acm - an acm publication

Commentaries

2007

  • Techniques of persuasive communication: old wisdom in a new package
    by Philip Yaffe
    December 2007
    What you are about to read will probably sound familiar. Indeed, it has been said many times before. However, I believe this formulation is original and may help you better apply it in your marketing communication. I immodestly call it Yaffes Law.
  • Technology transfer and modernization: what can philosophers of technology contribute?
    by Bernhard Irrgang
    December 2007

    Technique- or technology-transfer is based in many ways on technological and economic paths that were often created by European colonization and have been intensified by Industrialization and Globalization. On the one hand, the modern age is a constantly developing planetary truth, a truth that impacts every society in the world. On the other hand, societies in third world countries have not produced this condition themselves because modernity is an external imposition. This means the modern age turns to be an unavoidable destiny for them. Traditional modernization and technology transfer abstract from almost all contextual factors. That is why technological development and modernization are being compared across continents and assessed with more or less value, not considering the cultural and social contextual circumstances. This supposes on one hand that the western way into the modern age has a model character, is normative and there are no alternatives to it. Also, it is supposed that the modern age is a desirable objective and that compensation leads to equal final situations.

    A requirement for technological standards and for technology transfer are innovations which constantly promise new development paths and stable institutional settings that can be monitored over a long period. These setting have to be ensured by the cultural system, especially by their social-economical dimensions. Also, the religious dimension is a part of this setting, and in Africa and South-east Asia is closely connected to the form and style of life and to culture. Secularization comparable to the western world only takes place in major cities, as they are islands of modernization. For thousands of years, technological process innovations such as technology transfer have been digested by cultural embedding and not through modernization. This might vary from place to place but in general it shows the same development. Heteronomous transfers meet culturally motivated resistance or are ignored, whereas the circumstances of technology transfer are a bit different. It is not being identified with culture transfer and does not automatically lead to a broad modernization but to a form of development with a speed of cultural adjustment - for sure slower than required by modernization. But this development can mostly be digested with the help of the embedding-paradigm. It is our task to generate forms of modernization with consideration for cultural embedding and traditions.

  • Understanding dependable computing concepts
    by Goutam Kumar Saha
    November 2007

    This work aims to visually describe the important concepts of a dependable computing system and the relationships between the concepts. The concept map here for dependable computing system concepts would help us for easier and meaningful understanding of this emerging important research topic of computer science and engineering. Readers here won't feel tired of reading long text horizontally lines after lines for conceptualizing this much research and interesting topic.

  • Economic recognition of innovation
    by Balkrishna C. Rao
    October 2007

    Globalization has benefited the economies of member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) by helping their businesses stay profitable through cost-effective outsourcing of mostly garden-variety tasks and some knowledge-based activities. With time, the latter will account for the lion's share of work outsourced and emerging export houses will also tend to cater more to their own domestic markets because of their expanding infrastructure and growing manpower possessing advanced skills. This will result in a leveled playing field coaxing developed countries to adopt widespread innovations to maintain their high perch in the economic pecking order. Such large-scale creativity can be managed better if it could be gauged with an appropriate measure. This work propounds a new economic measure called the Gross Domestic Innovation (GDI) to quantify innovations in OECD countries. It will supplement universal measures such as the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), productivity and numbers concerning employment. Apart from the methodology for its estimation, the impact of GDI on the various facets of a vibrant economy is discussed and inter alia, the role of GDI in fighting inflation and alleviating the negative influences of globalization is stressed. Also, a tentative analysis on the economies of U.S., Japan, Germany and China is presented to illustrate the concept.