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Report: The digital divide Browse:   Related Search: Themes: · world-infostructure · global networks · global market · global info-rights Keywords: · information poverty · manipulation · government

WORLD-INFOSTRUCTURE > THE DIGITAL DIVIDE > AN ECONOMIC AND THEREFORE ...

An Economic and therefore Governmental Issue While the digital divide might bring up the idea that enterprises will be able to sell more and more computers during the next years another truth looks as if there was no hope for a certain percentage of the population to get out of their marginalization, their position of being "have nots". Studies show that the issue of different colors of skin play a role in this, but more than "racial" issues it is income, age and education that decides about the have and have nots. There exist ~ 103 million households in the USA. ~6 million do not even have telephone access. Why should they care about computers? The digital divide cuts the world into centers and peripheries, not into nations, as it runs through the boarder between the North and the South as well as through nations. http://www.digitaldivide.gov/ http://www.digitaldividenetwork.org/ http://www.pbs.org/digitaldivide/ http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200-344552.html http://racerelations.about.com/newsissues/racerelations/msubdigdivide.htm http://www.techweek.com/articles/11-1-99/divide.htm http://www.ntia.doc.gov/ntiahome/net2/falling.html The most different institutions with various interests in their background work in that field; not rarely paid by governments, which are interested in inhabitants, connected to the net and economy. see also: http://www.washington.edu/wto/digital/ Searching information about the digital divide one will find informations saying that it is growing all the time whereas other studies suggest the contrary, like this one http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200-341054.html browse Report: The digital divide -1   Definition 0   An Economic and therefore Governmental Issue +1   The North against the South?  INDEX CARD     RESEARCH MATRIX  Expert system Expert systems are advanced computer programs that mimic the knowledge and reasoning capabilities of an expert in a particular discipline. Their creators strive to clone the expertise of one or several human specialists to develop a tool that can be used by the layman to solve difficult or ambiguous problems. Expert systems differ from conventional computer programs as they combine facts with rules that state relations between the facts to achieve a crude form of reasoning analogous to artificial intelligence. The three main elements of expert systems are: (1) an interface which allows interaction between the system and the user, (2) a database (also called the knowledge base) which consists of axioms and rules, and (3) the inference engine, a computer program that executes the inference-making process. The disadvantage of rule-based expert systems is that they cannot handle unanticipated events, as every condition that may be encountered must be described by a rule. They also remain limited to narrow problem domains such as troubleshooting malfunctioning equipment or medical image interpretation, but still have the advantage of being much lower in costs compared with paying an expert or a team of specialists.