The Internet is a mixed blessing for libraries and librarians. On the one hand, it provides opportunities to add services and expand collections; on the other, it increases user expectations and contributes to techno-stress. Today, the Net is challenging the librarian's ability to select, threatening the survival of the book, necessitating continuous retraining, presenting unique problems of access and preservation, putting new demands on budgets, and embroiling information professionals in legal controversies. In "Net Effects, Marylaine Block examines the issues and brings together a wealth of insights, war stories, and solutions. Nearly 50 articles by dozens of imaginative librarians--expertly selected and annotated by the editor--suggest practical and creative ways to deal with the range of Internet "side effects," regain control of the library, and avoid being blindsided by technology again.

In this new volume it is argued that network effects are much more common than usually assumed, and that they have a profound impact on many aspects of economic systems, especially technological change and economic growth. The analysis and modelling of this interrelationship is the central focus of this book. While there exists a vast body of literature on economic growth, the theories put forward so far have had limited success in explaining observed patterns of economic growth. ‘Growth cycles’ in particular continue to elude standard economic models, though evolutionary economics has made some progress. Seeking to fill the gap, Torsten Heinrich’s innovative approach uses microeconomics to explain heterogeneous sectoral dynamics on the meso level, and then aggregating these to observed macroeconomic growth rates. In this way, it is shown that an evolutionary model of technological change with network effects can explain not only commonly observed asymmetric industry structures, monopolies and oligopolies but also ‘growth cycles’. The book includes a comprehensive account of the most influential economic growth theories, a discussion of the research on network effects as well as an introduction to the methodology, the model, and a case study on the recent emergence of information and communication technology. This important new volume will be relevant to all those interested in theoretical economics, growth theory, innovation economics, agent based modelling and industry dynamics.

"This book about America's romance with computer communication looks at the Internet, not as a harbinger of the future or the next big thing, but as an expression of the times. Streeter demonstrates that our ideas about what connected computers are for have been in constant flux since their invention. In the 1950s they were imagined as the means for fighting nucelar wars, in the 1960s as systems for bringing mathematical certainty to the messy complexity of social life, in the 1970s as countercultural playgrounds, in the 1980s as an icon for what's good about free markets, in the 1990s as a new frontier to be conquered, and, by the late 1990s, as the transcendence of markets in an anarchist open source utopia. The Net Effect teases out how culture has influenced the construction of the internet and how the structure of the internet has played a role in cultures of social and political thought." -- cover.

Over the past three decades, the Internet's rapid growth has spurred the development of new applications in mobile computing, digital music, online video, gaming and social networks. These applications rely heavily upon various underlying network protocols and mechanisms to enable, maintain and enhance their Internet functionality The Effects of Traffic Structure on Application and Network Performance provides the necessary tools for maximizing the network efficiency of any Internet application, and presents ground-breaking research that will influence how these applications are built in the future. The book outlines how to design and run all types of networking experiments, and establishes the best practices in synthetic traffic generation for current and future researchers and practitioners to follow. It addresses some basic concepts and methods of traffic generation, but also details extensive empirical research in testing and evaluating network protocols and applications within a laboratory setting. The Effects of Traffic Structure on Application and Network Performance is designed as a reference book for networking professionals who must design, plan, test and evaluate their networks. Advanced-level students and researchers in computer science and engineering will find this book valuable as well