What is Technology?
Technology is not just about computers and latest gadgets.
Technology is the practical application of science to improve human life.
Technology is important because we depend on so many assets; basic tools, irrigation, medical advancements, and that is to say nothing of the convenience of modern-day.
Technology is the development of new skills, approaches and techniques which make something easier to do in a more accurate and efficient way.
What is Productivity?
Productivity = Value / Time
(productivity equals value divided by time)
By this definition there are two primary ways of increasing productivity:
1) Increase the value created
2) Decrease the time required to create that value
You can complicate this definition by including other factors like energy and resources, but I prefer the simplicity of time because in most cases factors like energy and resources are reducible to time anyway. Time also makes it very easy to compare different levels of productivity, such as output per hour or per day.
– There are four things which contribute to productivity:
o Impact –
▪ What extent is the value provided?
▪ Who receives the value? Yourself, your boss, your co-workers, your customers, your team, certain investors, your community, your country, all conscious beings, etc?
▪ What degree of value is ultimately received by each person or group? Are you providing value to one person, 10 people, 100 people, 1000 people, millions of people, the whole planet?
The Essay on Free Time Leisure People Weekend
Review of Waiting for the Weekend In the opening chapter of Waiting for the Weekend, Witold Rybczynski analyzes free time. He explains the notion of five and two, and how the weekend is the most coveted time of the week. He explains how the weekend is more of a break from the regular week than free time. The five and two structure has affected leisure in the sense that we have a designated time to ...
▪ How much do you feel the value you provide ripples outward beyond those you provide it to directly?
▪ How quickly do those ripples dissipate?
▪ What’s your sense of the basic level of impact of your value?
▪ Is it limited or expansive?
Greater leverage means greater potential impact
o Endurance –
▪ How long does the value you create endure?
▪ Is it quickly consumed and forgotten?
The Starry Night by Vincent Van Gogh is still providing value 122 years after its creation. But other works of art do not provide any enduring value beyond the lifetime of the artist. They are quickly abandoned and eventually replaced. This is one of the most recognized paintings nowadays. Van Gogh’s Starry Night is a classic painting that invokes emotions from the serenity of the church steeple to the wild abandon of colour used for the late night sky.
o Essence –
▪ What is the essence of the value you produce?
▪ Do you help people survive? Entertain them? Enlighten them? H
▪ How much do others value what you produce?
▪ What price would they be willing to pay for it?
▪ Do they consider your value essential, optional, or undesirable?
▪ How unique is your value?
▪ Are you the only one who can provide it, or are there plenty of equivalent choices?
o Volume –
▪ What is the volume of value you create?
▪ How much of it are you putting out in a given period of time?
▪ What is the quantity in which you produce that value?
For example, Picasso was a prolific artist who created hundreds of different works over his lifetime. Other artists had a far lower volume of output.
So now we have this little formula:
Value = Impact x Endurance x Essence x Volume
Productivity = Impact x Endurance x Essence x Volume / Time
The Essay on Telecommunications Technology Can Provide A Firm With A Competitive Advantage
Describe in detail the ways that telecommunications technology can provide a firm with a competitive advantage. A competitive advantage can be achieved by enhancing the firms ability to deal with customers, suppliers, substitute products and services, and new entrance into its market. A firm may find it difficult to keep informed of all changes taking place within its industry, but with the proper ...
Research on the Productivity Effects of Information Technology: (this has been taken from a document that I believe every one of you have read while doing your research: http://ebusiness.mit.edu/erik/itp.html ).
This document is self explanatory and it shows the growth in productivity in the US markets through the Integration of Technology.
“Productivity is the fundamental measure of a technology’s contribution. While major success stories exist, so do equally impressive failures. (See, for example [Kemerer and Sosa, 1991; Schneider, 1987].) The lack of accurate quantitative measures for the output and value created by information technology has made the MIS manager’s job of evaluating investments particularly difficult. Academics have had similar problems assessing the contributions of this critical new technology, and sometimes this has been interpreted as a negative signal of its value.
In the 1980s and early 1990s, disappointment in information technology was chronicled in articles disclosing broad negative correlations with economy-wide productivity and information worker productivity. Several econometric estimates also indicated low IT capital productivity in a variety of manufacturing and service industries. More recently, researchers began to find positive relationships between IT investment and various measures of economic performance. The principal empirical research studies of IT and productivity are listed in table 1.”
Table 1: Principal Empirical Studies of IT and Productivity
| |Cross-sector |Manufacturing |Services |
|Aggregate Level Studies|Jonscher [1983], |Morrison & Berndt [1991] |Brand & Duke[1982] |
| |Jonscher [1994] | | |
|(Economy-wide and |Baily [1986b], Baily & Chakrabarti|Berndt et al. [1992] |Baily [1986a] |
|Industry- level) |[1988], |Berndt & Morrison [1995] | |
The Research paper on Technology Addiction In Teens
Many people warn of the possible harmful effects of using technology in the classroom. Will children lose their ability to relate to other human beings? Will they become dependent on technology to learn? All of them have given humanity unbounded access to information in which can be turned into knowledge. The impact of technology is given the vital role of technology in today’s world. This ...
| |Baily & Gordon [1988] | | |
| |Roach [1987], Roach [1988], Roach |Siegel & Griliches [1992] |Roach [1987], Roach [1989a], Roach |
| |[1989b] | |[1991] |
| |Brooke [1992] |Siegel [1994] | |
| |Lau & Tokutsu [1992] | | |
| |Oliner & Sichel [1994] | | |
| |Jorgenson & Stiroh [1995] | | |
| |Brynjolfsson [1995] | | |
|Micro-Level |Osterman [1986] |Loveman [1994] |Cron & Sobol [1983] |
|Studies |Dos Santos [1993] |Weill [1988, 1992] |Pulley & Braunstein [1984] |
| |Krueger [1993] |Dudley & Lasserre [1989] |Bender [1986] |
|(Firms and Workers) |Brynjolfsson & Hitt [1994] |Barua, Kriebel & Mukhopadhyay |Bresnahan [1986] |
| | |[1991] | |
| |Hitt & Brynjolfsson [1994] |Brynjolfsson & Hitt [1993] |Franke [1987] |
| | |Brynjolfsson & Hitt [1995] | |
| |Lichtenberg [1995] | |Strassmann [1985] |
The Essay on Nano Technology 2
18 seems to be the magic number in today's manufacturing process. Intel and AMD both boast their upgraded production, and note that it will lead to ever increasing speeds and capabilities. Quietly, however, there is a growing consensus among the scientific community that silicon based-chips are on their way out. Tiny, molecular computers are becoming more and more feasible, and may do to silicon ...
| | | |Strassmann [1990] |
| | | |Harris & Katz [1991] |
| | | |Parsons et al. [1990] |
| | | |Diewert & Smith [1994] |
Technology is the cause for nearly all improvements in productivity. If used correctly technology can help you be more productive and get a lot more done. The problem is the learning curve with some of the technology you spend more time trying to figure it out than you do making good use of it. There is plenty of research about that, and there is no debate about that among economists. It is fair to say that the entire role of technology in society is to improve economic productivity. If you work in a technology field, then broadly speaking your job is to improve society’s economic productivity.
People who think of office distractions and tech support and who then doubt that tech makes us more productive are entirely missing the very obvious big picture. Technology is a broad concept that deals with a species’ usage and knowledge of tools and crafts, and how it affects a species’ ability to control and adapt to its environment. In human society, it is a consequence of science and engineering, although several technological advances predate the two concepts. New technologies — and you can define that as everything from the wheel in its day, to the plow and other agricultural technologies, to modern transportation and the internet and cell phones — these things make possible enormous increases in measurable productivity. I need only remind you that 200 years ago the country needed nearly 100% of the labor force to be farmers for us just to grow enough food to live on. Nowadays, only 2% or so of us need to be farmers, and we all eat too much. The other 98% provide goods and services no one dreamed of and satisfy needs of a higher order than existed 200 years ago. That is the essence of “economic productivity” — taking the resources available to us and producing exponentially greater value from it.
The Essay on How Does Technology Foster Economic Growth
How Does Technology Foster Economic Growth in a Free Enterprise System? Technology is an important part in economical growth. Technology aids in the ease of work and production. It makes our work load a whole lot easier. If it were not for technology, it might take us three times as long to do something that we could do in a third of the time. For instance, computers are probably the first item ...
Much of the labor force today is engaged in providing things of value that would simply not be possible to provide without recent technologies like the Internet, IT, etc. Those are things people 30 years ago did not have at all.
Small Example:
Technology changes both the amount of labor needed to produce certain products, but also the nature of the skills necessary for the labor that is still an input to that production. It was once very common for a company that manufactured things to have machinists in their labor force who used tools to make parts out of metal on site at the manufacturing plant. It is becoming much more common for plants to have CNC machines that actually perform the machining work by using computer programs, rather than the skilled hands of a machinist operating tools. The efficiencies were dramatic. One example is a part that once took 8 hours of machinist time could be made in 15 minutes on a CNC machine.
This revolution caused the industries that needed a lot of machining work to invest in computers, CNC machines, and a few skilled operators of those machines instead of the many more skilled machinists it used to require. This reduced demand for machinists who were unable to learn the techniques required to operate the CNC machines, but increased demand for those that could.
Reading Material:
http://www.cat.com/cda/files/938977/7/TechIntegration_Eng.pdf
http://ebusiness.mit.edu/erik/itp.html
When is economic growth good for the poor?
http://www.alternet.org/story/148975/higher_wages%2C_profit_sharing_and_greater_flexibility_benefit_all_employ
ees_–_and_the_company_bottom_line_too
http://www.portfolio.com/business-news/2010/05/19/harvard-publishes-study-that-shows-treating-workers-well-boosts-bottom-line
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structural_unemployment
The Essay on Heracles And His Labors
Heracles and His Labors The Metropolitan Museum of Art presents us a bronze statue of Heracles. It is dated last quarter of the 6th century B.C. The statue is made of bronze; it is 5 1/16 in. (12.80 cm) in height. Artists and sculptors traditionally present Heracles as a child killing a snake, a young man who takes rest after a heroic deed, a young man who makes a heroic deed, or a strong man with ...
http://ja-jp.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=64668829737
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/403/nummi
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Toyota_Way
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/10/the-invisible-hand-is-risk-aversion.html
Kind Regards
Jennifer