Historically speaking, in many societies a select few carried the burden of preserving and transferring knowledge. While modern society has broadened the scope of education, this is not enough in the medical sciences. We must ensure that all those who pursue a career in medicine become life-long learners who will grow and contribute well beyond their years in medical school. In considering how ...

If even a fraction of the predictions about nanotechnology are realized, our society will be a dramatically different and better place than it is today. Yet, due to the infancy of the field, it is still unclear how traditional patent doctrine will be applied to nanotechnology. As it stands, the creators of nanoscale versions of traditional products might face infringement claims from traditiona...

M uch recent news has focused on promoting traditional lifestyles and banning or discouraging all others. However, an overview of society shows that the proportion of traditional families are becoming fewer and fewer. These traditional families are those consisting of one man and one woman living together with the possibility of children, either biological or adopted. Non-traditional families i...

In my 1992 paper in Economic Notes, I argued that the traditional heuristic interpretation of taxes in the pivotal mechanism (in terms of the utility loss imposed by the taxed individual on the rest of society) is not correct, since it takes into account only the effect that the individual has on the decision concerning the project and disregards the effect that the same individual has on the t...

Socioeconomic, demographic, and health characteristic surveys were conducted by medical and nursing students of the Aga Khan University in two settlements of Karachi city. Comparisons of health and socioeconomic indicators are made between Orangi, a squatter settlement (katchi abadi) and Karimabad, a middle class community. Results of these surveys suggest that the demo graphic and health chara...

In the light of high profile governmental and international efforts to realise the knowledge society, I review the arguments made for and against it from a technology standpoint. I focus on Advanced Knowledge Technologies (AKT) with applications on a large scale and in open-ended environments like the world wide web and its ambitious extension, the semantic web. I argue for a greater role of so...

In traditional society, women were supposed to do housework, take care of children, and give the family emotional stability. However, with the social and economic changes that affect our urban and rural society, the traditional values also change. More women are engaged in full-time jobs. No longer are they only women and mothers; they are also business women, politicians, and contributors to s...

There is a traditional belief in the computability of nature and society, but it has run into severe difficulties. Computability is only simple for linear problems. But most problems in the world are nonlinear and complex—from the biological evolution of life to the ecological, economic, and social dynamics of human society. Classical physics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) have often been ins...

The objective of this paper is to describe how Bhutanese society has become monetised over the years, at first very slowly, but rapidly during the last half century. I will briefly comment on the effect that monetisation has had on Bhutanese Society, and the potential conflict that exists between traditional values in Bhutan, which are largely non-monetary based, and so-called “modern” values, ...