An examination of telepresence technologies through the lens of contemporary artistic experiments, from early video art through current "drone vision" works. "Telepresence" allows us to feel present-through vision, hearing, and even touch-at a remote location by means of real-time communication technology. Networked devices such as video cameras and telerobots extend our corporeal agency into distant spaces. In Here/There, Kris Paulsen examines telepresence technologies through the lens of contemporary artistic experiments, from early video art through current "drone vision" works. Paulsen traces an arc of increasing interactivity, as video screens became spaces for communication and physical, tactile intervention. She explores the work of artists who took up these technological tools and questioned the aesthetic, social, and ethical stakes of media that allow us to manipulate and affect far-off environments and other people-to touch, metaphorically and literally, those who cannot touch us back. Paulsen examines 1970s video artworks by Vito Acconci and Joan Jonas, live satellite performance projects by Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz, and CCTV installations by Chris Burden. These early works, she argues, can help us make sense of the expansion of our senses by technologies that privilege real time over real space and model strategies for engagement and interaction with mediated others. They establish a political, aesthetic, and technological history for later works using cable TV infrastructures and the World Wide Web, including telerobotic works by Ken Goldberg and Wafaa Bilal and artworks about military drones by Trevor Paglen, Omar Fast, Hito Steyerl, and others. These works become a meeting place for here and there.

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.

From the heliocentric controversy and evolution, to debates on biotechnology and the environment, this book offers a balanced introduction to the key issues in science and religion.
A balanced, introductory textbook which fully spans the interface between science and religion, and includes illustrations of scientific concepts throughout
Explores key historical issues, including the heliocentric controversy, and evolution, but also topics of current importance, such as biotechnology and environmental issues
Appendices include a wide range of biblical readings; excerpts from early philosophers, theologians and scientists, including Aristotle, Aquinas, Hume, Kant, Galileo, Newton, and Darwin; and short works from twentieth and twenty-first century scientists and theologians
Accessibly structured in to sections covering cosmology, evolution, and ethics in a scientific age
Provides significant coverage of scientific information and balanced explanations of the key debates for introductory students

This book addresses questions surrounding the feasibility of a global approach to ethical governance of science and technology. The emergence and rapid spread of nanotechnology offers a test case for how the world might act when confronted with a technology that could transform the global economy and provide solutions to issues such as pollution, while potentially creating new environmental and health risks. The author compares ethical issues identified by stakeholders in China and the EU about the rapid introduction of this potentially transformative technology - a fitting framework for an exploration of global agency. The study explores the discourse ethics and participatory Technology Assessment (pTA) inspired by the work of Jurgen Habermas to argue that different views can be universally recognized and agreed upon, perhaps within an ideal global community of communication. The book offers a developed discourse model, utilizing virtue ethics as well as the work of Taylor, Beck, Korsgaard and others on identity formation, as a way forward in the context of global ethics. The author seeks to develop new vocabularies of comparison, to discover shared aspects of identity and to achieve, hopefully, an `intercultural personhood' that may lead to a global ethics. The book offers a useful guide for researchers on methods for advancing societal understanding of science and technology. The author addresses a broad audience, from philosophers, ethicists and scientists, to the interested general reader. For the layperson, one chapter surveys nanoissues as depicted in fiction and another offers a view of how an ordinary citizen can act as a global agent of change in ethics.

Dr Nick Hawkes gathers evidence from science, history, and mathematics to seek out the signature of God. By surveying the various fields of study, he gathers a mass of evidence, concluding that faith in God is reasonable and that the evidence invites it. Addressing the big questions of origins and meaning, Hawkes considers the cosmos and the arguments for a Creator behind creation. He looks at biology, and the ideas of Darwin and Dr Richard Dawkins. He examines the significance of suffering and the phenomenon of mathematics - the code by which we understand how things work. He sifts through history and how it has been 'molded'. He considers the nature of truth, and whether it is ever knowable, and if so how; and he takes a long, hard look at ideas about the afterlife. What we believe is important. It becomes our identity, something we stake our very lives upon. Who Ordered The Universe? is essential reading for those battling with identity and their place in the world. It is the ideal gift for a non-Christian friend.

Mere Science and Christian Faith holds out a vision for how it can lead us more deeply into the conversations around science and faith that confront the church today.

Emerging adults want to believe that science and faith can coexist peacefully, and Greg Cootsona argues that they can. In his book Mere Science and Christian Faith he holds out a vision for the integration of science and faith and how it can lead us more deeply into the conversations that confront the church today.

Many Christians have been brought up under the assumption that mainstream science is incompatible with genuine Christian faith—so when they see compelling evidence for biological evolution, for example, they feel forced to choose between science and their faith. The devastating effects of this dilemma are plain to see, as emerging adults either leave the faith or shut themselves off to the findings of the scientific community. But it’s a false dilemma. In this book, Greg Cootsona argues against the idea that science and faith are inherently antagonistic. We don't have to keep them scrupulously separated—instead, we can bring them into dialogue with one another. Cootsona brings this integration to a number of current topics in science and faith conversations, including hermeneutics, the historical Adam and Eve, cognitive science, and the future of technology. His insights are enhanced by his work with Fuller Seminary's STEAM research project. Emerging adults want to believe that science and faith can coexist peacefully. Mere Science and Christian Faith holds out a vision for how that integration is possible and how it can lead us more deeply into the conversations around science and faith that confront the church today.

What is 'technology'? What does it help us to do? What does it force us to consider about our experience of being in the world? In Challenging the Phenomena of Technology, technology is positioned as an experience with specific features, rather than as a class of objects, and this enables a reflection on the ways in which amateurs and experts interact with the artefacts that all humans rely upon. Using e-readers, such as the Kindle and iPad, as a case study, Hayler argues that the use of technology is both more complicated and more human than public discussion often gives it credit for, forcing us to consider its impacts on perception, cognition, and what it means to know anything at all.

Our computers and mobile devices do wonderful things for us. But they also impose a burden, making it harder for us to focus, do our best work, build strong relationships, and find the depth and fulfillment we crave.

How to solve this problem? "Hamlet's BlackBerry" argues that we just need a new way of thinking, an everyday philosophy for life with screens. William Powers sets out to solve what he calls the conundrum of connectedness. Reaching into the past--using his own life as laboratory and object lesson--he draws on some of history's most brilliant thinkers, from Plato to Shakespeare to Thoreau, to demonstrate that digital connectedness serves us best when it's balanced by its opposite, "disconnectedness." Lively, original, and entertaining, "Hamlet's BlackBerry" will challenge you to rethink your digital life.

This book chronicles the development of electronic literacies through the stories of individuals with varying backgrounds and skills. Authors Cynthia L. Selfe and Gail E. Hawisher employ these stories to begin tracing technological literacy as it has emerged over the last few decades within the United States. They selected 20 case studies from the corpus of more than 350 people who participated in interviews or completed a technological literacy questionnaire during six years of their study. The book is organized into seven chapters that follow the 20 participants in their efforts to acquire varying degrees of technological literacy. Each chapter situates the participants' life-history accounts in the cultural ecology of the time, tracing major political, economic, social, and educational events, factors, and trends that may have influenced--and been influenced by--literacy practices and values. These literacy histories are richly sown with information that can help those in composition and writing studies situate the processes of acquiring the literacies of technology in specific cultural, material, educational, and familial contexts.

These case studies provide initial clues about combinations of factors that affect--and are affected by--technological literacy acquisition and development. The first-hand accounts presented here offer, in abundant detail, everyday literacy experiences that can help educators, parents, policymakers, and writing teachers respond to today's students in more informed ways.

Pandemics, Science and Policy analyses the World Health Organisation's (WHO) management of the 2009 H1N1 Pandemic. Abeysinghe illustrates the ways in which the WHO's account was vulnerable to contestation, and ultimately how uncertain risks can affect policy and action on the global level.

This book provides an accessible and authoritative biography of the Welsh man of science, William Robert Grove. Grove was an important and highly influential figure in Victorian science. His career as both man of science and leading barrister and judge spanned the Victorian age, and he also played a vital role in the movement to reform the Royal Society. This biography will set Grove's career and contributions in context, paying particular attention to the important role of Welsh industrial culture in forming his scientific outlook. The place of science in culture changed radically during the course of the nineteenth century, and Grove himself played a key role in some of those transformations. Looking at his life in science can, however, do more than illuminate an individual scientific career - it can offer a way of gaining new insights into the changing face of Victorian science.

Food fraudsters be warned! Sophisticated science was at the centre of detecting and prosecuting this new crime of food fraud. The ground-breaking case, a first of its kind, needed new sentencing guidelines for judges, new working arrangements for prosecutors and police and an EU-wide agreement on techniques and standards used for prosecution, which were agreed on the hoof in response to a crime detected in over 40 countries. In 2013 thousands of consumers, retailers and food businesses were ripped-off by insiders - thieves who substituted and sold horse-meat in place of beef. They used a web of deception that involved unwitting suppliers passing off their fraudulent produce to some of Britain's largest retailers and international food business. Following so-called Horsegate, the enforcement world had to change. There is now a team focussing on food fraud and a desire to put the perpetrators behind bars. Much tougher sanctions have been introduced with the aim of discouraging such crimes. This book is a timely look at the web of deception and how it can be stopped. Aimed at food enforcement professionals, lay readers with an interest in crime, students studying food fraud, criminology or forensics and anyone who eats food. Once again, life emulated art, this deception mirrors the story of the thief who came to dinner, gained inside knowledge and stole priceless artefacts from the host. So, who will come to dinner next time? This is the second book by the author, a scientist sharing his inside knowledge on this food crime.

A sociotechnical investigation of ubiquitous computing as a research enterprise and as a lived reality. Ubiquitous computing (or ubicomp) is the label for a "third wave" of computing technologies. Following the eras of the mainframe computer and the desktop PC, ubicomp is characterized by small and powerful computing devices that are worn, carried, or embedded in the world around us. The ubicomp research agenda originated at Xerox PARC in the late 1980s; these days, some form of that vision is a reality for the millions of users of Internet-enabled phones, GPS devices, wireless networks, and "smart" domestic appliances. In Divining a Digital Future, computer scientist Paul Dourish and cultural anthropologist Genevieve Bell explore the vision that has driven the ubiquitous computing research program and the contemporary practices that have emerged-both the motivating mythology and the everyday messiness of lived experience. Reflecting the interdisciplinary nature of the authors' collaboration, the book takes seriously the need to understand ubicomp not only technically but also culturally, socially, politically, and economically. Dourish and Bell map the terrain of contemporary ubiquitous computing, in the research community and in daily life; explore dominant narratives in ubicomp around such topics as infrastructure, mobility, privacy, and domesticity; and suggest directions for future investigation, particularly with respect to methodology and conceptual foundations.

Winner, 2012 Sally Hacker Prize, Society for the History of Technology Hotel Dreams is a deeply researched and entertaining account of how the hotel's material world of machines and marble integrated into and shaped the society it served. Molly W. Berger offers a compelling history of the American hotel and how it captured the public's imagination as it came to represent the complex-and often contentious-relationship among luxury, economic development, and the ideals of a democratic society. Berger profiles the country's most prestigious hotels, including Boston's 1829 Tremont, San Francisco's world-famous Palace, and Chicago's enormous Stevens. The fascinating stories behind their design, construction, and marketing reveal in rich detail how these buildings became cultural symbols that shaped the urban landscape.

The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) represents one of the most significant crossroads at which the assumptions and methods of scientific inquiry come into direct contact with-and in many cases conflict with-those of religion. Indeed, at the core of SETI is the same question that motivates many interested in religion: What is the place of humanity in the universe? Both scientists involved with SETI (and in other areas) and those interested in and dedicated to some religious traditions are engaged in contemplating these types of questions, even if their respective approaches and answers differ significantly. This book explores this intersection with a focus on three core points: 1) the relationship between science and religion as it is expressed within the framework of SETI research, 2) the underlying assumptions, many of which are tacitly based upon cultural values common in American society, that have shaped the ways in which SETI researchers have conceptualized the nature of their endeavor and represented ideas about the potential influence contact might have on human civilization, and 3) what sort of empirical evidence we might be able to access as a way of thinking about the social impact that contact with alien intelligence might have for humanity, from both religious and cultural perspectives. The book developed as a result of a course the author teaches at the University of Texas at Austin: Religion, Science, and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.

This study is an in-depth analysis of eight microenterprise projects in India, Bangladesh, Thailand, Peru, Guatemala, Honduras, Ghana and Tanzania. It attempts to describe the effects the different projects had on women's lives and to look at their impacts from the point of view of the women themselves.;The case studies are of projects undertaken by three agencies - ATI, specializing in the business approach; ITDG, specializing in the technological components of development; and UNIFEM, tending to use the community development approach. To the interest provided by such a comparison is added the opportunity of examining not only projects which attempted to achieve their aim through a single-aspect intervention (the "unidimensional" projects) but also those which clustered several interventions (the "multidimensional"). In general, the multidimensional projects achieved greater impacts.

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.

Originally published: Nottingham, England: Inter-Varsity Press, 2009.

Sharing is central to how we live today: it is what we do online; it is a model of economic behaviour; and it is also a type of therapeutic talk. Sharing embodies positive values such as empathy, communication, fairness, openness and equality. The Age of Sharing shows how and when sharing became caring, and explains how its meanings have changed in the digital age. But the word 'sharing' also camouflages commercial or even exploitative relations. Websites say they share data with advertisers, although in reality they sell it, while parts of the sharing economy look a great deal like rental services. Ultimately, it is argued, practices described as sharing and critiques of those practices have common roots. Consequently, the metaphor of sharing now constructs significant swathes of our social practices and provides the grounds for critiquing them; it is a mode of participation in the capitalist order as well as a way of resisting it. Drawing on nineteenth-century literature, Alcoholics Anonymous, the American counterculture, reality TV, hackers, Airbnb, Facebook and more, The Age of Sharing offers a rich account of a complex contemporary keyword. It will appeal to students and scholars of the internet, digital culture and linguistics.

The relationship between infrastructure governance and the ways we read and represent waste systems, examined through three waste tracking and participatory sensing projects. Waste is material information. Landfills are detailed records of everyday consumption and behavior; much of what we know about the distant past we know from discarded objects unearthed by archaeologists and interpreted by historians. And yet the systems and infrastructures that process our waste often remain opaque. In this book, Dietmar Offenhuber examines waste from the perspective of information, considering emerging practices and technologies for making waste systems legible and how the resulting datasets and visualizations shape infrastructure governance. He does so by looking at three waste tracking and participatory sensing projects in Seattle, Sao Paulo, and Boston. Offenhuber expands the notion of urban legibility-the idea that the city can be read like a text-to introduce the concept of infrastructure legibility. He argues that infrastructure governance is enacted through representations of the infrastructural system, and that these representations stem from the different stakeholders' interests, which drive their efforts to make the system legible. The Trash Track project in Seattle used sensor technology to map discarded items through the waste and recycling systems; the Forager project looked at the informal organization processes of waste pickers working for Brazilian recycling cooperatives; and mobile systems designed by the city of Boston allowed residents to report such infrastructure failures as potholes and garbage spills. Through these case studies, Offenhuber outlines an emerging paradigm of infrastructure governance based on a complex negotiation among users, technology, and the city.

Today's digital revolution is a worldwide phenomenon, with profound and often differential implications for communities around the world and their relationships to one another. This book presents a new, explicitly international theory of media ethics, incorporating non-Western perspectives and drawing deeply on both moral philosophy and the philosophy of technology. Clifford Christians develops an ethics grounded in three principles - truth, human dignity, and non-violence - and shows how these principles can be applied across a wide range of cases and domains. The book is a guide for media professionals, scholars, and educators who are concerned with the global ramifications of new technologies and with creating a more just world.

This book examines the emergent and expanding role of technologies that hold both promise and possible peril for transforming the ageing process in this century. It discusses the points and counterpoints of technological advances that would influence a reconstruction of what it means to age when embedded in a post-human vision for a post-biological future. The book presents a provocative interdisciplinary meta-analysis that contrasts paradigms with inflection points, making the case that society has entered a new inflection point, provisionally labeled as Post Ageing. It goes on to discuss the moderate and radical versions of this inflection point and the philosophical issues that need to be addressed with the advent of post ageing activities: postponing and possibly ending ageing, primarily through technological advances. This book will be a valuable resource for professionals who wish to review the continuum of varied constructs and intersects of technologies ranging from those purporting to enhance the activities of daily living in older adults, to those that would enable the older worker to stay competitive in the labor market, to those that propose to extend longevity and ultimately, claim to transcend ageing itself-moving toward a transhumanistic domain and more specifically, a post-ageing inflection point.

Provides exceptional insights and clarity to patterns of order in living things, including the promise of healing and new birth in Christ.