Contingency and the 'Networked Information Economy': A Critique of 'The Wealth of Networks'
Yochai Benkler is right when he argues, most recently in "The Wealth of Networks", that the "networked public sphere" affords a looser, more democratic "platform" for innovation and deliberation than the "one-way, hub-and-spoke structure" of the "mass-media model." His suggestion, however, that the techniques of meaning production in the emergent technologies themselves vindicate the liberal theory of deliberative democracy is unconvincing to the extent they, in Benkler's rendering, remain unavailable or unintelligible to whole swaths of the citizenry. By overstating the accessibility of the new technologies, he obfuscates the extant political economy of cultural production. It may now be truer than ever that the decentralized and transparent characteristics of the new platforms allow ideas and information to flow more efficiently and democratically to more people than under the "mass-media model." It also affords more people the opportunity to create and participate in a range of "nonmarket" deliberative processes in public and in private. But these facts do not mean that we are all smarter, or freer, or (with apologies to Adam Smith) better off. The "networked public sphere" is hardly analogous to the lived public sphere in which the putative free flow of ideas itself has a "nonmarket" logic that is contingent on a variety of entrenched economic, social, and cultural arrangements. Until policy leaders develop strategies for expanding the availability or improving the accessibility of the new technologies, the affordances of the "networked public sphere" will accrue only to its wired participants.
A new deal for Blacks : the emergence of civil rights as a national issue
In Search of Democracy : The NAACP Writings of James Weldon Johnson, Walter White, and Roy Wilkins (1920-1977) The NAACP Writings of James Weldon Johnson, Walter White, and Roy Wilkins (1920-1977), Sondra Kathryn Wilson Associate of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute Harvard University, Jul 9, 1999, Social Science, 544 pages. This collection of writings offers a glimpse into the minds of three N.A.A.C.P. leaders who occupied the center of black thought and action during some of the most troublesome.
OTEC cold water pipe design for problems caused by vortex-excited oscillations
Abstract Vortex-excited oscillations of marine structures result in reduced fatigue life, large hydrodynamic forces and induced stresses, and sometimes lead to structural damage and to destructive failures. The cold water pipe of an Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion (OTEC) plant is nominally a bluff, flexible cylinder with a large aspect ratio ( L / D = length/diameter), and is likely to be susceptible to resonant vortex-excited oscillations. The objective of this paper is to survey recent results pertaining to the vortex-excited oscillations of structures in general and to consider the application of these findings to the design of the OTEC cold water pipe. Practical design calculations are given as examples throughout the various sections of the report. This paper is limited in scope to the problems of vortex shedding from bluff, flexible structures in steady currents and the resulting vortex-excited oscillations. The effects of flow non-uniformities, surface roughness of the cylinder, and inclination to the incident flow are considered in addition to the case of a smooth cylinder in a uniform stream. Emphasis is placed upon design procedures, hydrodynamic coefficients applicable in practice, and the specification of structural response parameters relevant to the OTEC cold water pipe. There are important problems associated with the shedding of vortices from cylinders in waves and from the combined action of waves and currents, but these complex fluid/structure interactions are not considered in this paper.