Implant technology Kevin Warwick at the University of Reading works on implant technologies which could enhance or modify functions of the limbs and the brain, or bring back functionalities lost, for example, in an accident or as a consequence of a stroke. Implants are also used for identification in "intelligent buildings" where they serve to control "personnel flows". However, the real potential of electronic implants seems to lie in the field of electronic drugs. The basics of the brain computer interface are already explored, and there are now efforts to electronically modify the function of the mind. Large software and IT companies are sponsoring this research which could result in the commercialisation of electronic drugs, functioning as anti-depressants, pain killers and the like. Evidently, the same technologies can also be used as narcotic drugs or to modify people's behaviour. The functioning of body and mind can be adapted to pre-defined principles and ideals, their autonomous existence reduced and subjected to direct outside control.

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Public Relations Clients Unlike in the United Kingdom, where members of the PR Consultants Association are required to have an updated, published list of all clients, the U.S. Council of PR decided against a proposal for the disclosure of client lists. Therefore the worlds biggest PR agencies, which are mostly U.S. based, are still in the position to make a secret of their clients. Although public relations activity is mostly associated with marketing and issues management for corporate firms, also PR for nations, politicians and NGOs is common. Among the first to pursue PR for nations was Edward L. Bernays, one of the founders of modern public relations. Besides his activity in the Creel-Committee, which was responsible for the American propaganda during World War I, he also worked as a PR consultant for Lithuania and India. With his engagement for United Fruit he was moreover actively involved in the Cold War - especially in the overthrow of the Guatemalan government of Guzman.

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Satyrs, Frankenstein, Machine Men, Cyborgs The idea of hybrid beings between man and non-human entities can be traced back to mythology: mythologies, European and non-European are populated with beings which are both human and non-human, and which, because of this non-humanness, have served as reference points in the human endeavour of understanding what it means to be human. Perhaps "being human" is not even a meaningful phrase without the possibility to identify ourselves also with the negation of humanness, that is, to be human through the very possibility of identification with the non-human. While in classical mythology, such being were usually between the man and animal kingdoms, or between the human and the divine, the advent of modern technology in the past two centuries has countered any such irrational representations of humanness. The very same supremacy of rationality which deposited the hybrid beings of mythology (and of religion) on the garbage heap of the modern period and which attempted a "pure" understanding of humanness, has also been responsible for the rapid advance of technology and which in turn prepared a "technical" understanding of the human. The only non-human world which remains beyond the animal and divine worlds is the world of technology. The very attempt of a purist definition of the human ran encountered difficulty; the theories of Darwin and Freud undermined the believe that there was something essentially human in human beings, something that could be defined without references to the non-human. Early representations of half man - half machine creatures echo the fear of the violent use of machinery, as in wars. Mary Shelley published Frankenstein in 1818, only a few years after the end of the Napoleonic wars. But machines are not only a source of fear exploited in fiction literature, their power and makes their non-humanness super-humanness. The French philosopher and doctor Julien de La Mettrie argues in his famous Machine Man that human beings are essentially constructed like machines and that they obey to the same principles. Machine Man provides a good example of how the ideas of the Enlightenment of human autonomy are interwoven with a technical discourse of perfection. What human minds have later dreamed up about - usually hostile - artificial beings has segmented in the literary genre of science fiction. Science fiction seems to have provided the "last" protected zone for the strong emotions and hard values which in standard fiction literature would relegate a story into the realm of kitsch. Violent battles, strong heroes, daring explorations, infinity and solitude, clashes of right and wrong and whatever else makes up the aesthetic repertoire of metaphysics has survived unscathed in science fiction. However, science fiction also seems to mark the final sequence of pure fiction: the Cyborg heroes populating this genre have transcended the boundary between fact and fiction, ridiculing most established social theories of technology based on technological instrumentalism. Donna Haraway has gone a long way in coming to terms with the cultural and social implications of this development. "By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs", Haraway states in her Cyborg Manifesto. In cyber culture, the boundaries between organisms and machines, between nature and culture become as ambivalent as the borderline between he physical and the non-physical: "Our best machines are made of sunshine; they are all light and clean because they are nothing but signals". In the Flesh Machine the Critial Art Ensemble analyses the mapping of the body, as in genetics, as one aspect of keeping state power in place, the other two aspects being the "war machine" and the "sight machine". The mapping of the flesh machine is a logical and necessary consequence of the development of the other two "machines". Cyborgisation is in the words of CEA, the "coming of age of the flesh machine", which, although it has "intersected both the sight and war machine since ancient times ... is the slowest to develop. " Representation is a necessary preliminary to violence, since "Any successful offensive military action begins with visualization and representation. The significant principle here .... is that vision equals control."

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FREEnet (The Network for Research, Education and Engineering) FREEnet is an academic and research network, interconnecting computer networks of research institutes of the Russian Academy of Sciences, universities, colleges, and other research and academic institutions. It was established in 1991 by the N.D. Zelinsky Institute of Organic Chemistry at the Center of Computer Assistance to Chemical Research. It provides its more than 350 members of the academic and educational community with all types of basic Internet services and various information services. Strategies and Policies FREEnets general intention is to become a backbone infrastructure providing: Open networking services for efficient access to the network and information resources located both in Russia and all over the Internet. Reliable network connectivity for research, academic and educational communities in Russia and abroad. Worldwide access to science and information resources of the Russian Academy of Sciences, universities and colleges in Russia. Assistance to the progress of Russian based fundamental research. Assistance to the development and application of modern information technologies in education.

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