After The Information Age

Textbook

The Internet has transformed the way people work, play, and communicate. The many questions raised by new information technologies are explored in the following chapters: Will the Information Highway Benefit Society? How Should the Information Highway Be Developed? How Should the Government Regulate E-Commerce? Should Computer Content Be Regulated?

Was Edward Snowden a patriot or a traitor? Just how far do American privacy rights extend? And how far is too far when it comes to government secrecy in the name of security? These are just a few of the questions that have dominated American consciousness since Edward Snowden exposed the breath of the NSA's domestic surveillance program. In these seven previously unpublished essays, a group of prominent legal and political experts delve in to life After Snowden, examining the ramifications of the infamous leak from multiple angles: • Washington lawyer and literary agent RONALD GOLDFARB acts as the book's editor and provides an introduction outlining the many debates sparked by the Snowden leaks. • Pulitzer Prize winning journalist BARRY SIEGEL analyses the role of the state secrets provision in the judicial system. • Former Assistant Secretary of State HODDING CARTER explores whether the press is justified in unearthing and publishing classified information. • Ethics expert and dean of the UC Berkley School of Journalism EDWARD WASSERMAN discusses the uneven relationship between journalists and whistleblowers. • Georgetown Law Professor DAVID COLE addresses the motives and complicated legacy of Snowden and other leakers. • Director of the National Security Archive THOMAS BLANTON looks at the impact of the Snowden leaks on the classification of government documents. • Dean of the University of Florida Law School JON MILLS addresses the constitutional right to privacy and the difficulties of applying it in the digital age.

The career of computer visionary Grace Murray Hopper, whose innovative work in programming laid the foundations for the user-friendliness of today's personal computers that sparked the information age. A Hollywood biopic about the life of computer pioneer Grace Murray Hopper (1906–1992) would go like this: a young professor abandons the ivy-covered walls of academia to serve her country in the Navy after Pearl Harbor and finds herself on the front lines of the computer revolution. She works hard to succeed in the all-male computer industry, is almost brought down by personal problems but survives them, and ends her career as a celebrated elder stateswoman of computing, a heroine to thousands, hailed as the inventor of computer programming. Throughout Hopper's later years, the popular media told this simplified version of her life story. In Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age, Kurt Beyer reveals a more authentic Hopper, a vibrant and complex woman whose career paralleled the meteoric trajectory of the postwar computer industry. Both rebellious and collaborative, Hopper was influential in male-dominated military and business organizations at a time when women were encouraged to devote themselves to housework and childbearing. Hopper's greatest technical achievement was to create the tools that would allow humans to communicate with computers in terms other than ones and zeroes. This advance influenced all future programming and software design and laid the foundation for the development of user-friendly personal computers.

Synthesizes a body of research and theories relating to the way firms can undergo transformation in order to remain competitive in a changing business environment. This book includes the coordination and alignment of a firm's business strategy.

An invaluable guide to creating successful simulations for teaching and scholarly research

Physics at the beginning of the twenty-first century has reached new levels of accomplishment and impact in a society and nation that are changing rapidly. Accomplishments have led us into the information age and fueled broad technological and economic development. The pace of discovery is quickening and stronger links with other fields such as the biological sciences are being developed. The intellectual reach has never been greater, and the questions being asked are more ambitious than ever before. Physics in a New Era is the final report of the NRC's six-volume decadal physics survey. The book reviews the frontiers of physics research, examines the role of physics in our society, and makes recommendations designed to strengthen physics and its ability to serve important needs such as national security, the economy, information technology, and education.

What would medieval English literature look like if we viewed it through the lens of the compendium? In that case, John Trevisa might come into focus as the major author of the fourteenth century. Trevisa (d. 1402) made a career of translating big informational texts from Latin into English prose. These included Ranulph Higden's Polychronicon, an enormous universal history, Bartholomaeus Anglicus's well-known natural encyclopedia De proprietatibus rerum, and Giles of Rome's advice-for-princes manual, De regimine principum. These were shrewd choices, accessible and on trend: De proprietatibus rerum and De regimine principum had already been translated into French and copied in deluxe manuscripts for the French and English nobility, and the Polychronicon had been circulating England for several decades. This book argues that John Trevisa's translations of compendious informational texts disclose an alternative literary history by way of information culture. Bold and lively experiments, these translations were a gamble that the future of literature in England was informational prose. This book argues that Trevisa's oeuvre reveals an alternative literary history more culturally expansive and more generically diverse than that which we typically construct for his contemporaries, Geoffrey Chaucer and William Langland. Thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century European writers compiled massive reference books which would shape knowledge well into the Renaissance. This study maintains that they had a major impact on English poetry and prose. In fact, what we now recognize to be literary properties emerged in part from translations of medieval compendia with their inventive ways of handling vast quantities of information.