The Age of Information is destined to become an important research topic in networked systems. This monograph provides the reader with an easy-to-read tutorial-like introduction into this novel approach of dealing with the freshness of information within systems.

Information usually has the highest value when it is fresh. For example, real-time knowledge about the location, orientation, and speed of motor vehicles is imperative in autonomous driving, and the access to timely information about stock prices and interest rate movements is essential for developing trading strategies on the stock market. The Age of Information (AoI) concept, together with its recent extensions, provides a means of quantifying the freshness of information and an opportunity to improve the performance of real-time systems and networks. Recent research advances on AoI suggest that many well-known design principles of traditional data networks (for, e.g., providing high throughput and low delay) need to be re-examined for enhancing information freshness in rapidly emerging real-time applications. This book provides a suite of analytical tools and insightful results on the generation of information-update packets at the source nodes and the design of network protocols forwarding the packets to their destinations. The book also points out interesting connections between AoI concept and information theory, signal processing, and control theory, which are worthy of future investigation.

Structuring the Information Age provides insight into the largely unexplored evolution of information processing in the commercial sector and the underrated influence of corporate users in shaping the history of modern technology. JoAnne Yates examines how life insurance firms—where good record-keeping and repeated use of massive amounts of data were crucial—adopted and shaped information processing technology through most of the twentieth century. The book analyzes this process beginning with tabulating technology, the most immediate predecessor of the computer, and continuing through the 1970s with early computers. Yates elaborates two major themes: the reciprocal influence of information technology and its use, and the influence of past practices on the adoption and use of new technologies. In the 1950s, insurance industry leaders recognized that computers would enable them to integrate processes previously handled separately, but they also understood that they would have to change their ways of working profoundly to achieve this integration. When it came to choosing equipment and applications, most companies ultimately preferred a gradual, incremental migration to an immediate and radical transformation. In tracing this process, Yates shows that IBM's successful transition from tabulators to computers in part reflected that vendor's ability to provide large customers such as insurance companies with the necessary products to allow gradual change. In addition, this detailed industry case study helps explain information technology's so-called productivity paradox, showing that firms took roughly two decades to achieve the initial computerization and process integration that the industry set as objectives in the 1950s.

Praise for David Houle "Houle breaks down big ideas into easily digestible, entertaining small bites...Crack this book open whenever globalization's gotten you down."—Slate.com. "The Shift Age lifts us out of the rapids of techno-change and helps us see the course of the river we've been rafting on."-Howard Bloom, author of the GOD PROBLEM and GLOBAL BRAIN "[The Shift Age] is must read for anyone who is interested in where humanity is headed in coming generations. This book provides an overview of how our progeny will live, work, and play in coming decades."—Bob Citron, Co-Founder and Executive Director, Foundation for the Future "David Houle's Shift Age offers an astounding proposition: the Information Age is ending with emergence of an age of constant change. Read this book!"—Reese Schonfeld, Cofounder of CNN, CNN Headline News, and Food Network "America needs a new educational vision. Shift Ed provides a clear vision that emphasizes the essential ingredients of a twenty-first-century education based upon creativity, collaboration and critical thinking. Houle makes a great case that nothing less than transformation will be enough."—Daniel H. Pink, author of A WHOLE NEW MIND: WHY RIGHT-BRAINERS WILLL RULE THE FUTURE and DRIVE: THE SURPRISING TRUTH ABOUT WHAT MOTIVATES US "The New Health Age offer a succinct primer on how we got here and where we should be taking the health of our nation" —Mehmet Oz, M.D., host of The Dr. Oz Show The Information Age? Think again. Change is everywhere: how we communicate, what we do for a living, the values we hold, the way we raise our children, even the way we access information. Thanks to a global economy, the force of the Internet, and the explosion of mobile technology, we have—almost imperceptibly—been ushered into a new era, the Shift Age, in which change happens so quickly that it's become the norm. Man-made developments—such as tools, machines, and technology—defined previous ages, but the Shift Age will be defined by our own power of choice. In Entering the Shift Age, leading futurist David Houle argues that we are going through a major collapse of legacy thinking, eroding many of the thought structures that have defined the last two hundred years of humanity. Houle identifies and explains the new forces that will shape our lives—including remote workplaces, the cloud, "24/7" culture, speed-of-light connectivity, creativity, and the influence of Millenials and Digital Natives—for the next twenty years. In this eye-opening book, Houle navigates this pivotal point in human history with clarity and anticipation, focusing on the power of human consciousness and the direct influence we can impart on everything from healthcare to media to education. According to Houle, we are more independent than ever before. We are in control. There's no "going back" to the way things were. Reality is changing ever faster, and ENTERING THE SHIFT AGE is your guide to keeping up.

The Electric Information Age Book explores the nine-year window of mass-market publishing in the sixties and seventies when formerly backstage players-designers, graphic artists, editors-stepped into the spotlight to produce a series of exceptional books. Aimed squarely at the young media-savvy consumers of the "Electronic Information Age," these small, inexpensive paperbacks aimed to bring the ideas of contemporary thinkers like Marshall McLuhan, R. Buckminster Fuller, Herman Kahn, and Carl Sagan to the masses. Graphic designers such as Quentin Fiore (The Medium Is the Massage, 1967) employed a variety of radical techniques-verbal visual collages and other typographic pyrotechnics-that were as important to the content as the text. The Electric Information Age Book is the first book-length history of this brief yet highly influential publishing phenomenon.

Synthesizes a body of research and theories relating to the way firms can undergo transformation in order to remain competitive in a changing business environment. This book includes the coordination and alignment of a firm's business strategy.

An exploration of the technical, social, legal, and economic aspects of the scholarly infrastructure needed to support research activities in all fields in the twenty-first century. Scholars in all fields now have access to an unprecedented wealth of online information, tools, and services. The Internet lies at the core of an information infrastructure for distributed, data-intensive, and collaborative research. Although much attention has been paid to the new technologies making this possible, from digitized books to sensor networks, it is the underlying social and policy changes that will have the most lasting effect on the scholarly enterprise. In Scholarship in the Digital Age, Christine Borgman explores the technical, social, legal, and economic aspects of the kind of infrastructure that we should be building for scholarly research in the twenty-first century. Borgman describes the roles that information technology plays at every stage in the life cycle of a research project and contrasts these new capabilities with the relatively stable system of scholarly communication, which remains based on publishing in journals, books, and conference proceedings. No framework for the impending “data deluge” exists comparable to that for publishing. Analyzing scholarly practices in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities, Borgman compares each discipline's approach to infrastructure issues. In the process, she challenges the many stakeholders in the scholarly infrastructure—scholars, publishers, libraries, funding agencies, and others—to look beyond their own domains to address the interaction of technical, legal, economic, social, political, and disciplinary concerns. Scholarship in the Digital Age will provoke a stimulating conversation among all who depend on a rich and robust scholarly environment.

Two award-winning journalists reveal the epic story of one of the 20th century's most brilliant figures--the eccentric mathematical genius Norbert Wiener, who founded the revolutionary science of cybernetics and then spent his life warning the world about its dangerous human consequences. photos.

Privacy is a growing concern in the United States and around the world. The spread of the Internet and the seemingly boundaryless options for collecting, saving, sharing, and comparing information trigger consumer worries. Online practices of business and government agencies may present new ways to compromise privacy, and e-commerce and technologies that make a wide range of personal information available to anyone with a Web browser only begin to hint at the possibilities for inappropriate or unwarranted intrusion into our personal lives. Engaging Privacy and Information Technology in a Digital Age presents a comprehensive and multidisciplinary examination of privacy in the information age. It explores such important concepts as how the threats to privacy evolving, how can privacy be protected and how society can balance the interests of individuals, businesses and government in ways that promote privacy reasonably and effectively? This book seeks to raise awareness of the web of connectedness among the actions one takes and the privacy policies that are enacted, and provides a variety of tools and concepts with which debates over privacy can be more fruitfully engaged. Engaging Privacy and Information Technology in a Digital Age focuses on three major components affecting notions, perceptions, and expectations of privacy: technological change, societal shifts, and circumstantial discontinuities. This book will be of special interest to anyone interested in understanding why privacy issues are often so intractable.