Current claims by government, major IT companies and educational institutions in the UK that IT skills offer enhanced inclusion into the new economy, are attracting women to the field of information systems. The needs of one social group – lone women parents – that IT skills initiatives seek to include will be analyzed in the light of another policy trend, the ‘work life balance’. Using narrati...

When an academic, scientist, or research engineer harps on about the knowledge-based economy, it’s hard to take as anything other than shameless self-serving hyperbole. Knowledge is, after all, what these people are supposed to be producing, and now here they are, telling the rest of us that that’s what drives the economy. Combine those self-promoting tendencies with the superficial observation...

This issue of Interface Focus is being used to introduce readers of Interface to research into the use of plants to supply mankind with renewable energy and material resources. This field is given the general name of biorenewables research, but over the past few years it has come to public attention through media coverage surrounding one type of biorenewable product, liquid biofuels. Biofuels r...

The article discusses the causes of the difficulties and contradictions associated with the management information systems referring to the competences of knowledge workers in organizations. As far as entities are concerned, the reasons are mainly the effects of global phenomena of socio-economic life. Unfortunately, with the increase in the declared need for competences in the knowledge-based ...

In this paper, we employ techniques from artificial intelligence such as reinforcement learning and agent based modeling as building blocks of a computational model for an economy based on conventions. First we model the interaction among firms in the private sector. These firms behave in an information environment based on conventions, meaning that a firm is likely to behave as its neighbors i...

It is widely recognized that a Share Economy (SE) Pareto-dominates a FixedWage Economy (FWE) if unions care about employment. This begs the question, why profit sharing is less than ubiquitous. In this paper, we offer a solution to this conundrum by looking at particular transition arrangements from a FWE to a SE. We analytically show that despite the Pareto-dominance of a SE, the changeover fr...

In this study, emergy evaluation was used to analyze the Peruvian ecological – economic system. The material and energy flows were evaluated in units of solar emergy. The performance of the Peruvian system was assessed through emergy-based indices. The main calculated indicators are the following: (a) Emergy/USD ratio = 1.01 E+13 sej/dollar; (b) Emergy Yield Ratio (EYR) = 9.69; and (c) Environm...