Should life-support be considered futile if the patient is permanently unconscious or too sick to leave the intensive care setting. This talk will explore the medical and ethical aspects of medical futility. This presentation explores the application if GITs in natural resource management planning. These technologies participate in a process that turns landscapes and their inhabitants into calculable map objects, or facts. The factual landscapes are also a performance of objectivity that suggest that humans can understand and control the natural world to produce an endless supply of these social values.
GITs thus participate in the process of managing the social world through the natural one.
I will present a case study from land management practices in British Colombia. This perspective helps us see how pre-computer models of technology use in insurance operations structured the choice and use of computers by insurance firms in the early computer era. This conservative influence is often underestimated, especially in the case of technologies popularly seen as new and innovative. It helps us understand, for example, how IBM made the transition from being the most successful vendor of pre-computer tabulating technology to being the most successful vendor of computers in the 1950s. While structuration leads us to expect reinforcement of existing patterns most of the time, it also helps us interpret the exceptions to existing patterns that opened the way to new and innovative uses of computer technology in insurance.