Technical standards have received increasing attention in recent years from historians of science and technology, management theorists and economists. Often, inquiry focuses on the emergence of stability, technical closure and culturally uniform modernity. Yet current literature also emphasizes the durability of localism, heterogeneity and user choice. This collection investigates the apparent tension between these trends using case studies from across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
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The History of Technology" addresses tensions between material standards and process standards, explores the distinction between specifying standards and achieving convergence towards them, and examines some of the discontents generated by the reach of standards into 'everyday life'.
Includes the Special Issue "By whose standards? Standardization, stability and uniformity in the history of information and electrical technologies"

Named one of the greatest minds of the 20th century by Time, Tim Berners-Lee is responsible for one of that century's most important advancements: the world wide web.  Now, this low-profile genius-who never personally profitted from his invention -offers a compelling protrait of his invention.  He reveals the Web's origins and the creation of the now ubiquitous http and www acronyms and shares his views on such critical issues as censorship, privacy, the increasing power of softeware companies , and the need to find the ideal balance between commercial and social forces.  He offers insights into the true nature of the Web, showing readers how to use it to its fullest advantage.  And he presents his own plan for the Web's future, calling for the active support and participation of programmers, computer manufacturers, and social organizations to manage and maintain this valuable resource so that it can remain a powerful force for social change and an outlet for individual creativity.

This book is an important outcome of the Fifth World Internet Conference. It provides a comprehensive account of the new trends and highlights of global Internet development over the past year, covering network infrastructure, information technology, digital economy, world internet media, cyber security, and international cyberspace governance. This year, the book improves the Global Internet Development Index System and adds more countries into the assessed list, in order to reflect more comprehensively, objectively and accurately the general situation of the world Internet development and thus to provide reference for all countries in promoting Internet development and governance.

The technical problems confronting different societies and periods, and the measures taken to solve them form the concern of this annual collection of essays. Volumes contain technical articles ranging widely in subject, time and region, as well as general papers on the history of technology. In addition to dealing with the history of technical discovery and change, History of Technology also explores the relations of technology to other aspects of life -- social, cultural and economic -- and shows how technological development has shaped, and been shaped by, the society in which it occurred.

The technical problems confronting different societies in different periods and the measures taken to solve them form the concern of this annual collection of essays. Dealing with the history of technical discovery and change, the volumes in this series explore the relationship of technology to other aspects of life--social, cultural and economic--and show how technological development has shaped, and been shaped by, the society in which it has occurred.

Sir Tony Hoare has had an enormous influence on computer science, from the Quicksort algorithm to the science of software development, concurrency and program verification. His contributions have been widely recognised: He was awarded the ACM's Turing Award in 1980, the Kyoto Prize from the Inamori Foundation in 2000, and was knighted for "services to education and computer science" by Queen Elizabeth II of England in 2000. This book presents the essence of his various works-the quest for effective abstractions-both in his own words as well as chapters written by leading experts in the field, including many of his research collaborators. In addition, this volume contains biographical material, his Turing award lecture, the transcript of an interview and some of his seminal papers. Hoare's foundational paper "An Axiomatic Basis for Computer Programming", presented his approach, commonly known as Hoare Logic, for proving the correctness of programs by using logical assertions. Hoare Logic and subsequent developments have formed the basis of a wide variety of software verification efforts. Hoare was instrumental in proposing the Verified Software Initiative, a cooperative international project directed at the scientific challenges of large-scale software verification, encompassing theories, tools and experiments. Tony Hoare's contributions to the theory and practice of concurrent software systems are equally impressive. The process algebra called Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP) has been one of the fundamental paradigms, both as a mathematical theory to reason about concurrent computation as well as the basis for the programming language occam. CSP served as a framework for exploring several ideas in denotational semantics such as powerdomains, as well as notions of abstraction and refinement. It is the basis for a series of industrial-strength tools which have been employed in a wide range of applications. This book also presents Hoare's work in the last few decades. These works include a rigorous approach to specifications in software engineering practice, including procedural and data abstractions, data refinement, and a modular theory of designs. More recently, he has worked with collaborators to develop Unifying Theories of Programming (UTP). Their goal is to identify the common algebraic theories that lie at the core of sequential, concurrent, reactive and cyber-physical computations.

An enlightening history of 19th-century technology, focusing on the connections between invention and cultural values. Victorian Technology: Invention, Innovation, and the Rise of the Machine captures the extraordinary surge of energy and invention that catapulted 19th-century England into the position of the world's first industrialized nation. It was an astonishing transformation, one that shaped—and was shaped by—the values of the Victorian era, and that laid the groundwork for the consumer-based society in which we currently live. Filled with vivid details and fascinating insights into the impact of the Industrial Revolution on peoples' lives, Victorian Technology locates the forerunners of the defining technologies of the our time in 19th-century England: the computer, the Internet, mass transit, and mass communication. Readers will encounter the innovative thinkers and entrepreneurs behind history-making breakthroughs in communications (the transatlantic cable, wireless communication), mass production (the integrated factory), transportation (railroads, gliders, automobiles), and more.

This book traces the pedagogical evolution of technical communication in America as it grew out of Engineering English requirements from roughly the turn of the century to 1950. This study examines specific curricular patterns, texts, and writers on the subject of technical communication, while also tracing engineering educational patterns as they emerge from the proceedings of the society for the promotion of engineering education. Unique to the second edition of the book is a new preface by the recent past ATTW series editor, Jimmie Killingsworth, a new introduction by Elizabeth Tebeaux, and an epilogue by Katherine Staples. Writing in a Milieu of Utility concludes that technical writing, as we teach it today, likely found its roots in engineering composition pedagogy, when, at approximately the turn of the century, engineering educators recognized that writing about science and technology not only made sense in an academic milieu that emphasized utility, but that such writing could also contribute to the professional success of engineering students. Existing somewhat tenuously as engineering itself sought academic status, technical communication emerged ultimately as a re-conceptualized composition course, after early to mid twentieth century calls for English and engineering cooperation made traditional composition offerings less relevant. Academic writing on environmental communication proliferated in the 1990's. A few of us had been calling for such work and making initial investigations throughout the 1980's, but the momentum in the field built slowly. Spurred by coverage in the mass media, academic publishers finally caught the wave of interest. In this exciting new volume, the editors demonstrate more fully than ever before how environmental rhetoric and technical communication go hand in hand. The key link that they and their distinguished group of contributors have discovered is the ancient concern of communication scholars with public deliberation. Environmental issues present technical communicators with some of their greatest challenges, above all, how to make the highly specialized and inscrutably difficult technical information generated by environmental scientists and engineers usable in public decision making. The editors encourage us to accept the challenge of contributing to environmentally conscious decision making by integrating technical knowledge and human values. For technical communicators who accept the challenge of working toward solutions by opening access to crucial information and by engaging in critical thinking on ecological issues, the research and theory offered in this volume provide a strong foundation for future practice.

Why has "car society" proven so durable, even in the face of mounting environmental and economic crises? In this follow-up to his magisterial Atlantic Automobilism, Gijs Mom traces the global spread of the automobile in the postwar era and investigates why adopting more sustainable forms of mobility has proven so difficult. Drawing on archival research as well as wide-ranging forays into popular culture, Mom reveals here the roots of the exuberance, excess, and danger that define modern automotive culture.

The technical problems confronting different societies and periods, and the measures taken to solve them form the concern of this annual collection of essays. Volumes contain technical articles ranging widely in subject, time and region, as well as general papers on the history of technology. In addition to dealing with the history of technical discovery and change, History of Technology also explores the relations of technology to other aspects of life -- social, cultural and economic -- and shows how technological development has shaped, and been shaped by, the society in which it occurred.

This book provides a compact history of gears, by summarizing the main stages of their development and the corresponding gradual acquisition of engineering expertise, from the antiquity to the Renaissance and the twentieth century. This brief history makes no claim to be exhaustive, since the topic is so extensive, complex and fascinating that it deserves an entire encyclopedia. Despite its brevity, the book debunks a number of popular misconceptions, such as the belief that the first literary description of a gear was supplied by Aristotle. It disproves not only this myth, but also other peremptory statements and/or axiomatic assumptions that have no basis in written documents, archaeological findings or other factual evidence. The book is chiefly intended for students and lecturers, historians of science and scientists, and all those who want to learn about the genesis and evolution of this topic.

This book highlights the close interactions between plants, plant knowledge, politics, and social life in Padua during the age of revolution. It explores the lives and thoughts of two brothers, the lawyer Andrea Meneghini and the botanist GiuseppeMeneghini, illustrating the unspoken dreams of progress and a new social order, but also sheds light on the ambiguous relationship between the Paduan elite and Austrian rule before the 1848 revolution. A closer look at park designs, gardening associations and networks, fl ower exhibitions, agricultural societies, organicist metaphors, and botanical research on the organization of living bodies opens up unexpected parallels between actors and ideas of two apparently distant areas: botany and political economy.