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Books > Professional & Technical > Technology: general issues > General
In this eye-opening book, author Lloyd J. Dumas argues that our
capacity for developing ever more powerful technologies and the
unavoidable fallibility of both machine and man will lead us
towards a disaster of an unprecedented scale. Most of us assume
that those in charge can always find a way to control any
technology mankind creates, no matter how powerful. But in a world
of imperfect human beings who are prone to error, emotion, and
sometimes to malevolent behavior, this could be an arrogant—and
disastrous—assumption. This book is filled with compelling,
factual stories that illustrate how easy it is for situations to go
terribly wrong, despite our best efforts to prevent any issue. The
author is not advocating an anti-technology "return to nature," nor
intending to highlight the marvels of our high-tech world. Instead,
the objective is to reveal the potential for disaster that
surrounds us in our modern world, elucidate how we arrived at this
predicament, explain the nature and ubiquity of human fallibility,
expose why proposed "solutions" to these Achilles heels cannot
work, and suggest alternatives that could thwart human-induced
technological disasters.
This book gathers selected papers presented at the International
Conference on Innovations in Information and Communication
Technologies (ICI2CT 2020), held at National University of
Singapore, Singapore, during 18-19 December 2020. It presents the
works on the intersection of the Computer Science and Communication
Engineering. Topics covered in the book include communications
engineering, Internet and web technology, computer and information
science, artificial intelligence, data science and management, and
ICT applications.
Author Charles E. Willingham always said he would achieve
millionaire status before he turns sixty years old. At the age of
fifty-nine-one day before his sixtieth birthday-Willingham achieves
his lofty goal. But it was a long, hard road.
Born in 1939, Willingham grows up in Texas picking cotton,
feeding chickens, and graduating at the bottom of his high school
class. But he soon catapults to the big time, becoming a U.S. Air
Force Cold War spy, nearly getting shot down by Russian MIGs, and
landing in the middle of the Cuban Missile Crisis and the building
of the Berlin Wall.
After the Cold War, Willingham creates hardware at Cal-Tech to
measure the cosmic microwave fields emitted from the theoretical
Big Bang, and then helps develop the country's first weather
satellites at Ford Aerospace. But it is when he enters the
relatively new field of computer technology that he eventually
makes his fortune working for computer software magnate Bill
Gates.
With a host of laugh-out-loud escapades, "In My Time" is a
classic rags-to-riches story and a vivid chronicle of one man's
life in the twentieth century. A rollicking rollercoaster ride
around the world and back, it is also a tale of Willingham's rugged
individualism and hard-earned wisdom.
This study examines the rise of the technopolis--high
technology-based regional development. It explores how and why
these regions emerged and the policies that have been devised to
promote them. The rapid, propulsive growth of the technopolis in
the 1960s and 1970s caught many people by surprise. Silicon Valley
arose in an agricultural area; Route 128 in a stagnant
manufacturing region. Throughout the rest of the world, a new
generation of regional development policies have appeared, the most
common ones being science parks, small business incubators, and
venture capital funds. This book surveys these policies from a
comparative, critical perspective. It also develops a theoretical
framework for understanding why regional high-technology
development occurs and the role policy can play in the process.
This work will be of interest to development planners and
scholars in the fields of economic geography, development
economics, and regional development.
The Author is a Chartered Surveyor and Arbitrator and has been in
the Quantity Surveying field for the last 40 years. The book deals
with construction irregularities, frauds and the necessity for
Technical Auditing of construction projects. The construction
industry is huge expanding and expected to reach in excess of US $
12 Trillion by 2020. The bulk of this amounts shall come from
emerging markets and from public money. Still Construction Auditing
is practically performed by Accountants in all parts of the world.
The Author feels that this should be done by Engineers with proper
training and accreditation.Further, the Author feels that there is
a necessity to spend at least one dollar for auditing for every
thousand dollars spent to see whether the money is spent
wisely.This is very important in case of public money. The
construction industry as a whole is infested with irregularities
and frauds and so much so that the estimated loss is around 10%,
which shall reach in excess of US $ one Trillion by 2020.To put in
context, the combined GDPs of Saudi Arabia and South Africa. If the
existing internal and external auditing system does not bring in
0.5%(1/20 of the estimated waste) as savings on a regular basis,
then it can be safely assumed that the system needs modifications
or complete overhaul. The book deals with basic guide lines for
Technical Auditing of construction to bring in savings.This also
gives a set of proposals for future improvements of the existing
system and the same can be used in developing counries or modified
to suit each country's requirements.
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