Digital Technology and Cultural Policy

This paper reviews how digital technology, and the devices and broadband networks associated with it (the Internet, for short), can be expected to a ect the ways in which books, music, the visual arts, libraries and archived cultural heritage (cultural goods, for short) are produced, distributed and consumed. The paper has four parts. First, I place the growth of the Internet in historical and comparative perspective. I argue that the United States is presently engaged in a regulatory e ort similar in intent to those imposed on earlier communications revolutions. In this context, I outline the ways that the Internet can be expected to change how people produce and consume cultural goods. I distinguish between practices the technology makes possible and practices likely to become established as typical for the majority of people. Second, I discuss some of the new arenas for cultural policy thrown up by the Internet. I argue that, just as it has bound many kinds of cultural content into a single medium, the Internet has tied together a variety of regulatory issues and brought cultural policy into contact with areas of policy-making not normally associated with culture. Third, I focus on the relationship between creativity, consumption and copyright law. Fourth, I describe a number of key conflicts over the Internet's architecture and content. How these are resolved through policy choices will have important consequences for how we consume and experience cultural goods of all kinds in the future.

Organ Entrepreneurs

The supply of human organs for transplantation might seem an unlikely place to begin thinking about entrepreneurship. After all, there is no production market for human organs and, with the surprising exception of Iran, legal rules around the world make the sale of human organs for transplantation a criminal offense. Yet entrepreneurs have been present throughout the history of organ transplantation — a history of the active exploration, innovation, and management of a potentially very controversial exchange at the seemingly clear boundaries that separate giving from selling, life from death, and right from wrong. This article explores the role of entrepreneurial activity in the organ transplantation industry, with the goal of showing how the specific case helps us understand the more general phenomenon of innovation in the shadow of the law, and the role of reciprocity and gift exchange in that process. We begin with a more general point about the connection between structures of exchange and their social legitimacy, illustrating it with a familiar current case from the (conventionally entrepreneurial) world of the “sharing economy”. We then describe three innovations in the world of organ transplantation, discussing the legitimation problems faced by innovators in each case, and the strategies they have drawn on. First, Kidney Paired Donation (KPD), one of the first entrepreneurial attempts to bridge the gap between kidney supply and demand, allows patients with willing, but biologically incompatible donors, to “swap” with a similarly situated pair. Second, Non-simultaneous, Extended Altruistic Donor chains (or “NEAD” chains), removed the simultaneity constraint imposed by KPD, allowing more flexibility and a greater number of transplants, but also inserting the possibility of strategic behavior by donor-recipient pairs. Finally, we consider the most recent innovation, Advanced Donation, in which a donor donates a kidney before her paired recipient has been matched to a specific donor or scheduled for surgery, creating new challenges and risks

Custom, Contract, and Kidney Exchange

In this Essay, we examine a case in which the organizational and logistical demands of a novel form of organ exchange (the nonsimultaneous, extended, altruistic donor (NEAD) chain) do not map cleanly onto standard cultural schemas for either market or gift exchange, resulting in sociological ambiguity and legal uncertainty. In some ways, a NEAD chain resembles a form of generalized exchange, an ancient and widespread instance of the norm of reciprocity that can be thought of simply as the obligation to pay it forward rather than the obligation to reciprocate directly with the original giver. At the same time, a NEAD chain resembles a string of promises and commitments to deliver something in exchange for some valuable consideration—that is, a series of contracts. Neither of these salient social imaginaries of exchange—gift giving or formal contract—perfectly meets the practical demands of the NEAD system. As a result, neither contract nor generalized exchange drives the practice of NEAD chains. Rather, the majority of actual exchanges still resemble a simpler form of exchange: direct, simultaneous exchange between parties with no time delay or opportunity to back out. If NEAD chains are to reach their full promise for large-scale, nonsimultaneous organ transfer, legal uncertainties and sociological ambiguities must be finessed, both in the practices of the coordinating agencies and in the minds of NEAD-chain participants. This might happen either through the further elaboration of gift-like language and practices, or through a creative use of the cultural form and motivational vocabulary, but not necessarily the legal and institutional machinery, of contract

Repugnance Management and Transactions in the Body

Researchers have made progress in understanding the role of repugnance in transactions involving the human body. Yet, often, the focus remains on exchange between individuals and how they mentally cope (or not) with repugnance. But these exchanges also entail a “vertical” dimension in which organizational and state actors both directly manage repugnance and also limit the repugnance management tools available to the marketplace. Analyzing repugnance and its management as an organizational and regulatory problem, in addition to an individual one, suggests that a single, harmonized system of exchange in bodily goods is unlikely to emerge with the passage of time

Do Presumed-Consent Laws Raise Organ Procurement Rates?

Abstract: In Western countries, the legal procurement of cadaveric human organs is everywhere organized as a gi -exchange. Yet despite this basic similarity, donation rates vary widely, and this fact is o en overlooked in debates about the merits of gi -versus marketbased systems. I investigate the sources of variation in procurement rates using time-series data from seventeen countries. I focus on the e ect of laws that (at least in principle) allow for the consent of the donor to be presumed, and the wishes of the next-of-kin to be overridden. Countries with presumed consent laws are found to have higher procurement rates, but the e ect is relatively weak. Evidence from two presumed-consent countries where procurement rates have grown rapidly (Spain and Italy) suggests that presumed consent laws are a marker for organizational practices that boost procurement rates rather than real causes of higher donation. Gi -giving and voluntary donation are the standard ways of obtaining organs for transplant, particularly organs like hearts and lungs which must come from the dead. Yet this gi -exchange does not happen everywhere in the same way or to the same extent. Despite the universality of voluntary donation, there is considerable crossnational variation in donor procurement rates. Some countries do much better than others. is variability has not received the attention it deserves, partly because the dominant ethical and policy debates focus on the relative merits of voluntary versus market systems. is has had two consequences. First, these debates tend to draw a sharp contrast between gi -and market-based systems, encouraging us to think in terms of a clear choice between the two. e assumption is that once the overall exchange system is xed, certain consequences for the volume and composition of the supply will tend to follow more or less directly. Second, there is a tendency for Donation is also the main source of organs from living donors, a growing illegal trade in organ sales notwithstanding. See Scheper-Hughes ( ) and Cohen ( ) for accounts of the black market in organs. consentlaw.tex Rev 1.

Counting and Commodifying

The Article discusses the issue of standardized testing and commodification in light of the U.S. education reform as related in the article “Testing as Commodification,” by Katharine Silbaugh. It says that Silbaugh offers information on the reform movement in education under the U.S. No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB). It adds that Silbaugh is concerned on the corruption risk posed by NLCB\u27s requirement that U.S. school make adequate yearly progress (AYP) based from standardized tests

A virtual coaching environment for improving golf swing technique

As a proficient golf swing is a key element of success in golf, many golfers make significant effort improving their stroke mechanics. In order to help enhance golfing performance, it is important to identify the performance determining factors within the full golf swing. In addition, explicit instructions on specific features in stroke technique requiring alterations must be imparted to the player in an unambiguous and intuitive manner. However, these two objectives are difficult to achieve due to the subjective nature of traditional coaching techniques and the predominantly implicit knowledge players have of their movements. In this work, we have developed a set of visualisation and analysis tools for use in a virtual golf coaching environment. In this virtual coaching studio, the analysis tools allow for specific areas require improvement in a player's 3D stroke dynamics to be isolated. An interactive 3D virtual coaching environment then allows detailed and unambiguous coaching information to be visually imparted back to the player via the use of two virtual human avatars; the first mimics the movements performed by the player; the second takes the role of a virtual coach, performing ideal stroke movement dynamics. The potential of the coaching tool is highlighted in its use by sports science researchers in the evaluation of competing approaches for calculating the X-Factor, a significant performance determining factor for hitting distance in a golf swing

Categories All the Way Down

Scores and classifications are dual to one another. Cardinal and ordinal measures are repeatedly used to produce nominal classifications of essential worth. Conversely, presumptively natural kinds provide the basis for new measurement and scoring systems. Over time, the iterative application of nominal classifications and quantifying measures produce involuted, nested systems whose structure and origins are hard to disentangle. While careful studies of earlier systems and methods have often uncovered these arbitrary aspects, newer technical tools for classification are at once substantially more opaque than their predecessors and more likely to be employed on very large scales. The classification situations to which they give rise thus have the potential to produce the sort of naturalized facticity characteristic of classical social facts

Classification Situations: Life-Chances in the Neoliberal Era

This article examines the stratifying effects of economic classifications. We argue that in the neoliberal era market institutions increasingly use actuarial tech-niques to split and sort individuals into classification situations that shape life-chances. While this is a general and increasingly pervasive process, our main empirical illustration comes from the transformation of the credit market in the United States. This market works as both as a leveling force and as a condenser of new forms of social difference. The U.S. banking and credit system has greatly broadened its scope over the past twenty years to incorporate previously excluded groups. We observe this leveling tendency in the expansion of credit amongst lower-income households, the systematization of overdraft protections, and the unexpected and rapid growth of the fringe banking sector. But while access to credit has democratized, it has also differentiated. Scoring technologies classify and price people according to credit risk. This has allowed multiple new distinctions to be made amongst the creditworthy, as scores get attached to different interest rates and loan structures. Scores have also expanded into markets beyond consumer credit, such as insurance, real estate, employment, and elsewhere. The result is a cumulative pattern of advantage and disadvantage with both objectively measured and subjectively experienced aspects. We argue these private classificatory tools are increasingly central to the generation of „market-situations“, and thus an important and overlooked force that structures individual life-chances. In short, classification situations may have become the engine of modern class situations

The reclamation of the Shannon Estuary inter‐tidal flats: a case study of the Clare Slobland Reclamation Company

Extensive reclamation of the sloblands in the Shannon estuary have been undertaken over hundreds of years but particularly in the mid to late 1800s. There is extensive documentary evidence of the various reclamation schemes that were undertaken. The Clare Slobland Reclamation Company attempted to reclaim a very large section of the Fergus sub-estuary of the Shannon but ultimately failed, despite enormous expenditure. A smaller less ambitious reclamation in the same area was completed afterwards by the Fergus Reclamation Company. The financing, legislation, scale and chronology of the Clare Slobland Reclamation Scheme is outlined along with the difficulties it faced and the eventual causes of its failure are examined. In addition the entitlements of the company and their associated responsibilities are outlined and these show the extent of the powers they had to change and alter the landscape