Internet access as citizen's right? Citizenship in the digital age

Discourses about Internet and rights generate ideological, economic, and policy debates that bring to prominence the question of citizenship in today's digital age. But what does Internet access as a citizen's right imply? What are the pragmatic meanings of the intersection of citizenship, rights, and technology access? Specifically, what does citizens' right to technology mean for African states? This paper examines citizenship, rights, and Internet in South Africa, and attempts to move the discourse beyond philosophical rhetoric to practical policy interpretations. To do this, the study examines interpretations and reactions of policy-makers to the idea of Internet access as a citizen's right, and through a survey explores the views of many youth on this subject. Findings reveal strong opinions about rights and technology access in South Africa. For policy-makers, the reality of the socioeconomic challenges of Africa humbles an egalitarian aspiration of rights and Internet access.     

Balancing domestic regulation and trade liberalisation under the GATS: universal access issues in South Africa's telecoms sector

The service sector increasingly has become the cornerstone of a great number of economies in both the developed and developing world. The main barrier to trade in services is the imposition of domestic regulations which are aimed at ensuring the affordability, availability and efficiency of services. Such domestic regulations are important for services and the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) consequently recognises the right of countries to regulate in order to achieve these goals. The GATS, however, also seeks to discipline such regulations to ensure that they do not hinder trade in services. This article seeks to assess these seemingly competing interests in the context of South Africa's history and its burgeoning telecommunications sector.     

Demonstrating Access to Public Services Diagrammatically

The Nomogramma di Gandy is a practical analytical tool and presentational method that can be applied to the subject of access to public services, such as universities, prisons, and hospitals. Illustrative examples are provided. It is flexible, requires minimal data, and can compare access across many geographical areas in one presentation. It addresses the need to appreciate the dynamics that can exist behind summary statistical analyses that focus on net changes, and can show trends over time. Such visual scanning of multiple data points and their relative juxtapositions, enables many common thinking errors to be minimized, if not completely avoided.     

Rape as terror: The case of Bosnia

When ethnic minority parties are excluded from government coalitions, are group attributes such as religion related to the groups’ use of political violence? We argue that extremist factions within minority groups make use of divergence in religion to mobilize support for violent action when the group is excluded from government. Thus, we posit that while religion per se is not a source of violence, extremist elements of ethnic minorities, whose religion differs from the majority, may use religious divergence to mobilize group members to perpetrate terrorism. Specifically we test the hypotheses that extremist factions of an excluded group will be more likely to carry out terrorist attacks when the group's members belong to a different religion as well as when they belong to a different denomination or sect of a religion than the majority. To test these propositions, we use data on ethnic minority party inclusion in government coalitions, ethnic minority group religion, and the Global Terrorism Database (GTD) by matching perpetrators with ethnic groups for all democracies, 1970–2004.     

Are internet robots adequately regulated?

The robots.txt protocol allows website owners to specify whether and if so, what bots may access their sites. On the one hand, websites owners may have good reason to fend off bots. The bots may consume too much capacity, they may harvest data that are not suitable for presentation elsewhere on the web, or the owner may have reasons for disallowing bots that lie in the relation with user of the bot. On the other hand, search engines, aggregators and other users of bots may provide social beneficial services based on the data collected by bots, i.e. data that are freely available to anybody visiting the site manually. How should the law regulate disputes that arise in this context? Two legal regimes (trespass to chattels and unauthorised access) have been examined. Based on the characteristics of the disputes at hand, a number of desirable characteristics for an ideal form of regulation are identified. When testing the two regimes they are found to be lacking. A structure for a form of regulation is presented that allows the law to develop in a way that does more justice to the disputes at hand.     

Squaring the speed of light? Regulating market access in algorithmic finance

Abstract

We examine the sociomaterial regulation of algorithmic trading against the background of the European Union’s directives on Markets in Financial Instruments (MiFID/MiFIR). Tracing the purification and translation of regulatory practices within a French brokerage firm, we examine the impact of electronic trading on the nature of market access. Central to our analysis is the ‘Blackbox’, a tool designed to manage market access efficiently by collating trade flows and automatically pairing them with trading algorithms. Our findings show that, through a process of ‘abstracting’, purification and translation are kept strictly separate, allowing the broker to meet the regulatory requirements de jure whilst retaining de facto the unregulated advantages of high-speed materiality. We discuss the implications for both the policy and practice of high-speed financial trading.     

Innovation in the public sphere: reimagining law and economics to solve the National Institutes of Health publishing controversy

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) are responsible for the largest proportion of biological science funding in the United States. To protect the public interest in access to publicly funded scientific research, the NIH amended terms and conditions in funding agreements after 2009, requiring funded Principal Investigators to deposit published copies of research in PubMed, an Open Access repository. Principal Investigators have partially complied with this depository requirement, and the NIH have signaled an intent to enforce grant agreement terms and conditions by stopping funding deposits and engaging in legal action.The global economic value of accessible knowledge offers a unique opportunity for courts to evaluate the impact of enforcing ‘openness’ contract terms and conditions within domestic and international economies for public and economic benefit. Through judicial enforcement of Open Access terms and conditions, the United States can increase economic efficiency for university libraries, academic participants, and public consumers, while accelerating global innovation, improving financial returns on science funding investments, and advancing more efficient scientific publishing models.     

混合式学习理念下Access数据库教学改革探讨

在高等职业院校中,Access数据库为考核学生计算机掌握水平的重要标准之一。在传统的Access数据库教学模式中,由于教学方式单一、枯燥,学生普遍存在学习积极性不强,上机操作时无法集中注意力的问题。针对存在的这一现象,相关学者及专家提出了将混合式学习理念充分融入Access数据库教学模式中的设想。在混合式学习理念下的Access数据库教学模式中,完善教学环境构建;在实际的Access数据库教学过程中,通常采用以项目为主线,以教学任务为驱动的教学方法;对于无法由课堂教学解决的问题,教师可通过运用在线教学中的资源学习中心及多媒体教学进行有效解决;在混合式学习的测评环节中,教师可以将学生期末的考试成绩、平时在线测试所得成绩、小组的测评成绩以及学生的自我评价按一定的权重进行综合评价。混合式教学法能充分激发学生学习热情,大大提高了教学效果;基于混合式理念下的Access数据库教学,通过采用上课、上机、上网三者相结合的教学形式,使学生实现了随时随地学习;通过对整个教学进行改革,实现了试题库、任务库等学习资源库的完善,大大提高了Access数据库教学质量及效率。     

遗传资源获取管制和惠益分享制度的立法模式选择

建立遗传资源的获取管制和惠益分享法律制度是我国目前环境立法中的一个重要课题,如何确定立法模式、规范遗传资源的获取途径及惠益分享条件和内容是难点.制定以专门立法为主、修改既有法律为辅的双层立法模式体系,并对其中的主管机构、遗传资源的获取步骤、惠益分享等制度提出具体安排,是解决这个问题的有益尝试.