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.

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.

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.

This book deals with the social, cultural and especially political significance of media by shifting from the usual focus on the public sphere and publics and paying attention to populations. It describes key moments where populations of different sorts have been subject to formative and diverse projects of governing, in which communication has been key. It brings together governmentality studies with the study of media practices and communication technologies. Chapters consider print culture and the new political technology of individuals; digital economies as places where populations are formed, known and managed as productive resources; workplaces, schools, clinics and homes as sites of governmental objectives; and how to appropriately link communication technologies and practices with politics. Through these chapters Philip Dearman, Cathy Greenfield and Peter Williams demonstrate the value of considering communication in terms of the government of populations.

This book traces and analyzes the transformation of the public discourse of science and technology in Mao-era China. Based on extensive primary sources such as science dissemination materials and technical handbooks, as well as mass media products of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution periods, this book delineates the emergence of a pragmatic approach to knowledge in society. To achieve the goal of fast modernization with limited financial, human, and material resources, the party-state accommodated Western and local, "modern" and "traditional" knowledges in the fields of agricultural mechanization, steel production and Chinese veterinary medicine. The case studies demonstrate that scientific knowledge production in the Mao-era included various social groups and was entangled with political and cultural issues. This reveals and explains the continuity of scientific thinking across the historical divides of 1949 and 1978, which has hitherto been underestimated.

In 1885, Thomas Edison, age thirty-nine and already a world-famous inventor, met the two great loves of his life: Mina Miller and Fort Myers, Florida. Mina soon became his second wife, and Fort Myers--a remote, almost inaccessible, village on Florida's southwest coast--became their winter home.

Other tomes tell the global account of Thomas Edison, the American icon named by Life magazine as the "Man of the Millennium." This book offers a look at his life in his tropical retreat, his "jungle," where for forty-six years he and his bride sought refuge from the cold winters and the demanding lifestyle of his New Jersey home, laboratory, and business complex.

While in Fort Myers he watched over his extensive botanical gardens, fished from both his boat and his long dock, interacted with the locals, and labored for many hours in his laboratory. Henry Ford and his family lived nextdoor and many dignitaries came to visit, including President-elect Hoover and Harvey Firestone.
The Edisons became an essential part of the Fort Myers story. They made lifelong friendships with townsfolk and joined in local activities until the love affair of the Edisons was cut short by the death of Thomas in 1931. Mina continued to live out her love for Fort Myers and its people until her death in 1947. She gave their winter estate, Seminole Lodge (Thomas's "jungle"), to the grateful citizens of Fort Myers.

Weaving together chapters on imperial Japan's wartime mobilization, Asia's first wave of postwar decolonization, and Cold War geopolitical conflict in the region, Engineering Asia seeks to demonstrate how Asia's present prosperity did not arise from a so-called 'economic miracle' but from the violent and dynamic events of the 20th century. The book argues that what continued to operate throughout these tumultuous eras were engineering networks of technology. Constructed at first for colonial development under Japan, these networks transformed into channels of overseas development aid that constituted the Cold War system in Asia. Through highlighting how these networks helped shape Asia's contemporary economic landscape, Engineering Asia challenges dominant narratives in Western scholarship of an 'economic miracle' in Japan and South Korea, and the 'Asian Tigers' of Southeast Asia. Students and scholars of East Asian studies, development studies, postcolonialism, Cold War studies and the history of technology and science will find this book immensely useful.

Automating Linguistics offers an in-depth study of the history of the mathematisation and automation of the sciences of language. In the wake of the first mathematisation of the 1930s, two waves followed: machine translation in the 1950s and the development of computational linguistics and natural language processing in the 1960s. These waves were pivotal given the work of large computerised corpora in the 1990s and the unprecedented technological development of computers and software.Early machine translation was devised as a war technology originating in the sciences of war, amidst the amalgamate of mathematics, physics, logics, neurosciences, acoustics, and emerging sciences such as cybernetics and information theory. Machine translation was intended to provide mass translations for strategic purposes during the Cold War. Linguistics, in turn, did not belong to the sciences of war, and played a minor role in the pioneering projects of machine translation.Comparing the two trends, the present book reveals how the sciences of language gradually integrated the technologies of computing and software, resulting in the second-wave mathematisation of the study of language, which may be called mathematisation-automation. The integration took on various shapes contingent upon cultural and linguistic traditions (USA, ex-USSR, Great Britain and France). By contrast, working with large corpora in the 1990s, though enabled by unprecedented development of computing and software, was primarily a continuation of traditional approaches in the sciences of language sciences, such as the study of spoken and written texts, lexicography, and statistical studies of vocabulary.