Auswahl der wissenschaftlichen Literatur zum Thema „Press line phone numbers“

Purpose This paper aims to compare residential fixed-line telephone surveys with cell phone surveys for assessing the extent of the potential undercoverage issue evaluating the necessity and feasibility of conducting cell phone surveys or dual-frame telephone surveys in Hong Kong. Design/methodology/approach The research team simultaneously carried out a conventional fixed-line telephone survey and a cell phone survey in 2015 with similar features on survey design, sampling and data collection procedures. Two samples with sample size of 801 and 1,203 were achieved separately. Data collected were analysed to see to what extent survey findings will be biased if the sampling frame of telephone surveys is solely based on residential fixed-line numbers in Hong Kong, and if such a bias does exist, whether a survey conducted through cell phones or by adding a cell phone-only (CO) group would be an ideal solution for it. Findings The findings show that the cooperation rates for the cell phone survey were much lower than those of the fixed-line telephone survey. The respondents from two surveys were fairly different. However, estimates of most commonly used socio-demographic characteristics from the latter group had the least bias compared with population statistics. Supplanting the traditional fixed-line survey with a cell phone survey or supplementing it with a CO group will not make the resulting sample a better representative of the population but it will amplify the sample bias on the major social socio-demographic characteristics. Originality/value This paper empirically compares the two types of telephone surveys in a well-designed scientific study.

Social network applications are being more widely used among users and new types of such applications are created by developers. Almost all users who use smart phones are users of such application. Major concern in these applications is privacy and security. We can name WhatsApp, Viber, Facebook, Telegram, Line, WeChat and Beetalk as the most popular applications. There are also websites which provide online numbers in order to receive SMS. The goal of this website is providing anonymous virtual phone number to protect users from spam. Also these sites provide different number from different countries and let people to can use them for different application. The services of these websites are divided into two groups: subscription services in which a unique number is assigned to the user by charging him/her and free services in which user can see the received messages of some online numbers without any registration.

Background: Since 1989 Sydney Sexual Health Centre has provided a community phone information line (PIL). The service aims to educate and promote the sexual health of the community and facilitate efficient use of the centre’s resources through the provision of information and advice to the community and health professionals; a referral service; and patient triage. In October 1997 a comprehensive computerised database was developed to collect caller information. In 2003, a 5-year review of the PIL database was undertaken with the express aim of describing the profile of people using the service. Methods: We analysed data from the PIL from 16 October 1997 to end 20 December 2002 using SPSS. Results: A total of 34 013 callers were in the PIL database. Every year the service has seen an increase in demand from 5295 calls in 1998 (first full year of service) to 8401 in 2002. The majority of callers lived in central and southeast Sydney geographical area, however, calls were registered from over 55% of postcodes in NSW and from interstate. The average caller age each year was 32 years with similar standard deviation and the distribution over time has not changed. There were equal numbers of male and female callers each year. Peak times for people to call the PIL were 2–4 pm with a high number of callers at 10 am. In general, calls were between 4 and 6 Min duration. Overall, 14 098 (41.4%) of calls in the database were for general sexual health information. The majority of the information callers over the period who have been calling about infections have called about herpes simplex virus. Conclusions: As is evident the PIL meets a specific community need. This study did not, however, look at patient outcomes and this area needs investigation to fully evaluate the benefits of a community PIL.

Quality function deployment is a cross-functional decision-making tool that converts customer needs into technical attributes of new products. Fuzzy numbers are usually adopted to evaluate the customer need importance and the customer need–technical attribute relationships. However, the weighted normalized customer need–technical attribute relationship matrix is not always full rank. If the different fuzzy numbers of two technical attributes are defined as the fuzzy negative ideal solutions, both the closeness coefficients are 0, and the traditional technique for order preference by similarity to an ideal solution cannot prioritize the two technical attributes. Actually, the rankings of different fuzzy numbers are not identical. To solve this problem, we present a new technique for order preference by similarity to an ideal solution to prioritize technical attributes in the fuzzy quality function deployment. The fuzzy positive ideal solution, fuzzy negative ideal solution, and distance measurement of the new technique for order preference by similarity to an ideal solution are improved. As a result, the proposed method not only prioritizes various forms of numbers without considering the lower and upper limits, the median, and boundary interval but also deals with the nonfull rank matrix. Besides, the Theory of Inventive Problem Solving is used to solve technical conflicts which are identified by the line-fitting method. The prioritization results from the proposed method can help to reasonably allocate design and manufacturing resources. Finally, a case on phone shell is given to illustrate the application of the proposed quality function deployment method.

185 Background: The term “telephone triage” best represents a large proportion of customer interactions carried out by telephone versus other contact channels. It’s often referred to as the “front door” to a business and is the place where the most crucial customer interactions take place. Therefore, the effective and efficient operation of managing these interactions is a key ingredient to the overall success of any organization. Over the last several years, customer feedback and monitoring of trends on the Press Ganey Patient Satisfaction surveys showed opportunity for improvement in the overall patient care experience at our centers. This led to the development of a strategic goal to create a decentralized phone triage center that would manage these interactions as a group across the service line. Methods: A subgroup of key stakeholders came together for a Failure Mode Effects Analysis of the current state. Results were used in the creation of standard work and process flow algorithms for training the new staff. Staff training included: customer service education; shadow experiences across sites; one to one mentoring on new software and technology Results: The Phone Triage room opened this fall and is staffed daily to manage roughly 400 calls. We track quality metrics that fall into three categories: service, quality and efficiency measures. Service measures include the total number of incoming call; number of abandoned calls; length of time the caller is on hold; and statistics on the telephone and answered service factor. Quality measures include: knowledge/competency of service agents; adherence to protocol; first call resolution rate and transfer rate. Lastly, efficiency measures include average handle time; on hold time; schedule efficiency; and agent availability. In October, the center managed 4657 calls over a 14-day period, 98% were answered in under 2.5 minutes with a 2% abandon call rate. Conclusions: Early data shows pooling of service line resources and utilization of technology has increased customer satisfaction. We plan to monitor trends on several key Press Ganey performance indicators with the next quarter results available in January 2017.

PT. Selamat Sempurna, Tbk is a company that manufactures automotive parts, namely car filters. This filter product has many part numbers. In this company has one of the production lines, namely Line Seat Press Shop, this line produces components from filters, namely seat components. Seat is the main part of the filter component that functions as a filter holder to the engine. This Seat component consists of several part numbers (shapes or variations) following the filter product, and some part numbers handled by the manual engine B070 & L224 will affect the changes in the production engine settings. This production machine includes machines that require time in a slow setup process for switching dies when switching from one part number to another part number compared to other machines, because the element of the process setting is long. With a fishbone diagram, the root cause of the Change Over Part long problem on the machine is from the method category (there is no preparation desk dies and there is not separation of external setup and internal setup). Previously the time needed for Change Over Part was 1961 seconds. After knowing the root cause of the problem and the improvement of the time needed is only 866 seconds. The time difference is 1067 seconds, so save on average time 1095 seconds or 18 minutes / setup. Keywords: Filter product, Change Over part (COP), Fishbone Diagram, Setup, Process Elements.

Face-to-face prevention-focused relationship education programs have generally been efficacious in improving couples’ communication and relationship satisfaction. Computer-based interventions have furthered the dissemination of these interventions, so anyone with access to a computer can participate in the intervention. One of the next steps in this line of research is finding affordable and convenient ways to disseminate this information. One possibility is text messaging. The current study examined the feasibility of utilizing text messages as a dissemination tool for relationship enhancement. In this study, 128 married individuals were randomly assigned to a control condition ( n = 64), where relationship-related text messages were not received, or to a treatment condition ( n = 64), where relationship-related text messages were received. Individuals assigned to the treatment condition responded positively toward the intervention. Participants’ dropout and retention rates were promising, and 99% of the participants supplied authentic phone numbers. Participants reported the intervention helped them make changes in their relationship, and that the text messages’ content was beneficial to their relationship. Strengths, limitations, and ideas for future research are discussed, as well as the implications for utilizing text messages as a dissemination tool for preventative relationship education.

In a binary response setting, it has been frequently observed that small numbers are reacted to faster with the left hand and large numbers with the right hand (i. e., the SNARC-effect) which reflects the spatial left-right orientation of the mental number line ( Dehaene, Bossini, & Giraux, 1993 ). In line with the work of Keus and Schwarz (in press ), we investigated the locus of the conflict in the SNARC effect in a parity judgment task with the Arabic numerals 1, 2, 8, or 9. Differences between compatible (left-hand response to 1 or 2 and right-hand response to 8 and 9) and incompatible SNARC conditions (left-hand response to 8 or 9 and right-hand response to 1 or 2) were observed in the lateralized readiness potential (LRP) but not in the peak latency of the P300. In accordance with Keus and colleagues ( Keus, Jenks, & Schwarz, 2005 ), we argue that the locus of the conflict is situated at intermediate response-related stages. However, instead of adopting a single-route processing architecture, a dual route account is proposed as the underlying processing architecture explaining the SNARC effect.

Genetics has fascinated societies since ancient times, and references to traits or behaviors that appear to be shared or different among related individuals have permeated legends, literature, and popular culture. Biomedical advances from the past century, and particularly the discovery of the DNA double helix, the increasing numbers of links that were established between mutations and medical conditions or phenotypes, and technological advances that facilitated the sequencing of the human genome, catalyzed the development of genetic testing. Genetic tests were initially performed in health care facilities, interpreted by health care providers, and included the availability of counseling. Recent years have seen an increased availability of genetic tests that are offered by companies directly to consumers, a phenomenon that became known as direct-to-consumer genetic testing. Tests offered in this setting range from the ones that are also provided in health care establishments to tests known as ‘recreational genomics,’ and consumers directly receive the test results. In addition, testing in this context often does not involve the availability of counseling and, when this is provided, it frequently occurs on-line or over the phone. As a field situated at the interface between biotechnology, biomedical research, and social sciences, direct-to-consumer genetic testing opens multiple challenges that can be appropriately addressed only by developing a complex, inter-disciplinary framework.

This thesis is devoted to Topic: Knowledge level of first aid procedures among teachers of seleced primary schools in Karlovy Vary. In the theoretical part my focus is on the term pre- medical first aid, the principles of providing it, the legislation associated with first aid, mentioned are also the first-aider's safety, the principles of calling professional medical help, there are also the press line phone numbers stated. The thesis contains principles of first aid provided especially to children in selected injury and non-injury conditions. In practical part of this thesis I present quantitative research through questionnaire which was addressed to pedagogues of selected primary and secondary schools in Karlovy Vary. The data obtained were processed into graphs or tables. The main aim of this thesis was to discover the knowledge level of pre-medical first aid in teachers. The questionnaire evaluation suggests that the knowledge level of pre-medical first aid practices in by me selected teachers could be graded as B. It was discovered that the years of pedagogical experience in by me selected teachers might have an impact on the theoretical knowledge of providing pre-medical first aid. It is evident from my research that the best average grade for answering knowledge questions in questionnaire...

Nationalism: Past as Prologue began as a single volume being compiled by Ad Akande, a scholar from South Africa, who proposed it to me as co-author about two years ago. The original idea was to examine how the damaging roots of nationalism have been corroding political systems around the world, and creating dangerous obstacles for necessary international cooperation. Since I (Bruce E. Johansen) has written profusely about climate change (global warming, a.k.a. infrared forcing), I suggested a concerted effort in that direction. This is a worldwide existential threat that affects every living thing on Earth. It often compounds upon itself, so delays in reducing emissions of fossil fuels are shortening the amount of time remaining to eliminate the use of fossil fuels to preserve a livable planet. Nationalism often impedes solutions to this problem (among many others), as nations place their singular needs above the common good. Our initial proposal got around, and abstracts on many subjects arrived. Within a few weeks, we had enough good material for a 100,000-word book. The book then fattened to two moderate volumes and then to four two very hefty tomes. We tried several different titles as good submissions swelled. We also discovered that our best contributors were experts in their fields, which ranged the world. We settled on three stand-alone books:” 1/ nationalism and racial justice. Our first volume grew as the growth of Black Lives Matter following the brutal killing of George Floyd ignited protests over police brutality and other issues during 2020, following the police assassination of Floyd in Minneapolis. It is estimated that more people took part in protests of police brutality during the summer of 2020 than any other series of marches in United States history. This includes upheavals during the 1960s over racial issues and against the war in Southeast Asia (notably Vietnam). We choose a volume on racism because it is one of nationalism’s main motive forces. This volume provides a worldwide array of work on nationalism’s growth in various countries, usually by authors residing in them, or in the United States with ethnic ties to the nation being examined, often recent immigrants to the United States from them. Our roster of contributors comprises a small United Nations of insightful, well-written research and commentary from Indonesia, New Zealand, Australia, China, India, South Africa, France, Portugal, Estonia, Hungary, Russia, Poland, Kazakhstan, Georgia, and the United States. Volume 2 (this one) describes and analyzes nationalism, by country, around the world, except for the United States; and 3/material directly related to President Donald Trump, and the United States. The first volume is under consideration at the Texas A & M University Press. The other two are under contract to Nova Science Publishers (which includes social sciences). These three volumes may be used individually or as a set. Environmental material is taken up in appropriate places in each of the three books. * * * * * What became the United States of America has been strongly nationalist since the English of present-day Massachusetts and Jamestown first hit North America’s eastern shores. The country propelled itself across North America with the self-serving ideology of “manifest destiny” for four centuries before Donald Trump came along. Anyone who believes that a Trumpian affection for deportation of “illegals” is a new thing ought to take a look at immigration and deportation statistics in Adam Goodman’s The Deportation Machine: America’s Long History of Deporting Immigrants (Princeton University Press, 2020). Between 1920 and 2018, the United States deported 56.3 million people, compared with 51.7 million who were granted legal immigration status during the same dates. Nearly nine of ten deportees were Mexican (Nolan, 2020, 83). This kind of nationalism, has become an assassin of democracy as well as an impediment to solving global problems. Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times (2019:A-25): that “In their 2018 book, How Democracies Die, the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt documented how this process has played out in many countries, from Vladimir Putin’s Russia, to Recep Erdogan’s Turkey, to Viktor Orban’s Hungary. Add to these India’s Narendra Modi, China’s Xi Jinping, and the United States’ Donald Trump, among others. Bit by bit, the guardrails of democracy have been torn down, as institutions meant to serve the public became tools of ruling parties and self-serving ideologies, weaponized to punish and intimidate opposition parties’ opponents. On paper, these countries are still democracies; in practice, they have become one-party regimes….And it’s happening here [the United States] as we speak. If you are not worried about the future of American democracy, you aren’t paying attention” (Krugmam, 2019, A-25). We are reminded continuously that the late Carl Sagan, one of our most insightful scientific public intellectuals, had an interesting theory about highly developed civilizations. Given the number of stars and planets that must exist in the vast reaches of the universe, he said, there must be other highly developed and organized forms of life. Distance may keep us from making physical contact, but Sagan said that another reason we may never be on speaking terms with another intelligent race is (judging from our own example) could be their penchant for destroying themselves in relatively short order after reaching technological complexity. This book’s chapters, introduction, and conclusion examine the worldwide rise of partisan nationalism and the damage it has wrought on the worldwide pursuit of solutions for issues requiring worldwide scope, such scientific co-operation public health and others, mixing analysis of both. We use both historical description and analysis. This analysis concludes with a description of why we must avoid the isolating nature of nationalism that isolates people and encourages separation if we are to deal with issues of world-wide concern, and to maintain a sustainable, survivable Earth, placing the dominant political movement of our time against the Earth’s existential crises. Our contributors, all experts in their fields, each have assumed responsibility for a country, or two if they are related. This work entwines themes of worldwide concern with the political growth of nationalism because leaders with such a worldview are disinclined to co-operate internationally at a time when nations must find ways to solve common problems, such as the climate crisis. Inability to cooperate at this stage may doom everyone, eventually, to an overheated, stormy future plagued by droughts and deluges portending shortages of food and other essential commodities, meanwhile destroying large coastal urban areas because of rising sea levels. Future historians may look back at our time and wonder why as well as how our world succumbed to isolating nationalism at a time when time was so short for cooperative intervention which is crucial for survival of a sustainable earth. Pride in language and culture is salubrious to individuals’ sense of history and identity. Excess nationalism that prevents international co-operation on harmful worldwide maladies is quite another. As Pope Francis has pointed out: For all of our connectivity due to expansion of social media, ability to communicate can breed contempt as well as mutual trust. “For all our hyper-connectivity,” said Francis, “We witnessed a fragmentation that made it more difficult to resolve problems that affect us all” (Horowitz, 2020, A-12). The pope’s encyclical, titled “Brothers All,” also said: “The forces of myopic, extremist, resentful, and aggressive nationalism are on the rise.” The pope’s document also advocates support for migrants, as well as resistance to nationalist and tribal populism. Francis broadened his critique to the role of market capitalism, as well as nationalism has failed the peoples of the world when they need co-operation and solidarity in the face of the world-wide corona virus pandemic. Humankind needs to unite into “a new sense of the human family [Fratelli Tutti, “Brothers All”], that rejects war at all costs” (Pope, 2020, 6-A). Our journey takes us first to Russia, with the able eye and honed expertise of Richard D. Anderson, Jr. who teaches as UCLA and publishes on the subject of his chapter: “Putin, Russian identity, and Russia’s conduct at home and abroad.” Readers should find Dr. Anderson’s analysis fascinating because Vladimir Putin, the singular leader of Russian foreign and domestic policy these days (and perhaps for the rest of his life, given how malleable Russia’s Constitution has become) may be a short man physically, but has high ambitions. One of these involves restoring the old Russian (and Soviet) empire, which would involve re-subjugating a number of nations that broke off as the old order dissolved about 30 years ago. President (shall we say czar?) Putin also has international ambitions, notably by destabilizing the United States, where election meddling has become a specialty. The sight of Putin and U.S. president Donald Trump, two very rich men (Putin $70-$200 billion; Trump $2.5 billion), nuzzling in friendship would probably set Thomas Jefferson and Vladimir Lenin spinning in their graves. The road of history can take some unanticipated twists and turns. Consider Poland, from which we have an expert native analysis in chapter 2, Bartosz Hlebowicz, who is a Polish anthropologist and journalist. His piece is titled “Lawless and Unjust: How to Quickly Make Your Own Country a Puppet State Run by a Group of Hoodlums – the Hopeless Case of Poland (2015–2020).” When I visited Poland to teach and lecture twice between 2006 and 2008, most people seemed to be walking on air induced by freedom to conduct their own affairs to an unusual degree for a state usually squeezed between nationalists in Germany and Russia. What did the Poles then do in a couple of decades? Read Hlebowicz’ chapter and decide. It certainly isn’t soft-bellied liberalism. In Chapter 3, with Bruce E. Johansen, we visit China’s western provinces, the lands of Tibet as well as the Uighurs and other Muslims in the Xinjiang region, who would most assuredly resent being characterized as being possessed by the Chinese of the Han to the east. As a student of Native American history, I had never before thought of the Tibetans and Uighurs as Native peoples struggling against the Independence-minded peoples of a land that is called an adjunct of China on most of our maps. The random act of sitting next to a young woman on an Air India flight out of Hyderabad, bound for New Delhi taught me that the Tibetans had something to share with the Lakota, the Iroquois, and hundreds of other Native American states and nations in North America. Active resistance to Chinese rule lasted into the mid-nineteenth century, and continues today in a subversive manner, even in song, as I learned in 2018 when I acted as a foreign adjudicator on a Ph.D. dissertation by a Tibetan student at the University of Madras (in what is now in a city called Chennai), in southwestern India on resistance in song during Tibet’s recent history. Tibet is one of very few places on Earth where a young dissident can get shot to death for singing a song that troubles China’s Quest for Lebensraum. The situation in Xinjiang region, where close to a million Muslims have been interned in “reeducation” camps surrounded with brick walls and barbed wire. They sing, too. Come with us and hear the music. Back to Europe now, in Chapter 4, to Portugal and Spain, we find a break in the general pattern of nationalism. Portugal has been more progressive governmentally than most. Spain varies from a liberal majority to military coups, a pattern which has been exported to Latin America. A situation such as this can make use of the term “populism” problematic, because general usage in our time usually ties the word into a right-wing connotative straightjacket. “Populism” can be used to describe progressive (left-wing) insurgencies as well. José Pinto, who is native to Portugal and also researches and writes in Spanish as well as English, in “Populism in Portugal and Spain: a Real Neighbourhood?” provides insight into these historical paradoxes. Hungary shares some historical inclinations with Poland (above). Both emerged from Soviet dominance in an air of developing freedom and multicultural diversity after the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed. Then, gradually at first, right wing-forces began to tighten up, stripping structures supporting popular freedom, from the courts, mass media, and other institutions. In Chapter 5, Bernard Tamas, in “From Youth Movement to Right-Liberal Wing Authoritarianism: The Rise of Fidesz and the Decline of Hungarian Democracy” puts the renewed growth of political and social repression into a context of worldwide nationalism. Tamas, an associate professor of political science at Valdosta State University, has been a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University and a Fulbright scholar at the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. His books include From Dissident to Party Politics: The Struggle for Democracy in Post-Communist Hungary (2007). Bear in mind that not everyone shares Orbán’s vision of what will make this nation great, again. On graffiti-covered walls in Budapest, Runes (traditional Hungarian script) has been found that read “Orbán is a motherfucker” (Mikanowski, 2019, 58). Also in Europe, in Chapter 6, Professor Ronan Le Coadic, of the University of Rennes, Rennes, France, in “Is There a Revival of French Nationalism?” Stating this title in the form of a question is quite appropriate because France’s nationalistic shift has built and ebbed several times during the last few decades. For a time after 2000, it came close to assuming the role of a substantial minority, only to ebb after that. In 2017, the candidate of the National Front reached the second round of the French presidential election. This was the second time this nationalist party reached the second round of the presidential election in the history of the Fifth Republic. In 2002, however, Jean-Marie Le Pen had only obtained 17.79% of the votes, while fifteen years later his daughter, Marine Le Pen, almost doubled her father's record, reaching 33.90% of the votes cast. Moreover, in the 2019 European elections, re-named Rassemblement National obtained the largest number of votes of all French political formations and can therefore boast of being "the leading party in France.” The brutality of oppressive nationalism may be expressed in personal relationships, such as child abuse. While Indonesia and Aotearoa [the Maoris’ name for New Zealand] hold very different ranks in the United Nations Human Development Programme assessments, where Indonesia is classified as a medium development country and Aotearoa New Zealand as a very high development country. In Chapter 7, “Domestic Violence Against Women in Indonesia and Aotearoa New Zealand: Making Sense of Differences and Similarities” co-authors, in Chapter 8, Mandy Morgan and Dr. Elli N. Hayati, from New Zealand and Indonesia respectively, found that despite their socio-economic differences, one in three women in each country experience physical or sexual intimate partner violence over their lifetime. In this chapter ther authors aim to deepen understandings of domestic violence through discussion of the socio-economic and demographic characteristics of theit countries to address domestic violence alongside studies of women’s attitudes to gender norms and experiences of intimate partner violence. One of the most surprising and upsetting scholarly journeys that a North American student may take involves Adolf Hitler’s comments on oppression of American Indians and Blacks as he imagined the construction of the Nazi state, a genesis of nationalism that is all but unknown in the United States of America, traced in this volume (Chapter 8) by co-editor Johansen. Beginning in Mein Kampf, during the 1920s, Hitler explicitly used the westward expansion of the United States across North America as a model and justification for Nazi conquest and anticipated colonization by Germans of what the Nazis called the “wild East” – the Slavic nations of Poland, the Baltic states, Ukraine, and Russia, most of which were under control of the Soviet Union. The Volga River (in Russia) was styled by Hitler as the Germans’ Mississippi, and covered wagons were readied for the German “manifest destiny” of imprisoning, eradicating, and replacing peoples the Nazis deemed inferior, all with direct references to events in North America during the previous century. At the same time, with no sense of contradiction, the Nazis partook of a long-standing German romanticism of Native Americans. One of Goebbels’ less propitious schemes was to confer honorary Aryan status on Native American tribes, in the hope that they would rise up against their oppressors. U.S. racial attitudes were “evidence [to the Nazis] that America was evolving in the right direction, despite its specious rhetoric about equality.” Ming Xie, originally from Beijing, in the People’s Republic of China, in Chapter 9, “News Coverage and Public Perceptions of the Social Credit System in China,” writes that The State Council of China in 2014 announced “that a nationwide social credit system would be established” in China. “Under this system, individuals, private companies, social organizations, and governmental agencies are assigned a score which will be calculated based on their trustworthiness and daily actions such as transaction history, professional conduct, obedience to law, corruption, tax evasion, and academic plagiarism.” The “nationalism” in this case is that of the state over the individual. China has 1.4 billion people; this system takes their measure for the purpose of state control. Once fully operational, control will be more subtle. People who are subject to it, through modern technology (most often smart phones) will prompt many people to self-censor. Orwell, modernized, might write: “Your smart phone is watching you.” Ming Xie holds two Ph.Ds, one in Public Administration from University of Nebraska at Omaha and another in Cultural Anthropology from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing, where she also worked for more than 10 years at a national think tank in the same institution. While there she summarized news from non-Chinese sources for senior members of the Chinese Communist Party. Ming is presently an assistant professor at the Department of Political Science and Criminal Justice, West Texas A&M University. In Chapter 10, analyzing native peoples and nationhood, Barbara Alice Mann, Professor of Honours at the University of Toledo, in “Divide, et Impera: The Self-Genocide Game” details ways in which European-American invaders deprive the conquered of their sense of nationhood as part of a subjugation system that amounts to genocide, rubbing out their languages and cultures -- and ultimately forcing the native peoples to assimilate on their own, for survival in a culture that is foreign to them. Mann is one of Native American Studies’ most acute critics of conquests’ contradictions, and an author who retrieves Native history with a powerful sense of voice and purpose, having authored roughly a dozen books and numerous book chapters, among many other works, who has traveled around the world lecturing and publishing on many subjects. Nalanda Roy and S. Mae Pedron in Chapter 11, “Understanding the Face of Humanity: The Rohingya Genocide.” describe one of the largest forced migrations in the history of the human race, the removal of 700,000 to 800,000 Muslims from Buddhist Myanmar to Bangladesh, which itself is already one of the most crowded and impoverished nations on Earth. With about 150 million people packed into an area the size of Nebraska and Iowa (population less than a tenth that of Bangladesh, a country that is losing land steadily to rising sea levels and erosion of the Ganges river delta. The Rohingyas’ refugee camp has been squeezed onto a gigantic, eroding, muddy slope that contains nearly no vegetation. However, Bangladesh is majority Muslim, so while the Rohingya may starve, they won’t be shot to death by marauding armies. Both authors of this exquisite (and excruciating) account teach at Georgia Southern University in Savannah, Georgia, Roy as an associate professor of International Studies and Asian politics, and Pedron as a graduate student; Roy originally hails from very eastern India, close to both Myanmar and Bangladesh, so he has special insight into the context of one of the most brutal genocides of our time, or any other. This is our case describing the problems that nationalism has and will pose for the sustainability of the Earth as our little blue-and-green orb becomes more crowded over time. The old ways, in which national arguments often end in devastating wars, are obsolete, given that the Earth and all the people, plants, and other animals that it sustains are faced with the existential threat of a climate crisis that within two centuries, more or less, will flood large parts of coastal cities, and endanger many species of plants and animals. To survive, we must listen to the Earth, and observe her travails, because they are increasingly our own.

As the scandal over Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation’s illegal phone hacking activities broke to television audiences around the world, I could not help but wonder why?’And I am sure many others asked themselves the same question. What prompted Murdoch’s executives to condone illegal activities aimed at listening into private conversations? Obvious, you might say: getting the latest scoop on a murder investigation, or the most salacious titbit about the royal family. But let us delve deeper and ask again, as a child might, why? So that more readers would read the News of the World, of course! Stupid question? What drove so many people, estimated at over 4 million, a significant fraction of Britain’s population, to follow the tabloid press so avidly? The daily newspaper remains a primary source of news for the vast majority of the world’s population. Of course, most people also read more serious papers than the News of the World. Still, what is it that drives some news items to become headlines rather than be relegated to the corner of an inside page? The scientific answer is Information; capitalized here because there is more to the term than as understood in its colloquial usage. You may call it voyeurism in the case of News of the World, or the hunger to know what is happening around the world for, say, the New York Times. Both forms of enquiry suffer from the need to filter the vast numbers of everyday events that take place every second, so as to determine those that would most likely be of interest to readers. The concept of Information is best illustrated by comparing the possible headlines ‘Dog Bites Man’ and ‘Man Bites Dog’. Clearly the latter, being a far rarer event, is more likely to prompt you to read the story than the former, more commonplace occurrence. In 1948, Claude E. Shannon published a now classic paper entitled ‘A Mathematical Theory of Communication’. By then the telegraph, telephone, and radio had spawned a whole new communications industry with the AT&T company at its locus. Shannon, working at AT&T Bell Laboratories, was concerned with how fast one could communicate meaning, or information in its colloquial sense, over wires or even the wireless.

When Edison introduced his new-fangled electric-lighting system, he found a receptive audience. The public, the press, and even his competitors— with the possible exception of the gaslight industry—recognized that here was a technology of the future. Alexander Graham Bell, on the other hand, had a tougher time. In 1876, just three years before Edison would create a practical light bulb, Bell’s invention of the telephone fell flat. “A toy,” his detractors huffed. What good was it? The telegraph already handled communications quite nicely, thank you, and sensible inventors should be trying to lower the cost and improve the quality of telegraphy. Indeed, that’s just what one of Bell’s rivals, Elisha Gray, did—to his everlasting regret. Gray had come up with a nearly identical telephone some months before Bell, but he had not patented it. Instead, he had turned his attention back to the telegraph, searching for a way to carry multiple signals over one line. When Gray eventually did make it to the patent office with his telephone application, he was two hours behind Bell. Those two hours would cost him a place in the history books and one of the most lucrative patents of all time. Some months later, Bell offered his patent to the telegraph giant Western Union for a pittance—$100,000—but company officials turned him down. The telephone, they thought, had no future. It wasn’t until the next year, when Bell had gotten financing to develop his creation on his own, that Western Union began to have second thoughts. Then the company approached Thomas Edison to come up with a similar machine that worked on a different principle so that it could sidestep the Bell patent and create its own telephone. Eventually, the competitors combined their patents to create the first truly adequate telephones, and the phone industry took off. By 1880 there were 48,000 phones in use, and a decade later nearly five times that. More recently, when high-temperature superconductors were first created in 1986, the experts seemed to be competing among themselves to forecast the brightest future for the superconductor industry.