Current Article
Inside the Digital Dump

Page 1 of 11
May/June 2007
Technology drives the forces of globalization. But when we replace our computers and flat-screens with the newest in high-tech cool, what happens to the hardware we throw away? Welcome to the digital dumping ground, where the poor make a living off other people's spare parts.

Turnkey Production Networks are networks of highly specialized merchant suppliers that provide individual components to larger manufacturers, spreading the risk around and helping to change the longtime industry model of vertical consolidation.

After nearly a decade of subpar performance, US electronics firms experienced a resurgence in the early 1990's. How can we explain this resurgence? First, by looking to the decline of Japanese firms and increased competition within Asia, and second by looking to the US' firms increased reliance on international produciton networks to cut costs.

As Korean electronics firms began to meet increased competition from Japanese and other Asian firms, they successfully turned to offshoring their production networks to lower costs. This paper tracks the experience of Samsung, a major industrial conglomerate.

Selected online full-text computer books from O'Reilly and other IT publishers including Addison-Wesley, Cisco Press, New Riders, Peachpit, Prentice Hall, Prentice Hall Professional Technical Reference, Que, and Sams. All the books are fully searchable and fully navigable. Browse titles and subject areas to get to relevant chapters or perform keyword searches across multiple titles simultaneously.

Access Science is the online version of the comprehensive Mc-Graw Hill Encyclopedia of Science Technology. It is fully searchable and provides access to articles, illustrations, definitions and biographies of famous scientists. It is an excellent starting point for scientific research.

In addition to electrical and electronics engineering applications, this encyclopedia features important topics of interest to engineers, including: education; historical background of fields in electrical and electronics engineering; patents; technology and society; and computer and software engineering.