Authors: Gwen Solomon. Nancy Allen. Paul Resta.
Paperback, 288 pages
Publisher: Allyn & Bacon
Publication Date: 2002-10-10
Edition: 1st

Reviews :

   

Twenty-three nationally-known educators discuss educational technology and diversity, provide historical and philosophical insights into digital divide issues, and offer practical suggestions for teachers, administrators, and policy makers. This book is designed to help educators understand complex technology issues and to equip them to meet whatever challenges keep their students from having full access to a quality education through technology. It discusses how schools acquire hardware, software, and connectivity, and why some schools experience such success in these endeavors and others are heartbreakingly behind. Perhaps most importantly, it examines the most current research in the effectiveness of technology and pedagogy in diverse settings to make suggestions on how teachers can create powerful learning environments for all students. Technology coordinators, teachers and school administrators.

...

Authors: Adam Thierer.
Hardcover, 450 pages
Publisher: Cato Institute
Publication Date: 2003-10-25


Reviews :

    The rise of the World Wide Web is challenging traditional concepts of jurisdiction, governance, and sovereignty. Many observers have praised the Internet for its ubiquitous and "borderless" nature and argued that this global medium is revolutionizing the nature of modern communications. Indeed, in the universe of cyberspace there are no passports and geography is often treated as a meaningless concept.

But does that mean traditional concepts of jurisdiction and goverance are obsolete? When legal disputes arise in cyberspace, or when governments attempt to apply their legal standards or cultural norms to the Internet, how are such matters to be adjudicated?

Cultural norms and regulatory approaches vary from country to country, as reflected in such policies as free speech and libel standards, privacy policies, intellectual property, antitrust law, domain name dispute resolution, and tax policy. In each of those areas, policymakers have for years enacted myriad laws and regulations for "realspace" that are now being directly challenged by the rise of the parallel electronic universe known as cyberspace.

Who is responsible for setting the standards in cyberspace? Is a "U.N. for the Internet" or a multinational treaty appropriate? If not, who's standards should govern cross-border cyber disputes? Are different standards appropriate for cyberspace and "real" space? Those questions are being posed with increasing frequency in the emerging field of cyberspace law and constitute the guiding theme this book's collection of essays.

Contributors include: Vinton Cerf, Clyde Wayne Crews Jr., Adam Thierer, Rep. Christopher Cox, Jack L. Goldsmith, David G. Post, Jonathan Zittrain, Michael Geist, Dan Burk, Bruce H. Kobayashi, Larry Ribstein, Robert Corn-Revere, Kurt Wimmer, Michael Greve, Fred Cate, Harold Feld, Eric P. Crampton, Donald J. Boudreaux....

Authors:
Hardcover, 307 pages
Publisher: Springer
Publication Date: 2008-08-20
Edition: 1

Reviews :

   

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks are comprised of equal "nodes" that function as both clients and servers, as opposed to systems in which data and information are managed through centralized servers. The implications of this architecture go far beyond the technological realm; the ability of individuals to share digital content files, including audio and video material, in real time, facilitates communication and, at a deeper cultural level, promotes community without hierarchy or strict control. As Eli Noam, Lorenzo Pupillo, and their colleagues demonstrate in this timely and incisive volume, P2P has permeated all facets of society, from YouTube and music downloading experiments on college campuses to international policy debates over intellectual property rights. Peer-to-Peer Video is the first book to apply economic principles to analyze and understand the P2P phenomenon, considering such topics as "consumer demand and the commons" and "file sharing and the copyright crisis." Moreover, the authors, who include scholars, consultants, and industry executives, provide numerous contemporary examples from the U.S. and around the world to shed light on the implications of P2P as a mass medium, considering such issues as pricing, licensing, security, and regulation. The result is provocative commentary on a slice of popular culture that will interest scholars and students, policymakers, media industry professionals, and general readers alike.

...

Authors: Philip H. Pollock III.
Paperback, 203 pages
Publisher: CQ Press
Publication Date: 2005-05-15
Edition: 2nd

Reviews :

    This popular companion volume gets students using actual political data, and working with a software tool that properly prepares them for future political science courses. A no-nonsense introduction to SPSS, the workbook uses over 110 screen shots to provide step-by-step instruction and advice on using the statistics program most used by today's political scientists. With updated customized datasets, this workbook equips students to analyze real political science research. The second edition has been updated for SPSS 12.0 and 13.0, but also accommodates users of 11.0 and student versions....

Authors: David Mayers.
Paperback, 416 pages
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Publication Date: 1990-04-12


Reviews :

    One of a select group of American foreign service officers to receive specialized training on the Soviet Union in the late 1920s and early 1930s, George Frost Kennan eventually became the American government's chief expert on Soviet affairs during the height of the Cold War.
Drawing upon a wealth of original research, David Mayers' fascinating life of George Kennan examines his high-level participation in foreign policy-making and interprets his political and philosophical development within a historical framework. Mayers presents an engaging and lucid account of Kennan's training; his rise to prominence during the late 1940s and his policy failures; and his later roles as critic of America's external policy, advocate of detente with the Soviet Union, and proponent of nuclear arms limitation. Mayers also explores Kennan's complicated relationships with such important political figures and analysts as Dean Acheson, John Foster Dulles, and Walter Lippmann....

Authors: William E. Huxhold. Eric M. Fowler. Brian Parr.
Paperback, 300 pages
Publisher: Esri Press
Publication Date: 2004-04-01


Reviews :

    Both a textbook for GIS classes in urban planning and a workbook for local governments, this book shows how to do real tasks that are required when a city decides to go digital and use geographic information systems (GIS) to store and access information. With this book, planners, analysts, and other local government staff use data from a real city to perform tasks such as creating buildings and parcels, setting coordinate systems, and building geodatabase topology. After creating a geodatabase, working with attribute data, and geocoding data, planners will be able to perform spatial analysis to find possible drug houses near playgrounds, find buildable vacant lots, produce land use reports, and more....

Authors: Harm Schepel.
Hardcover, 500 pages
Publisher: Hart Publishing
Publication Date: 2005-02-23


Reviews :

    This book provides a comprehensive overview of the rise, role and status of private product safety standards in the legal regulation of integrating markets....

Authors: Ronald V. Bettig.
Paperback, 288 pages
Publisher: Westview Press
Publication Date: 1996-09-12


Reviews :

    ...

Authors: Colin Bennett. Charles Raab.
Paperback, 382 pages
Publisher: The MIT Press
Publication Date: 2006-05-16


Reviews :

    Privacy protection, according to Colin Bennett and Charles Raab, involves politics and public policy as much as it does law and technology. Moreover, the protection of our personal information in a globalized, borderless world means that privacy-related policies are inextricably interdependent. In this updated paperback edition of The Governance of Privacy Bennett and Raab analyze a broad range of privacy policy instruments available to contemporary advanced industrial states, from government regulations and transnational regimes to self-regulation and privacy-enhancing technologies. They consider two possible dynamics of privacy regulation—a "race to the bottom," with competitive deregulation by countries eager to attract global investment in information technology, versus "a race to the top," with the progressive establishment of global privacy standards.

Bennett and Raab begin by discussing the goals of privacy protection, the liberal and individualist assumptions behind it, and the neglected relationship between privacy and social equity. They describe and evaluate different policy instruments, including the important 1995 Directive on Data Protection from the European Union, as well as the general efficacy of the "top-down" statutory approach and self-regulatory and technological alternatives to it. They evaluate the interrelationships of these policy instruments and their position in a global framework of regulation and policy by state and non-state actors. And finally, they consider whether all of this policy activity at international, national, and corporate levels necessarily means higher levels of privacy protection....

Authors: James Boyle.
Paperback, 288 pages
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Publication Date: 1997-10-30


Reviews :

    Who owns your genetic information? Might it be the doctors who, in the course of removing your spleen, decode a few cells and turn them into a patented product? In 1990 the Supreme Court of California said yes, marking another milestone on the information superhighway. This extraordinary case is one of the many that James Boyle takes up in Shamans, Software, and Spleens, a timely look at the infinitely tricky problems posed by the information society. Discussing topics ranging from blackmail and insider trading to artificial intelligence (with good-humored stops in microeconomics, intellectual property, and cultural studies along the way), Boyle has produced a work that can fairly be called the first social theory of the information age.

Now more than ever, information is power, and questions about who owns it, who controls it, and who gets to use it carry powerful implications. These are the questions Boyle explores in matters as diverse as autodialers and direct advertising, electronic bulletin boards and consumer databases, ethno-botany and indigenous pharmaceuticals, the right of publicity (why Johnny Carson owns the phrase "Here's Johnny!"), and the right to privacy (does J. D. Salinger "own" the letters he's sent?). Boyle finds that our ideas about intellectual property rights rest on the notion of the Romantic author--a notion that Boyle maintains is not only outmoded but actually counterproductive, restricting debate, slowing innovation, and widening the gap between rich and poor nations. What emerges from this lively discussion is a compelling argument for relaxing the initial protection of authors' works and expanding the concept of the fair use of information. For those with an interest in the legal, ethical, and economic ramifications of the dissemination of information--in short, for every member of the information society, willing or unwilling--this book makes a case that cannot be ignored....

    In 1990 the Supreme Court of California ruled that DNA extracted from a spleen removed from your body could be patented--one of many court precedents to define the emerging laws of cyberspace. Boyle explores such seemingly weird decisions as well as legal issues surrounding autodialers, direct advertising, consumer databases, ethnobotany, the right of publicity, and the right to privacy. Boyle argues that contemporary ideas about intellectual property are based on a Romantic notion of selfhood that is outmoded and counterproductive in our information-based society, a society in which--as someone else probably said before the phrase was popularized by Stewart Brand--"information wants to be 'free.'"...