bookmarks (hide)53
- The Visual Understanding Environment (VUE) is an Open Source project based at Tufts University. The VUE project is focused on creating flexible tools for managing and integrating digital resources in support of teaching, learning and research. VUE provides a flexible visual environment for structuring, presenting, and sharing digital information.
- Simple, minimalist Gmail skin
- Incredibly useful little app that sits in the menubar and gives you access to all your library loans. Soon available as am iPhone app as well.
- How Germany weathered the recession
- Prezi is the zooming presentation editor
- A new solar charger promises to keep your iPhone juiced up at all times.
- Theme: Global Governance - Political Authority in Transition The nation-state is generally regarded as inadequate to cope with the expanding global problems of the 21st century. Global climate change, international economic crises, transnational terrorism and crime, pandemics, nuclear proliferation, and more, all challenge the capabilities of states individually and collectively. Nation-states are also challenged from below by secessionist and other sub-national movements and from above by global civil society. In response to these competing pressures, political authority has begun to flow upwards to supranational or multilateral bodies, downwards to regional and local governments, and sideways to private actors – both within nations and transnationally – who assume previously public responsibilities. Governance is no longer the exclusive preserve of sovereign states, if it ever was. But neither is it moving uniformly in a single direction. Despite growing interest in problems of global governance and decades of research, four key questions still lack clear answers. Where is political authority moving? Why is authority moving? Is global governance good? How can global governance be improved and reformed? We invite proposals for papers and panels that address these and other issues related to the problems of global governance in the 21st century. We especially welcome proposals that bridge different theoretical, epistemological and ontological divides within international studies to address common substantive problems. DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSION OF PROPOSALS IS JUNE 1, 2010 All proposals should be submitted online using the MyISA Conference Management System at http://isanet.ccit.arizona.edu/MyISA Program Chairs contact information: Email: isa2011@isanet.org
- Insuring crops with a mobile phone
- For use as case study in posc-3916
- Simulation of WWII for teaching purposes.
- The tiny Optoma PK102 pico projector delivers vivid color images and handles stand-alone presentations via its built-in media player.
- Information has gone from scarce to superabundant. That brings huge new benefits, says Kenneth Cukier (interviewed here) but also big headaches
- BrightBuilt Barn is an award-winning, practical, affordable, beautiful structure that is one of the only buildings in the world to be designed to be truly carbon neutral.
- Have your paper reviewed BEFORE you turn it in.
- WIDE ANGLE’s unprecedented, award-winning 12-year documentary project, Time for School, returns in 2009 with visits to seven classrooms in seven countries to offer a glimpse into the lives of seven extraordinary children who are struggling to get what nearly all American kids take for granted: a basic education. We started filming in 2002, watching as kids first entered school in Afghanistan, Benin, Brazil, India, Japan, Kenya and Romania, many despite great odds. Several years later, in 2006, we returned to film an update — and now, three years later, we travel to check in on our young teenagers who are making the precarious transition to middle school. Among the highlights: in Afghanistan we reunite with 16-year-old Shugufa, who resolutely remains in school despite the Taliban’s recent acid attacks on young women her age. “If they continue attacking schools, our country won’t progress. Without an education you can’t get anywhere,” says Shufuga, whose own education was delayed when her family lived in a refugee camp in Pakistan during years when the Taliban ruled her country. We also visit the biggest slum in Nairobi, Kenya, where 15-year-old Joab’s mother has died and his father has abandoned the family. We watch as, incredibly, Joab manages to stay at the top of his class while also raising and feeding his two younger siblings. And in the blazing desert of Rajasthan, India, we encounter Neeraj, 15, only to learn that she has been unable to realize her dream of making it to 10th grade: since our last visit her night school has closed, and she now helps support her family by grazing the livestock full-time while her brothers continue their education. These children’s stories put a human face on the shocking fact that more than 75 million children are currently out of school; of these, two thirds are girls. One in four children in developing countries does not complete five years of basic education, and there are nearly one billion illiterate adults — one-sixth of the world’s people. WIDE ANGLE plans to continue revisiting all the children, and their peers and families, through 2015, the year they should graduate — and, not coincidentally, the U.N.’s target date for achieving universal education, a Millennium Development goal endorsed by all 191 members of the United Nations. While each child in Time for School 3 has a unique story, taken together their lives tell an epic tale, shedding light on one of the most urgent and under-reported stories of our time
- The Jesuit Universities’ center in China. Founded by the 28 US Jesuits universities in 1998, The Beijing Center for Chinese Studies (TBC) has provided an unprecedented education about China. TBC primarily focuses on year-abroad undergraduate education, and today hosts nearly 200 undergraduate students each year from Jesuit universities all over the world. TBC offers over 50 courses each year across 13 different fields of study, all taught in English by faculty from the best academic institutes in Beijing. The TBC library of Chinese Studies contains over 20,000 volumes about China in English. Besides undergraduate semester study-abroad, TBC has produced series of short-term academic programs named “ChinaContact” and a summer intensive language program “ChinaVoice”.
publications (hide)2696
- Social Networks, 32 (1): 16--29 (2010)
- Faber and Faber, London, (1929)
- Journal of Economic History, 70 (01): 57--82 (2010)
- Bank of England Working Paper, 35. Bank of England, London, (1995)
- Study, NSBA, (July 2007)
- Principles of Self-Organization: Transactions of the University of Illinois Symposium, Pergamon, London, (1962)
- RAND, Santa Monica, CA, (2009)
- Computational & Mathematical Organization Theory, 13 (4): 355–377 (December 2007)Computational & Mathematical Organization Theory provides an international forum for interdisciplinary research that combines computation, organizations and society. The goal is to advance the state of science in formal reasoning, analysis, and system building drawing on and encouraging advances in areas at the confluence of social networks, artificial intelligence, complexity, machine learning, sociology, business, political science, economics, and operations research. The papers in this journal will lead to the development of newtheories that explain and predict the behaviour of complex adaptive systems, new computational models and technologies that are responsible to society, business, policy, and law, new methods for integrating data, computational models, analysis and visualization techniques. Various types of papers and underlying research are welcome. Papers presenting, validating, or applying models and/or computational techniques, new algorithms, dynamic metrics for networks and complex systems and papers comparing, contrasting and docking computational models are strongly encouraged. Both applied and theoretical work is strongly encouraged. The editors encourage theoretical research on fundamental principles of social behaviour such as coordination, cooperation, evolution, and destabilization. The editors encourage applied research representing actual organizational or policy problems that can be addressed using computational tools. Work related to fundamental concepts, corporate, military or intelligence issues are welcome. The journal publishes a number of special issues on focused topics, including organizations of intelligent agents, counter-terrorism, computational statistics for networks, and organizations in crises. In addition, tutorial papers, such as how to check the robustness of a simulation, or system details - such as algorithm descriptions are also welcome. The audience is international in scope. It includes researchers, students, academic, corporate and military personnel in all of the social and organizational disciplines, operations research and graph theory, mathematics, computer science, and management..
- Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, (2009)Book review in The Economist: JOHN CASSIDY'S new book is a sequel of sorts. In his previous work, “Dot.Con”, which came out in 2002, he chronicled the follies of the stockmarket bubble of the late 1990s. In “How Markets Fail”, Mr Cassidy, a British writer for the New Yorker, recounts the story of America's housing boom and its devastating bust. It is more than just an account of the failures of regulators and the self-deception of bankers and homebuyers, although these are well covered. For Mr Cassidy, the deeper roots of the crisis lie in the enduring appeal of an idea: that society is always best served when individuals are left to pursue their self-interest in free markets. He calls this “Utopian economics”. This approach turns much of the book into a very good history of economic thought. Mr Cassidy starts in 1776 with Adam Smith and his butchers, brewers and bakers, who supplied their wares as if guided by an unseen hand. Smith's analysis was made richer in the 1940s by Friedrich von Hayek, the Austrian who saw market prices as signals of which goods were scarce and which were abundant. Hayek's idea of the free market as a machine for processing and transmitting information “was one of the great insights of the 20th century,” writes Mr Cassidy. The book gives a detailed account of how the formal “proof” of the efficiency of free markets evolved. The breakthrough was made in the early 1950s by Kenneth Arrow, an American economist, and Gérard Debreu, a French mathematician who died in 2004. Mr Cassidy admires the maths, but points out that their findings rely on some unrealistic assumptions, something the two theorists were quite open about. Arrow and Debreu's “general equilibrium theory” seemed to give the stamp of scientific approval to unfettered markets. And it may have made it harder to challenge the purist free-market views of Alan Greenspan, the Federal Reserve chairman until 2006 whom Mr Cassidy partly blames for the dotcom and housing bubbles. Having set out the tenets of Utopian economics, the author then pokes holes in them. Individual self interest does not always benefit society, he argues, and draws on a deep pool of research (what he calls “reality-based economics”) to support his case. Markets fail if prices send the wrong signals. For instance, an increase in house prices ought to discourage new homebuyers. In practice, however, higher prices are a spur to buyers who hope to benefit from further rises. For would-be homeowners, the signal is that it is time to buy; for banks, that it is time to lend. Those who suspect a bubble face the same dilemma as textbook prisoners: it makes sense to act sensibly only if others do so too. Since that cannot be relied upon, it is safer to go with the herd. The result of such individually rational behaviour is a housing and credit boom, followed inevitably by a nasty bust. Markets also founder when there is hidden information—if sellers know more than buyers, for example—and when the prices paid by individuals do not fully reflect social costs, such as pollution. Such failures were evident in the build-up to the current crisis: dud mortgages were packaged as supposedly safe bonds to investors; banks did not factor in the wider costs of bad debt when making risky loans. Policymakers should have intervened to curb the excesses but were hamstrung by free-market ideology. “How Markets Fail” is an ambitious book, and one that mostly succeeds. Despite its title, it makes rather a good case for market economics; what it rails against is “free market idolatry”. Its call for a better balance between individual autonomy and state oversight might have seemed off-centre just a few years ago. Now its prescription is firmly in the mainstream..
- International Organization, 32 (1): 13--43 (1978)
- International Organization, 32 (1): 2--12 (1978)
- The Philosophy of Karl Popper, 1, Open Court, La Salle, IL, (1974)
- Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, (1981)
- International Studies Review, 12 (1): 31--52 (2010)
- Social Capital: Theory and Research, Aldine de Gruyter, New York, (2001)
- McKinsey Quarterly, (2010)
- University of California Press, Berkeley, (1992)
- University of California Press, Berkeley, (1992)
- University of California Press, Berkeley, (1992)
- Comparative Strategy, 27 (3): 227 (2008)
- Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, 31 (4): 493--516 (2007)
- Journal of Statistical Software, 24 (7): 1--36 (Dec 25, 2007)
- World Economy, 32 (2): 203--220 (2009)
- Journal of Archaeological Research, 6 (2): 91--120 (June 1998)
- Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, (1960)
- Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, (1963)
- Paper presented at the 51st Annual Meeting of the International Studies Association, New Orleans, LA, February 17-20, (2010)
- Paper presented at the 49th Annual Convention of the International Studies Association, San Francisco, CA, March 26--29, (2008)
- Journal of Global History, 5 (01): 29--50 (2010)
- International Political Sociology, 4 (1): 15--32 (2010)
- Cooperation and Conflict, 43 (2): 185--219 (2008)
- Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, (2000)
- The Economist, (February 2010)
- Wiley-IEEE, (November 2009)
- Management and Organization Review, (2010)
- Report, August. International Telecommunication Union (ITU), Geneva, (2006)
- Report, International Telecommunication Union (ITU), Geneva, (2002)
- Report, International Telecommunication Union (ITU), Geneva, (2005)
- Report, International Telecommunication Union (ITU), Geneva, (May 2007)
- Report, 2009/2. Institut der deutschen Wirtschaft, Cologne, Germany, (2009)
- Clarendon Press, Oxford, (1950)
- The Financial Times, (January 2010)
- Great power rivalries, University of South Carolina Press, Columbia, (1999)
- MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, (1999)Provides a good overview over the history of the Internet. Use of the Internet has grown tremendously in a very short time and we take much of it for granted. We shop online, bank online, purchase airline tickets and make hotel reservations online, all at the click of a mouse through the World Wide Web, a graphical application for using the Internet. But how did the Internet get its start? In Inventing the Internet, Janet Abbate tells the tale of the creation and evolution of the Internet beginning in the late 1960s with the development of a revolutionary concept for transferring data called packet switching developed simultaneously by Paul Baran of the Rand Corporation in the U.S. and Donald Davies of the National Physics Laboratory in Great Britain. Abbate discusses the challenges faced by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) in creating ARPANET, the first wide-scale computer network. ARPA's challenges ranged from utilizing the new and unproven technique of packet switching to connecting a wide variety of incompatible computers to the fledgling network. Packet switching proved to be a success but as Abbate points out, it is hard to say if packet switching made ARPANET a success or if ARPANET made packet switching a success. Abbate explains the efforts of several organizations that went into developing international standards that were necessary for the Internet to become as successful as it has become. Abbate also explores the social issues surrounding the creation and development of the Internet; issues such as the cooperation necessary between the builders and the users of ARPANET in the 1970s and 80s that made ARPANET more user friendly to how the users themselves saved the ARPANET and ultimately the Internet through the popularization of an unlikely application. Abbate states 'had the ARPANET's only value been as a tool for resource sharing, the network might be remembered today as a minor failure rather than a spectacular success. But the network users unexpectedly came up with a new focus for network activity: electronic mail.' Abbate delves into the popularization of the Internet through such applications such as the World Wide Web and how private enterprises including Internet service providers such as America Online, CompuServe and Prodigy quickly transformed the Internet from a dull, text-only entity to a glitzy, graphically oriented medium. The World Wide Web exponentially added to this popularization by providing an application that was not only easy to use but also wildly entertaining to both expert and novice users alike. Abbate presents this history of the Internet in an easy-to-read style that is both entertaining and informative. Inventing the Internet is well documented with extensive chapter notes and an excellent bibliography..
- Financial Times, (June 2007)
- Financial Times, (June 2007)
- Financial Times, (June 2007)
- American Journal of Political Science, 33 (4): 842--877 (November 1989)
- (2000)
- United Nations University Press, Tokyo and New York, (1998)
