云计算与知识产权

在中国以及世界各地,一场重大的计算技术变革将要展开:计算技术将开始向“云端”过渡. 简单地说,有了云计算,远程服务器可以通过网络提供软件功能服务.这些服务器可能位于街边的某个位置,可能分散于全国各地,也可能在世界的另一头.云端不仅可降低计算的成本和增强功能,而且还可使人们在网上协作和沟通更加便利,并且允许用户通过任何一台联网的计算机得到需要的数据或使用需要的应用软件.许多人认为云计算将引发一场在规模上可以和个人计算机及互联网变革相当的重大转变.     

New shop owners in old buildings: spatial politics of the apparel industry in Kyrgyzstan

This article adopts a political economy approach with insights from the political geography literature to illuminate how the apparel manufacturing sector in Kyrgyzstan has thrived in a region known for significant challenges in electricity access and availability. In contrast to studies that have analyzed the role of state policies and informal relations in promoting industrialization, we focus on how myriad shop owners gain access to elite-controlled, privatized urban infrastructure through owner–tenant relations in a new market economy. Drawing upon original interviews with Bishkek-based shop owners, we find that despite the challenges associated working in these spaces, including poor infrastructure and exploitative relationships with owners, they remain due to the constant provision of electricity and convenient location. We contribute to understanding how everyday shop owners make sense of and grapple with production challenges in a new market context, against the backdrop of Soviet infrastructural legacies and post-Soviet privatization processes.     

How Weakly Institutionalized Parties Monitor Brokers in Developing Democracies: Evidence from Postconflict Liberia

Political parties in sub-Saharan Africa's developing democracies are often considered to lack sufficiently sophisticated machines to monitor and incentivize their political brokers. We challenge this view by arguing that the decentralized pyramidal structure of their machines allows them to engage in broker monitoring and incentivizing to mobilize voters, which ultimately improves their electoral performance. This capacity is concentrated (a) among incumbent parties with greater access to resources and (b) where the scope for turnout buying is higher due to the higher costs of voting. Using postwar Liberia to test our argument, we combine rich administrative data with exogenous variation in parties' ability to monitor their brokers. We show that brokers mobilize voters en masse to signal effort, that increased monitoring ability improves the incumbent party's electoral performance, and that this is particularly so in precincts in which voters must travel farther to vote and thus turnout buying opportunities are greater.     

Political Brokers: Partisans or Agents? Evidence from the Mexican Teachers' Union

Political brokers mobilize voters all over the world, yet little is known about what motivates them to do so. This article theorizes about two drivers of brokers' efforts: (1) incentives—monetary rewards or sanctions—and monitoring and (2) partisan attachment. We examine our theory using data on the Mexican National Educational Workers Union (SNTE), Latin America's largest union and a well‐known political machine. Consistent with the role of teachers as brokers, we find that the vote share of parties supported by the SNTE machine is higher in polling stations located in schools. This effect is absent when teachers are asked to mobilize voters in support of a party for which they have no partisan attachment, and it is uncorrelated with the union's monitoring capacity. This suggests that partisan attachment, rather than incentives and monitoring, explains the SNTE's effectiveness as a political machine.     

Development and implementation of a quality assurance infrastructure in a multisite home visitation program in Ohio and Kentucky

As home visitation programs go to scale, numerous challenges are faced in implementation and quality assurance. This article describes the origins and implementation of Every Child Succeeds, a multisite home visitation program in southwestern Ohio and Northern Kentucky. In order to optimize quality assurance and generate new learning for the field, a Web-based system (eECS) was designed to systematically collect and use data. Continuous quality assurance procedures derived from business and industry have been established. Findings from data collection have documented outcomes, and have identified clinical needs that potentially undermine the impact of home visitation. An augmented module approach has been used to address these needs, and a program to treat maternal depression is described as an example of this approach. Challenges encountered are also discussed.     

Manufacturing and Migration in Eurasia

Abstract

This article investigates the social foundations of apparel manufacturing in Kyrgyzstan. Drawing upon interviews and a survey of Bishkek-based workshop owners, a bottom-up analysis finds that many are family businesses that started producing clothing after the country’s independence in 1991. I discuss here how they acquired the capital and knowledge necessary for this business, and how they mobilised a variety of migration-related experiences and relationships—often related to bazaar work—to compete in the sector. The findings contribute to a growing literature on how migration can facilitate family-based manufacturing in the post-Soviet region, although not without significant costs and challenges.     

Sewing to satisfaction: craft-based entrepreneurs in contemporary Kyrgyzstan

This article focuses on the reassembling of apparel production in post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan. We contribute to this special issue on well-being in Central Asia by examining how individual craft-based apparel producers (a subset of producers in the apparel industry) describe the process through which they built upon their Soviet past and reoriented their professional trajectories in a new competitive market environment. These producers locate professional satisfaction in their ability to draw upon and creatively re-employ local knowledge and experience learned in Soviet institutions, ultimately – as they articulate and perceive – deriving pride and well-being from the process of selling highly regarded ethnically inspired apparel products both at home and abroad.