Is There a "Right" Charging Principle with the NGN Advent?

Historically, telecommunications services developed adding one network to another (voice and data networks), but Next Generation Networks (NGN) are developing as native multiservice networks. Main characteristics include: broadband capacity, IP protocol, ability to transmit voice, data and video, quality control, separation among different network layers. The fact to deliver with one only network different services such as voice and data, now treated in a very different way with respect to charging principles (interconnection for voice, peering for Internet exchanges), poses the problem of the charging model to adopt in the future. In the paper we will analyse pros and cons of the different charging principles, both at wholesale and retail level, from an economic perspective. The first conclusion is that there is no "magic solution", as any criteria has pros and cons, but that it appears more appropriate to leave operators to choose their retail models, once the wholesale criteria are settled. Then the paper concentrates on the different scenarios which can arise choosing different charging principles at wholesale level. Particular attention is given to the issues of quality safeguard and of recovering nvestments in innovative networks and services. On many aspects "intermediate" scenarios seem better to answer economic problems than the "pure" scenarios, (calling party network pays for all wholesale services, including Internet/data, or bill & keep for everything, including voice).NGN, charging principles.

Shrines and Pilgrimages: Documenting Mary\u27s Role in the Pandemic

A 1997 special report in Scientific American claimed that the average lifespan of a website was only 44 days. A study in 2001 put that at 75 days, while a 2003 article indicated 100 days. Everything on the Internet doesn’t last forever. The Marian Library has collected material related to the Blessed Virgin Mary since its founding in 1943. Increasingly, some of the material that would have once been printed, and possibly made their way to the Marian Library archives, is now being shared only electronically. Things like shrine Mass schedules, news articles, or blog posts are available on websites, but are often updated and overwritten. Web archiving is the process of “capturing” a snapshot of a website at a particular time and preserving it for future use and study. With the current coronavirus pandemic across the world, individuals are asked to avoid gathering in large groups, practicing social distancing to curb the spread of the virus. Future scholars will want to one day study the impact that the coronavirus has had on Marian shrines and Marian devotion, and through the Marian Library\u27s web archive collections, they will be able to see these snapshots in time

Horseless Horses: Car Dealing and the Survival of Retail Bargaining

News reports suggest that in the near future, electronic chips on every item in a store will allow consumers to be charged for purchases automatically by simply walking out through the door.1 No checkout clerks will ask the shoppers if they found everything they were looking for; no checkout robots will ask if the customers would prefer to hear their oddly inflected voices speak in English or Spanish; nothing tangible will mark the exchange of value. This invisible transaction will be the latest evolutionary step away from the complex face-to-face negotiation between buyer and seller that once marked almost every retail transaction, one that uniquely survives in the purchase of an automobile. Would-be buyers who walk into automobile dealerships in the 21st century enter a time warp. They are transported back to the early 19th century , to an era before goods were sold to all shoppers at the same posted price and before dissatisfied customers could return their purchases. They are confronted by sales personnel who are masters of the ancient arts of flattery, high pressure, misdirection, misrepresentation, and patience. They are willing to sit for hours haggling over the cost of everything from the basic car itself, to the moonroof, the floor mats, the interest rate on the car loan, and the trade-in value of the owner’s current vehicle—to name just a few of the price points open to negotiation. It makes no difference if the customer is interested in a new or a used car; the process is roughly the same. In the worst (and fairly common) case, the shopper is met at the curb by a “greeter” who tries to determine if he or she is a “looker” or a serious buyer. Buyers are then turned over to a more experienced salesman who finds a car the buyer wants and opens a period of painful and protracted price negotiation, retreating often to an office in the back to check offers and counteroffers with his manager. Eventually the sales manager himself will appear to continue the dickering over price, and, if the customer is unyielding, the sales manager is sometimes replaced by his manager. In the meantime, the buyer has had to work with the dealer’s used-car appraiser to determine the trade-in value of his or her current car. Once the price of the new and used cars are agreed to, the customer is turned over one more time to the business manager who not only negotiates finance and insurance charges, but also tries to sell dealer-installed add-ons such as fabric protection and rust proofing.2 As bad as this system may seem, historically things were even worse. Prior to 1958, the buyer often had no idea what the dealer\u27s standard asking price was, because there was no established way to represent the price of cars on the lot. The requirement that all new cars carry a sticker listing the manufacturer\u27s suggested retail price (MSRP) created a common starting point for price negotiations, but no more than that. The advent of the Internet has armed some buyers with more accurate information about dealer costs, but that has only made the negotiations fiercer, forcing dealers to give better prices to informed buyers and then trying to make up the loss of profit by keeping up the costs to others. With the isolated exception of General Motors Saturn division, dealers adjust the prices of their vehicles to the local market, charging additional markup on highly sought after cars and cutting the price of slow-selling ones. And even on a Saturn lot, where sticker prices are stuck to, negotiation can take place on ancillary products and services, and will always occur on the trade-in allowance for the customer\u27s current car

Future of E-commerce: An Analysis of Ecommerce in Retail Business

The recent decade has observed a drastic change in the field of commerce. With the introduction of e-commerce in the early 2000's thousands of retail and consumer businesses have set up their platforms online. It is only through internet that e-commerce has gained so much popularity, where things have become digitalized and are now available with just a click of the mouse or tap on the screen. Starting as a simple process of executing commercial transactions through Electronic Data Change and Electronic Funds Transfer to selling almost anything and everything, E-commerce has change the way businesses operated once. However, due to advancement of technology ecommerce platforms face several complexities and competition. Till date ecommerce model is by far the most successful platform served on the internet. Today some of the most popular countries such as UK, China, Norway, Finland and South Korea has the largest E-commerce suppliers and buyers. All of the following countries have total e-commerce sales ranges in between 10-15% of their total spending. Some of the most prosperous and established organizations such as Amazon and eBay have E-commerce as their base. E-commerce has made the day to day tasks of various businesses and consumers so rapid that gone are the days when it took over a week to sell or buy a product. With all this being said there is still a lot more to unravel about this vast field of commerce. This study revolves around further improvements and suggestions related to the future and growth of ecommerce in retail businesses. (Reynolds, 2000

Where to go in the near future: diverging perspectives on online public service delivery

Although the electronic government is under heavy development, a clear vision doesn’t seem to exist. In this study 20 interviews among leaders in the field of e-government in the Netherlands resulted in different perspectives on the future of electronic public service delivery. The interviews revealed different objectives and interpretations of the presuppositions regarding citizens’ desires. Opinions about channel approaches and ‘trigger services’ appeared to vary. Furthermore, the respondents didn’t agree on the number of contact moments between citizen and government, had different opinions about digital skills, pled for various designs of the electronic government and placed the responsibility for electronic service delivery in different hands. Conclusion is that there is a lack of concepts on how to do things. Everybody talks about eGovernment, but all have different interpretations. \u

The Internet of Things Will Thrive by 2025

This report is the latest research report in a sustained effort throughout 2014 by the Pew Research Center Internet Project to mark the 25th anniversary of the creation of the World Wide Web by Sir Tim Berners-LeeThis current report is an analysis of opinions about the likely expansion of the Internet of Things (sometimes called the Cloud of Things), a catchall phrase for the array of devices, appliances, vehicles, wearable material, and sensor-laden parts of the environment that connect to each other and feed data back and forth. It covers the over 1,600 responses that were offered specifically about our question about where the Internet of Things would stand by the year 2025. The report is the next in a series of eight Pew Research and Elon University analyses to be issued this year in which experts will share their expectations about the future of such things as privacy, cybersecurity, and net neutrality. It includes some of the best and most provocative of the predictions survey respondents made when specifically asked to share their views about the evolution of embedded and wearable computing and the Internet of Things

Expanding Our Boundaries With Technology

When Kate first came to speak at the ACL Conference at Lee University, I think I\u27m not exaggerating by saying we fell in love with her and she fell in love with us. We enjoyed her and her enthusiasm and she enjoyed us. I was trying to figure out what I was going to plan for another general session at this year\u27s conference and about that time Steve Preston sent me a note saying, \u27Just got a note from Kate, and she is so excited that ACL was coming back here and she wanted to come to the conference. Was there anything she could do?\u27 Our conference theme is about expanding our boundaries in the area of information literacy, which is certainly appropriate. We are also expanding our boundaries technologically. The two things go hand and hand. So, I asked her to come join us today. I\u27m sure all of you know by now, she is the head of SOLINET. For those of you not from this part of the country, it\u27s the largest of the OCLC networks and besides all the usual stuff, they are very well known especially in this part of the country for the wonderful workshops that they put on. So Kate, tell us what\u27s going on

The Internet of Things Connectivity Binge: What are the Implications?

Despite wide concern about cyberattacks, outages and privacy violations, most experts believe the Internet of Things will continue to expand successfully the next few years, tying machines to machines and linking people to valuable resources, services and opportunities

The Source of Magic

This paper is an attempt to show that a large part of Western society no longer operates on the rationalist principles that most of us thought it did, but that it instead runs by magic more akin to that in fantasy works. The term ‘magic’ is not meant metaphorically or in science fiction author Arthur C Clarke’s sense that ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic’ (Clarke 1962), but is meant literally in the sense that Frazer (1890, republished 2003) used the term. This means that instead of trying to understand the present and near future by looking at the works of science fiction creators who put forth a rationalist and technological view of the world, we would understand the future better by looking to the fantasy of authors such as Jack Vance, Matthew Hughes, Ursula Le Guin, Piers Anthony and Michael Moorcock. This magic is manifested through magical thinking and irrational behaviour, where the majority of us use literal spells and incantations in our daily interactions with each other in the networked world, and where we worship capricious gods; most importantly, those spells, incantations and worship actually work, and those gods have actually come to exist. This paper will also show just how the spread of the computer technology propounded by scientists, technologists and SF writers has inevitably led to the creation of this irrational and magical world. This is partly because of limitations built-in to the formal systems on which these systems are based, leading to an extreme example of the law of unintended consequences. Finally, the paper will explain the mechanism by which magic is literally becoming real by reference to Frazer’s two laws of magic: the Law of Similarity and the Law of Contagion