Over the last decade or so, the field of science and technology studies (STS) has become an intellectually dynamic interdisciplinary arena. Concepts, methods, and theoretical perspectives are being drawn both from long-established and relatively young disciplines. From its origins in philosophical and political debates about the creation and use of scientific knowledge, STS has become a wide and deep space for the consideration of the place of science and technology in the world, past and present.

The "Routledge Handbook of Science, Technology and Society "seeks to capture the dynamism and breadth of the field by presenting work that pushes the reader to think about science and technology and their intersections with social life in new ways. The interdisciplinary contributions by international experts in this handbook are organized around six topic areas:

• embodiment
• consuming technoscience
• digitization
• environments
• science as work
• rules and standards

This volume highlights a range of theoretical and empirical approaches to some of the persistent and new questions in the field. It will be useful for students and scholars throughout the social sciences and humanities, including in science and technology studies, history, geography, critical race studies, sociology, communications, women s and gender studies, anthropology, and political science."

The capability to innovate in an on-going manner is emerging as a decisive key factor in today's world of business and work. The ability to stay competitive is becoming identical with the ability to innovate. This book originated from the research and development project "International Monitoring" and outlines the topic of innovative capability from a practice-oriented angle. Contributions of German and international experts offer an enlightening glimpse behind the scenes of innovations. The central issue is not the description of features of successful innovation processes or how innovations can be efficiently controlled and managed, but under which conditions they can emerge in the first place. In what way can individuals, organizations, networks and societies be enabled to continuously induce innovations?

The book describes and analyses the new environment for innovation, it does this with an emphasis on yet uncharted regions within the field of practice-based innovation, coming up with guidelines for innovation policy measures needed in order to realise this. While it focuses on these policies it also takes into account multi-actor innovation processes, user-driven innovation, "related variety" and many other aspects; aspects such as, just to name a few: communicating creative processes and distributing practice-based innovation; then there is creativity itself, encompassing new fields of knowledge and expertise. The authors go on to describe value networks, showing how to make practice-based innovations, explaining innovation diffusion and absorptive capacity. The book presents new insights as well as the latest research related to the frequently used term "innovation". Definitions are put forward, giving, by way of examples, a detailed description of concepts we draw upon when using these. Innovation as a concept is constantly being subdivided into increasingly finer distinctions, which, in turn, determine the discourse. The book takes a close look at these, further taking into account the challenges as well as the opportunities inherent in developing practice-based innovation procedures and policies of global importance, never losing sight of advancing long-term effectiveness.

Technology and Touch addresses the development of a range of new touch technologies, both technologies that we reach out to touch (like iPhones and iPads) and technologies that touch us (such as new prosthetics, smart clothing and robots). Cranny-Francis explores how this development helps us to connect with and understand our world, and ourselves. This everyday practice, or biopolitics of touch, is exemplified in a range of art works that deploy touch and allow us to examine the nature of being and of meaning. Cranny-Francis also refers the biopolitics of touch to the study of new touch technologies, exploring their capacity to have us reflect on old fears and prejudices, as well as challenging our incorporation into technologies and networks that may be unethical or deeply compromised.

The Rocket Lab: Maurice Zucrow, Purdue University, and America's Race to Space focuses on the golden era of space exploration between 1946 and 1966, specifically the life and times of Purdue University's Dr. Maurice J. Zucrow, a pioneering teacher and researcher in aerospace engineering. Zucrow taught America's first university course in jet and rocket propulsion, wrote the field's first textbook, and established the country's first educational Rocket Lab. He was part of a small circle of innovators who transformed Purdue into the country's largest engineering university, which became a cradle of astronauts. Taking a chronological and thematic approach, The Rocket Lab weaves between the local and national, drawing in rival universities, especially Harvard, MIT, Princeton, and Caltech. Also covered is Zucrow's role in the national project system of research and development through World War II and the Cold War. At Aerojet, he was one of the country's original project engineers, dedicated to scientific-technical expertise and the stepwise approach. He made vanguard power plant contributions to the Northrop Flying Wing, as well as the Corporal, Nike, and Atlas missiles, among others. Zucrow's work in propulsion helped to improve the country's arsenal of ballistic missiles and space launchers, and as a teacher, he educated the first generation of aerospace engineers. This book elevates Zucrow and the central role he played in getting the United States to space.

This volume summarizes the state of the art in supercomputing, with special emphasis on the industrial relevance of the presented results and methods. The book showcases an innovative usage of state-of-the-art modeling, novel numerical algorithms and the use of leading-edge high-performance computing systems in a GRID-like environment.

What impact has technology had on cultural meanings, values, and symbols? This anthropological exploration shows how technologies produce novel and sometimes jarring realignments among cultural institutions. Contemporary reproductive, medical, genetic, and information technologies forge unprecedented family relationships, produce a new mode of thinking based on the confluence of artificial and human intelligence, and reconfigure conventional scales of time and space. Taken together, they redefine what it is to be human.

Prof. Dr. Egon Krause Aerodynamisches Institut RWTH Aachen Wullnerstr. zw. 5 u. 7, D-52062 Aachen Prof. Dr. Willi Jager Interdisziplinares Zentrum fur Wissenschaftliches Rechnen Universitat Heidelberg 1m Neuenheimer Feld 368, D-69120 Heidelberg Prof. Dr. Michael Resch Hi::ichstleistungsrechenzentrum Stuttgart Allmandring 30, D-70550 Stuttgart The High-Performance Computing Center Stuttgart (HLRS) underwent dra- matic changes during the last year. At the beginning of 2003 the Center was separated from the Computing Center of Stuttgart University and turned into an independent central unit of Stuttgart University. Last March the Land Baden-Wurttemberg shaped up her strategy of cooperation and formed of a new Center of Competence in High-Performance Computing in Baden- Wurttemberg by aS80ciating HLR Stuttgart with the SSC Karlsruhe. At the present time the HLRS is preparing its decision for a new computer system to be planned to be operative in 2005. A safe decision is difficult to arrive at since the offers of the vendors of high-performance computers are continuously and rather rapidly changing. At the lower end the microprocessor based systems are attacked by clusters ofPCs. The superior price-performance VI Preface ratio makes such rather inexpensive systems attractive for a variety of appli- cations, most of which are latency bound. At the upper end microprocessor based systems are pressured by vector-based systems. The latter have seen a revival nourishing on the success and political impact of the earth simulator project.

People nowadays live in a human-made environment, or technotope. Their lives are entangled with technology. Because technology not only brings gifts but also costs and hazards, it is important to reflect on what good technology is and, indeed, whether a technology contributes to a good life.
The ethicists and social scientists united in this volume contribute to a novel approach to ethics and technology that initiates or enhances timely ethical reflection with scientists and engineers. Ethical reflection during research and development can help to anticipate how it can change human (social) like, and evaluate those changes. "Ethics on the Laboratory Floor" contributes to research decisions, for example with regard to what research goals to pursue, what research lines to prioritise, or how best to design user tests. By joining these deliberations "Ethics on the Laboratory Floor" helps to realise the best technological alternatives.

During the next years neural networks and systems amenable to instructions will extend their influence in science and technology. A prominent point of interest in this field is assigned to optical networks: they are small and flexible, and due to their ability of parallel processing they are devoted to the construction of small systems. This monograph explains the fundamentals of optical neural networks to physicists, engineers and device constructors.

HIGHLY COMMENDED: Business Book Awards 2022 - Specialist Business Book Crypto is big news. You may be an existing user yourself or have friends that laud its promise of getting rich fast. Arm yourself with the knowledge to come out on top in the crypto wars. If thousands of people can lose billions of dollars in OneCoin, masterminded by the now infamous Missing Cryptoqueen made famous by the BBC's podcast series and called 'one of the biggest scams in history' by The Times, what makes you think your money is safe? OneCoin isn't alone. Crypto Wars reveals how some of the most shocking scams affected millions of innocent people all around the world with everything from religious leaders to celebrities involved. In this book, you get exclusive access to the back story of the most extreme Ponzi schemes, the most bizarre hoaxes and brutal exit strategies from some of the biggest charlatans of crypto. Crypto expert and educator, Erica Stanford, will show you how market-wide manipulation schemes, unregulated processes and a new collection of technologies that are often misunderstood, have been exploited to create the wild west of crypto, run by some less than reputable characters. From OneCoin to PonziCoin to Trumpcoin and everything in between, Crypto Wars uncovers the scandals, unpicks the system behind them and allows you to better understand a new technology that has the potential to revolutionize banking and our world for the better.

Hoping to help transform engineering into a more socially just field of practice, this book offers various perspectives and strategies while highlighting key concepts and themes that help readers understand the complex relationship between engineering education and social justice. This volume tackles topics and scopes ranging from the role of Buddhism in socially just engineering to the blinding effects of ideologies in engineering to case studies on the implications of engineered systems for social justice.

This book aims to serve as a framework for interventions or strategies to make social justice more visible in engineering education and enhance scholarship in the emerging field of Engineering and Social Justice (ESJ). This creates a 'toolbox' for engineering educators and students to make social justice a central theme in engineering education.

Adequate verification is the key issue not only in today's arms control, arms limitation, and disarmament regimes, but also in less spectacular areas like auditing in economics or control of environmental pollution. Statistical methodologies and system analytical approaches are the tools developed over the past decades for quantifying those components of adequate verification which are quantifiable, i. e. , numbers, inventories, mass transfers, etc. , together with their uncertainties. In his book Safeguards Systems Analy sis, Professor Rudolf Avenhaus condenses the experience and expertise he has gained over the past 20 years, when his work was mainly related to the development of the IAEA's system for safeguarding nuclear materials, to system analytical studies at IIASA in the field of future energy requirements and their risks, and to the application of statistical techniques to arms control. The result is a unified and up-to-date presentation and analysis of the quantitative aspects of safeguards systems, and the application of the more important findings to practical problems. International Nuclear Material Safeguards, by far the most advanced verification system in the field of arms limitation, is used as the main field of application for the game theoretical analysis, material accountancy theory, and the theory on verification of material accounting data developed in the first four chapters.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the Third International Conference on Arts and Technology, ArtsIT 2013, held in Milano, Bicocca, Italy, in March. The 19 revised full papers presented were carefully selected and reviewed from 31 submissions and are organized in topical sections on: art and technology in action, music and technology in action, reflecting on art and technology, understanding the artistic practice, and at the boundaries.

The 25 classic articles in this volume deal with the role of technological change in economic growth, the extent of social and private returns from research and development, the relationship between market structure and technological change, the controversies over intellectual property rights, the processes by which innovations spread, and the management of technology. This volume will prove invaluable to economists, managers and government policymakers.

This book explores digital technologies from a distinctive postmodern perspective. Contrary to common belief, Sassower argues that digital technologies have allowed for the centralization of economic power. Further, where new digital devices offer the potential to express freedom and bring about revolutions they also allow for increasing possibilities for surveillance of citizens. The digital age and the current state of the global political economy are therefore linked and focusing on the promise of new technologies without locating them in their political structures and institutions or economic realities can be misleading and dangerous.

As science becomes more deeply embedded in a complex technological infrastructure, has this changed the relationship between the sciences and the various technologies that support them? As our technologies help shrink our world, can we restrict our ethical concerns or must we find a way to face the fact that we are now one world? What do new forms of architecture say about whom we are? Is the design process the new epistemological paradigm? The answers to all of these is "yes" according to Joseph C. Pitt (VirginaTech).

Doing Philosophy of Technology presents an updated and integrated overview of the most important thinking from this prominent philosopher of technology. Throughout his career Joseph C. Pitt has defended the view that to say anything meaningful about the value of a technology one must know something about that technology and how it functions in the world. This starting point leads naturally to a pragmatist philosophical stance, since it is the real world consequences of introducing a technology that must be the basis for any further normative judgements.

In the book we find an extended set of arguments that challenge the idea that there are eternal philosophical issues that transcend the impacts that technologies make on human beings and their world. Rather, it is claimed that as our technologies transform our world they transform us and the kinds of questions we find important to answer.

With so many terms available to define the same thing, it would seem nearly irresponsible to introduce yet another term (complex situation) to describe a phenomenological state of such as a system. However, a complex situation infers both a broader meaning and imposes a different perspective.Complex in this context is dependent on understanding and reality rather than observer and knowledge. Situation imposes a gestalt that cannot be characterized within a singular perspective that relegates paradox to a superior/subordinate hierarchy. This also infers that complex situation has no monotonic definition or each definition is by default incomplete. Therefore the perennial derivations for systems such as complex systems, system of systems, federation of systems is no longer a sufficient descriptor for complex situation. Ergo system and its genealogy lack the constitution to define complex situations. The books' intent is to explore this pathology through a series of papers written by authors that work in complex situations and have dealt with the limitations of the status quo: systems."

Time series with mixed spectra are characterized by hidden periodic components buried in random noise. Despite strong interest in the statistical and signal processing communities, no book offers a comprehensive and up-to-date treatment of the subject. Filling this void, Time Series with Mixed Spectra focuses on the methods and theory for the statistical analysis of time series with mixed spectra. It presents detailed theoretical and empirical analyses of important methods and algorithms. Using both simulated and real-world data to illustrate the analyses, the book discusses periodogram analysis, autoregression, maximum likelihood, and covariance analysis. It considers real- and complex-valued time series, with and without the Gaussian assumption. The author also includes the most recent results on the Laplace and quantile periodograms as extensions of the traditional periodogram. Complete in breadth and depth, this book explains how to perform the spectral analysis of time series data to detect and estimate the hidden periodicities represented by the sinusoidal functions. The book not only extends results from the existing literature but also contains original material, including the asymptotic theory for closely spaced frequencies and the proof of asymptotic normality of the nonlinear least-absolute-deviations frequency estimator.

New digital technologies have fostered much debate about the nature of social relationships, institutions and structures in a new information age. An amorphous and interdisciplinary field of research has emerged, concerning itself with the complexities and contradictions involved in the fundamental shifts and radical transformations which information and communication technologies (ICTs) are purportedly bringing about across cultural, political and economic practices. From cyberselves to cyber communities, from media wars to the digital divide, sociology confronts a new digital landscape. This text takes stock of how the discipline has addressed the challenge of the digital providing a uniquely sociological framework with which to critically re-evaluate fundamental social concerns: from digital intimacies and online relationships to new forms of mediated inequality and network structures, from digitally mediated media practices to education and health 2.0, this text provides a comprehensive introduction to the transformations wrought by digital technologies to contemporary societies and a critical reflection on how the digital is reconfiguring the tools, concepts and precepts of the discipline.

New digital technologies have fostered much debate about the nature of social relationships, institutions and structures in a new information age. An amorphous and interdisciplinary field of research has emerged, concerning itself with the complexities and contradictions involved in the fundamental shifts and radical transformations which information and communication technologies (ICTs) are purportedly bringing about across cultural, political and economic practices. From cyberselves to cyber communities, from media wars to the digital divide, sociology confronts a new digital landscape. This text takes stock of how the discipline has addressed the challenge of the digital providing a uniquely sociological framework with which to critically re-evaluate fundamental social concerns: from digital intimacies and online relationships to new forms of mediated inequality and network structures, from digitally mediated media practices to education and health 2.0, this text provides a comprehensive introduction to the transformations wrought by digital technologies to contemporary societies and a critical reflection on how the digital is reconfiguring the tools, concepts and precepts of the discipline.

Over the course of the last two decades, Iran has gone through major industrial transformation, in spite of major obstacles in the path of the country's development. This comprehensive book examines the Iranian government's mobilization of resources to develop science and technology, presenting an overview of the structure, dynamics, and outcomes of the government's science and technology policies. It evaluates sectors at the systems level and emphasizes the prominence of government, rather than of the market, in the innovation system of the Iranian economy. Written by authors who are in positions of leadership in the industries they discuss, this book offers an unparalleled look into Iran's current technology achievements.

Australia has always imported overseas technology, largely out of necessity, but has this been exploitative, fostering a relationship of dependence, or used to Australia's advantage? Jan Todd explores this question in the context of nineteenth-century science. In her important study, Todd argues that the technology transfer was far more complex than has been widely acknowledged. She shows that technology systems reflect national characteristics, institutions and priorities, drawing general conclusions about Australian science and technology in an imperial context. Much of the book is devoted to two fascinating case studies: the anthrax vaccination for sheep and the cyanide process of gold extraction, both transferred from Europe. In both cases, considering a range of economic, political and cultural factors, she traces a process of creative adaptation to these technologies.

High-Performance Computers (HPC) have initiated a revolutionary develop ment in research and technology since many complex and challenging prob lems in this area can only be solved by HPC and a network in modeling, algo rithms and software. In 1998 the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Association) recommended to install an additional Federal High Performance Computer followed by the one in Stuttgart. In January 1999 the Wissenschaftsrat (German Science Council) decided that the Leibniz Rechenzentrum (Computing Center) of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences in Munich should run the second Federal High-Performance Computer in Ger many. The investment cost of this Hochstleistungsrechner in Bayern (HLRB) was borne by the Federal Government of Germany and the Free State of Bavaria whereas the operating cost was at the expense of the Bavarian Gov ernment only. The operation of the HLRB is organized in combination with the - Leibniz-Rechenzentrum (LRZ) of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences as the operating authority of the HLRB - Steering Committee of the HLRB - Competence Network for Technical/Scientific High-Performance Comp- ing in Bavaria (KONWIHR). In 2000 a Hitachi SR8000-Fl was installed. It was the first Teraflops Com puter in Germany and reached a peak performance of two Teraflops after an extension at the end of 2001. The goal of HLRB is to provide computer facil ities necessary to solve challenging scientific and technological problems that cannot be solved on big servers but require large (storage) high-performance (very fast) computers and efficient software.

The nature of distributed computation in complex systems has often been described in terms of memory, communication and processing. This thesis presents a complete information-theoretic framework to quantify these operations on information (i.e. information storage, transfer and modification), and in particular their dynamics in space and time. The framework is applied to cellular automata, and delivers important insights into the fundamental nature of distributed computation and the dynamics of complex systems (e.g. that gliders are dominant information transfer agents). Applications to several important network models, including random Boolean networks, suggest that the capability for information storage and coherent transfer are maximised near the critical regime in certain order-chaos phase transitions. Further applications to study and design information structure in the contexts of computational neuroscience and guided self-organisation underline the practical utility of the techniques presented here.