Information Technology Boom Research Articles

Сучасний стан світового фондового ринку та виклики його розвитку

The purpose of the article is to study the current state of the global stock market and potential challenges on the future path of its development. The study of the state of the world stock market, among other things, is carried out by analytical agencies that single out individual countries to analyze the state of their national stock markets: the USA, the Eurozone, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, Japan, China, Canada, and Australia. The largest in terms of proportion in the capitalization of the world market is the market of the group of North American countries (the USA and Canada), which occupies 83.13%. Currently, the global financial market is in a recession phase, which is characterized by high levels of inflation and certain specific features. Over the past decades, the global financial system has acquired additional trends that make their own adjustments to tendencies in the world stock market and create potential challenges to the development of the global securities market. Among the main challenges that affect the prospects of the global stock market, the following can be mentioned: 1) speculative challenge from the growth of the derivatives market; 2) potential challenge from the tendency of democratization of the global stock market. The democratization of the stock market is understood as an increase in the ability of individuals to gain access to capital markets, receive new information, access to investment platforms and investment products, that is, we are talking about the openness of the market and a decrease in its concentration; 3) challenges from the growth of cyber threats that can lead to manipulation of order management systems, which, in turn, leads to incorrect channels, fake orders or failure to submit along with damaging the trade surveillance systems, which will result in enabling the manipulative, illegal trade practices; 4) the negative consequence of standardization of capital raising through stock markets; 5) challenges within the post-COVID paradigm; 6) challenges from changes in the structure of investors; 7) challenges for the world stock market due to the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by the Russian Federation, which affected the energy and consumer sectors, as the commodity markets of oil, gas, agricultural products and fertilizers suffered, mainly having negative consequences for the markets of the continent of Eurasia and Africa. Thus, the global stock market is developing in a paradigm of uncertainty, geopolitical sharpness, significant rates of digitalization and the continuation of the boom in information technology, democratization and the post-pandemic period, which creates its own combination of challenges.

In search of a rational foundation for the massive IT boom in the Australian banking industry: Can the IT boom really drive relationship banking?

Information technology (IT) is meant to improve bank performance by lowering operational costs and improving the process of financial intermediation of banks. However, the empirical evidence has failed to reach a consensus on the precise effects of IT on bank performance as some find evidence to concur with the Solow Paradox, while others contradict this paradox. The heterogeneity in the quality of banking services is partly responsible for the inconsistency in the findings. To sidestep the issue of heterogeneity, we consider the top-tier Australian banks for which the quality of banking services is homogeneous. Applying the dynamic panel data methodology, i.e., panel autoregressive distributed lag (panel ARDL) and cross-sectionally augmented panel ARDL (CS-ARDL) models, we investigate the effect of IT on the cost and profit efficiency frontiers of the top-tier Australian banks during 2000–2019. We unequivocally establish that the frontiers of bank profits rise due to the adoption and diffusion of IT investment, contradicting the assumed failure of IT to adequately collect soft information in the banking industry. Furthermore, we find that the cost frontiers have risen, driven by the IT boom. Hence, there is evidence that despite increases in operational inefficiency, IT has shifted the profit frontiers up by enhancing relationship banking in Australia.

Digital Smile Design.

One of the important ways of social interaction is through verbal and nonverbal communication. The human face is capable of eliciting multi-response according to the situation; amongst them, a smile plays a significant effect in relaying a positive communication that can immensely influence societal outcomes. An important part of dental treatment is to restore the tooth to functionality and to esthetically rehabilitate it, which forms the core of esthetic dentistry. Modern advancements have led us to various esthetic treatment options. Recently, due to the boom of information technology, we are progressing into the digital age where everything has almost been made through computers and the internet. In the dental field, advanced software is being used to modify and create smiles, thereby completely revolutionizing esthetic dentistry. Digital smile design is a recently introduced concept and software which analyzes the smile of an individual through various input scanners and photographs. They provide a plethora of solutions and predictions as to how the smile can be designed, to the point it can pinpoint minor corrections. Here, we discuss the importance of smiles and the analysis using digital smile design.

Recent progress of superconducting electronics in China

It has been nearly 110 years since the discovery of superconductors, and more than 30 years since the discovery of high temperature superconductors (HTS). Great progress has been made in the application of superconducting electronics in the last two decades. HTS microwave devices have shown much higher perfomance than the traditional ones and have found their ways to the industry applications in mobile communication, radar, and special communication applications. Owing to the ultrahigh sensitivity to magnetic fields and currents, superconducting quantum interference devices (SQUIDs) have been used as the irresplacible sensors in geological surveying, magnetic resonanc imaging, biomagnetic imaging, and other areas. The sensitivity of superconducting radiation detectors such as superconducting SIS mixer, superconducting hot electron bolometer, superconducting transition edge sensor, superconducting nanowire single photon detector, and superconducting microwave kinetic inductance detector are near the quantum limitation. They are now key technology in geophysics, astrophysics, quantum information science, biomedicine, and so on. Superconducting Josephson parametric amplifier has become a key element for superconducting quantum computing. Superconducting integrated circuit has been included in the international roadmap for devices and systems, and shows that having the potential to become one of the mainstreams for post-Moore information processing technology. In metrology, superconducting Josephson effect and Josephson junction array devices have been widely used in the redefinition of quantum voltage reference and basic units of the International system of Units. Superconducting electronics plays an important role in the current quantum information technology boom, which in turn promotes the development of superconducting electronics. This review will brief introduce the research and application of superconducting electronics in China in recent years.

Jihad and Hijra Concepts Emergence in Face of Globalization and Postmodernism

The hypothesis of our work is that the concepts of globalization, the information technology boom and Postmodernism are closely linked and that somehow eroded the ontological concepts of identity, individual and cultural diversity, in terms of the relationship I and the other. In the international strategic framework that other has fallen on Arab-Islamic culture. The thought of the Western world, with its logic of instrumental rationality has built stereotypes about that culture, ignoring its archetype. This reality is the one that perceives the concepts of the Arab-Islamic tradition of Jihad and Hijra only as ideas that lead to the destruction and not as a heritage of the philosophical and religious thought for the development of humanity. From a Jungian interpretation, both concepts and the psychic behaviors that derive from them, outside the fallacious and violent interpretations, are valuable contributions to humanity in the current situation.

Recent trends in image watermarking techniques for copyright protection: a survey

Digital copyright protection signifies the technology of rights protection, utilization control, and management of digital substances in the activity of production, propagation, retailing, and consumption. In the era of digital boom in information technology and multimedia, malicious exploitations and piracy have become a global phenomenon; thus, the need for digital content protection is inexorable. Image watermarking has been advocated universally to resolve innumerable dilemmas correlated with issues in the fields of digital rights management and multimedia security. According to anticipated applications, various suitable image watermarking procedures have been designed to safeguard the copyright of digital subjects. In this study, contemporary developments of digital image watermarking techniques are appraised so as to identify state-of-the-art practices and their limitations. This research contribution will be expedient for the academics in instigating efficient watermarking techniques for copyright authentication.

Big data, machine learning, and artificial intelligence: a field guide for neurosurgeons.

Big data has transformed into a trend phrase in healthcare and neurosurgery, becoming a pervasive and inescapable phrase in everyday life. The upsurge in big data applications is a direct consequence of the drastic boom in information technology as well as the growing number of internet-connected devices called the Internet of Things in healthcare. Compared with business, marketing, and other sectors, healthcare applications are lagging due to a lack of technical knowledge among healthcare workers, technological limitations in acquiring and analyzing the data, and improper governance of healthcare big data. Despite these limitations, the medical literature is flooded with big data-related articles, and most of these are filled with abstruse terminologies such as machine learning, artificial intelligence, artificial neural network, and algorithm. Many of the recent articles are restricted to neurosurgical registries, creating a false impression that big data is synonymous with registries. Others advocate that the utilization of big data will be the panacea to all healthcare problems and research in the future. Without a proper understanding of these principles, it becomes easy to get lost without the ability to differentiate hype from reality. To that end, the authors give a brief narrative of big data analysis in neurosurgery and review its applications, limitations, and the challenges it presents for neurosurgeons and healthcare professionals naive to this field. Awareness of these basic concepts will allow neurosurgeons to understand the literature regarding big data, enabling them to make better decisions and deliver personalized care.

Individualized Teaching and Teaching Process Evaluation for International Trade Students Based on Information Techniques

With the boom in information technology, countries around the world are competing the information the education industry. However, there is not yet a well-established standard to evaluate students’ capabilities in the teaching process based on information techniques. To solve the problem, this paper introduces the latest information techniques, such as big data and cloud computing, into the teaching of international trade, designs an individualized teaching system based on student portrait, and constructs an intelligent evaluation system of the teaching process. On this basis, several suggestions were put forward on the reform of the training model of international trade students. This research provides new insights on the evaluation and improvement of the teaching effect in the department of international trade.

The unemployed hero in Indian Tamil cinema: Perspectives on youth, gender and aspiration

In this article, I explore the portrayal of the information technology (IT) boom in Indian Tamil cinema to think through representations of unemployed youth. Three main questions anchor this article: one, what are the ways in which unemployment is problematized? Two, how are depictions of unemployment (and employment) gendered? How do gendered representations of unemployment feed into dominant tropes of language, given the Dravidian orientation of Tamil cinema? Three, how are these crises resolved, and what imaginaries do they present of relationships between men and women? Through a reading of three recent films that directly or indirectly relate to the IT boom, I offer an analysis of the privileging of certain professions, skills and academic disciplines under capitalism, its effects on employment prospects for youth, as well as its gendered implications. I argue that the films assert a subculture of masculinity that represents the subaltern male’s encounter with the globalizing city and its many transformations – most visibly the feminization of labour represented by the IT industry. Refuting the claim that cinema has positively embraced neoliberal subjectivity and celebrates the entrepreneurial spirit of youth, I show that the ‘unemployed hero’ is constructed as a social conscience to highlight the problems of a globalizing world. Though many aspects of late capitalism are productively critiqued through such consciousness-raising, the breakdown of traditional gendered roles appears as a leitmotif, exposing the gendered nature of anxieties accompanying the IT boom. The remaking and consolidation of masculine identity then becomes a way to manage these anxieties.

Remote sensing data quality model: from data sources to lifecycle phases

ABSTRACT The importance of data quality assessment has significantly increased with the boom of information technology and the growing demand for remote sensing (RS) data. The Remote Sensing Data Quality Working Group of the International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing aimed to conduct an investigation on the principles of data quality. Literature review revealed that most publications introduce data quality models for application specific processing chains and quality schemes are built case by case with particular domain indicators only. Yet no general concept independent from applications has been developed so far. This paper focuses on the formulation of a RS quality concept adopted from information technology domain describing a triangular RS data quality scheme that relates data sources, quality dimensions and lifecycle phases. Following the introduction it provides examples of international standards and fundamentals of theoretic quality modelling. After a short overview on platforms/sensors, definitions of different quality dimensions are presented with their metrics organised in clusters (like resolution or accuracy). The main achievement of the paper relates lifecycle phases to different quality dimensions of high relevance. The objective is not only to address experts of RS but to raise awareness of uncertainty for the general RS user community.

An ethical analysis of how ESL teachers construct their professional identities through the use of information technology in teaching

While there is growing recognition of the mutually shaping relationship between teaching with information technology (IT) and teachers’ beliefs, skills and self‐efficacy, there has been a paucity of research attention on the construction of teacher identity during actual IT‐assisted in‐class teaching and out‐of‐class networking with students, in a full institutional and social context. This study investigates how a group of secondary school English as a second language (ESL) teachers regulated their teaching and practices and constructed their identities in relation to governmental requirements for the use of IT in teaching. Teachers from seven government‐subsidised schools in Hong Kong were interviewed about their experiences of using IT in teaching. We frame the reported practices of these teachers as a process of construction of identity, formed in the context of the ‘governmentality’ supporting current examination‐oriented educational policy. Observing from the perspective of what has been termed ‘governmentality’ and an ethical framework for self‐formation of personal identity makes it possible to see these teachers’ professional identities constructed through the use of IT practices within the contradictory conditions of professional/personal demands, compliance/resistance, school promotion/peer non‐cooperation, advantage/disadvantage in use of IT, use of IT/content and pedagogical knowledge. This study has implications for developing a more supportive and rational environment for the use of IT in teaching, in which more autonomy and identity options—rather than constraints—can be provided for teachers in the digital era. This study also informs practitioners and policy makers in other educational settings experiencing a similar IT boom in teaching.

Understanding the New Normal: The Role of Demographics

Since the onset of the Great Recession, the U.S. economy has experienced low real GDP growth and low real interest rates, including for long maturities. We show that these developments were largely predictable by calibrating an overlapping-generation model with a rich demographic structure to observed and projected changes in U.S. population, family composition, life expectancy, and labor market activity. The model accounts for a 1¼–percentage point decline in both real GDP growth and the equilibrium real interest rate since 1980—essentially all of the permanent declines in those variables according to some recent estimates. The model also implies that these declines were especially pronounced over the past decade or so because of demographic factors most-directly associated with the baby boom and the passing of the information technology boom. Our results further suggest that real GDP growth and real interest rates will remain low in coming decades, consistent with the U.S economy having reached a “new normal.”

Producing abjection: E-waste improvement schemes and informal recyclers of Bangalore

This article focuses upon informal e-waste recyclers who subsidise the environmental costs of Bangalore’s information technology boom. It illustrates how improvement schemes devised by development agencies, to make Bangalore’s e-waste disposal practices more sustainable, reproduced the effects of bourgeois environmentalism and effectively cast off informal recyclers from having a substantial role in the city’s emerging regime of e-waste management. Being cast out and rendered superfluous has been a deeply degrading experience for Bangalore’s informal recyclers. In order to foreground this experience I draw upon the notion of abjection and show how informal recyclers are constituted as abject residents who must be confined to collecting and processing waste from the most marginal frontiers of the city’s e-waste circuits.

Editors’ Introduction

Editors’ Introduction

Bubbles and the Weibull distribution: was there an explosive bubble in US stock prices before the global economic crisis?

Existing studies on bubbles have been mainly concerned with investigating the stationarity properties of stock prices and market fundamentals. We develop a new method of testing for bubbles that relates the bubble component of stock prices to the probability of bursting in the context of the Weibull distribution. There were several eruptions and subsequent collapses of seeming bubbles over the past three decades: 1987 (Black Monday), 2000 (information technology (IT) boom) and 2007 (housing market boom). Using US monthly data for the S&P 500 and NASDAQ series, we have found that the S&P 500 series contained an explosive bubble only during the boom of the housing market that occurred before the 2007 global economic crisis, and the NASDAQ market contained an explosive bubble during the surge of stock prices peaking in 1987 and 2007, although our stationarity tests fail to detect the bubbles. No bubble was found in both the S&P and NASDAQ series during the 2000 IT boom. Our evidence corroborates the criticism that the traditional unit root and cointegration tests may not be able to detect some important class of bubbles.

Food Marketing to Children in India: Comparative Review of Regulatory Strategies Across the World

Food marketing directed to children is an issue of concern in the present day society. Revolution in food industry, increasing globalization and boom in information technology has introduced various types of food products and the way they are placed in front of likely consumers. This has resulted in rising trend of obesity and switch from communicable to non-communicable diseases, which is not cost effective for nation as a whole. Multinational companies have targeted children as a naïve audience to boost their sales. In-ethical practice of misleading claims in the advertisements is instrumental in many cases. Food marketing to children has been assumed a public health threat since times of yore. World Health Organization has resolutions and recommendations on this subject. Member countries, including India are a signatory to this declaration. However, much needs to be done to counter these multinational food giants. Regulations and policies need to be enforced at national and institutional levels. Parents must be educated; schools and social organizations to be made proactive on this aspect.

High-frequency data and the effectiveness of the spot exchange rate EUR/USD

The boom of information technology in recent years significantly influenced the development of the financial markets. Financial markets have become accessible to the public, and increased demand for financial instruments is inevitably reflected in the advanced menu of securities dealers who currently offer a wide variety of investment in the underlying assets and through financial leverage allows investors to profit from tiny price changes of the underlying asset. Shortening of trading period and increasing the frequency of the trades clearly contributes to the growth of profits of securities dealers. The question remains whether this trading method offers the advantage to the investor himself, and whether the investor is able to take advantage of potential market inefficiencies to achieve above-average profits in the short term period. Therefore, this paper analyzes the behaviour of the spot exchange rate EUR/USD within a day, and through statistical tests examining the validity of the random walk hypothesis for the 5-minute, hourly, 4-hourly and daily changes in the spot exchange rate of the currency pair EUR/USD.

Canada, the European Union, and Transatlantic Financial Governance

The focus of economic relations between Canada and Europe - and more specifically, the European Union - is usually on trade and investment, not finance. This has been true since at least the 1970s when Canada's was in vogue, the third option being the idea that Canada should expand and deepen its trade relations with Europe so as to reduce its economic dependence on the United States.1 More recently, the negotiation of a comprehensive economic and trade agreement has dominated the public discussion of Canada's economic relationship with the EU.2 In terms of international finance and its governance, Canada and the EU are normally not concerned with each other but rather with the United States. This is because in the post-World War II period, the US has dominated capital markets and the setting of international financial regulation.3 Cooperation between Canada and the EU in matters of financial governance has instead taken place in international organizations and forums such as the G7, the G20, the International Monetary Fund, the Bank for International Settlements and its Basel committee on banking supervision, and the Financial Stability Forum (now the Financial Stability Board), whose decision-making has traditionally been heavily influenced by the United States.4Today, however, the United States no longer dominates international finance. After a rise in US financial power in the 1990s, the last decade has seen a number of events undermine America's influence. The first was the burst of the dot-com bubble in 2000. The exponential rise of the Nasdaq stock exchange and the massive entry of foreign capital that accompanied the US information technology boom in the second half of the 1990s reinforced the United States' position as the leader of the globalization game. The dot-com bubble crash put a dent in US leadership, however, because the crash was blamed in part on inadequate regulation and supervision of the brokerage firms that promoted the shares of dot-com companies to the public. The second hit was the result of major accounting scandals at Enron and WorldCom in 2001 and 2002, which resulted in their bankruptcy, as well as that of Arthur Andersen - Enron's auditor and one of the world's top-five accounting firms at the time. In this case, it was US accounting standards and corporate governance practices that were blamed for these failures. The third (and final?) nail in the coffin came with the burst ofthe US subprime mortgage bubble in 2007, resulting in a financial crisis that went global and in turn caused the world economy to suffer the so-called great recession.5 In this last case, blame was put on insufficient regulation and supervision ofthe US financial sector. As a result of these failures, the United States' reputation as a beacon of financial stability has been severely dented, which has greatly undermined its ability to influence the governance of global financial markets.Given the dominant role that the United States has played in the domain of international finance in the last 60 years, one should not be surprised that Canada and the EU have focused their international financial governance attention on the US rather than on each other. But now US financial hegemony appears to be waning, and at the same time, Canada's financial profile has reached some kind of apex: its banks did not experience a crisis, while the EU is facing serious economic challenges of its own. What does this situation mean for the economic relationship between Canada and the EU and the challenges that they face in matters of global financial governance? More specifically, how have Canada and Europe responded to the rise and fall of American financial hegemony? Have their responses been similar or different? To what extent have their responses involved collaborating with each other?To answer these questions, the remainder of this article is divided into three parts. First, it is argued that, based on theoretical considerations, Canada would have been expected to follow the US lead in matters of financial governance, while the EU would have been expected to oppose US hegemony. …

Enhance Academic Study in Vocational Education in China

The increase in international trade and the information technology boom led us to begin to face the previously unthinkable of academic shortage towards vocational education. The main objective of this paper is to present the problem and find ways to solve it. The main finding included lack of investment from society and high degree involvement of government, the curricula is without of academic flexibility, students are sorted into different school types largely on the basis of their entering exam score, shortage of high-quality teachers and instructors. Thus this paper puts four ways to tackle the problem: decrease the involvement of government; setting hybrid curricula and providing technical research project; providing attractive option that the possibility to study further in university for vocational school graduates; emphasizing general and academic knowledge over industry and vocational skills by aligning academic institutions and firms.

EXAMINING THE OBSTACLES TO BROADENING PARTICIPATION IN COMPUTING: EVIDENCE FROM A SURVEY OF PROFESSIONAL WORKERS

I. INTRODUCTION Insuring that the nation has a sufficient number of trained information technology (IT) professionals and that the composition of this group reflects a diversity of backgrounds, especially in terms of race and gender, has been widely recognized as important issue (Gilbert, 2006). Despite recent growth in the off shoring of some IT work, employment growth has remained strong, yet enrollment in computer science programs has declined, and the number of women and underrepresented minorities in the IT workforce has remained frustratingly low. Encouraging more women and minorities to choose IT careers would help raise both overall numbers in the field and the diversity of the resulting workforce. Expanding the domestic labor supply that is available to U.S. employers is a major reason for encouraging female entry into IT that has been identified in the literature. Bartol and Aspray (2006) found that employers who struggled to find enough qualified IT workers at the height of the IT boom around 1999 could have solved these labor shortage problems had they done a better job of including women and minorities in the IT workforce. Rather than adopting strategies that moved women toward parity in IT, U.S. industry resorted to importing temporary foreign workers to fill the open positions. The current politically controversial trend of offshoring technical jobs is also primarily being driven by efforts to gain access to a labor force that would allow firms to hire adequate numbers of qualified workers. As Bartol and Aspray (2006, p. 408) argued, however, an increase in the domestic IT labor pool by representative participation by women and minorities would go a long way toward meeting that end. In addition to the labor supply issue, diversity in the IT workforce is important since a more gender-balanced workforce is more likely to understand the concerns of increasingly diverse customer base. As Wulf (1999) argued, ... those differences in experience are the 'gene pool' from which creativity springs. In the past few years, a number of pilot efforts have been undertaken to address a variety of perceived obstacles that are believed to discourage these underrepresented groups. These policy initiatives have focused on a variety of avenues through which the problem of under representation might be addressed including labor and workforce issues, immigration policy, and research funding initiatives. Policy solutions designed to increase the diversity of the IT workforce must, however, be informed by a clear understanding of the underlying reasons for the limited numbers of women and minorities in IT careers. With this in mind, we report here a number of results derived from a recently completed study of current IT professionals that help to explain the reasons for the relatively small number of women in IT occupations. Our data suggest two important conclusions. First, our evidence leads us to reject the argument that the demanding nature of IT careers is the primary barrier for increasing the number of women. Weinberger's (2004) survey of college women, for example, found that 30%--40% of the women surveyed believed that IT careers would be incompatible with raising children because of demanding schedules. Our first conclusion suggests that this is not a sufficient explanation. Women do report that family responsibilities conflict with work more than men, but we find that women in IT report no greater conflict than in comparable careers that have much higher proportions of women workers. Thus, while work-family conflicts may discourage some women from pursuing demanding careers, they do not offer a mechanism to explain the relatively small numbers of women in IT careers. Our second conclusion is that the concept of occupational personality can help to account for the relative shortage of women in IT careers. These findings suggest several strategies for increasing gender diversity that we discuss in our conclusion. …