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Books > Professional & Technical > Technology: general issues > History of engineering & technology
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.
Imagine that murdered primatologist Dr. Dian Fossey of Gorillas in
the Mist fame were alive today and able to reflect upon her death
as well as her legacy. This is the impetus behind author Georgianne
Nienaber's compelling work, Gorilla Dreams: The Legacy of Dian
Fossey. At the beginning of Gorilla Dreams, Fossey attends her own
funeral and watches her murdered gorillas interacting with the
graveside bystanders. She establishes a new relationship with the
slain gorilla Digit, who acts as her guide after death as she
carefully reviews her life, its challenges, successes, hardships,
and the ultimate closure of her murder. Although Fossey's death is
officially unsolved, recently released documents obtained through
the Freedom of Information Act, as well as testimony from the
International War Crimes Tribunal proceedings, offer new suspects,
motives, and opportunities. Every fact about Fossey's life is
meticulously annotated. However, the setting of her conversations
with the murdered gorillas is obviously fictional, yet steeped in
African tradition. the famed primatologist's life that honors the
African belief that the dead live on in spiritual form.
The technical problems confronting different societies and periods
and the measures taken to solve them form the concern of this
annual collection of essays. It deals with the history of technical
discovery and change and explores the relationship of technology to
other aspects of life - social, cultural and economic - showing how
technological development has shaped, and been shaped by, the
society in which it occurred.
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.
"
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"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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