Cybertax

Internet, the fastest growing communications medium or consumer electronic technology, doubles its size every six months. Within a few years the number of citizens in Cyberspace will outnumber all but the largest nations. The borderless world of the Internet extends its reach to all corners of the world. Best of all, it is almost free. Hardware costs aside, once on the Internet a user can surf anywhere for the price of a local phone call. But what about all the foregone tax revenue that electronic commerce could facilitate? Although Internet commerce is in its earliest stages, its rapid growth is anticipated. Some estimate that in thirty years time, consumer activity online could represent more than thirty percent of total consumer activity. This leads to the erosion of national tax bases. In this paper we show that as a measure of last resort the bit tax can be implemented. Although the exact implementation of such a tax is not yet clear, the general idea of a tax on information from the point of view of an eroding tax base and the changing society is certainly worth considering. Furthermore, the tax revenues could be directed towards improving access to the Internet, educating individuals to become acquainted with the Internet and providing additional needed bandwidth.economics of technology ;

The Second Law and Rivalrous Digital Information (Or Maxwell's Demon in an Information Age)

Over thirty years ago Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, in an extraordinary book The Entropy Law and the Economic Process opened up a whole new branch of environmental economics, exploring the impact of a fundamental, though not widely known, law of nature, the second law of thermodynamics, on the economic process. The 2nd law of thermodynamics basically says that when energy gets transformed some of it always gets wasted. No matter how efficient we make any machine it will always waste energy to some degree. This has implications for the knowledge society. There is a widespread belief that once information is digitised it can be copied and distributed at zero marginal cost but digital information fundamentally depends on access to a source of energy. And it turns out that large data centres and servers use up a lot of energy. The big technology companies' energy bills can run into hundreds of millions of dollars. In a world facing an energy crisis that means digital information is a little more rivalrous than we originally thought..

Echelon\u27s Effect: The Obsolescence of the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Legal Regime

The technological progress of the past thirty years has vastly increased the surveillance capabilities of the global intelligence community. At the same time, the law governing the use of this technology and its consequent information has remained largely static. This lack of adjustment, for better or worse, has rendered federal foreign intelligence surveillance law irrelevant in many respects

Echelon\u27s Effect: The Obsolescence of the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Legal Regime

The technological progress of the past thirty years has vastly increased the surveillance capabilities of the global intelligence community. At the same time, the law governing the use of this technology and its consequent information has remained largely static. This lack of adjustment, for better or worse, has rendered federal foreign intelligence surveillance law irrelevant in many respects

New media and education

In the last thirty years we witnessed to a number of relevant innovations and changes. Some of them belong to the information technology domain and parts of them were the reason why the IT domain became the ICT domain. In order to better understand problems and issues related to education and learning it is useful to outline some of the most relevant achievements and milestones in the technological domain. If we focus on the European approach to the spread of information technology termed in the ‘90ies “Information Society” we can find initiatives such as i2015 the EU policy framework for the information society and media for the 1 next decade and, at global level, the WSIS+10 a ten years activity aimed to draw the guidelines for an harmonious and fruitful development of the information society. It promotes the positive contribution that information and communication technologies can make to the economy, society and personal quality of life. Everyone experienced in “ICT based innovation” knows that “It is not only a matter of technology”. Of course technology advances are one of the potential actors as in the case of the diffusion of personal computing or easy access to digital networking. Anyway different parameters are actively influencing e-Services success or failure: cultural aspects, organisational issues, bureaucracy and workflow, infrastructure and technology in general, user’s habits, literacy, capacity, market models, interaction design or merely mind-set! Before looking in detail how all these aspects are impacting on education and learning let’s take into account some additional relevant aspects

New Media and the Quality of Life

We are currently in the middle of a revolution. This revolution, sometimes called the digital revolution, is the revolutionary transformation brought about in the information and communication structure of society by the advent of the digital computer, with most of the major transformations having taken place in the past thirty years. Digital computing technology has generated the mainframe and personal computer, the multimedia computer, and computer networks. It has also transformed the telephone system and the monetary system, it is transforming all kinds of conventional products ranging from washing machines to automobiles, and it is on its way to change television as well. More than ever, contemporary society is an Information Society, in which the importance of information and communication is much greater than in past societies, and of which technologies that facilitate information and communication processes are a central societal feature. In this paper, I want to evaluate the implications of contemporary information and communication media for the quality of life, including both the new media from the digital revolution and the older media that still remain in use. My evaluation of contemporary media will proceed in three parts. In the section to follow, the benefits of contemporary media will be discussed, with special emphasis given to their immediate functional benefits. The section thereafter is devoted to a discussion of four potential threats posed by contemporary media. In a final major section, I look at the future of digital media and the possibilities available to us in shaping that future. A short concluding section ends the paper

Our Patient System and Health Care Information Technology: Valuable Incentive or Impediment to Innovation?

Patentable inventions have often been transformative, but the pace of such innovation has changed exponentially in the last thirty years. The patent law still seeks to reward ingenuity and nowhere should this maxim be truer than in the area of health information technology. But the pace and scope of changes in that arena have made rewarding that ingenuity with a patent increasingly difficult. The courts have struggled to apply patent laws to technology that is new and novel to a fault. This Article seeks to address how it is possible to continue to reward ingenuity in a field where progress will save not just money but lives

Citation Analysis of Doctoral Theses submitted to the Department of Library and Information Science, Gauhati University (2011-2017)

The present study is done by collecting and analyzing the references from the thirty theses submitted to the Department of Library and Information Science, Gauhati University in between 2011 to 2017. The year-wise distribution of theses is tabulated. From the 30 theses, 3684 citations have been retrieved where journals are found to be the most preferable source material followed by books and conference proceedings. Among the top 40 highly cited journals, 18 journals are from the UK followed by 14 from India. DESIDOC Journal of Library & Information Technology is on top rank with 72 citations. The citation half-life of literature is found approximately as 12 years

A Qualitative Method for Assessing the Impact of ICT on the Architectural Design Process

During the last thirty years or so, we have witnessed tremendous developments in information and communication technology (ICT). Computer processing power doubles each 18 months, as Gordon Moore predicted during the mid-1960s. The computer and communications world has been revolutionised by the invention of the Internet. It has changed the way of exchanging, viewing, sharing, manipulating and storing the information. Other technologies such as smartphones, wearable computers, tablets, wireless communications and satellite communications have made the adoption of ICT easier and beneficial to all its users. ICT affects the productivity, performance and the competitive advantage of a business. It also impacts on the shape of the business process and its product. In architectural design, ICT is widely used throughout the design process and its final product. The aim of this research, therefore, is to explore the key implication of using ICT in architectural design and what new changes and forms have occurred on buildings as a result of ICT developments and use by architecture practitioners. To achieve this aim, a qualitative research approach was adopted using a narrative review of ICT usage in the design of buildings. The literature found was subjected to a thematic analysis of how ICT adoption affected the architectural design process. The findings of this research indicate that there is a continuous change in the design process and its final products (buildings) as the technology evolves. The framework proposed provides a foundation for gathering evidence from case studies of the impact of ICT adoption by architectural designers. The research proposes that future empirical work has to be conducted to test and refine the relevance, importance and applicability of each of the components of the framework, in order to detect the impact of ICT on the building design process and its final product

How PR faced the challenge of the “information superhighway”

Before the Internet, social media and search engine optimisation, there was the “information superhighway” and the “Megachip age” in the 1980s. Although PR practitioners were slower than other communicators to recognise the potential of Internet and social media, there was some discussion thirty years ago. Drawing on the archive of the International Public Relations Association (IPRA), this paper reviews 21 papers of contemporary discussion over a 15 year period from 1981 to 1996 and draws lessons about the stages of adoption of innovative technology by practitioners. The views of practitioners varied over time. In the initial period from 1981 to 1987 their attitudes ranged from advancing the potential for rapid international outreach (Plank, 1983; Hietpas, 1984) to gloom about deskilling (McPhail 1987) and the future irrelevance of public relations counselling (Pessalano, 1984). From 1989 to 1996, as PR 1.0 (use of email) came in practice, there was less comment but continued concern that the faster information flow was leading to communication “dis-information” (Linning 1995). Only in 1996 was the term “Internet” introduced and lauded as beneficial development (Wilson, 1996). Overall, public relations practitioners are portrayed as slow to understand the benefits of the rapid technical advances in communication and holding doggedly to models of mediated communication. They also failed to foresee that information would be available for more people through IT developments, rather than fewer. The very evident reticence displayed by the IPRA publications sample may indicate why the digital communications sector was able to form outside the purview of the public relations sector and became a competitor to it (Theaker, 2004; Earl & Waddington, 2012)