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Books > Professional & Technical > Technology: general issues > History of engineering & technology
This book evaluates the importance of various historical sources
and discusses their role in the creation and transmission of
scientific knowledge. It presents an annotated translation of the
introductory words given by Johan Ludvig Heiberg to his translation
of the works of Archimedes. Further, it offers English translations
of and commentaries on selected fundamental works by Ernst
Hellinger and Gabrio Piola, which lay the groundwork for the modern
theory of advanced materials, and also examines the criteria used
to evaluate scientific works.
This book is dedicated to the life and work of Ignacy Lukasiewicz,
Polish pharmacist whose world-renowned achievements include
construction of the world's first oil refinery and invention of the
modern kerosene lamp. The authors also portray the history of the
Galician oil industry and set it in the context of political,
social and technological changes taking place in the 19th-century
Central and Eastern Europe. "The work adds substantially to
existing scholarship in English. As the author of the only
English-language academic monograph devoted to a general history of
the Galician oil industry, I can attest that this manuscript adds
significant and important information, details, depth of
investigation that is not provided in my book or any other book. It
therefore makes a novel contribution that will be very valuable to
anyone looking for a truly detailed account of Ignacy Lukasiewicz's
contribution within the context of the Galician oil industry in
general." Alison Frank Johnson Professor of History and of Germanic
Languages and Literatures Harvard University, Center for European
Studies "The authors sketch the profiles of two outstanding Poles,
pioneers of the oil industry - Ignacy Lukasiewicz, MSc. in
Pharmacy, and mining engineer and geologist Witold Zglenicki,
called the Polish Nobel (...) This scientific work is an
interesting and captivating read. It can be used not only by
scientists and students, but also by everyone who is interested in
industrial cultural heritage (...)." Krzysztof Bronski Professor
and Head of Department of Economic and Social History Economic
University in Krakow
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Vera Rubin
- A Life
(Hardcover)
Jacqueline Mitton, Simon Mitton; Foreword by Jocelyn Bell Burnell
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The first biography of a pioneering scientist who made significant
contributions to our understanding of dark matter and championed
the advancement of women in science. One of the great lingering
mysteries of the universe is dark matter. Scientists are not sure
what it is, but most believe it's out there, and in abundance. The
astronomer who finally convinced many of them was Vera Rubin. When
Rubin died in 2016, she was regarded as one of the most influential
astronomers of her era. Her research on the rotation of spiral
galaxies was groundbreaking, and her observations contributed
significantly to the confirmation of dark matter, a most notable
achievement. In Vera Rubin: A Life, prolific science writers
Jacqueline Mitton and Simon Mitton provide a detailed, accessible
overview of Rubin's work, showing how she leveraged immense
curiosity, profound intelligence, and novel technologies to help
transform our understanding of the cosmos. But Rubin's impact was
not limited to her contributions to scientific knowledge. She also
helped to transform scientific practice by promoting the careers of
women researchers. Not content to be an inspiration, Rubin was a
mentor and a champion. She advocated for hiring women faculty,
inviting women speakers to major conferences, and honoring women
with awards that were historically the exclusive province of men.
Rubin's papers and correspondence yield vivid insights into her
life and work, as she faced down gender discrimination and met the
demands of family and research throughout a long and influential
career. Deftly written, with both scientific experts and general
readers in mind, Vera Rubin is a portrait of a woman with
insatiable curiosity about the universe who never stopped asking
questions and encouraging other women to do the same.
A critical examination of the rise of wearable EEG monitors. From
Fitbits to GPS trackers, wearables promise to help us understand
and improve ourselves in quantified ways. We count our steps, track
our location, and even monitor our brain waves as we strive to
achieve better fitness, clearer direction, or a more focused mind.
But why do we rely on wearables to learn about ourselves? In
Instrumental Intimacy, Melissa M. Littlefield questions our desire
for mechanistic guidance by examining brain-based EEG wearables
that promise to improve sleep, relationships, self-knowledge, and
learning. Littlefield focuses specifically on EEGs' transition out
of the laboratory and into the hands of consumers. While other
brain-imaging technologies (such as MRI, PET, and MEG) are used
only in specialized laboratories, human electroencephalography
(a.k.a. EEG) is embedded in portable, user-friendly devices. These
direct-to-consumer wearables visualize brain activity as accessible
data, and many offer the promise of self-optimization.
Littlefield's illuminating book brings the histories of EEG to bear
on the contemporary development of EEG wearables via case studies
of EEG-based sleep aids, bio-mapping instruments, fashionable
surveillance tools, and athletic training devices. The author
argues that, over the past century, applied uses of EEG helped to
create new states of mind to be monitored and manipulated, as well
as discourses about the existence of brain waves and their
viability as a tool for brain optimization. By contextualizing and
analyzing EEG wearables, Instrumental Intimacy provides a crucial
intervention in an emergent consumer market and in the scholarly
fields of STS, critical neuroscience, and the history of
technology.
We like to think of sports as elemental: strong bodies trained to
overcome height, weight, distance; the thrill of earned victory or
the agony of defeat in a contest decided on a level playing field.
But in Game Changer, Rayvon Fouche argues that sports have been
radically shaped by an explosion of scientific and technological
advances in materials, training, nutrition, and medicine dedicated
to making athletes stronger and faster. Technoscience, as Fouche
dubs it, increasingly gives the edge (however slight) to the
athlete with the latest gear, the most advanced training equipment,
or the performance-enhancing drugs that are hardest to detect. In
this revealing book, Fouche examines a variety of sports
paraphernalia and enhancements, from fast suits, athletic shoes,
and racing bicycles to basketballs and prosthetic limbs. He also
takes a hard look at gender verification testing, direct drug
testing, and the athlete biological passport in an attempt to
understand the evolving place of technoscience across sport. In
this book, Fouche: * Examines the relationship among sport,
science, and technology* Considers what is at stake in defining
sporting culture by its scientific knowledge and technology*
Provides readers and students with an informative and engagingly
written study Focusing on well-known athletes, including Michael
Phelps, Oscar Pistorius, Caster Semenya, Usain Bolt, and Lance
Armstrong, Fouche argues that technoscience calls into question the
integrity of games, records, and our bodies themselves. He also
touches on attempts by sporting communities to regulate the use of
technology, from elite soccer's initial reluctance to utilize
goal-line technology to automobile racing's endless tweaking of
regulatory formulas in an attempt to blur engineering potency and
reclaim driver skill and ability. Game Changer will change the way
you look at sports-and the outsized impact technoscience has on
them.
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Despite widespread consensus that China's digital revolution was
sure to bring about massive democratic reforms, such changes have
not come to pass. While scholars and policy makers alternate
between predicting change and disparaging a stubbornly
authoritarian regime, in this book Shaohua Guo demonstrates how
this dichotomy misses the far more complex reality. The Evolution
of the Chinese Internet traces the emergence and maturation of one
of the most creative digital cultures in the world through four
major technological platforms: the bulletin board system, the blog,
the microblog, and WeChat. Guo transcends typical binaries of
freedom and control, to argue that Chinese Internet culture
displays a uniquely sophisticated interplay between multiple
extremes, and that its vibrancy is dependent on these complex
negotiations. In contrast to the flourishing of research findings
on what is made invisible online, this book examines the driving
mechanisms that grant visibility to particular kinds of
user-generated content. Offering a systematic account of how and
why an ingenious Internet culture has been able to thrive, Guo
highlights the pivotal roles that media institutions, technological
platforms, and creative practices of Chinese netizens have played
in shaping culture on- and offline.
The life story of the highest decorated soldier of the Wehrmacht.
Many photos of Rudels aircraft.
CoCo: The Colorful History of Tandy's Underdog Computer is the
first book to document the complete history of the Tandy Color
Computer (CoCo), a popular 8-bit PC series from the 1980s that
competed against the era's biggest names, including the Apple II,
IBM PC, and Commodore 64. The book takes you inside the interesting
stories and people behind this unique, underdog computer. Both
noted computer science and technology advocates, authors Pitre and
Loguidice reveal the story of a pivotal period in the home
computing revolution from the perspective of Tandy's CoCo. As these
computers were sold in Radio Shack stores throughout the United
States and other countries, they provide a critical point of
reference for key events in the unprecedented evolutionary period
for the PC industry in the 1980s. The book also features first-hand
accounts from the people who created and promoted the CoCo, from
the original Tandy executives and engineers to today's active
product creators and information keepers. The CoCo impacted many
lives, and this book leaves no stone unturned in recounting this
fascinating slice of the PC revolution that is still in play today.
From early telecommunications experiments to engineering and
budgetary challenges, it covers all the aspects that made the CoCo
a truly personal, useful computing experience in as small and
inexpensive a package as possible.
The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Technology gives readers a
view into this increasingly vital and urgently needed domain of
philosophical understanding, offering an in-depth collection of
leading and emerging voices in the philosophy of technology. The
thirty-two contributions in this volume cut across and connect
diverse philosophical traditions and methodologies. They reveal the
often-neglected importance of technology for virtually every
subfield of philosophy, including ethics, epistemology, philosophy
of science, metaphysics, aesthetics, philosophy of language, and
political theory. The Handbook also gives readers a new sense of
what philosophy looks like when fully engaged with the disciplines
and domains of knowledge that continue to transform the material
and practical features and affordances of our world, including
engineering, arts and design, computing, and the physical and
social sciences. The chapters reveal enduring conceptual themes
concerning technology's role in the shaping of human knowledge,
identity, power, values, and freedom, while bringing a
philosophical lens to the profound transformations of our existence
brought by innovations ranging from biotechnology and nuclear
engineering to artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and
robotics. This new collection challenges the reader with
provocative and original insights on the history, concepts,
problems, and questions to be brought to bear upon humanity's
complex and evolving relationship to technology.
This volume is a collection of essays of a philosophical nature on
the subject of technology, introducing authors from the
Portuguese-speaking community, namely from Portugal itself, Africa
and Brazil. Their contributions detail a unique perspective on
technology, placing this important topic within the historical,
ideological and social contexts of their countries, all of which
share a common language. The shared history of these countries and
the cultural and economic specificities of each one have stimulated
singular insights into these thinkers' reflections. The essays are
thematically diverse. Among the topics covered are technogenic
knowledge, visions of technology, risks and uncertainties,
mediatization, digitalization, and datafication, engineering
practice and ethics, alternative technoscientific strategies,
ontotechnologies of the body, virtual and archive. The
contributions also explore other themes that are more closely
related to the semi-peripheral world, such as technological
dependence and the incorporation of Western technology into the
social structure of ancestral communities. This book appeals to
students and researchers and provides a voice to authors whose work
are not usually available in English-language publications. It
serves as an ideal guide for all those who seek rigorous and
geographically widespread knowledge regarding thinking on
technology in several Portuguese-speaking countries.
London's sewers could be called the city's forgotten underground:
mostly unseen subterranean spaces that are of absolutely vital
importance, the capital's sewers nonetheless rarely get the same
degree of attention as the Tube. Paul Dobraszczyk here outlines the
fascinating history of London's sewers from the nineteenth century
onwards, using a rich variety of colour illustrations, photographs
and newspaper engravings to show their development from medieval
spaces to the complex, citywide network, largely constructed in the
1860s, that is still in place today. This book explores London's
sewers in history, fiction and film, including how they entice
intrepid explorers into their depths, from the Victorian period to
the present day.
Perhaps better than any other city, Manchester illustrates the
historical relationship between the growth of science and the
growth of industry - a relationship which is topical now, as it has
been for two centuries. This introduction provides a sketch map and
some references for those who would like to explore this local and
regional history.
This comprehensive chronology of the automobile covers its
engineering as well as the social, cultural, and political impact
of the car from the invention of the wheel to the O.J. Simpson car
chase. It examines the auto industry, the road and roadside, the
car in popular culture, gasoline/fuel history, the spatial
transformation of cities, air pollution, critics of car culture,
traffic accidents, the globalization of car culture, and much more.
This is a reference guide for students and scholars of
transportation history as well as anyone who has ever asked When
did Japan export the first car to the U.S.? or When and how was
smog discovered? or What make of car did Chuck Berry drive?
This book examines the development of nuclear propulsion in the
Royal Navy from the first proposal in 1946 to the start-up of the
last core improvement for the first submarine reactor power plant
PWR 1 in December 1974. Drawing from unreleased records and
archives, the book answers questions around three main themes.
Political: what problems were encountered in transferring nuclear
knowledge from the USA to the UK in the post-war period, and how
much support was there for the development of nuclear propulsion?
Military: why was there a requirement to develop nuclear
propulsion, and in particular, why submarines? Technical: were the
problems associated with nuclear energy fully appreciated, and did
the UK have the technical and engineering capability to develop
nuclear propulsion? Aside from the political considerations and
military motives for developing nuclear propulsion in the Royal
Navy, the author focuses on the technical problems that had to be
overcome by all participants in the Royal Navy's development of
nuclear propulsion, adding significantly to naval historiography.
Providing a critical analysis of the political, technological,
operational and industrial issues of introducing nuclear propulsion
into the Royal Navy, the author situates his research in the
context of the evolving Cold War, changing Anglo-American
relations, the end of Empire and the relative decline of British
power.
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