Wideband performance comparison between the 40 GHz and 60 GHz frequency bands for indoor radio channels

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Cutting out the middle man?: disintermediation and the academic library

Big Deals, open access, and digitisation increasingly mean that selection decisions are being removed from librarians and transferred to the end user. David Ball looks at the forces pushing towards this ‘disintermediation’ and considers the future role of the academic library

Economic FAQs About the Internet

This is a set of Frequently Asked Questions (and answers) about the economic, institutional, and technological structure of the Internet. We describe the history and current state of the Internet, discuss some of the pressing economic and regulatory problems, and speculate about future developments.Internet, telecommunications, congestion pricing, National Information Infrastructure

The Future of the Internet III

Presents survey results on technology experts' predictions on the Internet's social, political, and economic impact as of 2020, including its effects on integrity and tolerance, intellectual property law, and the division between personal and work lives

The organisational impact of open educational resources

The open educational resource (OER) movement has been growing rapidly since 2001, stimulated by funding from benefactors such as the Hewlett Foundation and UNESCO, and providing educational content freely to institutions and learners across the World. Individuals and organisations are motivated by a variety of drivers to produce OERs, both altruistic and self-interested. There are parallels with the open source movement where authors and others combine their efforts to provide a product which they and others can use freely and adapt to their own purposes. There are many different ways in which OER initiatives are organised and an infinite range of possibilities for how the OERs themselves are constituted. If institutions are to develop sustainable OER initiatives they need to build successful change management initiatives, developing models for the production and quality assurance of OERs, licensing them through appropriate mechanisms such as the Creative Commons, and considering how the resources will be discovered and used by learners

Internet Predictions

More than a dozen leading experts give their opinions on where the Internet is headed and where it will be in the next decade in terms of technology, policy, and applications. They cover topics ranging from the Internet of Things to climate change to the digital storage of the future. A summary of the articles is available in the Web extras section

The Case for Liberal Spectrum Licenses: A Technical and Economic Perspective

The traditional system of radio spectrum allocation has inefficiently restricted wireless services. Alternatively, liberal licenses ceding de facto spectrum ownership rights yield incentives for operators to maximize airwave value. These authorizations have been widely used for mobile services in the U.S. and internationally, leading to the development of highly productive services and waves of innovation in technology, applications and business models. Serious challenges to the efficacy of such a spectrum regime have arisen, however. Seeing the widespread adoption of such devices as cordless phones and wi-fi radios using bands set aside for unlicensed use, some scholars and policy makers posit that spectrum sharing technologies have become cheap and easy to deploy, mitigating airwave scarcity and, therefore, the utility of exclusive rights. This paper evaluates such claims technically and economically. We demonstrate that spectrum scarcity is alive and well. Costly conflicts over airwave use not only continue, but have intensified with scientific advances that dramatically improve the functionality of wireless devices and so increase demand for spectrum access. Exclusive ownership rights help direct spectrum inputs to where they deliver the highest social gains, making exclusive property rules relatively more socially valuable. Liberal licenses efficiently accommodate rival business models (including those commonly associated with unlicensed spectrum allocations) while mitigating the constraints levied on spectrum use by regulators imposing restrictions in traditional licenses or via use rules and technology standards in unlicensed spectrum allocations.

Knowledge management implications

Knowledge management is a general concept applied to almost any project that an organization undertakes, which is meant to transfer, share and exploit knowledge from one part of the organization to another. Most of the companies are already involved in knowledge management, even if, often, it is done informally and implicitly. The goal of a formal knowledge management program is just to make knowledge marketplaces to become more efficient. Many organizations are recognizing that the ownership of knowledge creates an important competitive advantage. Quite simply, the lack of a knowledge management program means that they are losing money or opportunities. The easiest kind of knowledge management project to justify is the ‘knowledge base’. A knowledge base is something that attempts to make the knowledge marketplace more efficient by making explicit knowledge easier to access. Projects that aim to facilitate the transfer of knowledge work best when organizations recognize how the existing knowledge marketplace operates, so that they can work within it.innovation, knowledge flow system, knowledge transfer, knowledge utilization process, tacit and explicit knowledge