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Globalisation is a fairly broad term that describes the phenomena of the 'local' turning into the 'global', or the coming together of different aspects of the world into a single and identifiable state. While this may not be directly from the dictionary, globalisation is one of those words that has taken on a life of its own in recent times and has developed meaning beyond that of its own definition. While the term globalisation may have at first been strictly applied to the international financial marketplace and its deregulation, what it means for many today has as much to do with cultural and political realities as economic ones.
This global phenomena involves all processes of integration no matter what exactly they are referring to. Globalisation involves economies, cultures and political movements in all of the different parts of the world. There is nothing new about different countries and cultures becoming integrated and working together, what is new though is the speed that it is now taking place. This is due mainly to the technological changes and acceleration that have occurred and are continuing to occur in the developed world.
Broadcasting technology has become a worldwide force and channels like the BBC and CNN are now available in many places around the globe. The Internet has also had a large effect on the acceleration of globalisation and can potentially act as a common cultural denominator. Broadcasting and the Internet are still economically and culturally dependent on other issues however and are not ubiquotous everywhere. This is one of the major problems with globalisation, with anti-globalisation proponents often mentioning how the world can not be integrated effectively due to already existing power differentials between countries and cultures.
The reality of globalisation is such that its implications are both impossible to ignore and equally impossible to comprehend. Governments are unable to forecast and deal with the realities of globalisation because in reality and by definition its force lies beyond the scope of any local government body. International corporations have the ability to expand more than the government of any one country and so are forcing the entire global political landscape to reevaluate and redefine itself. For instance globalisation can be viewed in the context of large international corporations spreading their products and businesses throughout the world, especially in fast developing nations.
The net result being a wider distribution of wealth, greater product choices and an increase in the use of modern technology. Take for instance the micro cash advance loans being offered throughout the Indian sub continent. Or globalisation can equally be viewed as the a detrimental force which exploits the worlds poor to feed the greed of rich nations. An example being the infamous sweatshops used by some rapacious western companies to produce their goods.
There are many different aspects of globalisation that in turn have many different effects on the world. This is another reason why it is very hard to pin point exactly what globalisation is, because it means so many different things to people. Globalisation has effects on finance, industry, the environment and all of the many political and cultural ideas and institutions. It effects information flows, consumer trends and immigration flows between different parts of the world.
Globalisation has spread in a huge way since the end of the second world war and will continue to do so as technology and communication improve between nations. I suspect that it will get harder and harder to define with any degree of certainty as it continues to grow as a global force and manages to assimilate its own meaning as it does so. Globalisation is not only allowing the free movement of goods and services but to some extent it is providing a platform for people to work in new and exciting countries. Finding jobs overseas is not always as easy as it seems though so going straight to the biggest job resources in a particular country, such as the job centre plus, is the best option. While globalisation is opening up the job markets across the world there are still visa requirements standing in the way of truly free employee movement unless you are in a free trade area such as the EU. |
With the English language being so powerful and prevalent online it can sometimes be easy to forget that a lot of the world do not speak English. Internationalisation (sometimes shortened to I18N or I - eighteen letters -N) is a term used in computing to refer to the adaption of computer software into different languages and for different geographical regions. Rather than having to redevelop a software application for every different language and region that it enters into, the process of internationalisation means that a program is designed from the beginning with the ability to adapt to these differences without having to undergo any engineering changes.
Internationalisation is often grouped together with the process of localisation, which is the adaption of software to fit with specific local languages and cultures. Indeed these two terms are really the compliment of each other, with internationalisation being necessary first to enable localisation to take place. The specifics of this process can refer to many different ways of localisation enablement. The product must first be implemented with adaptation in mind, and then space must be allowed within user interfaces for the appropriate language or cultural translation to take place. This can be anything from the support of an international character code to the design of graphic elements with space for multiple languages to be input.
There are also processing considerations that have to be made as data space may need to be assigned to different languages uniquely, for example an English character may require a single byte character code and a Japanese character may need a multi-byte character code. Character sets or charsets are one of the most important and basic elements of applying internationalisation to an application. A charset is a character encoding scheme and it is important that language variants like those between English and Japanese are taken into consideration.
Many problems exist when it comes to designing a program with internationalisation in mind. One the biggest hurdles a developer may come across is that there are no precise standards for identifying certain international preferences among computer users. A locale is the term used to define a set of parameters as they relate to country, language and other variants. A geographical region and a language are the minimum data required for a locale to be defined, but exactly how this is implemented varies between computer platforms and applications. This makes it very hard to develop a truly global program that can be used in a variety of circumstances and platforms with ease.
Internationalisation is more complex that it may seem at first grasp, as not only language issues need to be taken into consideration. Number formats, dates and times including daylight savings and currency settings are also important factors for a sucessful translation to take place. As the digital revolution expands more and more into the developing world, these issues are becoming important from a commercial perspective. Huge new markets are opening up and it only makes sense that in order to support these markets with new products, new standards of internationalisation will have to be developed.
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You may be using a keyboard and a mouse right now to access your computer, but there are many other interface options and methodologies out there being worked on. Lots of people are doing research into the field of brain-computer interfaces that work by directly linking together an external device with a human or animal brain. A brain-computer interface (BCI) can theoretically work through either a one way or a two way process, but two way interfaces have not yet been successfully implemented. The one way interfaces that do exist may allow a computer to send signals to a brain, or alternatively they may be set up to receive commands from the brain and turn them into digital signals. These interfaces may be one way in the future that allow people from different cultural backgrounds to interface with computers on equal terms. The first research into this field began in the 1970's but wasn't used with humans in any practical sense until the mid 1990's. The interface implants that now exist are designed to restore a particular function of the human brain that is not working as it should. This restoration may include the facilities of hearing, sight or movement, however this scope could increase in the future. With recent discoveries made and no doubt future discoveries to be made soon, brain-computer interfaces could potentially be designed to improve our natural human functions as well as restoring them. This will certainly make for lots of interesting ethical discussions and dilemmas in the near future.
Research working with brain-computer interfaces in humans can be either invasive, semi-invasive or non invasive in nature. Invasive interfaces are implanted directly into the brain of a person and are generally used to repair damaged facilities of sight or to provide extra functionality to a paralysis patient. As well as these functions, brain-computer interface implants have also been used to allow someone to control an artificial robotic hand and even to move a computer cursor. Semi or partially-invasive interfaces are put inside the head but not within the actual brain of the patient. Non-invasive brain-computer interfaces record brain signals through a neuroimaging procedure. Electoencephalography (EEG) is the most well known non-invasive interface which has been used as everything from a way of giving limited hand movement back to quadriplegic patients to acting as an interface for people to express musical ideas. Indeed the future of brain-computer interfaces will not only lie with the helping of the sick and disabled, but will equally be used to provide all people with a powerful way of doing anything on a computer at all. One good example of this is the software product 'mindball' which allows a user to control the movement of a virtual ball by learning to manipulate the EEG content coming from their brains. This trains the user to be focused and relaxed and may even have some future uses in the fields of meditation and education. This way of training someone to use a computer is totally unspecific to culture as it works with very basic functions of brain control. Brain-computer interfaces are still in their infancy as research continues into both brain functioning and the ways to map it effectively to electronic data. Ethical considerations will no doubt have an impact on the future of this field, as will cultural considerations and questions regarding the way language is controlled in the brain. Today its main use is in helping those with disabilities to function more fully, and through this we will hopefully learn more about how to use our brain as an effective interface for the future. |
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