Technology and Social Science examines the development and implementation of computer-assisted-learning in the social sciences. Encouraging both students and academics to improve the quality of their teaching and learning by using the wide range of new technologies effectively, this work highlights some of the pros and cons of technology, critically evaluating the technological process and its potential in the field. Encouraging the social science community to take an increasingly active role in this debate, the contributors examine key isues and emphasize areas in need of attention.

Telecommunications Engineer's Reference Book maintains a balance between developments and established technology in telecommunications. This book consists of four parts. Part 1 introduces mathematical techniques that are required for the analysis of telecommunication systems. The physical environment of telecommunications and basic principles such as the teletraffic theory, electromagnetic waves, optics and vision, ionosphere and troposphere, and signals and noise are described in Part 2. Part 3 covers the political and regulatory environment of the telecommunications industry, telecommunication standards, open system interconnect reference model, multiple access techniques, and network management. The last part deliberates telecommunication applications that includes synchronous digital hierarchy, asynchronous transfer mode, integrated services digital network, switching systems, centrex, and call management. This publication is intended for practicing engineers, and as a supplementary text for undergraduate courses in telecommunications.

With contributions from some of the top academics and scientists in the field, Advanced Studies in Multi-Criteria Decision Making presents an updated view of the landscape of Decision Sciences, current research topics, the interaction with other sciences and fields, as well as the prospects and challenges at an international level. Given that Decision Sciences are recognized today as indispensable for confronting the major societal challenges in science and technology, this book would be of interest to decision-makers, managers, and researchers from academia, and industrial/services companies that would like a fresh insight into MCDM. Features Integrates a wide range of scientific fields with a general reader approach, including applied researchers from the social, business, enterprise sciences Suitable for academics and professionals Presents a broad coverage of MCDM tools either in industry or in services companies and systems Provides a fresh overview on MCDM studies promoted by prestigious R&D institutions

Originally published in 1992 this book charts the global restructuring of telecommunications industries away from the monopoly structures of the past towards increased competition, deregulation and privatization. The book's authors are international policy-makers and scholars, who examine the regulatory environment within a theoretical and historical context. The book looks at the roots of regulatory and legislative changes by discussing individually the countries at the forefront of the revolution: the UK, France, Germany, Japan and the United States. It examines the impact of new technology for consequences of change in trade and government policies.

This book attempts to draw lessons from the experiences of developed as well as developing countries in carrying out telecommunications reform. Contributors come from academia, as well as from stakeholders in telecommunications policy in a dozen countries, mostly in the Asia-Pacific region. Globally, the telecommunications industry is undergoing major changes: technological advances in the form of a vast number of new digitised services, ownership shifts as state-owned carriers in many countries become fully or partly privatized, and a general transition from monopolistic to more competitive market environments. The economic and regulatory experiences derived from these changes are explored and analyzed using the USA, the UK, Australia and Singapore to represent developed and newly industrialized countries, and China, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Vietnam as examples of developing countries. The conclusions outlined in this timely volume hold important lessons for these as well as for other countries.

Why the privatization of British Telecom signaled a pivotal moment in the rise of neoliberalism, and how it was shaped by the longer development and digitalization of Britain’s telecommunications infrastructure. When Margaret Thatcher sold British Telecom for £3.6 billion in 1984, it became not only, at the time, the largest stock flotation in history, but also a watershed moment in the rise of neoliberalism and deregulation. In Visions of a Digital Nation, Jacob Ward offers an incisive interdisciplinary perspective on how technology prefigured this pivot. Giving due consideration to the politicians, engineers, and managers who paved the way for this historic moment, Ward illustrates how the decision validated the privatization of public utilities and tied digital technology to free market rationales. In this examination of the national and, at times, global history of technology, Ward’s approach is sweeping. Utilizing infrastructure studies, environmental history, and urban and local history, Ward explores Britain’s nationalist and welfarist plans for a digital information utility and shows how these projects contested and adapted to the “market turn” under Margaret Thatcher. Ultimately, Visions of a Digital Nation compellingly argues that politicians did not impose neoliberalism top-down, but that technology, engineers, and managers shaped these politics from the bottom up.

Michael A. Einhorn In continuing to deregulate telecommunications companies, regulators have begun to consider alternative approaches to traditional cost-based price regulation as a means of encouraging monopoly efficiency, promulgating technological innova tion, protecting consumers, and reducing administrative costs. Under cost-based regulatory procedures that had been used, prices were designed to recover the regulated company's costs plus an allowed rate of return on its rate base; this strategy was costly to administer, provided no consistent incentives to cost-ef ficiency and technological improvement, afforded many opportunities for strategic misrepresentation of reported costs, and may have encouraged both uneconomic expansion of the utility's rate base and cross-subsidization of its competitive services. A category of alternative regulatory approaches can be classified broadly as social contracts. Under the general strategy of social contract regulation, regulators first delimit a group of regulated core services that they continue to regulate and then stipulate a list of constraints that the utility must agree to meet in the future; in exchange, regulators agree to detariff or deregulate entirely other competitive or nonessential services that the utility may offer. As long as no stipulated constraints are violated, the utility may price freely any service; if it reduces costs, it may keep a share of its profits. According to the National Telecommunications Information Administration (NTIA, 1987), social contract agreements of one form or another have been considered or implemented in a majority of American states.