3,482 research outputs found

    Digital Goods and the New Economy

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    Digital goods are bitstrings, sequences of 0s and 1s, which have economic value. They are distinguished from other goods by five characteristics: digital goods are nonrival, infinitely expansible, discrete, aspatial, and recombinant. The New Economy is one where the economics of digital goods importantly influence aggregate economic performance. This Article considers such influences not by hypothesizing ad hoc inefficiencies that the New Economy can purport to resolve, but instead by beginning from an Arrow-Debreu perspective and asking how digital goods affect outcomes. This approach sheds light on why property rights on digital goods differ from property rights in general, guaranteeing neither appropriate incentives nor social efficiency; provides further insight into why Open Source Software is a successful model of innovation and development in digital goods industries; and helps explain how geographical clustering matters.aspatial, emergence, idea, information, innovation, intellectual asset, Internet, knowledge, Open Source, weightless economy

    An open virtual multi-services networking architecture for the future internet

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    © 2015, El Barachi et al.; licensee Springer. Network virtualization is considered as a promising way to overcome the limitations and fight the gradual ossification of the current Internet infrastructure. The network virtualization concept consists in the dynamic creation of several co-existing logical network instances (or virtual networks) over a shared physical network infrastructure. We have previously proposed a service-oriented hierarchical business model for virtual networking environments. This model promotes the idea of network as a service, by considering the functionalities offered by different types of network resources as services of different levels – services that can be dynamically discovered, used, and composed. In this paper, we propose an open, virtual, multi-services networking architecture enabling the realization of our business model. We also demonstrate the operation of our architecture using a virtualized QoS-enabled VoIP scenario. Moreover, virtual routing and control level performance was evaluated using proof-of-concept prototyping. Several important findings were made in the course of this work; one is that service-oriented concepts can be used to build open, flexible, and collaborative virtual networking environments. Another finding is that some of the existing open source virtual routing solutions such as Vyatta are only suitable for building small to medium size virtual networking infrastructures

    An open virtual multi-services networking architecture for the future internet

    Get PDF
    © 2015, El Barachi et al.; licensee Springer. Network virtualization is considered as a promising way to overcome the limitations and fight the gradual ossification of the current Internet infrastructure. The network virtualization concept consists in the dynamic creation of several co-existing logical network instances (or virtual networks) over a shared physical network infrastructure. We have previously proposed a service-oriented hierarchical business model for virtual networking environments. This model promotes the idea of network as a service, by considering the functionalities offered by different types of network resources as services of different levels – services that can be dynamically discovered, used, and composed. In this paper, we propose an open, virtual, multi-services networking architecture enabling the realization of our business model. We also demonstrate the operation of our architecture using a virtualized QoS-enabled VoIP scenario. Moreover, virtual routing and control level performance was evaluated using proof-of-concept prototyping. Several important findings were made in the course of this work; one is that service-oriented concepts can be used to build open, flexible, and collaborative virtual networking environments. Another finding is that some of the existing open source virtual routing solutions such as Vyatta are only suitable for building small to medium size virtual networking infrastructures

    Designing annotation before it's needed

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    Interpersonal Meaning in Textbooks for Teaching English as a Foreign Language in China: A Multimodal Approach

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    There is increasing awareness among linguists that discourse analysis inevitably involves analyses of meanings arising from the combination of multiple modes of communication. The evolving multimodal pedagogic environment for teaching English as a foreign language (henceforth EFL), among other communicative contexts, calls for a social, semiotic, and linguistic explanation. Situated within the theoretical landscape of social semiotics and in the pedagogic context of EFL education, the present study aims to elucidate how linguistic and visual semiotic resources are co-deployed to construe interpersonal meaning in multimodal textbooks. The data drawn upon are eighteen EFL textbooks for primary and secondary schooling, published by People’s Education Press between 2002 and 2006. The research design consists of three complementary sub-studies. First, it investigates the ways in which the semantic regions of ENGAGEMENT and GRADUATION can be modelled in multimodal texts, with special reference to the interplay of voices in textbook discourse. The second sub-study analyzes how verbal and visual semiotic resources are co-deployed to construe the ‘emotion and attitude’ goal highlighted in curriculum standards, with a particular focus on verbiage-image relations. Third, it extends the linguistic concept ‘modality’ to multimodal discourse, exploring coding orientation in texts for different educational contexts and between different constituent genres. The main findings of this thesis are as follows: (1) A range of multimodal resources (i.e. labelling, dialogue balloon, jointly-constructed text, illustration and highlighting) are identified as enabling editor voice to negotiate meanings with reader voice and character voice. It is found that the way in which an ENGAGEMENT value can be scaled is strongly associated with the intrinsic property of the given multimodal resource. The interaction between multiple voices is closely related to contact, social distance, and point of view. (2) It is shown that images play an essential role in realizing attitudinal meanings. Together with verbal APPRAISAL resources, visual semiotic features work to position the readers in ways that align them to set pedagogic goals, guiding them in completing jointly-constructed texts. Moreover, an attitudinal shift from an emotional release to a more institutionalized type of evaluation can be identified as students advance through the school years. (3) It is argued that what counts as real in multimodal texts is socially defined and specific to a given communicative context. The nature of pedagogic discourse should be taken into account when visual displays are produced for pedagogic materials. The implications of this study include both theoretical and pedagogic aspects。Theoretically it adapts and extends APPRAISAL analysis to multimodal discourse, exploring the intersemiotic complementarity and co-instantiation in construing global evaluative stance. This semiotic exploration, in return, suggests ways in which discourse analysis may help textbook users better understand and interpret the multimodal features. With the affordances as well as limitations of semiotic resources made explicit, we may have one step further towards a comprehensive and critical understanding of multimodal construal of interpersonal meaning in pedagogic materials

    A modular modelling framework for hypotheses testing in the simulation of urbanisation

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    In this paper, we present a modelling experiment developed to study systems of cities and processes of urbanisation in large territories over long time spans. Building on geographical theories of urban evolution, we rely on agent-based models to 1/ formalise complementary and alternative hypotheses of urbanisation and 2/ explore their ability to simulate observed patterns in a virtual laboratory. The paper is therefore divided into two sections : an overview of the mechanisms implemented to represent competing hypotheses used to simulate urban evolution; and an evaluation of the resulting model structures in their ability to simulate - efficiently and parsimoniously - a system of cities (the Former Soviet Union) over several periods of time (before and after the crash of the USSR). We do so using a modular framework of model-building and evolutionary algorithms for the calibration of several model structures. This project aims at tackling equifinality in systems dynamics by confronting different mechanisms with similar evaluation criteria. It enables the identification of the best-performing models with respect to the chosen criteria by scanning automatically the parameter along with the space of model structures (as combinations of modelled dynamics).Comment: 21 pages, 3 figures, working pape
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