Beyond language translation: crossing the cultural divide

Working in and designing for other cultures con lead to communication breakdowns. The author explores how this happens and suggests ways that we con use potentially problematic situations to our advantage. Although it is fundamentally difficult to establish successful cross-cultural collaboration, we should not avoid it. On the contrary, we should exploit cross-cultural work opportunities: encountering cultural breakdowns is the best way to widen our perspectives, understand ourselves more deeply, and consequently, be more creative, Finally. if communication breakdowns are unavoidable, why not use them? These breakdowns can be a driving force for coordinating cross-cultural collaboration-whether among people from different nations or different work cultures     

Rethinking the digital divide

In our search for transgressive models of distance education, we found inspiration in the "Web-back" performance pieces of Guillermo Gomez-Penia (1997), the production of virtual favelas in Brazil, and rural education models from the Philippines and Malaysia. As we thought in particular about our desire to reach Native American reservations and Mexican-American border towns in the US Southwest, we asked how these various Third World projects profile and recruit their students and what models of virtual education and empowerment they create.     

The digital divide: the special case of gender

Abstract This paper examines the evidence for the digital divide based on gender. An overview of research published in the last 20 years draws to the conclusion that females are at a disadvantage relative to men when learning about computers or learning other material with the aid of computer-assisted software. The evidence shows that the digital divide affects people of all ages and across international boundaries. We suggest that the digital divide is fundamentally a problem of computer anxiety whose roots are deep in socialization patterns of boys and girls and that interact with the stereotype of computers as toys for boys. A model of the digital divide is presented that examines gender stereotypes, attribution patterns, and stereotype threat as antecedents of computer anxiety. Computer anxiety in turn leads to differences in computer attitudes and computer performance. A number of suggestions are offered to reduce the impact of the digital divide.     

Navigating the applet-browser divide

The World Wide Web has emerged as a new application-delivery platform. In response, developers are offering users sophisticated Web-based Java applets that range from cybershopping carts to complex tools for genome mapping. These applets give you application functionality without taking up space on your hard drive. But trailing behind the applet bounty are new usability questions. A major one is how to make applet navigation seamless in the Web browser domain. Java applets are programs you write in Java and integrate into your Web page. Although applets can provide functionality similar to traditional applications, the applet code need not be installed on the users' hard drive. Instead, the applets execute Java-compatible Web browsers. Unlike standard Web pages, which users simply visit and browse, applet-enhanced pages let the user manipulate applet components and dynamically interact with information. The author discusses tools, techniques and concepts to optimize user interfaces     

The impact of ICT development on the global digital divide

Information and communication technology (ICT) has accelerated the growth of the global economy and improved the quality life of the world’s inhabitants. ICT has brought new ways of creating livelihoods for people. The diffusion of ICT has also increased year by year and made it possible to reduce poverty. The opportunities created by ICT also may eventually decrease the “distance” between countries in many other ways. Because access to ICT plays a key role in defining the global digital divide, it is important to study how the ICT gaps among countries have changed. This study examines global ICT development in the last decade. We collected secondary data for 136 countries from 2000 to 2008. Four relevant variables are used as proxies for the ICT development status of a country. Because of this multivariate nature of the data, most previous studies have applied a composite index approach to represent the ICT status of a country. For this study, we developed a framework to reduce multivariate raw data into an ordinal number representing a country’s ICT development level. The methodology behind the framework involves data clustering and multi-dimensional data ranking. After applying this data reduction procedure, we explored ICT development paths of different countries, and also conducted panel data analysis based on gross national income and various fixed effects.     

Cultural divide and the Internet

The aim of this paper is to study the relationship between culture and Internet usage. In the light of studies showing the existence of subcultures within a country, an experiment was designed and conducted based on the Hofstede cultural model and Tiwana’s expert knowledge model to determine how social differences affect the Internet usage of first-year university students. Data-mining techniques were then used to find relationships between culture and Internet usage. We conclude that abilities and performance relating to Internet use differs among subcultures not only because of the digital divide but also because of cultural differences. We also show that subcultures tend to converge over time when placed in the same context.     

The programming language ACTUS

This paper describes, in an informal manner, the programming language ACTUS which was designed to facilitate programming array processing and vector processing ‘supercomputers’. ACTUS extends the program structuring and data structuring facilities of Pascal to the synchronous parallel environment as represented by array and vector processor architectures. A knowledge of Pascal is assumed and only the parallel features of ACTUS are described.     

The programming language superpascal

This paper defines SuperPascal—a secure programming language for publication of parallel scientific algorithms. SuperPascal extends a subset of IEEE Standard Pascal with deterministic statements for parallel processes and synchronous message communication. A parallel statement denotes parallel execution of a fixed number of statements. A forall statement denotes parallel execution of the same statement by a dynamic number of processes. Recursive procedures may be combined with parallel and forall statements to define recursive parallel processes. Parallel processes communicate by sending typed messages through channels created dynamically. SuperPascal omits ambiguous and insecure features of Pascal. Restrictions on the use of variables enable a single-pass compiler to check that parallel processes are disjoint, even if the processes use procedures with global variables.     

The SIMNET simulation language

SIMNET is a network-based discrete simulation language that differs from available process languages in that it utilizes exactly four nodes: a source for creating transactions, a queue where waiting may take place, a facility where service is performed, and an auxiliary that is introduced to enhance the modeling flexibility of the language. Each node is provided with sufficient information that defines the exact manner in which a transaction enters, resides in, and leaves the node. The design of the language provides automatic collection of global statistical summary based on either the subinterval or the replication method. It is also possible to execute independent runs with different initial data in a single simulation session. Execution in SIMNET can be carried out interactively or in batch mode. Although SIMNET does not make use of external (FORTRAN) subroutines, the language is capable of modeling complex situations rather conveniently.     

The JStar language philosophy

This paper introduces the JStar parallel programming language, which is a Java-based declarative language aimed at discouraging sequential programming, encouraging massively parallel programming, and giving the compiler and runtime maximum freedom to try alternative parallelisation strategies. We describe the execution semantics and runtime support of the language, several optimisations and parallelism strategies, with some benchmark results.     

The query language Vizla

We define the query language Vizla, in which answers to queries are built up by pointing to representations of sets and functions in a conceptual model of the data base of an application, and to iconic identifiers of computational operators or control constructs. At its present stage of development the primary use of Vizla is in the validation of conceptual models of information systems, but it is to be developed into a user interface to SF, a prototyping language for information and control systems. Moreover, it can be regarded as a visual programming language in its own right. As such it is based on abstract data types     

The SL synchronous language

We present SL, a new programming language of the synchronous reactive family in which hypotheses about signal presence/absence are disallowed. One can decide that a signal is absent during an instant only at the end of this instant, and so reaction to this absence is delayed to the next instant. Sources of causal circularities are avoided, while only weak preemption remains. A structural operational semantics is provided through rewrite rules, and an implementation is described. In addition to directly executing programs, this implementation can also be used to produce automata by symbolic evaluation