Contextualizing the ideas of technology in Korea Questions of technology and early modern experiences

Pyungho Kim*

School of Communications, Dankook University, Kyunggi Yongin Suji Jukjon 126, 448-701 Seoul, Republic of Korea

In the early to mid-2000s, Korea was touted as a strong IT (information technology) nation. But its IT success story has faded into the background less than half a decade’s time. Critiques hold among others the problem of hardware-oriented, commercialistic, and consumerist nature of IT environment including the centralized, statist IT governance responsible for hindering an IT take-off in Korea. This problematic environment of IT is fundamentally a material consequence of particular ideas of technology Korean society maintainsdideas of hardwarism, commercialism, and consumerism. Then the important question is the origin of these ideas. A large body of research argues the national modernization drive of the 1960s as an embryonic momentum in which hardware-centric, commercially oriented, and consumerist ideas of technology were disseminated in earnest.

Persuasive as this argument is, the question still remains concerning how such perceptions about technology were embraced by the general populace at that moment with outright enthusiasm. This study argues that they were already gestated during the nation’s initial contact with modernity mostly by way of Japan in the context of the imperialistic world order of the late 19th century. And embedded as a paradigmatic structure, these ideas have been critical in the shaping of the trajectory of technology development and broadly a basic framework of modernization in Korea.

(2)

Risk-averse restructuring of freight railways in China

Russell Pittman

Economic Analysis Group, Antitrust Division, U.S. Department of Justice, LSB 9446, WA 20530, USA

New Economic School, Moscow, Russia

The Chinese freight railways system has been under capacity pressure and apparently acting as a constraint on continued economic growth for several years now. Earlier government consideration of serious structural reforms has given way to an emphasis on a dramatic expansion of the track network, most conspicuously by construction of high-speed passenger lines to free capacity for freight trains. A good deal of uncertainty remains as to both whether there will be sufficient track capacity to handle the increased volumes of coal and containers necessary for continued growth, and whether the desired private investment funds will be forthcoming so long as the system remains under tight government control.

(3)

An equational logic based approach to the security problem against inference attacks on object-oriented databases

Yasunori Ishihara, Toshiyuki Morita, Hiroyuki Seki, Minoru Ito

Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, Osaka University, 1-5, Yamadaoka, Suita, Osaka 565-0871, Japan

Graduate School of Information Science, Nara Institute of Science and Technology, 8916-5, Takayama, Ikoma, Nara 630-0192, Japan

A query is said to be secure against inference attacks by a user if there exists no database instance for which the user can infer the result of the query, using only authorized queries to the user. In this paper, first, the security problem against inference attacks on object-oriented databases is formalized. The definition of inference attacks is based on equational logic. Secondly, the security problem is shown to be undecidable, and a decidable sufficient condition for a given query to be secure under a given schema is proposed. The idea of the sufficient condition is to over-estimate inference attacks using over-estimated results of static

type inference. The third contribution is to propose subclasses of schemas and queries for which the security problem becomes decidable. Lastly, the decidability of the security problem is shown to be incomparable with the static type inferability, although the tightness of the over-estimation of the inference attacks is affected in a large degree by that of the static type inference.

Exercise 5.Write abstracts to the texts given in additional files.