Scholars of culture, humanities and social sciences have increasingly come to an appreciation of the importance of the legal domain in social life, while critically engaged socio-legal scholars around the world have taken up the task of understanding "Law's Empire" in all of its cultural, political, and economic dimensions. The questions arising from these intersections, and addressing imperialisms past and present forms the subject matter of a special symposium issue of Social Identities under the editorship of Griffith University's Rob McQueen, and UBC's Wes Pue and with contributions from McQueen, Ian Duncanson, Renisa Mawani, David Williams, Emma Cunliffe, Chidi Oguamanam, W. Wesley Pue, Fatou Camara, and Dianne Kirkby. This paper introduces the volume, forthcoming in late 2007. The central problematique of this issue has previously been explored through the 2005 Law's Empire conference, an informal but vibrant postcolonial legal studies network.

Law's Empire

A system of distributing video and/or audio information employs digital signal processing to achieve high rates of data compression. The compressed and encoded audio and/or video information is sent over standard telephone, cable or satellite broadcast channels to a receiver specified by a subscriber of the service, preferably in less than real time, for later playback and optional recording on standard audio and/or video tape.

Audio and video transmission and receiving system

This article explores the tension between standardization and flexibility in information infrastructure (II). Just like other large technical systems, the geographically dispersed yet highly interconnected II becomes increasingly resistant to change. Still, II design must anticipate and prepare for changes, even substantial ones, if infrastructure is to survive. An II contains a huge number of components that alternate between standardization and change throughout their lifetimes. These components are interdependent: when one is changed, others have to remain stable, and vice versa. The article examines theoretical concepts for frammg these aspects of an II. The empirical underpinning of the article is a study of two existing embryonic manifestations of II.

Developing Information Infrastructure: The Tension Between Standardization and Flexibility:

Economic Theory and Operations Analysis.

In this contribution we investigate how results from the ongoing discussion about ‘eInfrastructures’ can be used to improve the design of IT infrastructures in organizations. We first establish a perspective on organizational IT as ‘work infrastructure’ that focuses on the infrastructural nature of organizational Information Systems and describe challenges for designing within and for this type of infrastructure. Then we elaborate on possible use of concepts from the e-infrastructure discussion, in particular on the concept of ‘infrastructuring’ as it was developed by Star and Ruhleder (1996) and Star and Bowker (2002). Using their ‘salient characteristics of infrastructure’ we describe the methodological approach of ‘Infrastructuring’ to develop methodological and tool support for all stakeholders’ activities that contribute to the successful establishment of an information system usage (equivalent to a work infrastructure improvement). We illustrated our ideas by drawing on a case in which new work infrastructures were introduced into an organizational context and by mapping out existing and possible tool support for ‘infrastructuring’.

Infrastructuring: Toward an Integrated Perspective on the Design and Use of Information Technology*

Access policy has evolved over the past ten years in an environment pressured by competitive carriers and now with innovative technologies. A third dimension driven by new and innovative services will also effect the change in access. This paper reviews the issues of access and uses specific case studies to demonstrate the effects that access can have on the development of new and innovative telecommunications infrastructures. The primary focus is on the developments in Personal Communications Services, PCS, a new wireless service offering in the 1.8 to 2.0 GHz bands. The paper develops a set of detailed Microeconomic models for the new infrastructure and shows that access can have a dominant role to play on its rapid acceptance. The paper demonstrates that the infrastructure has limited scale and scope in its economies and that access fees and policy present potential bottlenecks to competing service providers. The paper concludes with a set of policy options that are a natural result of the detailed economic analysis of the new service.

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Alternative Networking Architectures Pricing, Policy and Competition

This paper examines the system design considerations of metropolitan area networks utilizing cable television networks for the delivery of a variety of services to residential customers. Specifically, this paper focuses on the technology, marketplace, and regulatory aspects of this new and expanding market.

Cable-Based Metro Area Networks

The economic viability of wireless local loop and its impact on universal service

Multimedia communications technology in diagnostic imaging.

Interference in the form of multipath or uncooperative targets can seriously degrade the angle-of-arrival estimation accuracy of mutiplebeam processors. In this paper, the generalized likelihood ratio test is used to derive a test to detect the presence of interference for multiple beam processors. The detector performance is then analyzed in detail with respect to its dependence on signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), signal-to-interference ration (SIR), and on the relative phase between the target and interfering signals. It is shown that good detection performance can be obtained unless the phase difference between the target and interference signals is either in or out of phase.

Terrence P. McGarty

Papers

Alternative Networking Architectures Pricing, Policy and Competition

Cable-Based Metro Area Networks

The economic viability of wireless local loop and its impact on universal service

Multimedia communications technology in diagnostic imaging.

Maximum-Likelihood Detection of Unresolved Radar Targets and Multipath