Engaging Across Boundaries—Emerging Practices in ‘Technical Democracy’

Engaging Across Boundaries—Emerging Practices in ‘Technical Democracy’

This special issue examines strategies for public engagement in science and technology issues in Australia, Japan and Aotearoa/New Zealand. It traverses issues relating to new energy technologies, food nanotechnology, the environmental impacts of dioxins, toxic waste disposal, genetic modification and the way scientists engage with the social dimensions of new biotechnologies. The papers look c...

Charting Democracy Across Parsers

Different parsers trained on the same corpus deliver different results, both in terms of overall performance and in terms of the individual analyses they provide. In particular, for any given sentence, one parser may provide a correct analysis, while another will produce an incorrect analysis; but when faced with a different sentence, the first parser may be in error while the second is correct...

Engaging the Community Through E-Democracy in South Australia

This chapter examines the spread of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in South Australia. It starts by assessing South Australia’s leading role in the adoption of democratic reforms in the nineteenth century. It then suggests that there is not the same enthusiasm for the more contemporary reforms found in the implementation of e-democracy. The chapter draws from an appraisal of ...

Economy, Industry, Innovation and Technical Democracy

This paper acknowledges that ethical questions raised by ICT are so fundamental that they include the question of the anthropological changes caused by communications tools. It then looks at the motivation of large companies to discharge their social responsibilities. The paper also argues that Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) are no longer the main decision makers for fundamental strategic corp...

Engaging employees through high-involvement work practices