Libros de Biografías y estudios de científicos, página 6 de 25

In this lively and entertaining book Donald R Prothero explores the astonishing connections between climate and life through the ages telling the remarkable stories of the scientists who made cruc

Who benefits from smart technology Whose interests are served when we trade our personal data for convenience and connectivity Smart technology is everywhere smart umbrellas that light up when rain is in the forecast smart cars that relieve drivers of the drudgery of driving smart toothbrushes that send your dental hygiene details to the cloud Nothing is safe from smartification In Too Smart Jathan Sadowski looks at the proliferation of smart stuff in our lives and asks whether the tradeoff exchanging our personal data for convenience and connectivity is worth it Who benefits from smart technology Sadowski explains how data once the purview of researchers and policy wonks has become a form of capital Smart technology he argues is driven by the dual imperatives of digital capitalism extracting data from and expanding control over everything and everybody He looks at three domains colonized by smart technologies collection and control systems the smart self the smart home and the smart city The smart self involves more than self tracking of steps walked and calories burned it raises questions about what others do with our data and how they direct our behavior whether or not we want them to The smart home collects data about our habits that offe

Many of the revolutionary effects of science and technology are obvious enough Bertrand Russell saw in the 1950s that there are also many negative aspects of scientific innovation Insightful and controversial in equal measure Russell argues that science offers the world greater well being than it has ever known on the condition that prosperity is dispersed power is diffused by means of a single world government birth rates do not become too high and war is abolished Russell acknowledges that is a tall order but remains essentially optimistic He imagines mankind in a race between human skill as to means and human folly as to ends but believes human society will ultimately choose the path of reason This Routledge Classics edition includes a new Preface by Tim Sluckin

An extraordinarily brave and moving memoir from one of the world s most famous whistle blowers activists and trans women In 2013 Chelsea Manning was sentenced to thirty five years in military prison for the largest leak of classified documents in history The next day Chelsea declared her gender identity as a woman and began to transition In this radically candid memoir Chelsea recounts how her challenging youth led her to join the US Army She writes of the fierce pride she took in her work the risks of the military s queer underground and the wider culture of silence and unaccountability She describes fifty nine days locked in an iron cage after her fateful decision and the community of solidarity she later discovered in prison Above all we see the phenomenal courage and resilience it took to survive and become a global advocate for transparency A terrific read full of unexpected turns and details that counter many of the assumptions made about Manning GUARDIAN Brilliantly told THE TIMES Searing uplifting redemptive NEW YORK TIMES A full and expansive account of Manning s life one which is often harrowing but funny and poignant too DAZED

Why are we more nostalgic in the digital age than ever before

Advances in technology often rely on a world of photons as the basic units of light Increasingly one reads of photons as essential to enterprises in Photonics and Quantum Technology with career and investment opportunities Notions of photons have evolved from the energy packet crowds of Planck and Einstein the later field modes of Dirac the seeming conflict of wave and particle photons to the ubiquitous laser photons of today Readers who take interest in contemporary technology will benefit from learning what photons are now considered to be and how our views of photons have changed in learning about the various operational definitions that have been used for photons and their association with a variety of quantum state manipulations that include Quantum Information astronomical sources and crowds of photons the boxed fields of Cavity Quantum Electrodynamics and single photons on demand the photons of Feynman and Glauber and the photon constituents of the Standard Model of Particle Physics The narrative points to contemporary photons as causers of change to atoms as carriers of messages and as subject to controllable creation and alteration a considerable diversity of photons not just one kind Our Changing Views of Photons A Tutorial Memoir pres

Ray Kurzweil one of the world s leading AI researchers innovators and futurists offers a provocative exploration of the most important project in human machine civilisation reverse engineering the brain to understand precisely how it works and using that knowledge to create even more intelligent machines

A leading philosopher seeks to recover common sense as a meeting place to reconcile science and philosophy With her previous books on Alfred North Whitehead Isabelle Stengers not only secured a reputation as one of the premier philosophers of our times but also inspired a rethinking of critical theory political thought and radical philosophy across a range of disciplines Here Stengers unveils what might well be seen as her definitive reading of Whitehead Making Sense in Common will be greeted eagerly by the growing group of scholars who use Stengers s work on Whitehead as a model for how to think with conceptual precision through diverse domains of inquiry environmentalism and ecology animal studies media and technology studies the history and philosophy of science feminism and capitalism On the other hand the significance of this new book extends beyond Whitehead Instead it lies in Stengers s recovery of the idea of common sense as a meeting place a commons where opposed ideas of science and humanistic inquiry can engage one another and help to move society forward Her reconciliation of science and philosophy is especially urgent today when climate disaster looms all around us when the values of what we thought of as civilization and modernity ar

A critical examination of the figure of the neural network as it mediates neuroscientific and computational discourses and technical practices Neural Networks proposes to reconstruct situated practices social histories mediating techniques and ontological assumptions that inform the computational project of the same name If so called machine learning comprises a statistical approach to pattern extraction then neural networks can be defined as a biologically inspired model that relies on probabilistically weighted neuron like units to identify such patterns Far from signaling the ultimate convergence of human and machine intelligence however neural networks highlight the technologization of neurophysiology that characterizes virtually all strands of neuroscientific and AI research of the past century Taking this traffic as its starting point this volume explores how cognition came to be constructed as essentially computational in nature to the point of underwriting a technologized view of human biology psychology and sociability and how countermovements provide resources for thinking otherwise

A brilliantly original exploration of humanity s intimate relationship with technology from the emergence of our species to the emergence of AI and beyond

A compelling biography of Mark Weiser a pioneering innovator whose legacy looms over the tech industry s quest to connect everything and who hoped for something better When developers and critics trace the roots of today s Internet of Things our smart gadgets and smart cities they may single out the same creative source Mark Weiser 1952 99 the first chief technology officer at Xerox PARC and the so called father of ubiquitous computing But Weiser who died young at age 46 in 1999 would be heartbroken if he had lived to see the ways we use technology today As John Tinnell shows in this thought provoking narrative Weiser was an outlier in Silicon Valley A computer scientist whose first love was philosophy he relished debates about the machine s ultimate purpose Good technology Weiser argued should not mine our experiences for saleable data or demand our attention rather it should quietly boost our intuition as we move through the world Informed by deep archival research and interviews with Weiser s family and colleagues The Philosopher of Palo Alto chronicles Weiser s struggle to initiate a new era of computing Working in the shadows of the dot com boom Weiser and his collaborators made Xerox PARC headquarters the site of a grand experiment Throug

Why do we feel excited afraid and frustrated by algorithms The Feel of Algorithms brings relatable first person accounts of what it means to experience algorithms emotionally alongside interdisciplinary social science research to reveal how political and economic processes are felt in the everyday People s algorithm stories might fail to separate fact and misconception and circulate wishful erroneous or fearful views of digital technologies Yet rather than treating algorithmic folklore as evidence of ignorance this novel book explains why personal anecdotes are an important source of algorithmic knowledge Minna Ruckenstein argues that we get to know algorithms by feeling their actions and telling stories about them The Feel of Algorithms shows how taking everyday algorithmic emotions seriously balances the current discussion which has a tendency to draw conclusions based on celebratory or oppositional responses to imagined future effects An everyday focus zooms into experiences of pleasure fear and irritation highlighting how political aims and ethical tensions play out in visions practices and emotional responses This book shows that feelings aid in recognizing troubling practices and also calls for alternatives that are currently ignored or suppre

M Murphy examines the ways in which efforts at population control since World War II have tied reproduction to neoliberal capitalism showing how data collection practices have been used to quantify the value of a human life in terms of its ability to improve the nation state s gross domestic product

Our systems are failing Old models for education healthcare and government food production energy supply are creaking under the weight of modern challenges As the world s population heads towards 10 billion it s clear we need new approaches Futurologist Mark Stevenson sets out to find them across four continents From Brazilian favelas to high tech Boston from rural India to a shed inventor in England s home counties We Do Things Differently travels the world to find the advance guard re imagining our future At each stop he meets innovators who have already succeeded in challenging the status quo pioneering new ways to make our world more sustainable equitable and humane Populated by extraordinary characters We Do Things Differently paints an enthralling picture of what can be done to address the world s most pressing dilemmas offering a much needed dose of down to earth optimism It is a window on and a roadmap to a different and better future

WINNER OF THE 800 CEO READ BUSINESS BOOK OF THE YEAR 2015 In the vein of Susan Cain s QUIET and Malcolm Gladwell s DAVID AND GOLIATH HOW TO FLY A HORSE is a smart empowering book that dispels the myths around genius and creativity There is a myth about how something new comes to be that geniuses have dramatic moments of insight where great things and thoughts are born whole Symphonies are composed complete Science is accomplished with eureka shrieks Businesses are built by magic touch The myth is wrong Anyone can create Acclaimed technology pioneer Kevin Ashton takes us behind the scenes of creation to reveal the true process of discovery and how new comes to be From Archimedes to Apple from Kandinsky to the Coke can from the Wright brothers who set out to fly a horse to Woody Allen he exposes the seemingly unremarkable individuals gradual steps multiple failures and countless ordinary and often uncredited acts that led to our most astounding breakthroughs

In the midst of spiraling ecological devastation multispecies feminist theorist Donna J Haraway offers provocative new ways to reconfigure our relations to the earth and all its inhabitants She eschews referring to our current epoch as the Anthropocene preferring to conceptualize it as what she calls the Chthulucene as it more aptly and fully describes our epoch as one in which the human and nonhuman are inextricably linked in tentacular practices The Chthulucene Haraway explains requires sym poiesis or making with rather than auto poiesis or self making Learning to stay with the trouble of living and dying together on a damaged earth will prove more conducive to the kind of thinking that would provide the means to building more livable futures Theoretically and methodologically driven by the signifier SF string figures science fact science fiction speculative feminism speculative fabulation so far Staying with the Trouble further cements Haraway s reputation as one of the most daring and original thinkers of our time

Husserl s Missing Technologies looks at the early twentieth century classical phenomenology of Edmund Husserl both in the light of the philosophy of science of his time and retrospectively at his philosophy from a contemporary postphenomenology Of central interest are his infrequent comments upon technologies and especially scientific instruments such as the telescope and microscope Together with his analysis of Husserl Don Ihde ventures through the recent history of technologies of science reading and writing and science praxis calling for modifications to phenomenology by converging it with pragmatism This fruitful hybridization emphasizes human technology interrelationships the role of embodiment and bodily skills and the inherent multistability of technologies In a radical argument Ihde contends that philosophies in the same way that various technologies contain an ever shortening obsolescence ought to have contingent use lives

Peter Russell argues that global communications and the internet are helping to link the minds of humanity together to form a single global brain and consciousness with remarkable potential

While the working lives of tech entrepreneurs and delivery platform workers seem far removed both are engaged in digital labor What unites their experience and allows us to speak of their work under the same umbrella Is it even possible to talk about digital labor as if it were a single form of work Digital Labor explores these questions and critically examines the economics politics and experiences of workers in these new modes of employment Using a novel definition of the term digital labor Kylie Jarrett explores unpaid user activity platform mediated gig work and formal employment within the digital media industries mapping the common features of these varied practices Applying a critical Marxian lens the book interrogates the structures of exploitation in this sector the organisation of the labor process the dynamics of alienation associated with this work and the commodification of workers lives It also documents the struggle of digital laborers to resist the iniquities and inequalities of their working environments Ultimately the book identifies what is specific about this form of labor and in doing so offers insight into the nature of work as it is being reconstituted in digital capitalism Synthesising an extensive range of studies and s

Is the automobility regime experiencing a transition towards sustainability To answer that question this book investigates stability and change in contemporary transport systems It makes a socio technical analysis of transport systems exploring the strategies and beliefs of crucial actors such as car manufacturers local and national governments citizens car drivers transport planners and civil society Two guiding questions are Will we see a greening of cars based on technological innovations that sustain the existing car based system Or is something more radical desirable and likely such as the development of travel regimes in which car use is less dominant