The mission of the Humanity Development Library is to make practical information from many sources available at the lowest possible cost to the user. Originally created as a set of CD-ROMs and now on the Web, the library provides a gateway to the publications of a whole host of international human development and educational organizations, from the Asian Cultural Centre for UNESCO (ACCU) to the...

The idea for the MIT Media Lab came out of work at the school's Architecture Machine group, and it formally opened the doors of its new building designed by I.M. Pei in 1985. In the Media Lab's first decade of operation, they worked on electronic music projects, holography, and cognition. Since then they have researched wireless communications, new forms of artistic expression, and so on....

The mission of the Humanity Development Library is to make practical information from many sources available at the lowest possible cost to the user. Originally created as a set of CD-ROMs and now on the Web, the library provides a gateway to the publications of a whole host of international human development and educational organizations, from the Asian Cultural Centre for UNESCO (ACCU) to the...

The idea of choice has been elevated to an ideal of nearly religious dimensions in the United States and other Western democracies. But is there a dark side to the ideology of choice? Renata Salecl, the Slovenian philosopher and social critic, thinks there is. In this talk, Salecl draws from fields as diverse as sociology and psychoanalysis to problematize the unexamined promotion of choice. In...

Electronic Commerce has been in existence for little more than three years, but due to its enormous capacity to affect "economic activities and social environments," it has already had a huge impact on retail, finance, and communications, representing 30 percent of GDP. This 156-page report from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development examines the past and potential impact that...