The 1980s saw the emergence of New Age and neo-paganism as major new religious movements. In the first book-length study of these movements, Michael York describes their rituals and beliefs and examines the similarities, differences and relationships between them. He profiles particular groups, including the Church Universal Triumphant, Nordic pagans, and the Covenant of Unitarian Pagans, and questions the adequacy of existing sociological categories for describing these largely amorphous phenomena.
We live in a moment of unprecedented complexity, an era in which change occurs faster than our ability to comprehend it. With "The Moment of Complexity", Mark C. Taylor offers a map for the unfamiliar terrain opening in our midst, unfolding an original philosophy of our time through a remarkable synthesis of science and culture. According to Taylor, complexity is not just a breakthrough scientific concept but the defining quality of the post-Cold War era. The flux of digital currents swirling around us, he argues, has created a new network culture with its own distinctive logic and dynamic.
Multinational Corporations and the Emerging Network Economy in Asia and the Pacific delves into the ongoing rise of a global economy anchored in a web of inter-firm production networks and the role played by multinational corporations in the process. It considers the strategies and business models corporations have adopted lately to face today’s highly competitive global markets, especially outsourcing and offshoring, focusing on the modalities observed in Asia Pacific and the Pacific Rim at large. Since their inception, corporations have undergone a series of fundamental changes; each has corresponded to a given era of industrial development and has given rise to a particular type of government policy response. The book addresses these timely issues and other such as the transformation of global production networks into global innovation networks, the link between corporate and national innovation strategies and movement up the global production value chain, and the fragmentation of production and the resulting increase in component and sub-assembly trade in the region. It also takes up the emergence of multinational corporations from developing countries and the efforts aimed at forging basic rules of corporate social responsibility and developing sound institutions for building a working framework of corporate governance in the Pacific. Written by some of the region’s most eminent and influential economists and political scientists, this volume will appeal to students and scholars working in the field of Asia Pacific studies as well as to businesspersons and policymakers taking decisions in the region.
Designed to help readers understand the very latest optical developments, technologies, architectures, and market trends driving the next-generation network, this comprehensive report of all-optical networks (AON) is a critical resource for any communications company that hopes to tackle today's optical networking challenge. The future of the AON remains uncertain, but the next-generation optical network promises to provide the bandwidth flexibility, reliability, and network-management functions required to enable end-to-end wavelength services.
Cutting through the confusion around the nature and implications of digitalization, this book explores the rise of the new digital networks, how they affect traditional infrastructure, and how they will eventually need to be regulated. The authors examine how digitalization affects infrastructures in telecommunications, transport, and energy, and how digital platforms establish themselves as a new network on top of and in addition to traditional ones. Complex concepts are introduced through short and colorful stories about the founders of the most popular platforms (Google, Facebook, Skype, Uber, etc.) and how they grew to positions of power, drawing parallels with century-old traditional network industries’ monopoly power (AT&T, General Electric, etc.). The authors argue that these digital platforms strongly interfere with traditional infrastructures that are heavily regulated and provide essential services for society – meaning that digital platforms should be considered as a new and much more powerful type of infrastructure and will require regulation accordingly. A global audience of policy makers, public authorities, consultants, lawyers, students, and academics, as well as anyone with an interest in these digital platforms, will find this book enlightening and essential reading.
Network Routing: Fundamentals, Applications and Emerging Technologies serves as single point of reference for both advanced undergraduate and graduate students studying network routing, covering both the fundamental and more moderately advanced concepts of routing in traditional data networks such as the Internet, and emerging routing concepts currently being researched and developed, such as cellular networks, wireless ad hoc networks, sensor networks, and low power networks.
Optical networks have moved from laboratory settings and theoretical research to real-world deployment and service-oriented explorations. New technologies such as Ethernet PON, traffic grooming, regional and metropolitan network architectures and optical packet switching are being explored, and the landscape is continuously and rapidly evolving. Some of the important issues involving these new technologies involve the architectural, protocol, and performance related issues. This book addresses many of these issues and presents a birds eye view of some of the more promising technologies. Researchers and those pursuing advanced degrees in this field will be able to see where progress is being made and new technologies are emerging. Emerging Optical Network Technologies: Architectures, Protocols and Performance provides state-of-the-art material written by the most prominent professionals in their respective areas.
The book covers a wide range of wireless communication and network technologies, and will help readers understand the role of wireless technologies in applications touching on various spheres of human life, e.g. healthcare, agriculture, building smart cities, forecasting and the manufacturing industry. The book begins by discussing advances in wireless communication, including emerging trends and research directions for network technologies. It also highlights the importance of and need to actively develop these technologies. In turn, the book addresses different algorithms and methodologies which could be beneficial in implementing 5G Mobile Communication, Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANET), Reliable Cooperative Networks, Delay Tolerant Networks (DTN) and many more contexts related to advanced communications. It then addresses the prominence of wireless communication in connection with the Internet of Things (IoT), Mobile Opportunistic Networks and Cognitive Radio Networks (CRN). Lastly, it presents the new horizons in architecture and building protocols for Li-Fi (Light-Fidelity) and Wearable Sensor Technology.
Describes how patterns of information, knowledge, and cultural production are changing. The author shows that the way information and knowledge are made available can either limit or enlarge the ways people create and express themselves. He describes the range of legal and policy choices that confront.