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This chapter discusses the importance of accounting information networks (AINs). More and more firms have refocused and vertically disaggregated, relying on small units which can involve both internal (within firm) and external (between firms) networks. The stability of such mixed mode structures requires the design of either AINs with a high degree of centrality or distributed AINs.

This chapter examines how social network analysis can be used as a diagnostic technique for better understanding myriad organizational challenges, ranging from improving communication between functional organizations to identifying key knowledge-sharing roles and responsibilities. A research program is described that aims to determine how organizations can better support work occurring in informal networks of employees. Working with a consortium of Fortune 500 companies and government agencies, collaboration and work in over forty informal networks from twenty-three different organizations was assessed. In all cases, the networks studied provided strategic and operational value to the embedding organization by enabling employees to effectively collaborate and integrate disparate expertise.

This chapter focuses on information networks, consisting of items of data linked together in some way. Information networks are all, so far as we know, man-made, with perhaps the best known example being the World Wide Web. There are also some networks which could be considered information networks but which also have social aspects to them. Examples include networks of email communications, networks on social-networking websites such as Facebook or LinkedIn, and networks of weblogs and online journals.

This chapter introduces the digitally augmented city as a major focus of current design research and practice. It critically examines the impact that the entanglement of networked information technologies with the urban realm has produced and discusses this in reference to extant literature. The entanglement of networked information technologies and urban environments has changed cities and urban life, and it has changed how we think about cities. Over the past two decades, a profusion of terms have been coined by scholars and practitioners to describe aspects of this changing urban condition. Networked city, real-time city, virtual city, smart city, hybrid city, responsive city, and ad hoc city are terms that are at times used lightly but that have underlying concepts that can help us capture more of the current urban condition and point to ways of working with it.

This chapter reviews the literature on mechanisms that underlie the onset and evolution of adolescent anxiety disorders as they relate to the development of anxiety in youth. It begins by examining adolescents' increased risk for anxiety disorders and the roles that social and biological, particularly neural, changes may play in its onset. Particular attention is given to the Social Information Processing Network (SIPN) which has both early (emotional) and later maturing (cognitive control) components. It then considers alterations in patterns of cognition that are associated with adolescent anxiety disorders, as well as their putative underlying neural mechanisms. The chapter describes an approach to studying the intersections among adolescent psychopathology, emotion and cognition, and underlying neural substrates. Finally, possible prevention approaches that integrate neuroscience and clinical research are presented.

This chapter discusses what happened to the Polish Jewish captives once they had been ransomed and released. Most sought to return home at the first opportunity. Without a patron, however, this was not easy. The captives had been brutally snatched from their previous lives and so, once freed, had little or no resources on which to rely. The religious obligation of the local Jewish society toward them ended with their ransom; once they had been freed, they were largely on their own and had to make their own way home—an extremely difficult, often impossible, proposition. There is no way to tell just what proportion of the ransomed captives managed to return home, though the desire to do so seems to have been fairly widespread. Still, there were those who simply could not manage it. The financial difficulties, the physical danger of long-distance travel, and the continuing threat of pirates in the Mediterranean must have deterred many, especially women, who often opted to stay and start new lives. The chapter then considers the refugee information network, the problems of identification, and the cultural contacts between Ashkenazi refugees and the Sephardi society.

In Chapter 9, political scientist and scholar of social networks David Lazer gives an overview of the standard tools of social network analysis. He explains how network dynamics can be useful for understanding human rights issues as they relate to global flows of people, information and goods, as well as for understanding the relationships between states and sub-state actors within the human rights regime.

This concluding chapter reviews the central arguments of the book and reflects critically on living with uncertainty and unpredictability as a form of critical mobility for urban living. It considers how the focus on efficiency, data-driven predictability, and control in the narrative about cities over the past two decades strikingly recalls the early days of the twentieth century. What then was the idealized new and modern has become the smart of today. The development of technology has long pursued the superlatives of faster, higher, bigger, cleaner, stronger, better, and safer. This was a promising strategy when the scope and reach of technologies were limited. Today, however, networked information technologies pervade not only cities but also large and intricate parts of our everyday practice.

This chapter analyses the objectives and methodology of the Pan-Pearl River Delta (Pan-PRD) regional transportation strategy. It also recommends four strategic measures in regional transportation development: a regional infrastructure network, an integrated transportation system, a regional common transportation market, and a regional transportation information network.

This chapter describes the birth and early history of the Internet, how Americans used it to find information, but also businesses and government in support of their work. A detailed analysis of how Americans in all walks of life used the Internet is provided. This chapter provides a relatively broad overview of how Americans used the Internet in all facets of their lives. It covers people of all ages, races, and levels of education. It pays attention to what kind of information they used and equally important, the rate at which these various groups adopted both the technology and the information contained in the Internet. It argues that adoption of the Internet proved both massive and rapid, made possible by prior experiences with such digital technologies as the PC and telephone, but also on the types of information available over the Internet. Combined with the nation’s ability to financial afford this technology and having some components of this network already in place (such as the telephone at home and at work) made the move to the Internet relatively easy to do when compared to adoption of earlier information handling technologies. In short, this chapter is a brief history of the use of the Internet, more than an account of how it came into being.

The increasingly digital nature of medical imaging means that medical device output represents the highest volume of digital data in the medical record. Information technology has allowed the direct and rapid connection of health data sources to those caregivers who make health care decisions. Often, this data flow requires large-scale interconnection of medical devices, hospital information systems, and IT networks within a health care system. All of this interconnection and drive to deliver “anywhere, anytime” exposes information technology systems to cyber security threats. This chapter first discusses why security is an issue in health care organizations. It then describes the ISO/IEC 80001–1:2010, which provides a risk management framework to deal with the complexity of risk to safety, effectiveness, and data and systems security.

In this chapter I provide a mix of detailed cross-disciplinary examples to illustrate the method in real-world settings. The examples in this chapter illustrate modeling and inference in a relatively simple set of problems. After exploring single-parameter applications under very limited information, I consider multi-parameter problems, beginning with the inference of a two-parameter size distribution of firms. This demonstrates a main characteristic of social science problems where the available information is most often insufficient to provide a very exact inference. Then a simple ecological example is formulated. It provides an interesting theoretical application of analyzing complex ecological networks based on very limited macro-level information. The chapter concludes with a simple formulation of efficient network and information aggregation. A few shorter examples are provided as well.

This chapter presents the results of a survey of “cool” and related terms on the World Wide Web using major search engines, conducted on July 6–7, 1998. There is clearly much more cool on the web in the form of self-declared cool pages, references to other cool pages, and general appreciation of things cool than might be expected for a word whose usage is non-functional. Second, the raw totals understate the case considerably because cool collects disproportionately in those parts of web pages that have premium value: in the encoded page title, the links on the page, and frequently even the URL or domain name. Third, cool exploits its position close to the bone of networked information to express information culture's awareness of itself. These results show that cool is an ethos or “character” of information—a way or manner of living in the world of information.

This chapter describes the inter-organizational networks among REMOs, and between REMOs and secular environmental movement organizations, and examines how different types and degrees of embeddedness influence cooperative relations. First, it looks at the ways in which REMOs’ embeddedness in religious authority systems, audiences, and cultures makes some REMOs unwilling or hesitant to enter into alliances while encouraging other REMOs to seek out new partnerships. More specifically it shows how the same kind of constraints that shape REMOs’ cultural work, discussed in the preceding chapter, also influence their cooperative relationships, while the imperatives of niche activism, described in Chapter 2, push some REMOs to enter alliances in order to gain much-needed resources. Second, it describes the relationship between religious and secular movement organizations and shows how REMOs limit such alliances in order to manage their boundaries, maintain the integrity of the mission and identity, and/or avoid alienating their audiences who consider such alliances religiously problematic. The chapter ends with a brief discussion about the limits of cooperation within religious environmentalism and across the larger movement field.

This chapter denounces the hypercommercialization of the information network and its control by private interests using the marketplace metaphor. It argues that government policy should adopt a justice-based metaphor instead, and focus on quantifying the amount of democratic opportunity created, after reaching consensus on the definition of democratic participation. The chapter begins with an overview of broadband Internet within the context of democracy and its importance in the promotion of social and democratic goals before offering an alternative theoretical framework for evaluating the “success” of broadband policy and creating a measure for “democratic capacity.” It then introduces a vision of broadband as an essential facilitator of democratic discourse and considers some recent attempts made by governments to rethink “development” in non-economic terms. Finally, it discusses the non-economic goals set by the National Broadband Plan in comparison with its quantifiable goals.

This chapter focuses on controversies over rural access to short-term weather forecasts and storm warnings after 1870, when the US Army Signal Service established the country’s first national weather service and brought official government forecasts into daily life. It describes the operation of the Signal Service’s information network, which collected synchronous weather observations from across the country that were transmitted by telegraph to Washington, D.C. and translated into a daily weather summary and forecast called the “Synopsis and Probabilities.” The chapter focuses on the increasing rural demand for access to government weather forecasts and the Signal Service’s attempts to disseminate weather information to areas beyond the reach of its telegraph network in the 1870s and 1880s. It features the perspectives of rural postmasters and farmers who experienced daily uncertainties regarding when and if the daily “Probabilities” would arrive. The chapter reveals how the government’s problem of short-term weather forecasting in the countryside was solved by the advent of Rural Free Delivery and rural telephone lines at the turn of the twentieth century.

The central paradox of modern economic growth in Mexico is the contrast between a tidal wave of technological imports—adopted and sometimes widely diffused—and a stubbornly persistent dependence on foreign know-how and hardware. Technological imports may alter the nature of work, boost productive output, and yield new sets of winners and losers, but they do not necessarily lead to the effective transfer of skills and knowledge. Chapter 8 examines the gap between adoption and assimilation by focusing on those factors that limited learning and the assimilation of technical know-how. In late nineteenth-century Mexico, opportunities for learning and for interacting with and engaging with global technologies were unequally distributed, with predictable results. In the short run, widespread adoption of new technologies made possible a dramatic transformation of the country’s productive potential. In the long run, they did little to contribute to the development of domestic capabilities among Mexico’s engineers, mechanics, and workers.

This opening introduces the reader to the art of memory and to the “memory palace” technique. The author traces the history of these concepts from antiquity to the contemporary digital age. Memory, he writes, is and has always been concerned not with language alone but also, most importantly, with graphic depiction and systems of visualization. The author argues that an emphasis on the sensory dimensions of rhetorical activity makes memory compatible with the icons, apps, data visualizations, and other means of graphic communication ubiquitous in the digital media ecology. What further interests him is how the ability to organize information visually has been wielded in order to aid invention. Across their varied guises, the images of the ars memoria have acted as visual portals between information and the users seeking to integrate information into a new assemblage. Graphs, charts, networks, even word lists—these objects distill into a single image a greater totality of information than working memory alone could synthesize. By incorporating visualizations into the book, the author seeks to provide a present-day equivalent of historical memory practices, demonstrating their utility as arts of invention for the twenty-first century.

This chapter examines the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions's global vision and the ways that it imagined the rest of the world, particularly through the formation of what it calls a “hierarchy of heathenism” that helped the Board decide where to send missionaries and when. It first considers how both push and pull factors brought American evangelicals into the foreign mission movement before discussing the importance of civilization in the hierarchy of heathenism envisioned by the Board. It then discusses the American missionaries' use of evangelical and commercial information networks to determine whether certain places in Asia were potential recipients for evangelization efforts. It also analyzes the Board's missions to the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii), Holy Land, and Africa. Finally, it explains how the hierarchy of heathenism brought together the American missionaries' ideas about culture, race, and religion with the geopolitical realities of the world in which they lived to rationalize space and help them to go about the work of converting the world to Christianity.