"Faced with this process of globalization, most governments appear to lack the tools required for facing up to the pressure from important media changes. The new global order is viewed as a daunting challenge, and it most often results in reactions of introversion, withdrawal and narrow assertions of national identity. At the same time, many developing countries seize the opportunity represented by globalization to assert themselves as serious players in the global communications market."
(UNESCO, World Communication Report)
The big hope of the South is that the Internet will close the education gap and economic gap, by making education easier to achieve. But in reality the gap is impossible to close, because the North is not keeping still, but developing itself further and further all the time; inventing new technologies that produce another gap each. The farmer's boy sitting in the dessert and using a cellular telephone and a computer at the same time is a sarcastic picture - nothing else.
Still, the so called developing countries regard modern communication technologies as a tremendous chance - and actually: which other choice is there left?
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Iris recognition relies upon the fact that every individuals retina has a unique structure. The iris landscape is composed of a corona, crypts, filaments, freckles, pits radial furrows and striatations. Iris scanning is considered a particularly accurate identification technology because the characteristics of the iris do not change during a persons lifetime, and because there are several hundred variables in an iris which can be measured. In addition, iris scanning is fast: it does not take longer than one or two seconds.
These are characteristics which have made iris scanning an attractive technology for high-security applications such as prison surveillance. Iris technology is also used for online identification where it can substitute identification by password. As in other biometric technologies, the use of iris scanning for the protection of privacy is a two-edged sword. The prevention of identity theft applies horizontally but not vertically, i.e. in so far as the data retrieval that accompanies identification and the data body which is created in the process has nothing to do with identity theft.
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Thinking of propaganda some politicians' names are at once remembered, like
The history of propaganda has to tell then merely mentioning those names:
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Following the invention of the first
Also, ensuing the introduction of the minicomputer in the mid 1970s by the early 1980s a market for personal computers (PC) was established. As computers had become easier to use and cheaper they were no longer mainly utilized in offices and manufacturing, but also by the average consumer. Therefore the number of personal computers in use more than doubled from 2 million in 1981 to 5.5 million in 1982. Ten years later, 65 million PCs were being used.
Further developments included the creation of mobile computers (laptops and palmtops) and especially networking technology. While mainframes shared time with many terminals for many applications, networking allowed individual computers to form electronic co-operations.
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The dream of a conflict-free capitalism appeals to a diverse audience. No politician can win elections without eulogising the benefits of the information society and promising universal wealth through informatisation. "Europe must not lose track and should be able to make the step into the new knowledge and information society in the 21st century", said Tony Blair.
The US government has declared the construction of a fast information infrastructure network the centerpiece of its economic policies
In Lisbon the EU heads of state agreed to accelerate the informatisation of the European economies
The German Chancellor Schröder has requested the industry to create 20,000 new informatics jobs.
The World Bank understands information as the principal tool for third world development
Electronic classrooms and on-line learning schemes are seen as the ultimate advance in education by politicians and industry leaders alike.
But in the informatised economies, traditional exploitative practices are obscured by the glamour of new technologies. And the nearly universal acceptance of the ICT message has prepared the ground for a revival of 19th century "adapt-or-perish" ideology.
"There is nothing more relentlessly ideological than the apparently anti-ideological rhetoric of information technology"
(Arthur and Marilouise Kroker, media theorists)
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Although fingerprinting smacks of police techniques used long before the dawn of the information age, its digital successor finger scanning is the most widely used biometric technology. It relies on the fact that a fingerprint's uniqueness can be defined by analysing the so-called "minutiae" in somebody's fingerprint. Minutae include sweat pores, distance between ridges, bifurcations, etc. It is estimated that the likelihood of two individuals having the same fingerprint is less than one in a billion.
As an access control device, fingerprint scanning is particularly popular with military institutions, including the Pentagon, and military research facilities. Banks are also among the principal users of this technology, and there are efforts of major credit card companies such as Visa and MasterCard to incorporate this finger print recognition into the bank card environment.
Problems of inaccuracy resulting from oily, soiled or cracked skins, a major impediment in fingerprint technology, have recently been tackled by the development a contactless capturing device (
As in other biometric technologies, fingerprint recognition is an area where the "criminal justice" market meets the "security market", yet another indication of civilian spheres becomes indistinguishable from the military. The utopia of a prisonless society seems to come within the reach of a technology capable of undermining freedom by an upward spiral driven by identification needs and identification technologies.
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After a number of mergers and acquisitions five powerful media conglomerates lead the world's content production and distribution. They operate on an international basis with subsidiaries all around the globe and engage in every imaginable kind of media industry.
Table: The World's Leading Media Companies
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(* Revenues of Time Warner only (merger with AOL took place in January 2000)
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The largest media and entertainment conglomerate in the world. The corporation resulted from the merger of the publisher Time Inc. and the media conglomerate Warner Communications Inc. in 1989. It acquired the Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. (TBS) in 1996. Time Warner Inc.'s products encompass magazines, hardcover books, comic books, recorded music, motion pictures, and broadcast and cable television programming and distribution. The company's headquarters are in New York City. In January 2000 Time Warner merged with AOL (America Online), which owns several online-services like Compuserve, Netscape and Netcenter in a US$ 243,3 billion deal.
ARPAnet was the small network of individual computers connected by leased lines that marked the beginning of today's global data networks. Being an experimental network mainly serving the purpose to test the feasibility of
In 1969 ARPANET went online and links the first two computers, one of them located at the University of California, Los Angeles, the other at the Stanford Research Institute.
But ARPAnet has not become widely accepted before it was demonstrated in action to a public of computer experts at the First International Conference on Computers and Communication in Washington, D. C. in 1972.
Before it was decommissioned in 1990,
In the USA commercial users already outnumbered military and academic users in 1994.
Despite the rapid growth of the Net, most computers linked to it are still located in the United States.
b. July 13, 1527, London, England
d. December 1608, Mortlake, Surrey
English alchemist, astrologer, and mathematician who contributed greatly to the revival of interest in mathematics in England. After lecturing and studying on the European continent between 1547 and 1550, Dee returned to England in 1551 and was granted a pension by the government. He became astrologer to the queen, Mary Tudor, and shortly thereafter was imprisoned for being a magician but was released in 1555. Dee later toured Poland and Bohemia (1583-89), giving exhibitions of magic at the courts of various princes. He became warden of Manchester College in 1595.
Probably the most significant Internet service, the World Wide Web is not the essence of the Internet, but a subset of it. It is constituted by documents that are linked together in a way you can switch from one document to another by simply clicking on the link connecting these documents. This is made possible by the Hypertext Mark-up Language (HTML), the authoring language used in creating World Wide Web-based documents. These so-called hypertexts can combine text documents, graphics, videos, sounds, and
Especially on the World Wide Web, documents are often retrieved by entering keywords into so-called search engines, sets of programs that fetch documents from as many
Among other things that is the reason why the World Wide Web is not simply a very huge database, as is sometimes said, because it lacks consistency. There is virtually almost infinite storage capacity on the Internet, that is true, a capacity, which might become an almost everlasting too, a prospect, which is sometimes
According to the Internet domain survey of the
Joseph Stalin (1879-1953):
After Lenin's death he took over and became a dictator without any limits of power. Everyone who dared to talk or act against him or was in suspicion of doing so, got killed. Millions were murdered. His empire was one made out of propaganda and fear. As long as he was in power his picture had to be in every flat and bureau. Soon after his death the cult was stopped and in 1956 the De-Stalination was started, though he was partly rehabilitated in 1970.
A gateway is a computer supplying point-to-multipoint connections between computer networks.
The "word" Kosov@ is a compromise between the Serb name KosovO and the Albanian KosovA. It is mostly used by international people who want to demonstrate a certain consciousness about the conflict including some sort of neutrality, believing that neither the one side nor the other (and maybe not even
For more explanations (in German) see:
According to the
Saddam Hussein joined the revolutionary Baath party when he was a university student. In 1958 he had the head of Iraq, Abdul-Karim Qassim, killed. Since 1979 he has been President of Iraq. Under his reign Iraq fought a decade-long war with Iran. Because of his steady enmity with extreme Islamic leaders the West supported him first of all, until his army invaded Kuwait in August 1990, an incident that the USA led to the Gulf War. Since then many rumors about a coup d'état have been launched, but Saddam Hussein is still in unrestricted power.
The research and development division of
http://www.research.att.com/
A BBS (bulletin board system) is a computer that can be reached by computer modem dialing (you need to know the phone number) or, in some cases, by
Bulletin board systems originated and generally operate independently of the Internet.
Source: Whatis.com
Napoleon I. (1769-1821) was French King from 1804-1815.
He is regarded as the master of propaganda and disinformation of his time. Not only did he play his game with his own people but also with all European nations. And it worked as long as he managed to keep up his propaganda and the image of the winner.
Part of his already nearly commercial ads was that his name's "N" was painted everywhere.
Napoleon understood the fact that people believe what they want to believe - and he gave them images and stories to believe. He was extraordinary good in black propaganda.
Censorship was an element of his politics, accompanied by a tremendous amount of positive images about himself.
But his enemies - like the British - used him as a negative image, the reincarnation of the evil (a strategy still very popular in the Gulf-War and the Kosovo-War) (see
Intellectual property, very generally, relates to the output that result from intellectual activity in the industrial, scientific, literary and artistic fields. Traditionally intellectual property is divided into two branches: 1) industrial property (
The North Atlantic Treaty was signed in Washington on 4 April 1949, creating NATO (= North Atlantic Treaty Organization). It was an alliance of 12 independent nations, originally committed to each other's defense. Between 1952 and 1982 four more members were welcomed and in 1999, the first ex-members of
The firm began in Germany in 1835, when Carl Bertelsmann founded a religious print shop and publishing establishment in the Westphalian town of Gütersloh. The house remained family-owned and grew steadily for the next century, gradually adding literature, popular fiction, and theology to its title list. Bertelsmann was shut down by the Nazis in 1943, and its physical plant was virtually destroyed by Allied bombing in 1945. The quick growth of the Bertelsmann empire after World War II was fueled by the establishment of global networks of book clubs (from 1950) and music circles (1958). By 1998 Bertelsmann AG comprised more than 300 companies concentrated on various aspects of media. During fiscal year 1997-98, Bertelsmann earned more than US$15 billion in revenue and employed 58.000 people, of whom 24.000 worked in Germany.
The bandwidth of a transmitted communications signal is a measure of the range of frequencies the signal occupies. The term is also used in reference to the frequency-response characteristics of a communications receiving system. All transmitted signals, whether analog or digital, have a certain bandwidth. The same is true of receiving systems.
Generally speaking, bandwidth is directly proportional to the amount of data transmitted or received per unit time. In a qualitative sense, bandwidth is proportional to the complexity of the data for a given level of system performance. For example, it takes more bandwidth to download a photograph in one second than it takes to download a page of text in one second. Large sound files, computer programs, and animated videos require still more bandwidth for acceptable system performance. Virtual reality (VR) and full-length three-dimensional audio/visual presentations require the most bandwidth of all.
In digital systems, bandwidth is data speed in bits per second (bps).
Source: Whatis.com