My good friend Moni had a great idea for celebrating her 25th birthday: she rented a photo shooting studio and had her friends and family come to compose a time capsule of her social environment of a quarter century.

The resulting 1061 photos (the raw photos that is, with no selection or editing done yet) are now online in my gallery (direct link: http://gallery.p-mi.com/thumbnails.php?album=47). However, due to restrictions by my hosting provider, only small, compressed versions of the photos are available in the gallery. I tried to upload them in full size, but that used up 100% of the server’s cpu time for too long — my provider didn’t really like that ;). So after some discussions I put them online at a smaller size…

I will come up with a solution to download full-size pictures and post a link in a separate blog entry. Stay tuned…

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New York City is undoubtedly one of the major global cities in today’s world, if not the epicentre of Western civilisation. Being at the forefront of the information society, information and communications technology (ICT) and infrastructure have come to be the very lifelines by which New York City operates. They are as vital to its economy and society as its subways, highways, bridges, harbours, and airports. It is therefore of interest to analyse and understand the current status of information and communications technology in New York City, as well as its economic and social implications for the present and the future. Due to the limited scope of this text, the focus will be on the five boroughs that make up New York City – the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, and Staten Island.

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The introduction of new technologies has always been a critical element in the evolution of cities and society as a whole. Just as the steam engine, the car, electricity, the telephone, or the Fordist mass production system have effectively created their own epochs of economic and social development, so today’s advanced information and communications technologies have propelled Western civilisation (and, increasingly, the entire world) into the information age. While rural areas are not exempt from this development, it is projected that by 2007 more than half of the world’s population will live in an urban environment, and it is in those urban environments that new technologies first gain their foothold. Any new technology of a certain scale also brings with it visions both utopian and dystopian of its potential to change the world. This essay therefore focuses on the influence – economic, social, political, and spacial – information and telecommunications technologies have actually had on cities in the U.S., as well as discussing some future implications.

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It is my belief that Socrates’ notion that “the unexamined life is not worth living” is true not only of our private lives, but to the same extent of our behaviour in a business environment. This text, therefore, is an attempt to impart the theories of project management and communication within organisations discussed in the course of the Everybody Manages lectures to three distinct yet in their qualities very much connected experiences of my past.

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The relationship between a father and his sons is a recurring theme in many of Arthur Miller’s plays, including The Man Who Had All the Luck, All My Sons, Death of a Salesman, and The Price. Being deeply influenced by Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov and the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, as well as perceiving his own father to be a failure during and after the Depression, Miller developed an inherent interest for and fascination with this theme. Even though it played only a subordinate role in Miller’s first Broadway production, The Man Who Had All the Luck, it is during the writing of this early play that Miller began to see the full potential of it:

“in writing of the father-son relationship and of the son’s search for his relatedness there was a fullness of feeling I had never known before; a crescendo was struck with a force I could almost touch.”

It is his subsequent “penetrating insight into familial relationships” that make both All My Sons and Death of a Salesman such arresting portraits of the father-son relationship. However, Miller never puts these relationships at the forefront of his plays, but uses them to great effect to enforce and enhance the central plot and theme. Following is an analysis the father-son relationships in All My Sons and Death of a Salesman and how Miller uses them in the context of the plays.

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