Universal Access And Its Asymmetries

Download or read book Universal Access and Its Asymmetries written by Harmeet Sawhney and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2022-12-13 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A framework for understanding the totality of costs and benefits of universal access that will foster honest appraisal and guide the development of good policies. Universal access—the idea that certain technologies and services should be extended to all regardless of geography or ability to pay—evokes ideals of democracy and equality that must be reconciled with the realities on the ground. The COVID-19 pandemic raised awareness of the need for access to high-speed internet service in the United States, but this is just the latest in a long history of debates about what should be made available and to whom. Rural mail delivery, electrification, telephone service, public schooling, and library access each raised the same questions as today’s debates about health care and broadband. What types of services should be universally available? Who benefits from extending these services? And who bears the cost? Stepping beyond humanitarian arguments to conduct a clear-eyed, diagnostic analysis, this book offers some surprising conclusions. While the conventional approach to universal access looks primarily at the costs to the system and the benefits to individuals, Harmeet Sawhney and Hamid Ekbia provide a holistic perspective that also accounts for costs to individuals and benefits for systems. With a comparative approach across multiple cases, Universal Access and Its Asymmetries is an essential exploration of the history, costs, and benefits of providing universal access to technologies and services. With a fresh perspective, it overturns common assumptions and offers a foundation for making decisions about how to extend service—and how to pay for it.

Download or read book Universal Access in Human-Computer Interaction. Access to Today's Technologies written by Margherita Antona and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-07-18 with total page 523 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The four LNCS volume set 9175-9178 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Learning and Collaboration Technologies, UAHCI 2015, held as part of the 17th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, HCII 2015, in Los Angeles, CA, USA in August 2015, jointly with 15 other thematically similar conferences. The total of 1462 papers and 246 posters presented at the HCII 2015 conferences were carefully reviewed and selected from 4843 submissions. These papers of the four volume set address the following major topics: LNCS 9175, Universal Access in Human-Computer Interaction: Access to today's technologies (Part I), addressing the following major topics: LNCS 9175: Design and evaluation methods and tools for universal access, universal access to the web, universal access to mobile interaction, universal access to information, communication and media. LNCS 9176: Gesture-based interaction, touch-based and haptic Interaction, visual and multisensory experience, sign language technologies, and smart and assistive environments LNCS 9177: Universal Access to Education, universal access to health applications and services, games for learning and therapy and cognitive disabilities and cognitive support and LNCS 9178: Universal access to culture, orientation, navigation and driving, accessible security and voting, universal access to the built environment and ergonomics and universal access.

Download or read book The Character of Consent written by Meg Leta Jones and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2024-06-18 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The rich, untold origin story of the ubiquitous web cookie—what’s wrong with it, why it’s being retired, and how we can do better. Consent pop-ups continually ask us to download cookies to our computers, but is this all-too-familiar form of privacy protection effective? No, Meg Leta Jones explains in The Character of Consent, rather than promote functionality, privacy, and decentralization, cookie technology has instead made the internet invasive, limited, and clunky. Good thing, then, that the cookie is set for retirement in 2024. In this eye-opening book, Jones tells the little-known story of this broken consent arrangement, tracing it back to the major transnational conflicts around digital consent over the last twenty-five years. What she finds is that the policy controversy is not, in fact, an information crisis—it’s an identity crisis. Instead of asking how people consent, Jones asks who exactly is consenting and to what. Packed into those cookie pop-ups, she explains, are three distinct areas of law with three different characters who can consent. Within (mainly European) data protection law, the data subject consents. Within communication privacy law, the user consents. And within consumer protection law, the privacy consumer consents. These areas of law have very different histories, motivations, institutional structures, expertise, and strategies, so consent—and the characters who can consent—plays a unique role in those areas of law. The Character of Consent gives each computer character its due, taking us back to their origin stories within the legal history of computing. By doing so, Jones provides alternative ways of understanding the core issues within the consent dilemma. More importantly, she offers bold new approaches to creating and adopting better tech policies in the future.

Download or read book The Power of Partnership in Open Government written by Suzanne J. Piotrowski and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2022-12-06 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What the Open Government Partnership tells us about how international initiatives can and do shape domestic public sector reform. At the 2011 meeting of the UN General Assembly, the governments of eight nations—Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico, Norway, Philippines, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States—launched the Open Government Partnership, a multilateral initiative aimed at promoting transparency, empowering citizens, fighting corruption, and harnessing new technologies to strengthen governance. At the time, many were concerned that the Open Government Partnership would end up toothless, offering only lip service to vague ideals and misguided cyber-optimism. The Power of Partnership in Open Government offers a close look, and a surprising affirmation, of the Open Government Partnership as an example of a successful transnational multistakeholder initiative that has indeed impacted policy and helped to produce progressive reform. By 2019 the Open Government Partnership had grown to 78 member countries and 20 subnational governments. Through a variety of methods—document analysis, interviews, process tracing, and quantitative analysis of secondary data—Suzanne J. Piotrowski, Daniel Berliner, and Alex Ingrams chart the Open Government Partnership’s effectiveness and evaluate what this reveals about the potential of international reform initiatives in general. Their work calls upon scholars and policymakers to reconsider the role of international institutions and, in doing so, to differentiate between direct and indirect pathways to transnational impact on domestic policy. The more nuanced and complex processes of the indirect pathway, they suggest, have considerable but often overlooked potential to shape policy norms and models, alter resources and opportunities, and forge new linkages and coalitions—in short, to drive the substantial changes that inspire initiatives like the Open Government Partnership.

Download or read book Inside IBM written by James W. Cortada and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2023-10-31 with total page 519 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: IBM was the world’s leading provider of information technologies for much of the twentieth century. What made it so successful for such a long time, and what lessons can this iconic corporation teach present-day enterprises? James W. Cortada—a business historian who worked at IBM for many years—pinpoints the crucial role of IBM’s corporate culture. He provides an inside look at how this culture emerged and evolved over the course of nearly a century, bringing together the perspectives of employees, executives, and customers around the world. Through a series of case studies, Inside IBM explores the practices that built and reinforced organizational culture, including training of managers, employee benefits, company rituals, and the role of humor. It also considers the importance of material culture, such as coffee mugs and lapel pins. Cortada argues that IBM’s corporate culture aligned with its business imperatives for most of its history, allowing it to operate with a variety of stakeholders in mind and not simply prioritize stockholders. He identifies key lessons that managers can learn from IBM’s experience and apply in their own organizations today. This engaging and deeply researched book holds many insights for business historians, executives and managers concerned with stakeholder relations, professionals interested in corporate culture, and IBMers.

Download or read book Teaching Early Modern English Literature from the Archives written by Heidi Brayman Hackel and published by Modern Language Association. This book was released on 2015-03-01 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The availability of digital editions of early modern works brings a wealth of exciting archival and primary source materials into the classroom. But electronic archives can be overwhelming and hard to use, for teachers and students alike, and digitization can distort or omit information about texts. Teaching Early Modern English Literature from the Archives places traditional and electronic archives in conversation, outlines practical methods for incorporating them into the undergraduate and graduate curriculum, and addresses the theoretical issues involved in studying them. The volume discusses a range of physical and virtual archives from 1473 to 1700 that are useful in the teaching of early modern literature--both major sources and rich collections that are less known (including affordable or free options for those with limited institutional resources). Although the volume focuses on English literature and culture, essays discuss a wide range of comparative approaches involving Latin, French, Spanish, German, and early American texts and explain how to incorporate visual materials, ballads, domestic treatises, atlases, music, and historical documents into the teaching of literature.

Download or read book Universal Access to Broadband and Service Programs written by Antonio García Zaballos and published by Inter-American Development Bank. This book was released on 2014-12-12 with total page 155 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Broadband is key to inclusive growth. It contributes substantially to social and economic development in the areas of job creation, business investment, and online services, among others. Several countries in Latin America and the Caribbean have already initiated reforms of their telecommunications framework to advance broadband towards universal usage. On one hand, the universal access service (UAS) policies that are relatively solid in middle-income or emerging countries will attract significant financial resources to manage the high costs that relate to new infrastructure in rural areas. Depending on the country's topography, however, the possibilities for development may be limited and costly. On the other, UAS policies that are considered advanced or have been long established (and rely considerably on the private sector) will need to address the disbanding of old frameworks. The objective of this publication is to assist national authorities in the region as they bridge the gaps between their countries and those that have developed effective UAS policies.