A systems approach to strategic manpower planning for technological development under conditions of manpower scarcity and centralised control

This thesis deals with the integration of the manpower criterion with the strategic decision making processes of technological projects in developing countries. This integration is to be achieved by ensuring the involvement of the actors, who have relevant roles and responsibilities along the whole life cycle of the project, in the strategic decision making phases of the project. The relevance of the actors is ascertained by the use of a responsibility index which relates their responsibility to the project's constituent stages. In the context of a technological project in a typical centrally-planned developing environment, the actors are identified as Arbiters, Planners, Implementors and Operators and their roles, concerns and objectives are derived. In this context, the actors are usually government and non-government organisations. Hence, decision making will involve multiple agencies as well as multiple criteria. A methodology covering the whole decision-making process, from options generation to options selection, and adopting Saaty's Analytical Hierarchy Process as an operational tool is proposed to deal with such multiple-criteria, multipleagency decision situations. The methodology is intended to integrate the consideration of the relevant criteria, the prevailing environmental and policy factors, and the concerns and objectives of the relevant actors into a unifying decision-making process which strives to facilitate enlightened decision making and to enhance learning and interaction. An extensive assessment of the methodology's feasibility, based on a specific technological project within the Iraqi oil industry is included, and indicates that the methodology should be both useful and implementable.

More than just HD

Television’s 50th anniversary marks half a century of extraordinary technological development. This begs the question: is the best we can expect for the next 50 years just Higher Definition pictures of the same old crap?

Ethics in a Technological World : Framing the Questions and Three Approaches

This study addresses the following question: How to think about ethics in a technological world? The question is treated first thematically by framing central issues in the relationship between ethics and technology. This relationship has three distinct facets: i) technological advance poses new challenges for ethics, ii) traditional ethics may become poorly applicable in a technologically transformed world, and iii) the progress in science and technology has altered the concept of rationality in ways that undermine ethical thinking itself. The thematic treatment is followed by the description and analysis of three approaches to the questions framed. First, Hans Jonas s thinking on the ontology of life and the imperative of responsibility is studied. In Jonas s analysis modern culture is found to be nihilistic because it is unable to understand organic life, to find meaning in reality, and to justify morals. At the root of nihilism Jonas finds dualism, the traditional Western way of seeing consciousness as radically separate from the material world. Jonas attempts to create a metaphysical grounding for an ethic that would take the technologically increased human powers into account and make the responsibility for future generations meaningful and justified. The second approach is Albert Borgmann s philosophy of technology that mainly assesses the ways in which technological development has affected everyday life. Borgmann admits that modern technology has liberated humans from toil, disease, danger, and sickness. Furthermore, liberal democracy, possibilities for self-realization, and many of the freedoms we now enjoy would not be possible on a large scale without technology. Borgmann, however, argues that modern technology in itself does not provide a whole and meaningful life. In fact, technological conditions are often detrimental to the good life. Integrity in life, according to him, is to be sought among things and practices that evade technoscientific objectification and commodification. Larry Hickman s Deweyan philosophy of technology is the third approach under scrutiny. Central in Hickman s thinking is a broad definition of technology that is nearly equal to Deweyan inquiry. Inquiry refers to the reflective and experiential way humans adapt to their environment by modifying their habits and beliefs. In Hickman s work, technology consists of all kinds of activities that through experimentation and/or reflection aim at improving human techniques and habits. Thus, in addition to research and development, many arts and political reforms are technological for Hickman. He argues for recasting such distinctions as fact/value, poiesis/praxis/theoria, and individual/society. Finally, Hickman does not admit a categorical difference between ethics and technology: moral values and norms need to be submitted to experiential inquiry as well as all the other notions. This study mainly argues for an interdisciplinary approach to the ethics of technology. This approach should make use of the potentialities of the research traditions in applied ethics, the philosophy of technology, and the social studies on science and technology and attempt to overcome their limitations. This study also advocates an endorsement of mid-level ethics that concentrate on the practices, institutions, and policies of temporal human life. Mid-level describes the realm between the instantaneous and individualistic micro-level and the universal and global macro level.