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8 - The Human Plague
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- By Stephen Emmott, University of Stirling
- Edited by Jonathan L. Heeney, University of Cambridge, Sven Friedemann, University of Bristol
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- Book:
- Plagues
- Published online:
- 24 March 2017
- Print publication:
- 09 February 2017, pp 184-195
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- Chapter
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Summary
It is now beyond reasonable doubt that we are the drivers of almost every global problem we face and that every one of these problems is set to grow, as we continue to grow., Can we say that humans constitute a ‘plague’. Well, it turns out that this is not too ridiculous a comparison to make. The term ‘plague’ is thought to originate from the Latin plāga (‘blow’), or what we would now call an ‘infection’ of a host by disease-causing agents. This includes the rapid multiplication of such organisms and their actions on the host, and the reaction of the host to these organisms and the toxins they produce. I argue the analogous case; that we humans are agents who, through our rapid multiplication and our actions, are now starting to have a deleterious impact on our host, our planet. As a consequence, there is now an emerging reaction of our host to us and our actions.
Just over 200 years ago, there were fewer than a billion humans living on Earth. When I was born in 1960, there were three billion. In 2015, the human population has more than doubled to over seven billion people, and the UN projections expect that there will be ten billion humans on earth sometime towards the end of this century. This is if, optimistically, fertility rates continue to decline as they have done over the last fifty years. It is worth mentioning that this fifty-year decline in fertility rate, which many are keen to point out as a counter-claim to the argument that we have a problem, is actually slowing. It is also worth highlighting that if the current fertility rate were to continue unchanged (which the United Nations defines as the ‘constant fertility variant’), the global population at the end of this century would not be ten billion people, but will be twenty-eight billion.
With this in mind, I should point out that the UN population statistics have been systematically revised upwards over the past decade. The ‘peak’ population under the ‘expected scenario’ in 2100 was under ten billion. It is now over 11 billion according to estimates at the time of writing (Figure 8.1).
6 - Managing portal services
- from Section 1 - Core themes
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- By Stephen Emmott, London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE)
- Edited by Andrew Cox
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Summary
Introduction
During the mid- to late-1990s, portals were public websites: the first page displayed when connecting to the internet. They were simple and the same for all users. Typically, they represented the front page of search engines or the default home page automatically set by ISPs (internet service providers) for their subscribers. Portals were in effect gateways to a subset of websites selected from the world wide web as a whole. In this sense, the metaphors of ‘portal’ or ‘gateway’ were apt and readily understood.
Today, portals are private websites: personalized interaction between individuals and organizations. They are complex and customized to the individual user. This complexity is evident in the myriad portal services that have been established using numerous portal systems. The quantity and variation is now such that portals can be classified into various types, as identified by Ovum in their taxonomy of portals: Specialized Portals, Public Web Portals, Enterprise Portals, Workspace Portals and Knowledge Portals (Winkler, 2005).
This maturation reflects a progression from serving audiences to serving individuals. In focusing upon the individual – the customer – the concept of a portal has developed from being a gateway through which information services located elsewhere are accessed, to being an environment within which information services are consumed, whether located elsewhere or not. In this way, the portal is recognized as a destination in its own right and no longer strictly a gateway through which other services are accessed. In effect, the terms portal and intranet have become largely synonymous in many cases.
For those managing a portal service, the focus needs to be on the word ‘service’ rather than ‘portal’. The aim of a portal service can be expressed as ‘meeting the information needs of customers in pursuit of the organization's objectives’. It follows that while a portal service is dependent upon the systems (i.e. technologies) that underpin it, it is the organization's stakeholders who are the manager's primary concern. Specifically, this concern should be focused at the intersection of the customers’, suppliers’ and organization's interests. This is where a portal service is differentiated from the systems underpinning it. To be effective, the manager needs to maintain a certain distance from each of the three interests and, in particular, the underlying systems.