted with infections that result in diarrhea and other diseases. Tens of millions of them die every year. Improving this state of affairs poses a massive challenge. Take sanitation: What if we could provide basic facilities for all those people over the next 20 years? You’d have to hook them up to the sewer system at the rate of half a million a day. We know how to install individual toilets and sewage pipes, but a project on that kind of scale is way beyond our capabilities. It would not only require new technology but a huge amount of money and political will, too. The challenges for providing all humanity with access to clean water are similarly gigantic. It’s not a matter of scarcity. There is enough drinking water for everyone on Earth even as its population continues to grow. According to the United Nations, a human being needs 20 liters of drinking water a day to live healthily. Every year, 100,000 cubic kilometers of rain fall on the earth, which translates into 40,000 liters per person per day. That would be plenty even if you only manage to tap a tiny fraction. Sufficient drinking water is available for all even in the driest regions of the earth. The problem is one of quality: People don’t die of thirst; they die from drinking water that’s not safe. The use of water for agriculture is another story. Roughly 70 percent of the human use of fresh water is for farming. People rarely realize just how much water agriculture requires. It takes 1,000 liters to grow the wheat for a single kilogram of fl our, for instance. Other products soak up even larger amounts of water. A kilogram of coffee needs 20,000 liters, and a liter of milk takes 3,000—mostly for the cattle feed and the grass consumed by the cow.

Some people have a drink when they get home from work—a martini, a beer. Maybe two or three. Life is especially stressful in the twenty-first century. The same indecent forces that are destroying nature are disrupting our working lives as well. Who will own the company tomorrow? Will there be a “reduction in force” or some other euphemism for the ax? When is the next reorganization coming? Is my ten or twenty years of faithful service an asset or, more likely, a sign of obsolescence and suspicious loyalty to bosses and co-workers now out of favor or working for other companies? How am I to answer the fax that arrived at 4:00 p.m., the one that seemed to contradict the fax that arrived at 11:00? When will I find time to fill out the questionnaire from the Resource Management Office, and does it take precedence over the Goals Enhancement Strategy questionnaire that came from the Administrative Services Division? Are my computer files compatible with the new software system, and, if so, why did the box on the screen say, “This paragraph is un-readable. Do you wish to substitute a standard paragraph?” Just what is our real work, anyway? Alcohol can take the edge off stress, but it is not everyone’s consolation. Some choose television or the Internet; mine is to pick up one of the scores of detective novels that I keep close to hand and plunge in. Then I can forget for a little while the vice presidents, deans, and other academic, corporate-style bosses who do their best to make life in the modern university an unproductive misery. In this way I can put out of mind, temporarily, the pleas of students who don’t understand why there are no courses to take and the ravings of colleagues who can’t figure out how to cope with the contradictory, impossible demands placed on them. Why should detective stories be, for so many, such a good and entertaining way of escaping from reality? That they are is clear; billions of copies have been sold.

To begin with a little anecdote. There is a classroom, an ugly, badly shaped, windowless room in a modern university building designed with students not in mind. In this room there is a small class, my class. We have rearranged tables and chairs in a semicircle around my place to defy the terrible ambience and to allow all twenty-five students to see and hear each other and me. Class is in session; I am talking. Two students sitting together in the front row—a thirty-year-old man with a pager on his belt and a twenty-year-old woman—are speaking to each other and laughing quietly; they see that I am looking at them and they continue to laugh, not furtively or offensively but openly and engagingly, as if I weren’t there. I don’t know what they are laughing about. Both of these students will eventually receive an A in the course for their exceptionally fine work. As I speak to the class, a part of my mind is thinking about these students and wondering why they are laughing. Is there chalk on my face? Is my fly open? Have I repeated myself or unconsciously misused a word or inverted a phrase? Then I remember something Bruce Wilshire wrote, and the paranoia fades. The laughter has nothing to do with me. Bruce, a philosopher who works in a nearby building on campus, described the same attitude in his own classes in his book, The Moral Collapse of the University. This passive and casual rudeness, a fairly new phenomenon, has a simple cause, he said: “I sometimes see students looking at me as if they thought I could not see them, as if I were just somebody on their screen.” When my students were laughing, it didn’t occur to them that I would be bothered—at that moment they were treating me as if I were a face on television. That’s what it is; I am sure of it. The students (at least most of them) and I inhabit different worlds, even when we sit in the same room.

In an address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, meeting at the Vatican on October 22, 1996, Pope John Paul II accepted the theory of evolution, thus bringing to an official end, for the Catholic Church, the most bitter and most persistent of all debates between science and religion. “New knowledge,” John Paul said, “has lead to the recognition of the theory of evolution as more than a hypothesis.” He qualified his statement somewhat by pointing out that there are many readings of evolution, “materialist, reductionist, and [his preference] spiritualist interpretations.” Still, we must not quibble; the Pope has endorsed slow evolutionary change, Darwinian evolution, as the likely way that nature modifies all living creatures, including all human beings. Fashioning us in the image of God, the Pope appears to believe, took a very, very long time. The dust has not yet settled on the great evolution war, nor will it settle soon. A few intelligent scientists are still not convinced that evolutionary theory explains the species richness of our planet and the amazing adaptations, such as eyes, wings, and social behavior, of its in-habitants. There also remain powerful religious orthodoxies that show no sign of giving up the fight for creationist theology. A second war about evolution is now being waged, an invisible, unpublicized struggle between a different set of protagonists; it is a war whose outcome will affect our lives and civilization more directly than the original controversy ever did. The new protagonists are not science and traditional religion; instead, they are the corporate apostles of the religion of progress versus those surviving groups and individuals committed to slow social evolution as a way of life. To understand this other struggle, it is necessary to look at evolution in a broad context that transcends biology. Not just a way of explaining how the camel got her hump or how the elephant got his trunk, the idea of evolution can also be applied to the writing of a play that “evolves” in the mind of the playwright or the “evolution” of treaties, banking systems, and anything else that changes over time in a non random direction.