East–West Perspectives on Privacy, Ethical Pluralism and Global Information Ethics

Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) are both primary drivers and facilitating technologies of globalization—and thereby, of exponentially expanding possibilities of cross-cultural encounters. Currently, over one billion persons throughout the planet have access to the Web: of these, Asian users constitute 35.8% of the Web population, while Europeans make up 28.3 % of world users—and North Americans only 20.9% (Internet World Stats, 2007). Our histories teach us all too well that such encounters—especially concerning potentially global ethical norms—always run the risk of devolving into more destructive rather than emancipatory events. Speci?cally, these encounters risk pulling us into one of two contradictory positions. First of all, naïve ethnocentrisms too easily issue in imperialisms that remake “the Other” in one’s own image—precisely by eliminating the irreducible differences in norms and practices that de?ne distinctive cultures. Second, these imperialisms thereby inspire a relativistic turn to the sheerly local—precisely for the sake of preserving local identities and cultures. Hence the general problem: how we might foster a cross-cultural communication for a global ICE that steers between the two Manichean polarities of ethnocentric imperialism and fragmenting relativism

First Looks: CATaC '98\ud

The First International Conference on Cultural Attitudes Towards Technology and Communication (CATaC’98), and its affiliated publications, seek to bring together current insights from philosophy, communication theory, and cultural sciences in an interdisciplinary dialogue. The synthesis of disparate scholarly ideas will shed greater light on just how culture impacts on the use and appropriation of new communications technologies. Beyond the individual contributions themselves, some of our most significant insights will emerge as we listen and discuss carefully with one another during the conference itself. As a way of preparing for that discussion, I offer the following overview of the CATaC papers and abstracts, along with a summary of the insights and questions they suggest

"Revolution? What Revolution?" Successes and limits of computing technologies in philosophy and religion

Computing technologies like other technological innovations in the modern West are inevitably introduced with the rhetoric of "revolution". Especially during the 1980s (the PC revolution) and 1990s (the Internet and Web revolutions), enthusiasts insistently celebrated radical changes— changes ostensibly inevitable and certainly as radical as those brought about by the invention of the printing press, if not the discovery of fire.\ud These enthusiasms now seem very "1990s�—in part as the revolution stumbled with the dot.com failures and the devastating impacts of 9/11. Moreover, as I will sketch out below, the patterns of diffusion and impact in philosophy and religion show both tremendous success, as certain revolutionary promises are indeed kept—as well as (sometimes spectacular) failures. Perhaps we use revolutionary rhetoric less frequently because the revolution has indeed succeeded: computing technologies, and many of the powers and potentials they bring us as scholars and religionists have become so ubiquitous and normal that they no longer seem "revolutionary at all. At the same time, many of the early hopes and promises instantiated in such specific projects as Artificial Intelligence and anticipations of virtual religious communities only have been dashed against the apparently intractable limits of even these most remarkable technologies. While these failures are usually forgotten they leave in their wake a clearer sense of what these new technologies can, and cannot do

Moving Embedded Solitons

The first theoretical results are reported predicting {\em moving} solitons residing inside ({\it embedded} into) the continuous spectrum of radiation modes. The model taken is a Bragg-grating medium with Kerr nonlinearity and additional second-derivative (wave) terms. The moving embedded solitons (ESs) are doubly isolated (of codimension 2), but, nevertheless, structurally stable. Like quiescent ESs, moving ESs are argued to be stable to linear approximation, and {\it semi}-stable nonlinearly. Estimates show that moving ESs may be experimentally observed as $\sim$10 fs pulses with velocity $\leq 1/10$th that of light.Comment: 9 pages 2 figure

Evolutionarily Stable Strategies in Quantum Hawk-Dove Game

We quantized the Hawk-Dove game by using the most general form of a pure initial state to investigate the existence of pure and mixed Evolutionarily Stable Strategies (ESS). An example is considered to draw a comparison between classical and quantum version of the game. Our choice of most general initial quantum state enables us to make the game symmetric or asymmetric. We show that for a particular set of game parameters where there exist only mixed ESS in the classical version of the game, however, quantization allows even a pure strategy to be an ESS for symmetric game in addition to ixed ESS. On the other hand only pure strategy ESS can exist for asymmetric quantum version of the Hawk-Dove game.Comment: Revised version. LaTex, 11 pages, no figure. Corresponding author's email: [email protected]

Electrostatic spherically symmetric configurations in gravitating nonlinear electrodynamics

We perform a study of the gravitating electrostatic spherically symmetric (G-ESS) solutions of Einstein field equations minimally coupled to generalized non-linear abelian gauge models in three space dimensions. These models are defined by lagrangian densities which are general functions of the gauge field invariants, restricted by some physical conditions of admissibility. They include the class of non-linear electrodynamics supporting ESS non-topological soliton solutions in absence of gravity. We establish that the qualitative structure of the G-ESS solutions of admissible models is fully characterized by the asymptotic and central-field behaviours of their ESS solutions in flat space (or, equivalently, by the behaviour of the lagrangian densities in vacuum and on the point of the boundary of their domain of definition, where the second gauge invariant vanishes). The structure of these G-ESS configurations for admissible models supporting divergent-energy ESS solutions in flat space is qualitatively the same as in the Reissner-Nordstr\"om case. In contrast, the G-ESS configurations of the models supporting finite-energy ESS solutions in flat space exhibit new qualitative features, which are discussed in terms of the ADM mass, the charge and the soliton energy. Most of the results concerning well known models, such as the electrodynamics of Maxwell, Born-Infeld and the Euler-Heisenberg effective lagrangian of QED, minimally coupled to gravitation, are shown to be corollaries of general statements of this analysis.Comment: 11 pages, revtex4, 4 figures; added references; introduction, conclusions and several sections extended, 2 additional figures included, title change

Federated Robust Embedded Systems: Concepts and Challenges

The development within the area of embedded systems (ESs) is moving rapidly, not least due to falling costs of computation and communication equipment. It is believed that increased communication opportunities will lead to the future ESs no longer being parts of isolated products, but rather parts of larger communities or federations of ESs, within which information is exchanged for the benefit of all participants. This vision is asserted by a number of interrelated research topics, such as the internet of things, cyber-physical systems, systems of systems, and multi-agent systems. In this work, the focus is primarily on ESs, with their specific real-time and safety requirements. While the vision of interconnected ESs is quite promising, it also brings great challenges to the development of future systems in an efficient, safe, and reliable way. In this work, a pre-study has been carried out in order to gain a better understanding about common concepts and challenges that naturally arise in federations of ESs. The work was organized around a series of workshops, with contributions from both academic participants and industrial partners with a strong experience in ES development. During the workshops, a portfolio of possible ES federation scenarios was collected, and a number of application examples were discussed more thoroughly on different abstraction levels, starting from screening the nature of interactions on the federation level and proceeding down to the implementation details within each ES. These discussions led to a better understanding of what can be expected in the future federated ESs. In this report, the discussed applications are summarized, together with their characteristics, challenges, and necessary solution elements, providing a ground for the future research within the area of communicating ESs