Technology maturity: What is it, and why is it important? For more than ten years, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) has criticized federal agencies for a history of cost and schedule overruns on a significant portion of their procurement programs. GAO has repeatedly reported that the use of immature technologies in programs is a primary cause for these overruns. In spite of these repeated reports, the problems in government procurement have not improved. In fact, recent reports indicate that the problems are getting worse. One cause of this worsening situation might be that, while GAO identified lack of technology maturity as a problem, they did not tell how to measure technology maturity, or conversely, its lack. This groundbreaking work attempts to fill this gap by examining the current state of technology maturity measurement, pointing out strengths and weaknesses of available measures, and proposing a complete technology maturity assessment as a potential solution. The book also includes a discussion of risk during technology development.

Kenneth Garcia presents an edited collection of papers from the 2015 conference on academic freedom at religiously affiliated universities, held at the University of Notre Dame. These essays reexamine the secular principle of academic freedom and discuss how a theological understanding might build on and further develop it. The year 2015 marked the 100th anniversary of the founding of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), the leading advocate of academic freedom in America. In October 2015, the University of Notre Dame convened a group of prominent scholars to consider how the concept and practice of academic freedom might evolve. The premise behind the conference was that the current conventional understandings of academic freedom are primarily secular and, therefore, not yet complete. The goal was to consider alternative understandings in light of theological insight. Theological insight, in this context, refers to an awareness that there is a surplus of knowledge and meaning to reality that transcends what can be known through ordinary disciplinary methods of inquiry, especially those that are quantitative or empirical. Essays in this volume discuss how, in light of the fact that findings in many fields hint at connections to a greater whole, scholars in any academic field should be free to pursue those connections. Moreover, there are religious traditions that can help inform those connections.

Uncovering the theoretical and creative interconnections between posthumanism and philosophies of immanence, this volume explores the influence of the philosophy of immanence on posthuman theory; the varied reworkings of immanence for the nonhuman turn; and the new pathways for critical thinking created by the combination of these monumental discourses. With the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari serving as a vibrant node of immanence, this volume maps a multiplicity of pathways from Deleuze, Guattari and their theoretical allies - including Spinoza and Nietzsche - to posthuman thought. As positions that insist, respectively, on the equal yet distinct powers of mind and body (immanence) and the urgent need to dismantle human privilege and exceptionality (posthumanism), each chapter reveals concepts for rethinking established notions of being, thought, experience, and life. The authors here take examples from a range of different media, including literature and contemporary cinema, featuring films such as Enthiran/The Robot (India, 2010) and CHAPPiE (USA/Mexico, 2015), and new developments in technology and theory. In doing so, they investigate Deleuzian and Guattarian posthumanism from a variety of political and ethical frameworks and perspectives, from afro-pessimism to feminist thought, disability studies, biopolitics, and social justice. Countering the dualisms of Cartesian philosophy and flattening the hierarchies imposed by Humanism, From Deleuze and Guattari to Posthumanism launches vital interrogations of established knowledge and sparks the critical reflection necessary for life in the posthuman era.

The book in front of you is the first international academic volume on the legal, philosophical and economic aspects of the rise of 3D printing. In recent years 3D printing has become a hot topic. Some claim that it will revolutionize production and mass consumption, enabling consumers to print anything from clothing, automobile parts and guns to various foods, medication and spare parts for their home appliances. This may significantly reduce our environmental footprint, but also offers potential for innovation and creativity. At the same time 3D printing raises social, ethical, regulatory and legal questions. If individuals can print anything they want, how does this affect existing systems of intellectual property rights? What are the societal consequences of the various types of products one can print with a 3D printer, for example weapons? Should all aspects of 3D printing be regulated, and if so, how and to what ends? How will businesses (have to) change their way of working and their revenue model in light of the shift to printing-on-demand? How will the role of product designers change in a world where everyone has the potential to design their own products? These and other questions are addressed in high quality and in-depth contributions by academics and experts, bringing together a wide variety of academic discussions on 3D printing from different disciplines as well as presenting new views, broadening the discussion beyond the merely technical dimension of 3D printing. Bibi van den Berg is Associate Professor at eLaw, the Center for Law and Digital Technologies at Leiden University, The Netherlands. Simone van der Hof is Full Professor at eLaw in Leiden and Eleni Kosta is Associate Professor at TILT, the Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology and Society at Tilburg University, The Netherlands.

As our digital economy continues to expand, gig work becomes increasingly significant. This incisive book investigates the ways in which social dialogue can reinforce decent working practices and create inclusive workplaces in the growing gig economy, putting forward a framework for structured dialogue and collective bargaining among social partners, platforms, and workers. Centred on four major case studies - Germany, Greece, Switzerland, and the UK - the book analyses the key challenges that characterise the varied European landscape of gig economies and workforces. With a particular focus on the hospitality, driving, and food delivery sectors, chapters explore the intersection of social partners' responses and gig workers' capacity to organise and build collective voice. Examining the complicated and overlapping linkages between workers' rights, social protection, social dialogue, and decent work, the book aims to expose, and ultimately put an end to, precariousness and exploitation in the context of gig labour. Integrating critical theoretical perspectives and methodologies with context-sensitive evidence, this book will be an essential resource for students and scholars of sociology, social policy, labour policy, employment relations, and human resource management. Its examination of timely questions of collective action and social dialogue in the gig economy will also appeal to activists, journalists, social partners, and policymakers.

This book is about the philosophy of de-extinction. To make an extinct species 'de-extinct' is to resurrect it by creating new organisms of the same, or similar, appearance and genetics. The book describes current attempts to resurrect three species, the aurochs, woolly mammoth and passenger pigeon. It then investigates two major philosophical questions such projects throw up. These are the Authenticity Question-'will the products of de-extinction be authentic members of the original species?'-and the Ethical Question-'is de-extinction something that should be done?' The book surveys and critically evaluates a raft of arguments for and against the authenticity or de-extinct organisms, and for and against the ethical legitimacy of de-extinction. It concludes, first, that authentic de-extinctions are actually possible, and second, that de-extinction can potentially be ethically legitimate, especially when deployed as part of a 'freeze now and resurrect later' conservation strategy.

In January 1998 a massive ice storm descended on New York, New England, and eastern Canada. It crushed power grids from the Great Lakes to the North Atlantic, forcing thousands of people into public shelters and leaving millions of others in their homes without electricity. In this riveting book Stephen Doheny-Farina presents an insider's account of these events, describing the destruction of the electric network in his own village and the emergence of the face-to-face interactions that took its place. His stories examine the impact of electronic communications on community, illuminating the relationship between electronic and human connections and between networks and neighborhoods, and exploring why and how media portrayals of disasters can distort authentic experience. Doheny-Farina begins by discussing the disaster and tracing the origins of the storm. He then goes back two hundred years to tell how this particular electric grid was built, showing us the sacrifices people made to create the grids that (usually) connect us to one another. Today's power grid, says Doheny-Farina, has become more vulnerable than we realize, as demand begins to outstrip capacity in urban centers around the nation. His book reminds us what those grids mean-both positively and negatively-to our electronically saturated lives.

Robert Grosseteste (1168/75-1253), Bishop of Lincoln from 1235-1253, is widely recognized as one of the key intellectual figures of medieval England and as a trailblazer in the history of scientific methodology. Few of his numerous philosophical and scientific writings circulated as widely as the Compotus, a treatise on time reckoning and calendrical astronomy apparently written during a period of study in Paris in the 1220s. Besides its strong and long-lasting influence on later writers, Grossteste's Compotus is particularly noteworthy for its innovatory approach to the theory and practice of the ecclesiastical calendar-a subject of essential importance to the life of the Latin Church. Confronting traditional computistical doctrines with the lessons learned from Graeco-Arabic astronomy, Grosseteste offered his readers a critical and reform-oriented take on the discipline, in which he proposed a specific version of the Islamic lunar as a substitute for the failing nineteen-year cycle the Church still employed to calculate the date of Easter. This new critical edition of Grosseteste's Compotus contains the Latin text with an en-face English translation. It is flanked by an extensive introduction and chapter commentary, which will provide valuable new insights into the text's purpose and disciplinary background, its date and biographical context, its sources, as well as its reception in later centuries.

Over the last century, the industrialization of agriculture and processing technologies have made food abundant and relatively inexpensive for much of the world's population. Simultaneously, pesticides, nitrates, and other technological innovations intended to improve the food supply's productivity and safety have generated new, often poorly understood risks for consumers and the environment. From the proliferation of synthetic additives to the threat posed by antibiotic-resistant bacteria, the chapters in Risk on the Table zero in on key historical cases in North America and Europe that illuminate the history of food safety, highlighting the powerful tensions that exists among scientific understandings of risk, policymakers' decisions, and cultural notions of "pure" food.

The creation of a new public realm through the use of the Internet and ICT may positively promote political liberties and freedom of speech, but could also threaten the political and public autonomy of the individual. Human Rights and the Impact of ICT in the Public Sphere: Participation, Democracy, and Political Autonomy focuses on the new technological era as an innovative way to initiate democratic dialogue, but one that can also endanger individual rights to freedom, privacy, and autonomy. This reference book focuses on the new opportunities technology offers for political expression and will be of use to both academic and legal audiences, including academics, students, independent authorities, legislative bodies, and lawyers.

When the new medium of CD-ROMs emerged, industry figures and critics alike proclaimed their virtually unlimited potential. Adapting material from well-established media like television and film, CD-ROMs have quickly transformed genres such as science fiction and horror. At the same time, the realities of actual CD-ROMs often fall short of their utopian visions.

On a Silver Platter marks a "coming of age" for CD-ROMs as a commercially and aesthetically significant medium demanding critical attention. Greg Smith brings together media scholars such as Lisa Cartwright, Henry Jenkins, Janet Murray, and Scott Bukatman to analyze how CD-ROMs offer alternatives to familiar places--to museums, to cities, and especially to classrooms. Examining specific CD-ROM titles, including, Sim City, Civilization, and Phantasmagoria, the contributors argue that CD-ROMs are complex texts worthy of close consideration, both for how they have changed our understanding of space and genre, and for how they will impact the development of future media.

By examining particular CD-ROM texts and contexts, On a Silver Platter probes this new medium for insight and understanding into the current state of multimedia and into the future of technology.

This volume covers invited papers presented during the La Rabida 2015 International Scientific Meeting on Nuclear Physics, which can be considered heir of a well known series of triennial international summer schools on Nuclear Physics organized from 1982 till 2003 by the Basic Nuclear Physics group in the University of Sevilla. The La Rabida 2015 meeting offered to graduate students and young researchers a broad view of the field of Nuclear Physics. The first invited speaker presented the state-of-the-art of Relativistic Mean Field calculations. The second set of notes covers selected topics in gamma ray spectroscopy with exotic nuclei. The third speaker presented an introduction to the subject of severe accidents in nuclear power plants. In the fourth set of notes, the author illustrated how to use laser spectroscopy to determine very important observables of atomic nuclei. The fifth speaker devoted its notes to explain several aspects of neutrino physics. Finally, the sixth speaker presented an overview of nuclear medicine and radiodiagnostic. In addition to this, the inclusion of the posters and seminars presented by the students gives a fresh and ample perspective on the many different problems of interest nowadays for the Nuclear Physics community.

The Internet Revolution in the Sciences and Humanities takes a new look at C.P. Snow's distinction between the two cultures, a distinction that provides the driving force for a book that contends that the Internet revolution has sown the seeds for transformative changes in both the sciences and the humanities. It is because of this common situation that the humanities can learn from the sciences, as well as the sciences from the humanities, in matters central to both: generating, evaluating, and communicating knowledge on the Internet. In a succession of chapters, the authors deal with the state of the art in web-based journal articles and books, web sites, peer review, and post-publication review. In the final chapter, they address the obstacles the academy and scientific organizations face in taking full advantage of the Internet: outmoded tenure and promotion procedures, the cost of open access, and restrictive patent and copyright law. They also argue that overcoming these obstacles does not require revolutionary institutional change. In their view, change must be incremental, making use of the powers and prerogatives scientific and academic organizations already have.

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. The book shows how technological development has shaped, and been shaped by, the society in which it occurred.

We are now entering an era where the human world assumes recognition of itself as data. Much of humanity's basis for existence is becoming subordinate to software processes that tabulate, index, and sort the relations that comprise what we perceive as reality. The acceleration of data collection threatens to relinquish ephemeral modes of representation to ceaseless processes of computation. This situation compels the human world to form relations with non-human agencies, to establish exchanges with software processes in order to allow a profound upgrade of our own ontological understanding. By mediating with a higher intelligence, we may be able to rediscover the inner logic of the age of intelligent machines. In The End of the Future, Stephanie Polsky conceives an understanding of the digital through its dynamic intersection with the advent and development of the nation-state, race, colonization, navigational warfare, mercantilism, and capitalism, and the mathematical sciences over the past five centuries, the era during which the world became "modern." The book animates the twenty-first century as an era in which the screen has split off from itself and proliferated onto multiple surfaces, allowing an inverted image of totalitarianism to flash up and be altered to support our present condition of binary apperception. It progresses through a recognition of atomized political power, whose authority lies in the control not of the means of production, but of information, and in which digital media now serves to legitimize and promote a customized micropolitics of identity management. On this new apostolate plane, humanity may be able to shape a new world in which each human soul is captured and reproduced as an autonomous individual bearing affects and identities. The digital infrastructure of the twenty-first century makes it possible for power to operate through an esoteric mathematical means, and for factual material to be manipulated in the interest of advancing the means of control. This volume travels a course from Elizabethan England, to North American slavery, through cybernetic Social Engineering, Cold War counterinsurgency, and the (neo)libertarianism of Silicon Valley in order to arrive at a place where an organizing intelligence that started from an ambition to resourcefully manipulate physical bodies has ended with their profound neutralization.

Although enormous industrial advances were made in the USSR, the country still lagged behind the West in the post-industrial age. What the Soviets could not build or manufacture, they had to get from the West. The final outcome was a culture developed in which there was no regard for consumerism and no respect for the environment. The author traces the development of the Soviet malaise, but warns that a future authoritarian regime could still revive the technological race. Conversely, he also replies to the academic debate on the excesses of modern technology in the West, with a sharp criticism of feminist and post-modernist perspectives.

Modern thought on economics and technology is no less magical than the world views of non-modern peoples. This book reveals how our ideas about growth and progress ignore how money and machines throughout history have been used to exploit less affluent parts of world society. The argument critically explores a middle ground between Marxist political ecology and Actor-Network Theory.

This volume deals with the role and impact of technology on the economy and society. The papers on corporate dimensions address the impact of patents, determinants of innovative activities, differential behaviour of multinationals, industrial groups and other firms with regard to innovations and technology. In contrast, the papers on social dimensions chiefly deal with the role of technology in reducing inequality. The majority of the papers employ econometric techniques and other statistical methods, and many are based on primary data. The studies emphasise the importance of innovations (especially patents) and human capital in influencing productivity across Indian states, the significance of patenting in determining the efficiency of firms, the role of business groups in promoting innovations, differences in the technological characteristics of multinational and domestic firms, and how mergers and acquisitions can promote R&D. The papers on social dimensions analyse how innovative activities can shape employment, the impact of technology on poverty, the socioeconomic characteristics of mobile phone ownerships, use of information and communications technologies at educational institutions, and the influence of Synchronous Technologies in reducing access to teaching programmes. The studies show that those Indian states that have invested in human capital and technology experienced higher labour productivity. Further, the studies establish a positive correlation between R&D spending and employment. Lastly, they demonstrate that the adoption of agriculture-related technologies can have a significant impact on rural poverty and consumption expenditures.