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Books > Science & Mathematics > Science: general issues
Artificial intelligence (AI) is often discussed as something extraordinary, a dream-or a nightmare-that awakens metaphysical questions on human life. Yet far from a distant technology of the future, the true power of AI lies in its subtle revolution of ordinary life. From voice assistants like Siri to natural language processors, AI technologies use cultural biases and modern psychology to fit specific characteristics of how users perceive and navigate the external world, thereby projecting the illusion of intelligence. Integrating media studies, science and technology studies, and social psychology, Deceitful Media examines the rise of artificial intelligence throughout history and exposes the very human fallacies behind this technology. Focusing specifically on communicative AIs, Natale argues that what we call "AI" is not a form of intelligence but rather a reflection of the human user. Using the term "banal deception," he reveals that deception forms the basis of all human-computer interactions rooted in AI technologies, as technologies like voice assistants utilize the dynamics of projection and stereotyping as a means for aligning with our existing habits and social conventions. By exploiting the human instinct to connect, AI reveals our collective vulnerabilities to deception, showing that what machines are primarily changing is not other technology but ourselves as humans. Deceitful Media illustrates how AI has continued a tradition of technologies that mobilize our liability to deception and shows that only by better understanding our vulnerabilities to deception can we become more sophisticated consumers of interactive media.
The powerful potential of digital media to engage citizens in political actions has now crossed our news screens many times. But scholarly focus has tended to be on "networked," anti-institutional forms of collective action, to the neglect of advocacy and service organizations. This book investigates the changing fortunes of the citizen-civil society relationship by exploring how social changes and innovations in communication technology are transforming the information expectations and preferences of many citizens, especially young citizens. In doing so, it is the first work to bring together theories of civic identity change with research on civic organizations. Specifically, it argues that a shift in "information styles" may help to explain the disjuncture felt by many young people when it comes to institutional participation and politics. The book theorizes two paradigms of information style: a dutiful style, which was rooted in the society, communication system and citizen norms of the modern era, and an actualizing style, which constitutes the set of information practices and expectations of the young citizens of late modernity for whom interactive digital media are the norm. Hypothesizing that civil society institutions have difficulty adapting to the norms and practices of the actualizing information style, two empirical studies apply the dutiful/actualizing framework to innovative content analyses of organizations' online communications-on their websites, and through Facebook. Results demonstrate that with intriguing exceptions, most major civil society organizations use digital media more in line with dutiful information norms than actualizing ones: they tend to broadcast strategic messages to an audience of receivers, rather than encouraging participation or exchange among an active set of participants. The book concludes with a discussion of the tensions inherent in bureaucratic organizations trying to adapt to an actualizing information style, and recommendations for how they may more successfully do so.
The emergence of Shaken Baby Syndrome (SBS) presents an object lesson in the dangers that lie at the intersection of science and criminal law. As often occurs in the context of scientific knowledge, understandings of SBS have evolved. We now know that the diagnostic triad alone does not prove beyond a reasonable doubt that an infant was abused, or that the last person with the baby was responsible for the babys condition. Nevertheless, our legal system has failed to absorb this new consensus. As a result, innocent parents and caregivers remain incarcerated and, perhaps more perplexingly, triad-only prosecutions continue even to this day. Flawed Convictions: Shaken Baby Syndrome and the Inertia of Injustice is the first book to survey the scientific, cultural, and legal history of Shaken Baby Syndrome from inception to formal dissolution. It exposes extraordinary failings in the criminal justice systems treatment of what is, in essence, a medical diagnosis of murder. The story of SBS highlights fundamental inadequacies in the legal response to science dependent prosecution. A proposed restructuring of the law contends with the uncertainty of scientific knowledge.
Since the first publication of this definitive work nearly 40 years ago, this fourth edition has been completely rewritten. Crystallization is used at some stage in nearly all process
industries as a method of production, purification or recovery of
solid materials.
This is the fifth volume of "Advances in Sonochemistry" the first
having been published in 1990. The definition of sonochemistry has
developed to include not only the ways in which ultrsound has been
harnessed to effect chemistry but also its uses in material
processing. Subjects included range from chemical dosimetry to
ultrasound in microbiology to ultrasound in the extraction of plant
materials and in leather technology.
An examination of the ways that digital technologies play an increasingly important role in the lives of precarious workers, far beyond the gig economy apps like Uber and Lyft. Over the past three decades, digital technologies like smartphones and laptops have transformed the way we work in the US. At the same time, workers at both ends of the income ladder have experienced rising levels of job insecurity and anxiety about their economic futures. In Left to Our Own Devices, Julia Ticona explores the ways that workers use their digital technologies to navigate insecure and flexible labor markets. Through 100 interviews with high and low-wage precarious workers across the US, she explores the surprisingly similar "digital hustles" they use to find work and maintain a sense of dignity and identity. Ticona then reveals how the digital hustle ultimately reproduces inequalities between workers at either end of polarized labor markets. A moving and accessible look at the intimate consequences of contemporary capitalism, Left to Our Own Devices will be of interest to sociologists, communication and media studies scholars, as well as a general audience of readers interested in digital technologies, inequality, and the future of work in the US.
The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century is the first collective critical study of this important period in intellectual history. The volume is divided into four parts. The first part explores individual philosophers, including Fichte, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Marx, and Nietzsche, amongst other great thinkers of the period. The second addresses key philosophical movements: Idealism, Romanticism, Neo-Kantianism, and Existentialism. The essays in the third part engage with different areas of philosophy that received particular attention at this time, including philosophy of nature, philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, philosophy of history, and hermeneutics. Finally, the contributors turn to discuss central philosophical topics, from skepticism to mat-erialism, from dialectics to ideas of historical and cultural Otherness, and from the reception of antiquity to atheism. Written by a team of leading experts, this Handbook will be an essential resource for anyone working in the area and will lead the direction of future research.
Though many separation processes are available for use in todays analytical laboratory, chromatographic methods are the most widely used. The applications of chromatography have grown explosively in the last four decades, owing to the development of new techniques and to the expanding need of scientists for better methods of separating complex mixtures. With its comprehensive, unified approach, this book will greatly assist the novice in need of a reference to chromatographic techniques, as well as the specialist suddenly faced with the need to switch from one technique to another.
This book is meant to be a companion volume for the ACS Symposium Series Book entitled Nuts and Bolts of Chemical Education Research. In the Nuts and Bolts book (edited by Diane M. Bunce and Renee Cole), readers were presented with information on how to conduct quality chemical education research. In the Myth book, exemplars of chemical education research are featured. In the cases where the chapter in the book is describing research that has already been published (typically in the Journal of Chemical Education), additional information is provided either in terms of research questions investigated that were not reported in the published article or background information on decisions made in the research that helped the investigation. The main focus of this type of discussion is to engage the reader in the reality of doing chemical education research including a discussion of the authors' motivation. It is expected that these two books could be used as textbooks for graduate chemical education courses showing how to do chemical education research and then providing examples of quality research.
Dalton's theory of the atom is generally considered to be what made
the atom a scientifically fruitful concept in chemistry. To be
sure, by Dalton's time the atom had already had a two-millenium
history as a philosophical idea, and corpuscular thought had long
been viable in natural philosophy (that is, in what we would today
call physics).
Inspired by the opportunities and challenges presented by rapid advances in the fields of retrieval of chemical and other scientific information, several speakers presented at a symposium, The History of the Future of Chemical Information, on Aug. 20, 2012, at the 244th Meeting of the American Chemical Society in Philadelphia, PA. Storage and retrieval is of undeniable value to the conduct of chemical research. The participants believe that past practices in this field have not only contributed to the increasingly rapid evolution of the field but continue to do so, hence the somewhat unusual title. Even with archival access to several of the presentations, a number of the presenters felt that broader access to this information is of value. Thus, the presenters decided to create an ACS Symposium book based on the topic, with the conviction that it would be valuable to chemists of all disciplines. The past is a moving target depending on the vagaries of technology, economics, politics and how researchers and professionals choose to build on it. The aim of The History of the Future of Chemical Information is to critically examine trajectories in chemistry, information and communication as determined by the authors in the light of current and possible future practices of the chemical information profession. Along with some additional areas primarily related to present and future directions, this collection contains most of the topics covered in the meeting symposium. Most of the original authors agreed to write chapters for this book. Much of the historical and even current material is scattered throughout the literature so the authors strived to gather this information into a discrete source. Faced with the rapid evolution of such aspects as mobile access to information, cloud computing, and public resource production, this book will be not only of interest but provide valuable insight to this rapidly evolving field, both to practitioners within the field of chemical information and chemists everywhere whose need for current and accurate information on chemistry and related fields is increasingly important.
Students taught with inquiry-based methods have been shown to make significant progress in their ability to formulate hypotheses, make proper assumptions, design and execute investigations, understand variables, record data, and synthesize new knowledge. are taught with it. This text presents a series of experiments that are intended to serve as the solid basis for a first-year chemistry or physical sciences course, using an inquiry based approach. Each provides: 1)instructions for an experiment; 2) in-depth teachers notes and 3) a sample lab report.
Tools of Chemistry Education Research meets the current need for information on more in-depth resources for those interested in doing chemistry education research. Renowned chemists Diane M. Bunce and Renee S. Cole present this volume as a continuation of the dialogue started in their previous work, Nuts and Bolts of Chemical Education Research. With both volumes, new and experienced researchers will now have a place to start as they consider new research projects in chemistry education. Tools of Chemistry Education Research brings together a group of talented researchers to share their insights and expertise with the broader community. The volume features the contributions of both early career and more established chemistry education researchers, so as to promote the growth and expansion of chemistry education. Drawing on the expertise and insights of junior faculty and more experienced researchers, each author offers unique insights that promise to benefit other practitioners in chemistry education research.
In recent decades there has been an explosion in work in the social and physical sciences describing the similarities between human and nonhuman as well as human and non-animal thinking. This work has explicitly decentered the brain as the sole, self-contained space of thought, and it has found thinking to be an activity that operates not only across bodies but also across bodily or cellular membranes, as well as multifaceted organic and inorganic environments. For example, researchers have looked at the replication and spread of slime molds (playfully asking what would happen if they colonized the earth) to suggest that they exhibit 'smart behavior' in the way they move as a potential way of considering the spread of disease across the globe. Other scholars have applied this model of non-human thought to the reach of data mining and global surveillance. In The Biopolitics of Alphabets and Embryos, Ruth Miller argues that these types of phenomena are also useful models for thinking about the growth, reproduction, and spread of political thought and democratic processes. Giving slime, data and unbounded entities their political dues, Miller stresses their thinking power and political significance and thus challenges the anthropocentrism of mainstream democratic theories. Miller emphasizes the non-human as highly organized, systemic and productive of democratic growth and replication. She examines developments such as global surveillance, embryonic stem cell research, and cloning, which have been characterized as threats to the privacy, dignity, and integrity of the rational, maximizing and freedom-loving democratic citizen. By shifting her level of analysis from the politics of self-determining subjects to the realm of material environments and information systems, Miller asks what might happen if these alternative, nonhuman thought processes become the normative thought processes of democratic engagement.
Three-fourths of scientific research in the United States is funded
by special interests. Many of these groups have specific practical
goals, such as developing pharmaceuticals or establishing that a
pollutant causes only minimal harm. For groups with financial
conflicts of interest, their scientific findings often can be
deeply flawed.
Bishop Harvey Spencer never thought he'd witness a pandemic-just as he never expected to see the election of a Black president, the election of a female vice president (Black or otherwise), or an insurrection. But all of those things have happened, and our lives have been forever altered. In this book, he seeks to discover what God is trying to reveal to us by letting COVID-19 run rampant. By studying the Bible, he discovered it is not silent when it comes to fighting an infectious disease. He answers questions such as: - How did ancient Israel fight the spread of another infectious disease-leprosy? - What does the Bible tell us about quarantining individuals who are sick or may be sick? - Why do some elected officials continue to display a lack of leadership amid the pandemic? The author also examines what the Bible says about using face coverings, what the world has done to fight other outbreaks of disease, and similarities between COVID-19 and other deadly viruses. Get simple, practical explanations from the Bible that will help you understand the spread of COVID-19-and how to protect yourself-with A Biblical Response to COVID-19.
For modern scientists, history often starts with last week's
journals and is regarded as largely a quaint interest compared with
the advances of today. However, this book makes the case that,
measured by major advances, the greatest decade in the history of
brain studies was mid-twentieth century, especially the 1950s. The
first to focus on worldwide contributions in this period, the book
ranges through dozens of astonishing discoveries at all levels of
the brain, from DNA (Watson and Crick), through growth factors
(Hamburger and Levi-Montalcini), excitability (Hodgkin and Huxley),
synapses (Katz and Eccles), dopamine and Parkinson's (Carlsson),
visual processing (Hartline and Kuffler), the cortical column
(Mountcastle), reticular activating system (Morruzzi and Magoun)
and REM sleep (Aserinsky), to stress (Selye), learning (Hebb) and
memory (HM and Milner). The clinical fields are also covered, from
Cushing and Penfield, psychosurgery and brain energy metabolism
(Kety), to most of the major psychoactive drugs in use today
(beginning with Delay and Deniker), and much more.
Get the answers you need at your fingertips faster than any other source. Success in Physics is critical when entering the growing fields of technology, computer science and engineering that will support our future progress and innovation with breakthroughs and advances. To help retain the facts, equations and concepts essential to success in class and beyond, these 6 laminated pages can be referenced quickly and easily while studying, as a refresher before exams or even as a desktop reference beyond school. Expertly written by author, editor and professor Brett Kaabel PhD, and designed for quick use and high retention. Be sure to get our original Physics guide and Physics 2 for more complete coverage and better grades for an unmatched value. 6 page laminated guide includes: Introduction, Constants & Definitions Classical Mechanics Kinematics, Newton's Laws Work & Kinetic Energy, Potential Energy (U) Conservation of Energy, Momentum Simple Harmonic Motion (SHM) Gravitation Thermodynamics Temperature Scales Zeroth Law, First Law & Second Law of Thermodynamics Thermal Properties of Systems Kinetic Theory of Gasses Waves Types of Waves Transverse vs. Longitudinal Waves Wave Equation Electromagnetism Electric Charge, Electric Field Magnetic Field, Magnetic Fluz Gauss's Law for Magnetism Faraday's Law of Induction Electromagnetic Waves, Electric Circuits Special Relativity Einstein's Postulates, Time Dilation Length Contraction Lorentz Transformation, Velocity Transformation Relativistic Doppler Effect Relativistic Energy & Momentum Quantum Mechanics Quantized Atomic Energy Levels Nuclear Physics Atoms, Nuclei, Nuclear Forces Radioactivity, Nuclear Reactions Force Carriers
This book is a unique introduction to graph theory, written by one of its founding fathers. It is not intended as a comprehensive treatise, but rather as an account of those parts of the theory that have been of special interest to the author. Professor Tutte details his experiences in the area, and provides a fascinating insight into the processes leading to his proofs.
Professors and research advisors have always endeavored to make the opportunity to gain new knowledge available to their students. However, new knowledge takes different forms. From a student perspective, it comes from reading textbooks and primary literature or attending classes and seminars. Professors share in these activities with their students, but they know that physically taking part in the acquisition of new knowledge through active research is where the true excitement begins. For many, if not all, faculty members research is the source of passion for chemistry, and sharing it with a rising generation of chemists often comprises a substantial part of the decision to pursue a career in the field of undergraduate education. These chapters and additional ones provide starting points for developing such a culture at the department level. In several cases the starting point is redesigning introductory or research methods courses to place a stronger emphasis on authentic research and its associated skills. In other cases the establishment of a thriving research group by one faculty member is the catalyst for initiating the departmental transformation. There are also several examples of how to set up an undergraduate research group in departments that place a heavy emphasis on research, and those that place less emphasis on research. Many of these offer roadmaps for developing interdisciplinary research groups or translating resource-intensive graduate-level research to an environment that is resource-restrictive. In still other cases the research has an experiential learning component. For many of the above examples the departmental/institutional role is not always obvious and may not be influential or important. This is a reminder that undergraduate research need not be "institutional" to be successful.
This hands-on guide is primarily intended to be used in
undergraduate laboratories in the physical sciences and
engineering. It assumes no prior knowledge of statistics. It
introduces the necessary concepts where needed, with key points
illustrated with worked examples and graphic illustrations. In
contrast to traditional mathematical treatments it uses a
combination of spreadsheet and calculus-based approaches, suitable
as a quick and easy on-the-spot reference. The emphasis throughout
is on practical strategies to be adopted in the laboratory.
For a decade, Ecco has published the most outstanding science writing in America, collected in highly acclaimed annual volumes edited by some of the most impressive and most important names in science and science writing today: James Gleick, Timothy Ferris, Matt Ridley, Oliver Sacks, Dava Sobel, Alan Lightman, Atul Gawande, Gina Kolata, Sylvia Nasar, and Natalie Angier. Now series editor Jesse Cohen invites the previous guest editors to select their favorite essays for this one-of-a-kind anthology. The result is an outstanding compendium--the best science writing of the new millennium, featuring an introduction by the series' 2010 editor and "New York Times" bestselling author of "How Doctors Think," Jerome Groopman.
The interactions of microbes with surfaces are important to many
natural and engineered processes, affecting a wide range of
applications from decontamination of surfaces or drinking water,
prevention of microbial colonization of biomaterials, and bacterial
processes in the environment. Therefore, there is great interest in
understanding the fundamental behavior of microbes at surfaces.
Topics are included that address interactions of cells with a
number of surfaces for antifouling and microbial cell-based sensor
applications; mechanistic studies of antimicrobial peptides and
quorum sensing; exploration of experimental and theoretical models
of a cell surface; cell surface display of peptides and enzymes as
biofabrication techniques; the fate and transport of bacteria in
the natural environment, as well as new experimental tools or
modeling techniques to study interactions at the microbial
surface.
Early in the Covid-19 pandemic, Salim S. Abdool Karim was catapulted into a prominent position in the media and on television as the face of South African science in the country's response to the pandemic. Up to that point, his groundbreaking research on AIDS had garnered many awards, leading to his recognition as one of the world’s leading epidemiologists, making him ideally positioned to take the scientific lead in the Covid-19 response. Standing Up for Science is Abdool Karim’s personal, behind-the-scenes account of the first three years of the Covid-19 pandemic. It is inspiring and informative, shedding light on the difficulties in providing scientific advice, on the international co-operation that was integral to responding to the pandemic, as well as giving insight to some of the controversies in the science-to-policy process, and drawing lessons from Covid-19 to prepare for future pandemics. Beyond the recent events in which the story is grounded, the book is an ode to the value of science and its power to help us tackle some of the world's biggest problems.
When we think of yoga today, we envision spandex-clad, perspiring, toned people brought together in a room filled with yoga mats and engaged in a fitness ritual set apart from day-to-day life. Their aim is to enhance something they all deem sacred: their bodies. In Selling Yoga, Andrea Jain looks at the development of modern, popular yoga and suggests that its practitioners are strategic participants in the contemporary global market for self-developmental products and services. Pre-colonial and early modern yoga systems comprise esoteric techniques that aim at transcendent states of detachment from ordinary and conventional life. In contrast, contemporary popularized yoga aims at immediate self-development through the enhancement of the mind-body complex according to dominant health and fitness paradigms. Postural yoga is prescribed not as an all-encompassing worldview or system of practice, but as one part of self-development that provides increased beauty and flexibility as well as reduced stress; it can be combined with various other worldviews and practices available in the global marketplace. However, Jain argues that yoga systems cannot be reduced to mere commodities-that yoga is, in fact, a religion of consumer culture. It functions as a social ritual that removes individuals from everyday life for the sake of self-development. Yoga brands destabilize the basic utility of yoga commodities and assign to them new meanings that represent the fulfillment of self-developmental needs deemed sacred in contemporary consumer culture. |
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