The BG News April 25, 1991

The BGSU campus student newspaper April 25, 1991. Volume 73 - Issue 123https://scholarworks.bgsu.edu/bg-news/6217/thumbnail.jp

The role of economic development and urban planning in the development of knowledge-based regions in secondary economic centres : a comparative study of Australia and Japan

Knowledge development and innovation have frequently been linked to rapid sustainable economic growth. Recent unprecedented globalisation and technological advancements have made understanding this relationship more important than ever. Indeed, innovation occurs through a complex process embedded in individual and collective human knowledge, experience and space, leading some to advocate the importance of fostering the social capital and creative capacity of local urban environments. This thesis hypothesises that urban planning and city design act as a framework for human interaction, movement and connectivity, influencing the efficiency of knowledge productivity and the innovation process.It contends that urban form impeding the interaction of soft infrastructure (social capital) is likely to require more government intervention and resources to overcome inefficiencies of low connectivity, accessibility and urban vibrancy. In contrast, urban form that enhances social capital tends to have better living and more accessible environments for all residents irrespective of socio-economic standing or aspiration. This thesis proposes that the high human attractiveness and movement of the latter improves the efficiency of knowledge exchange and innovation systems. Being the accumulative sum of all local systems, it is argued that a regional or national innovation system can be enhanced by local urban environments which better facilitate the flow of knowledge and innovation.This thesis presents the results of a four-year cross-national study exploring how urban form can leverage the socio-economic aspects of a city for new economy growth. It pays particular attention to the mechanisms linking new economy factors and the constructed urban environments in the case studies of Perth‟s Northwest Corridor in Western Australia, Australia, and Kansai Region in Japan. It identifies infrastructure types and the importance of urban form in generating an environment which facilitates knowledge development and innovation. This thesis contends that the environment of activity centres, for example train station developments, may be more supportive of national innovation and productivity priorities than others. Understanding how the urban space of such developments contributes to regional transfer mechanisms and flows can enable government policy to better identify and address regional innovation and knowledge gaps. Evidence presented suggests that urban planning not sensitive to the new economy contribution of urban space is likely to place unnecessary barriers in the innovation process

ICE-B 2010:proceedings of the International Conference on e-Business

The International Conference on e-Business, ICE-B 2010, aims at bringing together researchers and practitioners who are interested in e-Business technology and its current applications. The mentioned technology relates not only to more low-level technological issues, such as technology platforms and web services, but also to some higher-level issues, such as context awareness and enterprise models, and also the peculiarities of different possible applications of such technology. These are all areas of theoretical and practical importance within the broad scope of e-Business, whose growing importance can be seen from the increasing interest of the IT research community. The areas of the current conference are: (i) e-Business applications; (ii) Enterprise engineering; (iii) Mobility; (iv) Business collaboration and e-Services; (v) Technology platforms. Contributions vary from research-driven to being more practical oriented, reflecting innovative results in the mentioned areas. ICE-B 2010 received 66 submissions, of which 9% were accepted as full papers. Additionally, 27% were presented as short papers and 17% as posters. All papers presented at the conference venue were included in the SciTePress Digital Library. Revised best papers are published by Springer-Verlag in a CCIS Series book

Maiden’s Fashion As Eternal Becomings: Victorian Maidens and Sugar Sweet Cuties Donning Japanese Street Fashion in Japan and North America

Lolita fashion is a youth street style originating from Japan that draws on Victorian-era children’s clothing, Rococo aesthetics, and Western Punk and Gothic subculture. It is worn by teenage girls and women of a wide range of ages, and through the flow of related media and clothing aided by the Internet, Lolita style has become a global phenomenon. Wearers of the style are known as Lolitas, and local, national, and global communities can be found around the world outside Japan from North American to Europe. This study is a cross-cultural comparison of Lolita fashion wearers in Japan and North America, examining how differences in constructions of place and space; conceptualizations about girlhood and womanhood; perceptions of beauty and aesthetics; and formation of social groups and actor-networks have bearing on how an individual experiences the fashion. This work deconstructs Lolita style by using Japanese cultural concepts like shōjo (‘girl’ as a genderless being), otome (maiden), kawaii (cuteness) to explore the underlying framework that informs Japanese Lolita’s use of the fashion as a form of subversive rebellion, creating personal spaces to celebrate their individuality and revive the affects and memories of girlhood that are distanced from gendered social expectations. English-speakers, not having the same social and cultural knowledge, attempt to recontexualize Lolita fashion along the lines of feminism, sisterhood, personal style, and escape from the ‘modern’ to give meaning and purpose to their involvement with the fashion. Lolita fashion allows wearers to travel in between the lines of becoming-girl and becoming-women by offering a way to access girl-feeling and its associated happiness objects