Planned obsolescence

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Frank Puppe (ed

A special year like 1999 invites one to draw a balance of what has been achieved in the roughly 30 years of research and development in knowledge based systems (still abbreviated as XPS following the older term “expert systems”) and to take a look at th what the future may hold. For the 5 German conference on knowledge-based systems we therefore asked current and former speakers of the four working groups (FG’s) in the subdivision of knowledge-based systems (FA 1.5) of the German association of Informatics (GI) to present a survey of and future prospects for their respective fields: knowledge engineering, diagnosis, configuration, and case-based reasoning. An additional 14 technical papers deal with current topics in knowledge-based systems with an equal emphasis on methods and applications. They are selected from more than 50 papers accepted in the 4 parallel workshops of XPS-99: a) Knowledge Management, Organizational Memory and Reuse, b) various fields of applications, c) the traditional PuK Workshop (planning and configuration), and d) the GWCBR (German workshop on case-based reasoning). The other papers presented at these workshops are not included in this volume but are available as internal reports of Würzburg university together with the exhibition guide that emphasizing tool support for building knowledge based systems.

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[by] John Palfrey

Libraries today are more important than ever. More than just book repositories, libraries can become bulwarks against some of the most crucial challenges of our age: unequal access to education, jobs, and information. In BiblioTech, educator and technology expert John Palfrey argues that anyone seeking to participate in the 21st century needs to understand how to find and use the vast stores of information available online. And libraries, which play a crucial role in making these skills and information available, are at risk. In order to survive our rapidly modernizing world and dwindling government funding, libraries must make the transition to a digital future as soon as possible—by digitizing print material and ensuring that born-digital material is publicly available online. Not all of these changes will be easy for libraries to implement. But as Palfrey boldly argues, these modifications are vital if we hope to save libraries and, through them, the American democratic ideal. Publisher

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Trajce Cvetkovski

"Media piracy in music, film and gaming is as much about the future of formal copyright governance as it is about morality and freedom of expression. An illegal consumer is not a bad or immoral person because copyright laws state the act of copyright infringement is against the law. History reveals what social networking in the world of digitalization now tells us - consumers have always engaged in legal and illegal popular media consumption. Convergent consumption patterns are not new - file sharing is the latest development. However, the dominant few which have established the status quo over several decades strongly resist external technological challenges. The corporate elite which controls the bulk of popular media and their copyrights strictly preserve the formal legal structures in which copyrights exist. But the legal reality is that the façade of copyright governance has been seriously challenged in the 21st century. This book explores the unresolved issues concerned with media piracy and consumption"--Unedited summary from book cover.

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[by] Clifford D. Simak

Coming from the future, our children's children walked through holes in the air. The holes were time tunnels and down them were fleeing our after-generations, escaping from an invasion of intelligent yet murderously savage aliens.