Inside the Future

Inside the Future PDF Author: Henry C. Lucas Jr.
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313348278
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
From iPods to EZPass technology to YouTube to eGovernment initiatives, the impact of technology is changing our lives more and more each day. This book, a counterpart to a Maryland Public Television documentary, chronicles how and why and shows ways people can take advantage of the revolution in their personal and professional lives. As technology expert Henry C. Lucas, Jr., argues, the fundamentals of business and the economy—not to mention the details of daily life—are changing in every market, in every industry, and in every nation. This book explores the most significant of these technology-enabled transformations to help readers understand and appreciate the opportunities and threats presented by a new, technology-driven global economy. Among other things, Inside the Future demonstrates that: -A revolution in technology is transforming business and the way individuals live and work. -It's essential to adapt to change. Resisting technological advances is futile, and countries or people that fall behind in technology may never catch up. -The U.S. needs to prepare current and future workers for an economy that incorporates technology in every business process, an economy in which there are almost no constraints from time and place, and an economy in which most hierarchical organizations disappear. -The future competitiveness of the country depends on our ability to innovate and implement change enabled by technology. This revolution is leaving no person or organization untouched. From business to education and healthcare, the digitization and mobilization of every process affects us all. Yet this isn't a book about technology, but one that shows how people and organizations can adapt technology to transform their businesses as well as create a more productive, satisfying personal life. Readers will gain a new awareness of how leading organizations apply IT to create transformations, and how they can use technology to improve their lives, remain competitive in the workforce, and survive in this new age of constant change and re-invention.

Inside the Future

Inside the Future PDF Author: Henry C. Lucas Jr.
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313348278
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 226

Get Book Here

Book Description
From iPods to EZPass technology to YouTube to eGovernment initiatives, the impact of technology is changing our lives more and more each day. This book, a counterpart to a Maryland Public Television documentary, chronicles how and why and shows ways people can take advantage of the revolution in their personal and professional lives. As technology expert Henry C. Lucas, Jr., argues, the fundamentals of business and the economy—not to mention the details of daily life—are changing in every market, in every industry, and in every nation. This book explores the most significant of these technology-enabled transformations to help readers understand and appreciate the opportunities and threats presented by a new, technology-driven global economy. Among other things, Inside the Future demonstrates that: -A revolution in technology is transforming business and the way individuals live and work. -It's essential to adapt to change. Resisting technological advances is futile, and countries or people that fall behind in technology may never catch up. -The U.S. needs to prepare current and future workers for an economy that incorporates technology in every business process, an economy in which there are almost no constraints from time and place, and an economy in which most hierarchical organizations disappear. -The future competitiveness of the country depends on our ability to innovate and implement change enabled by technology. This revolution is leaving no person or organization untouched. From business to education and healthcare, the digitization and mobilization of every process affects us all. Yet this isn't a book about technology, but one that shows how people and organizations can adapt technology to transform their businesses as well as create a more productive, satisfying personal life. Readers will gain a new awareness of how leading organizations apply IT to create transformations, and how they can use technology to improve their lives, remain competitive in the workforce, and survive in this new age of constant change and re-invention.

Technology and Society

Technology and Society PDF Author: Deborah G. Johnson
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262303388
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 877

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Book Description
An anthology of writings by thinkers ranging from Freeman Dyson to Bruno Latour that focuses on the interconnections of technology, society, and values and how these may affect the future. Technological change does not happen in a vacuum; decisions about which technologies to develop, fund, market, and use engage ideas about values as well as calculations of costs and benefits. This anthology focuses on the interconnections of technology, society, and values. It offers writings by authorities as varied as Freeman Dyson, Laurence Lessig, Bruno Latour, and Judy Wajcman that will introduce readers to recent thinking about technology and provide them with conceptual tools, a theoretical framework, and knowledge to help understand how technology shapes society and how society shapes technology. It offers readers a new perspective on such current issues as globalization, the balance between security and privacy, environmental justice, and poverty in the developing world. The careful ordering of the selections and the editors' introductions give Technology and Society a coherence and flow that is unusual in anthologies. The book is suitable for use in undergraduate courses in STS and other disciplines. The selections begin with predictions of the future that range from forecasts of technological utopia to cautionary tales. These are followed by writings that explore the complexity of sociotechnical systems, presenting a picture of how technology and society work in step, shaping and being shaped by one another. Finally, the book goes back to considerations of the future, discussing twenty-first-century challenges that include nanotechnology, the role of citizens in technological decisions, and the technologies of human enhancement.

Society and Technological Change

Society and Technological Change PDF Author: Rudi Volti
Publisher: Macmillan Higher Education
ISBN: 1319129722
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 488

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Book Description
Society and Technological Change is the best text available for undergraduate courses exploring the relationship between societal and technological change Brimming with Rudi Volti's expertise and enthusiasm for its dynamic subject, this always timely volume helps students grasp the vast societal implications of a wide range of technological breakthroughs, both historic and contemporary.

Creative Technological Change

Creative Technological Change PDF Author: Ian Mcloughlin
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134680163
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 201

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Book Description
Creative Technological Change draws upon a wide range of thinking from organisational theory, innovation studies and the sociology of technology. It explores the different ways in which these questions have been framed and answered, especially in relation to new 'virtual' technologies. The idea of metaphor is used to capture the differences between, and strengths and weaknesses of various ways of conceptualising the technology/organisation relationship. This approach offers the possibility of developing new ways of thinking about, viewing and ultimately responding creatively to the organisational challenges posed by technological change.

Models of Innovation

Models of Innovation PDF Author: Benoit Godin
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262035898
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
Benoît Godin is a Professor at the Institut national de la recherche scientifique, Montreal. Models abound in science, technology, and society (STS) studies and in science, technology, and innovation (STI) studies. They are continually being invented, with one author developing many versions of the same model over time. At the same time, models are regularly criticized. Such is the case with the most influential model in STS-STI: the linear model of innovation. In this book, Benoît Godin examines the emergence and diffusion of the three most important conceptual models of innovation from the early twentieth century to the late 1980s: stage models, linear models, and holistic models. Godin first traces the history of the models of innovation constructed during this period, considering why these particular models came into being and what use was made of them. He then rethinks and debunks the historical narratives of models developed by theorists of innovation. Godin documents a greater diversity of thinkers and schools than in the conventional account, tracing a genealogy of models beginning with anthropologists, industrialists, and practitioners in the first half of the twentieth century to their later formalization in STS-STI. Godin suggests that a model is a conceptualization, which could be narrative, or a set of conceptualizations, or a paradigmatic perspective, often in pictorial form and reduced discursively to a simplified representation of reality. Why are so many things called models? Godin claims that model has a rhetorical function. First, a model is a symbol of “scientificity.” Second, a model travels easily among scholars and policy makers. Calling a conceptualization or narrative or perspective a model facilitates its propagation.

Paths of Innovation

Paths of Innovation PDF Author: David C. Mowery
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521646536
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
In 1903 the Wright brothers' airplane travelled a couple of hundred yards. Today fleets of streamlined jets transport millions of people each day to cities worldwide. Between discovery and application, between invention and widespread use, there is a world of innovation, of tinkering, improvement and adaptation. This is the world David Mowery and Nathan Rosenberg map out in Paths of Innovation, a tour of the intersecting routes of technological change. Throughout their book, Mowery and Rosenberg demonstrate that the simultaneous emergence of new engineering and applied science disciplines in the universities, in tandem with growth in the Research and Development industry and scientific research, has been a primary factor in the rapid rate of technological change. Innovation and incentives to develop new, viable processes have led to the creation of new economic resources - which will determine the future of technological innovation and economic growth.

Paper: Paging Through History

Paper: Paging Through History PDF Author: Mark Kurlansky
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393285480
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 530

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Book Description
From the New York Times best-selling author of Cod and Salt, a definitive history of paper and the astonishing ways it has shaped today’s world. Paper is one of the simplest and most essential pieces of human technology. For the past two millennia, the ability to produce it in ever more efficient ways has supported the proliferation of literacy, media, religion, education, commerce, and art; it has formed the foundation of civilizations, promoting revolutions and restoring stability. By tracing paper’s evolution from antiquity to the present, with an emphasis on the contributions made in Asia and the Middle East, Mark Kurlansky challenges common assumptions about technology’s influence, affirming that paper is here to stay. Paper will be the commodity history that guides us forward in the twenty-first century and illuminates our times.

Inside NASA

Inside NASA PDF Author: Howard E. McCurdy
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration began its space flight program in October of 1958 by launching the 84-pound Pioneer I space probe. Scarcely a decade later, in July of 1969, NASA amazed the world by landing the first humans on the Moon. In the two decades that followed, however, the agency appeared to lose both its vigor and its creativity. Inside NASA explores how an agency praised for its planetary probes and expeditions to the Moon became noted for the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger and a series of other malfunctions. Using archival evidence as well as in-depth interviews with space agency officials, Howard McCurdy investigates the relationship between the performance of the U.S. space program and NASA's organizational culture. He begins by identifying the beliefs, norms, and practices that guided NASA's early successes. Originally, the agency was dominated by the strong technical culture rooted in the research-and-development organizations from which NASA was formed. To launch the expeditions to the Moon, McCurdy explains, this technical culture was linked to an organizational structure borrowed from the Air Force Ballistic Missile Program. Over time, however, changes imposed to accomplish the lunar expedition - as well as the normal aging process and increased bureaucracy in the government as a whole-altered NASA's original culture and eroded its technical strength. McCurdy observes that NASA's early success depended on a number of related characteristics: extensive testing, in-house technical capability, hands-on experience, exceptional people, stoic acceptance of risk and failure, and a frontier mentality. He concludes that, given the conditions ofmodern government, the performance of high-technology agencies like NASA inherently tends to decline. Inside NASA offers a revealing study of both organizational culture and bureaucratic aging.

Conceptualizing Technological Change

Conceptualizing Technological Change PDF Author: Govindan Parayil
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9780742520042
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
In this original and thoughtful book, Govindan Parayil draws together current scholarship from disciplines ranging from history to economics to sociology as he develops a cohesive theory of technological change. Drawing on a detailed case study of the Green Revolution in Indian agriculture, Parayil convincingly argues that technological change is contingent upon the social-historical process of knowledge change.

Control, Information, and Technological Change

Control, Information, and Technological Change PDF Author: Gerald E. Flueckiger
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9401103771
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 169

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Book Description
Information theory, cybernetics and the theory of finite automata are used to model learning-by-doing, bounded rationality, routine behavior, and the formation of teams. The non-neoclassical characterization of production developed in this book ignores the usual quantitative relationships between inputs and outputs and instead views production strictly as a problem of control and communication. The motivation for this unconventional characterization of production comes from Schumpeter's critique of neoclassical economic theory. Schumpeter argued that neoclassical economic theory, and the habits of thought engendered by it, was the major obstacle to acquiring an understanding of technological change. The non-neoclassical characterization of production developed in this book is in keeping with how economic historians describe specific technological changes and how they write technological histories about particular machines, firms or industries.