Urban management revolution : intelligent management systems for ubiquitous cities

A successful urban management support system requires an integrated approach. This integration includes bringing together economic, socio-cultural and urban development with a well orchestrated transparent and open decision making mechanism. The paper emphasises the importance of integrated urban management to better tackle the climate change, and to achieve sustainable urban development and sound urban growth management. This paper introduces recent approaches on urban management systems, such as intelligent urban management systems, that are suitable for ubiquitous cities. The paper discusses the essential role of online collaborative decision making in urban and infrastructure planning, development and management, and advocates transparent, fully democratic and participatory mechanisms for an effective urban management system that is particularly suitable for ubiquitous cities. This paper also sheds light on some of the unclear processes of urban management of ubiquitous cities and online collaborative decision making, and reveals the key benefits of integrated and participatory mechanisms in successfully constructing sustainable ubiquitous cities.

The “Iranian ART Revolution”: infertility, assisted reproductive technology, and third-party donation in the Islamic Republic of Iran

Infertility is a social onus for women in Iran, who are expected to produce children early within marriage. With its estimated 1.5 million infertile couples, Iran is the only Muslim country in which assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) using donor gametes and embryos have been legitimized by religious authorities and passed into law. Th is has placed Iran, a Shia-dominant country, in a unique position vis-à-vis the Sunni Islamic world, where all forms of gamete donation are strictly prohibited. In this article, we first examine the “Iranian ART revolution” that has allowed donor technologies to be admitted as a form of assisted reproduction. Then we examine the response of Iranian women to their infertility and the profound social pressures they face. We argue that the experience of infertility and its treatment are mediated by women’s socioeconomic position within Iranian society. Many women lack economic access to in vitro fertilization (IVF) technologies and fear the moral consequences of gamete donation. Thus, the benefits of the Iranian ART revolution are mixed: although many Iranian women have been able to overcome their infertility through ARTs, not all women’s lives are improved by these technologies.

Hypercapitalism:Political economy, electric identity, and authorial alienation

Hypercapitalism, with its "knowledge economy", is the form of capitalism under which thought itself is produced, commodified, and exchanged within the globally integrated system of communication technologies. As such, hypercapitalism may be seen as not so much a revolution, but rather an evolution: the progressively thorough, inexorable totalisation of social relations by Capital. The study on which this paper is based synthesises the sociological perspectives of Marx (1970, 1844/1975, 1846/1972, 1976, 1978, 1981) and Adorno (1951/1974, 1991; Horkheimer & Adorno, 1944/1998), and the Critical Discourse perspectives of Fairclough (1989, 1992) and Lemke (1995) to argue that alienated thought and language are the fundamental, irreducible commodity-forms of Cybersociety’s knowledge economy.

Historical and Personal Perspectives on the Fall of the Berlin Wall, 1989: address to 20th anniversary forums.

The story of the fall of the Berlin Wall was an aspect of the “imagination gap” that we had to wrestle with as journalists covering the collapse of the Eastern Bloc in Europe. It was scarcely possible to believe what you found yourself reporting, and that work became a two-track process. On one hand a mass social movement was dictating the pace and direction of events; on the other, the institutional business of politics as usual, to provide a framework for all the change that was happening, had to be managed – and reported on. In later analyseds we could see, that crisis in the Soviet Union led to the crisis over the Berlin Wall; and from the fall of the Wall, came Germany’s reunification, and with that also, formation of the European Union as it is today. The government of the Federal Republic of Germany convinced its neighbours that a reunited Germany, within an expanded EU, would be a very acceptable “European Germany” -- not the leader of a “German Europe”. It committed itself financially, supporting the new Euro currency. The former communist states of Eastern Europe demanded to join and expand the EU; in order to remove themselves from the Soviet Union, enjoy human rights, and share in Western prosperity. So today, following on from the events of 1989, the European Union is an amalgam of 27 member countries, with close to 500 million citizens and accounting for 30 % of world Gross National Product.

Book Review: Jamie Peck and Kevin Ward (eds) City of Revolution: Restructuring Manchester

Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2002, xvi + 256 pp., £14.99 (pbk), ISBN 0719058880

Prevalence of Staphylococcus aureus strains in an Australian cohort, 1989-2003 : evidence for the low prevalence of the toxic shock toxin and Panton-Valentine leukocidin genes

The purpose of this paper is to determine the prevalence of the toxic shock toxin gene (tst) and to enumerate the circulating strains of methicillin-sensitive Staphylococcus aureus (MSSA) and methicillin-resistant S. aureus (MRSA) in Australian isolates collected over two decades. The aim was to subtype these strains using the binary genes pvl, cna, sdrE, pUB110 and pT181. Isolates were assayed using real-time polymerase chain reaction (PCR) for mecA, nuc, 16 S rRNA, eight single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and for five binary genes. Two realtime PCR assays were developed for tst. The 90 MRSA isolates belonged to CC239 (39 in 1989, 38 in 1996 and ten in 2003), CC1 (two in 2003) and CC22 (one in 2003). The majority of the 210 MSSA isolates belonged to CC1 (26), CC5 (24) and CC78 (23). Only 18 isolates were tst-positive and only 15 were pvl-positive. Nine MSSA isolates belonged to five binary types of ST93, including two pvlpositive types. The proportion of tst-positive and pvl-positive isolates was low and no significant increase was demonstrated. Dominant MSSA clonal complexes were similar to those seen elsewhere, with the exception of CC78. CC239 MRSA (AUS-2/3) was the predominant MRSA but decreased significantly in prevalence, while CC22 (EMRSA-15) and CC1 (WA-1) emerged. Genetically diverse ST93 MSSA predated the emergence of ST93- MRSA (the Queensland clone).

Digital dawn : a revolution in movie distribution?

How will the digital technology revolution impact the movie business? Hollywood developed a highly successful industrial system that has functioned well for almost a century in the sense that it enabled the Major film studios to largely control and dominate the industry. However, the new digital technology may now be propelling Hollywood toward the biggest technological transition since the creation of the studio system almost a century ago. For example, Major Hollywood studios are already beginning to provide video-on-demand (VOD) digital distribution of movies over the Internet. This article examines what is happening, and why. It sets out the background and the incipient changes already occurring. It makes an argument regarding the fundamental strategic dynamics, that acetate film was the key to the control of the Hollywood system, and speculates about how a shift away from acetate film to digital video may transform that system. The focus is on the impact on how the Major studios release and market their movies, and how new market and marketing opportunities for the low-budget independent filmmaking sector may arise.

Managing the online news revolution : the UK experience

Newspapers and, if to a lesser extent as yet, linear broadcast news providers on TV and radio are in the process of being replaced as the dominant carrier media of journalism by an emerging network of online outlets.