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- All Subjects: Technology
- Creators: Dean, W.P. Carey School of Business
- Resource Type: Text
Keywords: children, technology, media, apps, families
The nineteenth-century invention of smallpox vaccination in Great Britain has been well studied for its significance in the history of medicine as well as the ways in which it exposes Victorian anxieties regarding British nationalism, rural and urban class struggles, the behaviors of women, and animal contamination. Yet inoculation against smallpox by variolation, vaccination’s predecessor and a well-established Chinese medical technique that was spread from east to west to Great Britain, remains largely understudied in modern scholarly literature. In the early 1700s, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, credited with bringing smallpox variolation to Great Britain, wrote first about the practice in the Turkish city of Adrianople and describes variolation as a “useful invention,” yet laments that, unlike the Turkish women who variolate only those in their “small neighborhoods,” British doctors would be able to “destroy this [disease] swiftly” worldwide should they adopt variolation. Examined through the lens of Edward Said’s Orientalism, techno-Orientalism, and medical Orientalism and contextualized by a comparison to British attitudes toward nineteenth century vaccination, eighteenth century smallpox variolation’s introduction to Britain from the non-British “Orient” represents an instance of reversed Orientalism, in which a technologically deficient British “Occident” must “Orientalize” itself to import the superior medical technology of variolation into Britain. In a scramble to retain technological superiority over the Chinese Orient, Britain manufactures a sense of total difference between an imagined British version of variolation and a real, non-British version of variolation. This imagination of total difference is maintained through characterizations of the non-British variolation as ancient, unsafe, and practiced by illegitimate practitioners, while the imagined British variolation is characterized as safe, heroic, and practiced by legitimate British medical doctors. The Occident’s instance of medical technological inferiority brought about by the importation of variolation from the Orient, which I propose represents an eighteenth-century instance of what I call medical techno-Orientalism, represents an expression of British anxiety over a medical technologically superior Orient—anxieties which express themselves as retaliatory attacks on the Orient and variolation as it is practiced in the Orient—and as an expression of British desire to maintain medical technological superiority over the Orient.
Our team was tasked with creating a business model for a piece of technology developed by NASA. We then had to launch said business and find a way to measure its traction in a specific niche market.
Since its introduction, the use of technology has been rapidly expanding and has been integrated into almost every aspect of daily life. Alongside this growth, there has been an increasingly urgent movement for sustainability and to fight climate change. Because technology is so prevalent in society today, it is important to understand how the use of technology relates to sustainability and climate change. While technology has been beneficial to society, it requires vast amounts of energy to power, which causes significant environmental degradation. On the other hand, technology also has provided useful in reducing carbon emissions and mitigating the effects of climate change. This can be seen in areas such as efficient transportation and logistics systems and smart cities. Thus, technology has the potential to positively impact the environment, but its negative effects must also be reduced. Technology companies also play a large role in the reduction of carbon emissions, as they provide much of the services and technology that we use today. Companies such as Google, Amazon, and Microsoft have all made commitments to sustainability, and it is important that they are held accountable to these commitments. Additionally, as new technologies emerge, their environmental impact must also be calculated. The findings of this thesis show that the main negative impacts of technology come from its energy use and its life cycle, while the main positive impacts come from its indirect effect on production processes, systems, and industries. In the long-term, these indirect positive effects are expected to increase, but the energy demands of technology will also increase. Therefore, managing the energy demands of technology while also allowing for increased efficiency and reductions in carbon emissions is the main challenge that companies face regarding sustainability.
The challenges that companies face when digitally transforming the supply chain can often be self-inflicted. This paper will address those challenges and provide a structured approach to a successful transformation. It will also share insight from interviews conducted with the CIO and directors of three different companies as well various studies from outside sources. The purpose is to urge business leaders to re-evaluate the way they approach digital transformation in the supply chain to close information gaps and provide value to the whole organization.
Keywords. Supply Chain Management, Social Responsibility, Sustainability, Economics, Supply Management, Blockchain, Intelligent Technology
Paper Type. Conceptual Paper