A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY
2042 books about Technology & Engineering and 180
2042 books about Technology & Engineering
180 start with S start with S
180 start with S start with S
Salmon and Acorns Feed Our People
Colonialism, Nature, and Social Action
Kari Marie Norgaard
Rutgers University Press, 2019
Finalist for the 2020 C. Wright Mills Award from the Society for the Study of Social Problems
Since time before memory, large numbers of salmon have made their way up and down the Klamath River. Indigenous management enabled the ecological abundance that formed the basis of capitalist wealth across North America. These activities on the landscape continue today, although they are often the site of intense political struggle. Not only has the magnitude of Native American genocide been of remarkable little sociological focus, the fact that this genocide has been coupled with a reorganization of the natural world represents a substantial theoretical void. Whereas much attention has (rightfully) focused on the structuring of capitalism, racism and patriarchy, few sociologists have attended to the ongoing process of North American colonialism. Salmon and Acorns Feed Our People draws upon nearly two decades of examples and insight from Karuk experiences on the Klamath River to illustrate how the ecological dynamics of settler-colonialism are essential for theorizing gender, race and social power today.
Since time before memory, large numbers of salmon have made their way up and down the Klamath River. Indigenous management enabled the ecological abundance that formed the basis of capitalist wealth across North America. These activities on the landscape continue today, although they are often the site of intense political struggle. Not only has the magnitude of Native American genocide been of remarkable little sociological focus, the fact that this genocide has been coupled with a reorganization of the natural world represents a substantial theoretical void. Whereas much attention has (rightfully) focused on the structuring of capitalism, racism and patriarchy, few sociologists have attended to the ongoing process of North American colonialism. Salmon and Acorns Feed Our People draws upon nearly two decades of examples and insight from Karuk experiences on the Klamath River to illustrate how the ecological dynamics of settler-colonialism are essential for theorizing gender, race and social power today.
[more]
Satellite Communication Systems
B.G. Evans
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 1999
This updated and extended new edition has been compiled from the course material of the highly successful IEE Vacation School of the same name. The vacation school was designed to give a broad introduction to the subject of satellite communications and provide the background knowledge and tools of the trade for those entering the field. The 3rd edition of the book continues this theme and up-to-date information on mobile and personal satellite constellations, navigation and positioning, and military and small satellite systems has been added, as well as a look to future Ka-band multimedia systems. We have also included updated ITU information and sections on history, organisation and the satellite business. The book differs from others on the subject in its pragmatic and engineering-oriented approach. The contributors are all current practitioners from industry or academics specialising in the field.
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Satellite Communications in the 5G Era
Shree Krishna Sharma
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2018
Satellite communications (SatCom) plays a vital role in ensuring seamless access to telecommunications services anytime, and is a viable option for delivering telecommunication services in a wide range of sectors such as aeronautical, military, maritime, rescue and disaster relief. It should be an important component of 5G-and-beyond wireless architectures as it can complement terrestrial telecommunication solutions in various scenarios to provide highly reliable and secure connectivity over a wide geographical area. This book explores promising scenarios for 5G SatCom, novel paradigms for hybrid/integrated satellite-terrestrial integration, and emerging technologies for the next generation of SatCom systems. Topics covered include: Role of SatCom in the 5G Era; 5G satellite use cases and scenarios; SDN-enabled networks, NFV-based scenarios and on-board processing for satellite-terrestrial integration; EHF broadband aeronautical SatCom systems; Next-generation NGSO SatCom systems; Diversity combining and handover techniques for MEO satellites; Non-linear countermeasures for multicarrier satellites; SDN demonstrator for multi-beam satellite precoding; Beam-hopping SatCom systems; Optical on-off keying data links for LEO downlink applications; Ultra-high speed data relay systems; On-board interference detection and localization; Advanced random access schemes for SatCom systems; Interference avoidance, mitigation and dynamic spectrum sharing for hybrid satellite-terrestrial systems; and Two-way satellite relaying.
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Satellite-to-Ground Radiowave Propagation
J.E. Allnutt
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2011
This book is a follow-up to the award-winning first edition and is written as a comprehensive guide for those who need to obtain a working knowledge of radiowave propagation on satellite-to-ground links at frequencies above 1 GHz and as a reference book for experts in the field. To accomplish this, expanded sections of explanatory text, copiously illustrated, enable an undergraduate or non-specialist to grasp the fundamentals involved. An extensive reference list permits the expert to go to the source material should the level of enquiry go beyond the level of this book.
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Saving Seeds, Preserving Taste
Heirloom Seed Savers in Appalachia
Bill Best
Ohio University Press, 2013
The Brown Goose, the White Case Knife, Ora’s Speckled Bean, Radiator Charlie’s Mortgage Lifter—these are just a few of the heirloom fruits and vegetables you’ll encounter in Bill Best’s remarkable history of seed saving and the people who preserve both unique flavors and the Appalachian culture associated with them. As one of the people at the forefront of seed saving and trading for over fifty years, Best has helped preserve numerous varieties of beans, tomatoes, corn, squashes, and other fruits and vegetables, along with the family stories and experiences that are a fundamental part of this world. While corporate agriculture privileges a few flavorless but hardy varieties of daily vegetables, seed savers have worked tirelessly to preserve genetic diversity and the flavors rooted in the Southern Appalachian Mountains—referred to by plant scientists as one of the vegetative wonders of the world.
Saving Seeds, Preserving Taste will introduce readers to the cultural traditions associated with seed saving, as well as the remarkable people who have used grafting practices and hand-by-hand trading to keep alive varieties that would otherwise have been lost. As local efforts to preserve heirloom seeds have become part of a growing national food movement, Appalachian seed savers play a crucial role in providing alternatives to large-scale agriculture and corporate food culture. Part flavor guide, part people’s history, Saving Seeds, Preserving Taste will introduce you to a world you’ve never known—or perhaps remind you of one you remember well from your childhood.
[more]
Saving Seeds, Preserving Taste
Heirloom Seed Savers in Appalachia
Bill Best
Ohio University Press
The Brown Goose, the White Case Knife, Ora’s Speckled Bean, Radiator Charlie’s Mortgage Lifter — these are just a few of the heirloom fruits and vegetables you’ll encounter in Bill Best’s remarkable history of seed saving and the people who preserve both unique flavors and the Appalachian culture associated with them. As one of the people at the forefront of seed saving and trading for over fifty years, Best has helped preserve numerous varieties of beans, tomatoes, corn, squashes, and other fruits and vegetables, along with the family stories and experiences that are a fundamental part of this world. While corporate agriculture privileges a few flavorless but hardy varieties of daily vegetables, seed savers have worked tirelessly to preserve genetic diversity and the flavors rooted in the Southern Appalachian Mountains — referred to by plant scientists as one of the vegetative wonders of the world.
Saving Seeds, Preserving Taste will introduce readers to the cultural traditions associated with seed saving, as well as the remarkable people who have used grafting practices and hand-by-hand trading to keep alive varieties that would otherwise have been lost. As local efforts to preserve heirloom seeds have become part of a growing national food movement, Appalachian seed savers play a crucial role in providing alternatives to large-scale agriculture and corporate food culture. Part flavor guide, part people’s history, Saving Seeds, Preserving Taste will introduce you to a world you’ve never known — or perhaps remind you of one you remember well from your childhood.
Saving Seeds, Preserving Taste will introduce readers to the cultural traditions associated with seed saving, as well as the remarkable people who have used grafting practices and hand-by-hand trading to keep alive varieties that would otherwise have been lost. As local efforts to preserve heirloom seeds have become part of a growing national food movement, Appalachian seed savers play a crucial role in providing alternatives to large-scale agriculture and corporate food culture. Part flavor guide, part people’s history, Saving Seeds, Preserving Taste will introduce you to a world you’ve never known — or perhaps remind you of one you remember well from your childhood.
[more]
Saving the Tropical Forests
Judith Gradwohl and Russell Greenberg
Island Press, 1988
Saving the Tropical Forests is a source book on the causes and effects of tropical deforestation.
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The Scars of Project 459
The Environmental Story of the Lake of the Ozarks
Traci Angel
University of Arkansas Press, 2014
The Scars of Project 459 tells the environmental story of the Lake of the Ozarks, built by the Union Electric Company in 1931. At 55,000 acres, the lake was the biggest manmade lake in the United States at the time of its completion, and it remains the biggest in the Midwest, with 1,100 miles of shoreline in four different Missouri counties. Though created to generate hydroelectric power, not for development, the "Magic Dragon," as it is popularly known because of its serpentine shape, has become a major recreational area. Located in some of the most spectacular Ozark scenery, the giant lake today attracts three million visitors annually and has more than 70,000 homes along its shoreline. Traci Angel shows how the popularity of the Lake of the Ozarks has resulted in major present-day problems, including poor water quality, loss of habitat, and increasing concerns about aging waste-management systems for the homes surrounding the lake. Many in the area, especially business owners whose incomes depend on tourism, resist acknowledging these problems. The Scars of Project 459 aims to make public the challenges facing this important resource and ensure that its future is not to be loved to death.
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Scattering of Electromagnetic Waves by Obstacles
Gerhard Kristensson
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2016
This book is an introduction to some of the most important properties of electromagnetic waves and their interaction with passive materials and scatterers. The main purpose of the book is to give a theoretical treatment of these scattering phenomena, and to illustrate numerical computations of some canonical scattering problems for different geometries and materials. The scattering theory is also important in the theory of passive antennas, and this book gives several examples on this topic.
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Scattering of Wedges and Cones with Impedance Boundary Conditions
Mikhail A. Lyalinov
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2013
This book is a systematic and detailed exposition of different analytical techniques used in studying two of the canonical problems, the wave scattering by wedges or cones with impedance boundary conditions. It is the first reference on novel, highly efficient analytical-numerical approaches for wave diffraction by impedance wedges or cones. This text includes calculations of the diffraction or excitation coefficients, including their uniform versions, for the diffracted waves from the edge of the wedge or from the vertex of the cone; study of the far-field behavior in diffraction by impedance wedges or cones, reflected waves, space waves from the singular points of the boundary (from edges or tips), and surface waves; and the applicability of the reported solution procedures and formulae to existing software packages designed for solving real-world high-frequency problems encountered in antenna, wave propagation, and radar cross section. This book is for researchers in wave phenomena physics, radio, optics and acoustics engineers, applied mathematicians and specialists in mathematical physics and specialists in quantum scattering of many particles.
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Scenarios for a Future Electricity Supply
Cost-optimised variations on supplying Europe and its neighbours with electricity from renewable energies
Gregor Czisch
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2011
This book pursues the fundamental idea of using renewable energies in a rational and economic way in order to develop a climate-friendly electricity supply. As the most cost efficient solution, an electricity network for the whole of Europe and parts of Africa and Asia must be found. The sources of renewable and partly decentralised electricity generation could be connected in a comprehensive power supply to meet the electricity needs of an entire region.
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Scenes of Projection
Recasting the Enlightenment Subject
Jill H. Casid
University of Minnesota Press, 2015
Theorizing vision and power at the intersections of the histories of psychoanalysis, media, scientific method, and colonization, Scenes of Projection poaches the prized instruments at the heart of the so-called scientific revolution: the projecting telescope, camera obscura, magic lantern, solar microscope, and prism. From the beginnings of what is retrospectively enshrined as the origins of the Enlightenment and in the wake of colonization, the scene of projection has functioned as a contraption for creating a fantasy subject of discarnate vision for the exercise of “reason.”
Jill H. Casid demonstrates across a range of sites that the scene of projection is neither a static diagram of power nor a fixed architecture but rather a pedagogical setup that operates as an influencing machine of persistent training. Thinking with queer and feminist art projects that take up old devices for casting an image to reorient this apparatus of power that produces its subject, Scenes of Projection offers a set of theses on the possibilities for felt embodiment out of the damaged and difficult pasts that haunt our present.
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The School of the Americas
Military Training and Political Violence in the Americas
Lesley Gill
Duke University Press, 2004
Located at Fort Benning in Columbus, Georgia, the School of the Americas (soa) is a U.S. Army center that has trained more than sixty thousand soldiers and police, mostly from Latin America, in counterinsurgency and combat-related skills since it was founded in 1946. So widely documented is the participation of the School’s graduates in torture, murder, and political repression throughout Latin America that in 2001 the School officially changed its name to the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation. Lesley Gill goes behind the façade and presents a comprehensive portrait of the School of the Americas. Talking to a retired Colombian general accused by international human rights organizations of terrible crimes, sitting in on classes, accompanying soa students and their families to an upscale local mall, listening to coca farmers in Colombia and Bolivia, conversing with anti-soa activists in the cramped office of the School of the Americas Watch—Gill exposes the School’s institutionalization of state-sponsored violence, the havoc it has wrought in Latin America, and the strategies used by activists seeking to curtail it.
Based on her unprecedented level of access to the School of the Americas, Gill describes the School’s mission and training methods and reveals how its students, alumni, and officers perceive themselves in relation to the dirty wars that have raged across Latin America. Assessing the School’s role in U.S. empire-building, she shows how Latin America’s brightest and most ambitious military officers are indoctrinated into a stark good-versus-evil worldview, seduced by consumer society and the “American dream,” and enlisted as proxies in Washington’s war against drugs and “subversion.”
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Science and Technology Encyclopedia
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press, 2000
Up-to-date, concise, and easy to use, the Science and Technology Encyclopedia is a reliable resource for a wide general readership-from high school students to undergraduates to all those with an interest in the comprehensive array of scientific fields it covers.
It includes:
*More than 6,500 authoritative A-Z entries covering earth and life sciences (including natural history, physics, chemistry, medicine, information technology, and other disciplines)
*Biographical entries for more than 850 famous scientists, detailing their careers and achievements
*Over 20,000 cross-references
*More than 250 detailed illustrations, including schematic diagrams, representational natural history artwork, and technical cutaway diagrams
It includes:
*More than 6,500 authoritative A-Z entries covering earth and life sciences (including natural history, physics, chemistry, medicine, information technology, and other disciplines)
*Biographical entries for more than 850 famous scientists, detailing their careers and achievements
*Over 20,000 cross-references
*More than 250 detailed illustrations, including schematic diagrams, representational natural history artwork, and technical cutaway diagrams
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Science and Technology in Post-Mao China
Denis Fred Simon
Harvard University Press, 1989
Along with the political and economic reforms that have characterized the post-Mao era in China there has been a potentially revolutionary change in Chinese science and technology. Here sixteen scholars examine various facets of the current science and technology scene, comparing it with the past and speculating about future trends.
Two chapters dealing with science under the Nationalists and under Mao are followed by a section of extensive analysis of reforms under Deng Xiaoping, focusing on the organizational system, the use of human resources, and the emerging response to market forces. Chapters dealing with changes in medical care, agriculture, and military research and development demonstrate how these reforms have affected specific areas during the Chinese shift away from Party orthodoxy and Maoist populism toward professional expertise as the guiding principle in science and technology. Three further chapters deal with China’s interface with the world at large in the process of technology transfer.
Both the introductory and concluding chapters describe the tension between the Chinese Communist Party structure, with its inclinations toward strict vertical control, and the scientific and technological community’s need for a free flow of information across organizational, disciplinary, and national boundaries.
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Science and Technology Policy in the United States
Open Systems in Action
Kraemer, Sylvia
Rutgers University Press, 2006
During the latter half of the twentieth century, federal funding in the United States for scientific research and development increased dramatically. Yet despite the infusion of public funds into research centers, the relationship between public policy and research and development remains poorly understood.
How does the federal government attempt to harness scientific knowledge and resources for the nation's economic welfare and competitiveness in the global marketplace? Who makes decisions about controversial scientific experiments, such as genetic engineering and space exploration? Who is held accountable when things go wrong?
In this lucidly-written introduction to the topic, Sylvia Kraemer draws upon her extensive experience in government to develop a useful and powerful framework for thinking about the American approach to shaping and managing scientific innovation. Kraemer suggests that the history of science, technology, and politics is best understood as a negotiation of ongoing tensions between open and closed systems. Open systems depend on universal access to information that is complete, verifiable, and appropriately used. Closed systems, in contrast, are composed of unique and often proprietary features, which are designed to control usage.
From the Constitution's patent clause to current debates over intellectual property, stem cells, and internet regulation, Kraemer shows the promise-as well as the limits-of open systems in advancing scientific progress as well as the nation's economic vitality.
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Science and the American Century
Readings from "Isis"
Edited and with an Introduction by Sally Gregory Kohlstedt and David Kaiser
University of Chicago Press, 2013
The twentieth century was one of astonishing change in science, especially as pursued in the United States. Against a backdrop of dramatic political and economic shifts brought by world wars, intermittent depressions, sporadic and occasionally massive increases in funding, and expanding private patronage, this scientific work fundamentally reshaped everyday life. Science and the American Century offers some of the most significant contributions to the study of the history of science, technology, and medicine during the twentieth century, all drawn from the pages of the journal Isis.
Fourteen essays from leading scholars are grouped into three sections, each presented in roughly chronological order. The first section charts several ways in which our knowledge of nature was cultivated, revealing how scientific practitioners and the public alike grappled with definitions of the “natural” as they absorbed and refracted global information. The essays in the second section investigate the changing attitudes and fortunes of scientists during and after World War II. The final section documents the intricate ways that science, as it advanced, became intertwined with social policies and the law.
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Science and the Soviet Social Order
Loren Graham
Harvard University Press, 1990
Within two generations the Soviet Union has made the transition from a peasant society to an industrialized superpower. Today it has the world's largest scientific and technical establishment, surpassing that of the United States by almost one third. Nevertheless, the modernization of the Soviet Union is uneven. Indeed, in many aspects of rural and urban life the Soviet Union displays characteristics of an underdeveloped nation, which suggests that science and technology are less significant social forces there than in the modernized West. This book is the first to attest that science and technology have in fact been integral to the development of Soviet culture.
Close scrutiny is given both to the unique mechanisms that have given science and technology their prominence and to the distinctive, and recently liberalizing, effects they have had on intellectual and political developments in the Soviet Union. Included are the perceptive views of a dozen leading scholars who take on an unusually wide spectrum of topics—from communications technology to environmental issues, to science fiction and art, to bioethics and technocracy—while maintaining a consistent concern with the humanistic dimensions of the gargantuan enterprise of science. Loren Graham's discerning introduction provides a broad context for examining the active role of science and technology in Soviet culture and politics.
This splendid volume will appeal to anyone searching for a deeper understanding of a superpower in ferment. It will be of special interest not only to historians of science and technology but also to psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, and philosophers.
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Science at the Bar
Law, Science, and Technology in America
Sheila Jasanoff
Harvard University Press, 1995
Issues spawned by the headlong pace of developments in science and technology fill the courts. How should we deal with frozen embryos and leaky implants, dangerous chemicals, DNA fingerprints, and genetically engineered animals? The realm of the law, to which beleaguered people look for answers, is sometimes at a loss—constrained by its own assumptions and practices, Sheila Jasanoff suggests. This book exposes American law’s long-standing involvement in constructing, propagating, and perpetuating a variety of myths about science and technology.
Science at the Bar is the first book to examine in detail how two powerful American institutions—both seekers after truth—interact with each other. Looking at cases involving product liability, medical malpractice, toxic torts, genetic engineering, and life and death, Jasanoff argues that the courts do not simply depend on scientific findings for guidance—they actually influence the production of science and technology at many different levels. Research is conducted and interpreted to answer legal questions. Experts are selected to be credible on the witness stand. Products are redesigned to reduce the risk of lawsuits. At the same time the courts emerge here as democratizing agents in disputes over the control and deployment of new technologies, advancing and sustaining a public dialogue about the limits of expertise. Jasanoff shows how positivistic views of science and the law often prevent courts from realizing their full potential as centers for a progressive critique of science and technology.
With its lucid analysis of both scientific and legal modes of reasoning, and its recommendations for scholars and policymakers, this book will be an indispensable resource for anyone who hopes to understand the changing configurations of science, technology, and the law in our litigious society.
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Science in the Archives
Pasts, Presents, Futures
Edited by Lorraine Daston
University of Chicago Press, 2017
Archives bring to mind rooms filled with old papers and dusty artifacts. But for scientists, the detritus of the past can be a treasure trove of material vital to present and future research: fossils collected by geologists; data banks assembled by geneticists; weather diaries trawled by climate scientists; libraries visited by historians. These are the vital collections, assembled and maintained over decades, centuries, and even millennia, which define the sciences of the archives.
With Science in the Archives, Lorraine Daston and her co-authors offer the first study of the important role that these archives play in the natural and human sciences. Reaching across disciplines and centuries, contributors cover episodes in the history of astronomy, geology, genetics, philology, climatology, medicine, and more—as well as fundamental practices such as collecting, retrieval, and data mining. Chapters cover topics ranging from doxology in Greco-Roman Antiquity to NSA surveillance techniques of the twenty-first century. Thoroughly exploring the practices, politics, economics, and potential of the sciences of the archives, this volume reveals the essential historical dimension of the sciences, while also adding a much-needed long-term perspective to contemporary debates over the uses of Big Data in science.
With Science in the Archives, Lorraine Daston and her co-authors offer the first study of the important role that these archives play in the natural and human sciences. Reaching across disciplines and centuries, contributors cover episodes in the history of astronomy, geology, genetics, philology, climatology, medicine, and more—as well as fundamental practices such as collecting, retrieval, and data mining. Chapters cover topics ranging from doxology in Greco-Roman Antiquity to NSA surveillance techniques of the twenty-first century. Thoroughly exploring the practices, politics, economics, and potential of the sciences of the archives, this volume reveals the essential historical dimension of the sciences, while also adding a much-needed long-term perspective to contemporary debates over the uses of Big Data in science.
[more]
The Science of Energy
A Cultural History of Energy Physics in Victorian Britain
Crosbie Smith
University of Chicago Press, 1999
Although we take it for granted today, the concept of "energy" transformed nineteenth-century physics. In The Science of Energy, Crosbie Smith shows how a North British group of scientists and engineers, including James Joule, James Clerk Maxwell, William and James Thomson, Fleeming Jenkin, and P. G. Tait, developed energy physics to solve practical problems encountered by Scottish shipbuilders and marine engineers; to counter biblical revivalism and evolutionary materialism; and to rapidly enhance their own scientific credibility.
Replacing the language and concepts of classical mechanics with terms such as "actual" and "potential" energy, the North British group conducted their revolution in physics so astutely and vigorously that the concept of "energy"—a valuable commodity in the early days of industrialization—became their intellectual property. Smith skillfully places this revolution in its scientific and cultural context, exploring the actual creation of scientific knowledge during one of the most significant episodes in the history of physics.
Replacing the language and concepts of classical mechanics with terms such as "actual" and "potential" energy, the North British group conducted their revolution in physics so astutely and vigorously that the concept of "energy"—a valuable commodity in the early days of industrialization—became their intellectual property. Smith skillfully places this revolution in its scientific and cultural context, exploring the actual creation of scientific knowledge during one of the most significant episodes in the history of physics.
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Science on the Air
Popularizers and Personalities on Radio and Early Television
Marcel Chotkowski LaFollette
University of Chicago Press, 2008
Mr. Wizard’s World. Bill Nye the Science Guy. NPR’s Science Friday. These popular television and radio programs broadcast science into the homes of millions of viewers and listeners. But these modern series owe much of their success to the pioneering efforts of early-twentieth-century science shows like Adventures in Science and “Our Friend the Atom.” Science on the Air is the fascinating history of the evolution of popular science in the first decades of the broadcasting era.
Marcel Chotkowski LaFollette transports readers to the early days of radio, when the new medium allowed innovative and optimistic scientists the opportunity to broadcast serious and dignified presentations over the airwaves. But the exponential growth of listenership in the 1920s, from thousands to millions, and the networks’ recognition that each listener represented a potential consumer, turned science on the radio into an opportunity to entertain, not just educate.
Science on the Air chronicles the efforts of science popularizers, from 1923 until the mid-1950s, as they negotiated topic, content, and tone in order to gain precious time on the air. Offering a new perspective on the collision between science’s idealistic and elitist view of public communication and the unbending economics of broadcasting, LaFollette rewrites the history of the public reception of science in the twentieth century and the role that scientists and their institutions have played in both encouraging and inhibiting popularization. By looking at the broadcasting of the past, Science on the Air raises issues of concern to all those who seek to cultivate a scientifically literate society today.
Marcel Chotkowski LaFollette transports readers to the early days of radio, when the new medium allowed innovative and optimistic scientists the opportunity to broadcast serious and dignified presentations over the airwaves. But the exponential growth of listenership in the 1920s, from thousands to millions, and the networks’ recognition that each listener represented a potential consumer, turned science on the radio into an opportunity to entertain, not just educate.
Science on the Air chronicles the efforts of science popularizers, from 1923 until the mid-1950s, as they negotiated topic, content, and tone in order to gain precious time on the air. Offering a new perspective on the collision between science’s idealistic and elitist view of public communication and the unbending economics of broadcasting, LaFollette rewrites the history of the public reception of science in the twentieth century and the role that scientists and their institutions have played in both encouraging and inhibiting popularization. By looking at the broadcasting of the past, Science on the Air raises issues of concern to all those who seek to cultivate a scientifically literate society today.
[more]
The Scientific Revolution
Steven Shapin
University of Chicago Press, 2018
“There was no such thing as the Scientific Revolution, and this is a book about it.” With this provocative and apparently paradoxical claim, Steven Shapin begins his bold, vibrant exploration of the origins of the modern scientific worldview, now updated with a new bibliographic essay featuring the latest scholarship.
“An excellent book.”—Anthony Gottlieb, New York Times Book Review
“Timely and highly readable. . . . A book which every scientist curious about our predecessors should read.”—Trevor Pinch, New Scientist
“Shapin's account is informed, nuanced, and articulated with clarity. . . . This is not to attack or devalue science but to reveal its richness as the human endeavor that it most surely is. . . . Shapin's book is an impressive achievement.”—David C. Lindberg, Science
“It's hard to believe that there could be a more accessible, informed or concise account. . . . The Scientific Revolution should be a set text in all the disciplines. And in all the indisciplines, too.”—Adam Phillips, London Review of Books
“An excellent book.”—Anthony Gottlieb, New York Times Book Review
“Timely and highly readable. . . . A book which every scientist curious about our predecessors should read.”—Trevor Pinch, New Scientist
“Shapin's account is informed, nuanced, and articulated with clarity. . . . This is not to attack or devalue science but to reveal its richness as the human endeavor that it most surely is. . . . Shapin's book is an impressive achievement.”—David C. Lindberg, Science
“It's hard to believe that there could be a more accessible, informed or concise account. . . . The Scientific Revolution should be a set text in all the disciplines. And in all the indisciplines, too.”—Adam Phillips, London Review of Books
[more]
The Scientific-Military State
How Enlightened Engineers Reinvented Early American Government
Sveinn M. Jóhannesson
University of Chicago Press
Argues that engineers influenced by French Enlightenment science built much of the machinery of America’s military state while redrawing the line between the federal government and society.
In The Scientific-Military State, Sveinn M. Jóhannesson charts the emergence of a new kind of governance in early-nineteenth-century America: the scientific-military state. Federal officials used mathematics, science, and other forms of enlightened knowledge to launch the nation’s very first experiments in scientific education and expert administration. These figures forged a new intellectual elite that socially elevated itself above ordinary soldiers, workers, and civilians and reshaped the military state itself beyond familiar models of standing army or militia. Originating primarily from the US Military Academy at West Point, these experts, who were often engineers, debated statecraft, analyzed topography, designed fortifications, manufactured weapons, built infrastructure, and exercised military power as the United States spread across the continent. But the even deeper result was a transformed relationship between the government and its citizens, one that echoes today.
In The Scientific-Military State, Sveinn M. Jóhannesson charts the emergence of a new kind of governance in early-nineteenth-century America: the scientific-military state. Federal officials used mathematics, science, and other forms of enlightened knowledge to launch the nation’s very first experiments in scientific education and expert administration. These figures forged a new intellectual elite that socially elevated itself above ordinary soldiers, workers, and civilians and reshaped the military state itself beyond familiar models of standing army or militia. Originating primarily from the US Military Academy at West Point, these experts, who were often engineers, debated statecraft, analyzed topography, designed fortifications, manufactured weapons, built infrastructure, and exercised military power as the United States spread across the continent. But the even deeper result was a transformed relationship between the government and its citizens, one that echoes today.
[more]
A Scientist's War
The war diary of Sir Clifford Paterson, 1939-45
Robert Clayton
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 1991
Sir Clifford Paterson, OBE FRS, was Director of the GEC Research Laboratories at Wembley from their foundation in 1919 until his death in 1948. This book contains the daily diary which he kept from the beginning of September 1939 until May 1945.
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S-class destroyer Piet Hein (ex HMS Serapis)
Jantinus Mulder
Amsterdam University Press, 2024
Ordered by the Royal Navy in 1941, the destroyers of the 5th Emergency Flotilla became known as S-class and served as fleet and convoy escorts in World War II. In the last months of the war, three were transferred to the Royal Netherlands Navy for service in the Far East. HMS Serapis was renamed HNLMS Piet Hein and served in the Indonesian War of Independence and saw action in the Korean War. She was sold for scrap in 1962.
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Sea Clutter
Scattering, the K distribution and radar performance
Keith Ward
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2013
Sea Clutter: Scattering, the K Distribution and Radar Performance, 2nd Edition gives an authoritative account of our current understanding of radar sea clutter. Topics covered include the characteristics of radar sea clutter, modelling radar scattering by the ocean surface, statistical models of sea clutter, the simulation of clutter and other random processes, detection of small targets in sea clutter, imaging ocean surface features, radar detection performance calculations, CFAR detection, and the specification and measurement of radar performance. The calculation of the performance of practical radar systems is presented in sufficient detail for the reader to be able to tackle related problems with confidence. In this second edition the contents have been fully updated and reorganised to give better access to the different types of material in the book. Extensive new material has been added on the Doppler characteristics of sea clutter and detection processing; bistatic sea clutter measurements; electromagnetic scattering theory of littoral sea clutter and bistatic sea clutter; the use of models for predicting radar performance; and use of the K distribution in other fields.
[more]
Sea Clutter
Scattering, the K distribution and radar performance
Keith D. Ward
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2006
This book provides an authoritative account of the current understanding of radar sea clutter, describing its phenomenology, EM scattering and statistical modelling and simulation, and their use in the design of detection systems and the calculation and practical evaluation of radar performance.
[more]
Sea Monsters
A Voyage around the World's Most Beguiling Map
Joseph Nigg
University of Chicago Press, 2013
Smart phones and GPS give us many possible routes to navigate our daily commute, warn us of traffic and delays, and tell us where to find a cup of coffee. But what if there were sea serpents and giant man-eating lobsters waiting just off course if we were to lose our way? Would there be an app for that? In the sixteenth century, these and other monsters were thought to swim the northern waters, threatening seafarers who ventured too far from shore. Thankfully, Scandinavian mariners had Olaus Magnus, who in 1539 charted these fantastic marine animals in his influential map of the Nordic countries, the Carta Marina. In Sea Monsters, well-known expert on magical beasts Joseph Nigg brings readers face-to-face with these creatures, alongside the other magnificent components of Magnus’s map.
Nearly two meters wide in total, the map’s nine wood-block panels comprise the largest and first realistic portrayal of Northern Europe. But in addition to these important geographic elements, Magnus’s map goes beyond cartography to scenes both domestic and mystic. Close to shore, Magnus shows humans interacting with common sea life—boats struggling to stay afloat, merchants trading, children swimming, and fisherman pulling lines. But from the offshore deeps rise some of the most magical and terrifying sea creatures imaginable at the time or thereafter—like sea swine, whales as large as islands, and the Kraken. In this book, Nigg provides a thorough tour of the map’s cartographic details, as well as a colorful look at its unusual pictorial and imaginative elements. He draws on Magnus’s own text to further describe and illuminate the inventive scenes and to flesh out the stories of the monsters.
Sea Monsters is a stunning tour of a world that still holds many secrets for us land dwellers, who will forever be fascinated by reports of giant squid and the real-life creatures of the deep that have proven to be as bizarre and otherworldly as we have imagined for centuries. It is a gorgeous guide for enthusiasts of maps, monsters, and the mythic.
[more]
Searchlight
The Camp That Didn't Fail
Harry Reid
University of Nevada Press, 2007
Deep in the desolate Mojave Desert in Nevada’s extreme southern tip lies a small mining town called Searchlight. This meticulously researched book by Searchlight’s most distinguished native son recounts the colorful history of the town and the lives of the hardy people who built it and sustained a community in one of the least hospitable environments in the United States. Its story encompasses both Nevada’s early twentieth-century mining boom and the phenomenal growth of southern Nevada after World War II. Searchlight is a valuable contribution to the history of Nevada and a lively account of life in the forbidding depths of the Mojave Desert.<br> <br>
[more]
Seaway to the Future
American Social Visions and the Construction of the Panama Canal
Alexander Missal
University of Wisconsin Press, 2008
Realizing the century-old dream of a passage to India, the building of the Panama Canal was an engineering feat of colossal dimensions, a construction site filled not only with mud and water but with interpretations, meanings, and social visions. Alexander Missal’s Seaway to the Future unfolds a cultural history of the Panama Canal project, revealed in the texts and images of the era’s policymakers and commentators. Observing its creation, journalists, travel writers, and officials interpreted the Canal and its environs as a perfect society under an efficient, authoritarian management featuring innovations in technology, work, health, and consumption. For their middle-class audience in the United States, the writers depicted a foreign yet familiar place, a showcase for the future—images reinforced in the exhibits of the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition that celebrated the Canal’s completion. Through these depictions, the building of the Panama Canal became a powerful symbol in a broader search for order as Americans looked to the modern age with both anxiety and anticipation.
Like most utopian visions, this one aspired to perfection at the price of exclusion. Overlooking the West Indian laborers who built the Canal, its admirers praised the white elite that supervised and administered it. Inspired by the masculine ideal personified by President Theodore Roosevelt, writers depicted the Canal Zone as an emphatically male enterprise and Chief Engineer George W. Goethals as the emblem of a new type of social leader, the engineer-soldier, the benevolent despot. Examining these and other images of the Panama Canal project, Seaway to the Future shows how they reflected popular attitudes toward an evolving modern world and, no less important, helped shape those perceptions.
Best Books for Regional Special Interests, selected by the American Association of School Librarians, and Best Books for General Audiences, selected by the Public Library Association
Best Books for Regional Special Interests, selected by the American Association of School Librarians, and Best Books for General Audiences, selected by the Public Library Association
“Provide[s] a useful vantage on the world bequeathed to us by the forces that set out to put America astride the globe nearly a century ago.”—Chris Rasmussen, Bookforum
[more]
Secret Maps
Maps You Were Never Meant to See, from the Middle Ages to Today
Tom Harper, Nick Dykes, and Magdalena Peszko
University of Chicago Press, 2025
An illustrated story of the relationship between mapping and secrecy, charting the role maps played in concealing and revealing knowledge across centuries.
Is there anything more intriguing than a secret map? One that reveals clandestine information or meanings, or a map that is itself a secret? Secret Maps features over one hundred examples of these kinds of maps, connected by their varied relationships to secrecy, and ranging from the twelfth to the twenty-first centuries and across the globe. They include views into state secrecy and power—such as maps used for domestic and military purposes, imperial expansion, espionage, and surveillance as well as those with private or commercial uses, such as charts of private land, trade routes, or the flights of private jets. The maps span widely in their scope and cover issues of broad interest, from old-fashioned spying to contemporary concerns about technology and privacy.
As illuminating as it is thrilling, Secret Maps unearths the once-hidden routes, landscapes, and locations that have covertly shaped our world.
[more]
Secured Hardware Accelerators for DSP and Image Processing Applications
Anirban Sengupta
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2021
Written by an acknowledged expert in the field, this book focuses on approaches for designing secure hardware accelerators for digital signal processing and image processing, which are also optimised for performance and efficiency. State-of-the art security and optimization algorithms are presented, and their roles in the design of secured hardware accelerators for DSP, multimedia and image processing applications are explored.
[more]
Security and Privacy Schemes for Dense 6G Wireless Communication Networks
Agbotiname Lucky Imoize
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2023
Fifth generation (5G) wireless networks are now commercialized, and the research focus has shifted towards sixth generation (6G) wireless systems. The integration of sensor nodes and massive machine type communication (MTC) devices (MDs) in ubiquitous 5G networks has facilitated the design of critical enabling technologies to support billions of data-hungry applications. By leveraging sensor nodes in wireless sensor networks (WSNs), sensitive user information can be harvested and transmitted to receivers via WSN-assisted channels, which are often not well secured. Consequently, sensitive user information can be intercepted and used unlawfully. The security and confidentiality measures used for data transmission over existing 5G WSN-assisted channels are limited. 6G systems are envisaged to face fiercer security challenges. In 6G wireless networks, a new set of sensing and precise localization techniques are predicted. Thus, the need to secure user information against adversarial attacks needs to be implemented at the design stage.
[more]
Security for Mobility
Chris J. Mitchell
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2004
Over the last two decades, mobile telecommunications has grown dramatically, from a small niche technology to a massive industry. Mobile telephones are now ubiquitous, and the divisions between PCs, PDAs, mobile telephones and other mobile devices are becoming increasingly blurred. Against this background, the security of information of both the devices themselves, and the information handled by these devices, is becoming ever more important.
[more]
Seed Testing
Principles and Practices
Sabry G. Elias
Michigan State University Press, 2012
An essential reference for students, seed technologists, researchers, and seed industry personnel, this comprehensive guide outlines the most widely performed modern seed quality tests, explores the principles behind them, the history of seed testing, why seeds are tested and when, and sampling, sub-sampling, seed laboratory management, accreditation, and seed quality assurance programs. The authors describe statistical applications to seed testing and tolerances, and they provide a detailed morphological and structural description of seed formation and development. The book examines the testing of genetic traits and transgenic seeds, including DNA and protein genetic purity tests, and cultivar purity identification for conventional seeds. In addition to the most common seed purity and viability tests, tests for seed and seedling vigor, seed-borne diseases and seed moisture determination are also discussed.
[more]
Seed to Civilization
The Story of Food
Charles B. Heiser, Jr.
Harvard University Press, 1990
Seeds and Sovereignty
Debate Over the Use and Control of Plant Genetic Resources
Jack R. Jr. Kloppenburg, ed.
Duke University Press, 1988
Seeds for economically important crops are big business indeed. As large seed companies continue to improve their product in various ways, they make use of the original gene pools of these plants, often located in tropical and subtropical areas of the world. With increasing recognition that plant germplasm is an important raw material, highly charged international disputes have developed over the exchange and use of this material, adding another point of contention between poor nations and the manufacturing wealthier ones.
Twenty experts from several nations, representing both the natural and social sciences, consider the historical background, the issue of patent rights as applied to plant germplasm, the nature of global genetic interdependence, the internationalization of the seed industry, the implications of biotechnology on genetic resources, the Third World attitude toward the debate, and the viewpoints of the International Agricultural Research Centers.
Twenty experts from several nations, representing both the natural and social sciences, consider the historical background, the issue of patent rights as applied to plant germplasm, the nature of global genetic interdependence, the internationalization of the seed industry, the implications of biotechnology on genetic resources, the Third World attitude toward the debate, and the viewpoints of the International Agricultural Research Centers.
[more]
Seeing Like a Rover
How Robots, Teams, and Images Craft Knowledge of Mars
Janet Vertesi
University of Chicago Press, 2015
In the years since the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit and Opportunity first began transmitting images from the surface of Mars, we have become familiar with the harsh, rocky, rusty-red Martian landscape. But those images are much less straightforward than they may seem to a layperson: each one is the result of a complicated set of decisions and processes involving the large team behind the Rovers.
With Seeing Like a Rover, Janet Vertesi takes us behind the scenes to reveal the work that goes into creating our knowledge of Mars. Every photograph that the Rovers take, she shows, must be processed, manipulated, and interpreted—and all that comes after team members negotiate with each other about what they should even be taking photographs of in the first place. Vertesi’s account of the inspiringly successful Rover project reveals science in action, a world where digital processing uncovers scientific truths, where images are used to craft consensus, and where team members develop an uncanny intimacy with the sensory apparatus of a robot that is millions of miles away. Ultimately, Vertesi shows, every image taken by the Mars Rovers is not merely a picture of Mars—it’s a portrait of the whole Rover team, as well.
With Seeing Like a Rover, Janet Vertesi takes us behind the scenes to reveal the work that goes into creating our knowledge of Mars. Every photograph that the Rovers take, she shows, must be processed, manipulated, and interpreted—and all that comes after team members negotiate with each other about what they should even be taking photographs of in the first place. Vertesi’s account of the inspiringly successful Rover project reveals science in action, a world where digital processing uncovers scientific truths, where images are used to craft consensus, and where team members develop an uncanny intimacy with the sensory apparatus of a robot that is millions of miles away. Ultimately, Vertesi shows, every image taken by the Mars Rovers is not merely a picture of Mars—it’s a portrait of the whole Rover team, as well.
[more]
Seeing the City Digitally
Processing Urban Space and Time
Gillian Rose
Amsterdam University Press, 2022
This book explores what’s happening to ways of seeing urban spaces in the contemporary moment, when so many of the technologies through which cities are visualised are digital. Cities have always been pictured, in many media and for many different purposes. This edited collection explores how that picturing is changing in an era of digital visual culture. Analogue visual technologies like film cameras were understood as creating some sort of a trace of the real city. Digital visual technologies, in contrast, harvest and process digital data to create images that are constantly refreshed, modified and circulated. Each of the chapters in this volume examines a different example of how this processual visuality is reconfiguring the spatial and temporal organisation of urban life.
[more]
Seeing Underground
Maps, Models, and Mining Engineering in America
Eric C. Nystrom
University of Nevada Press, 2014
Digging mineral wealth from the ground dates to prehistoric times, and Europeans pursued mining in the Americas from the earliest colonial days. Prior to the Civil War, little mining was deep enough to require maps. However, the major finds of the mid-nineteenth century, such as the Comstock Lode, were vastly larger than any before in America. In Seeing Underground, Nystrom argues that, as industrial mining came of age in the United States, the development of maps and models gave power to a new visual culture and allowed mining engineers to advance their profession, gaining authority over mining operations from the miners themselves.
Starting in the late nineteenth century, mining engineers developed a new set of practices, artifacts, and discourses to visualize complex, pitch-dark three-dimensional spaces. These maps and models became necessary tools in creating and controlling those spaces. They made mining more understandable, predictable, and profitable. Nystrom shows that this new visual culture was crucial to specific developments in American mining, such as implementing new safety regulations after the Avondale, Pennsylvania fire of 1869 killed 110 men and boys; understanding complex geology, as in the rich ores of Butte, Montana; and settling high-stakes litigation, such as the Tonopah, Nevada, Jim Butler v. West End lawsuit, which reached the US Supreme Court.
Nystrom demonstrates that these neglected artifacts of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have much to teach us today. The development of a visual culture helped create a new professional class of mining engineers and changed how mining was done. Seeing Undergound is the winner of the 2015 Mining History Association’s Clark Spence Award for the best book on mining history.
Starting in the late nineteenth century, mining engineers developed a new set of practices, artifacts, and discourses to visualize complex, pitch-dark three-dimensional spaces. These maps and models became necessary tools in creating and controlling those spaces. They made mining more understandable, predictable, and profitable. Nystrom shows that this new visual culture was crucial to specific developments in American mining, such as implementing new safety regulations after the Avondale, Pennsylvania fire of 1869 killed 110 men and boys; understanding complex geology, as in the rich ores of Butte, Montana; and settling high-stakes litigation, such as the Tonopah, Nevada, Jim Butler v. West End lawsuit, which reached the US Supreme Court.
Nystrom demonstrates that these neglected artifacts of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have much to teach us today. The development of a visual culture helped create a new professional class of mining engineers and changed how mining was done. Seeing Undergound is the winner of the 2015 Mining History Association’s Clark Spence Award for the best book on mining history.
[more]
Selected Topics in Advanced Solid State and Fibre Optic Sensors
S.M. Vaezi-Nejad
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2000
New techniques and technologies for sensors are developing fast and being applied in a wide range of fields for measurement and instrumentation, both for research and commercial purposes. This book aims to provide advanced students and practising engineers with a selective tour of highlights in the topical field of sensors for measurement. The authors provide descriptions of the operation, characteristics and applications of the sensors on which they work, together with recent advances and prospects for the future. The chapters cover both fibre optic and solid state sensing, applied across a wide range of applications.
[more]
Self-Healing Materials
From fundamental concepts to advanced space and electronics applications
Brahim Aïssa
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2019
Self-healing materials are an emerging class of smart materials that are capable of repairing themselves from damage, either spontaneously or under a stimulus such as light, heat, or the application of a solvent. Intended for an audience of researchers in academia and industry, this book addresses a wide range of self-healing materials and processes, with emphasis on their performance in the space environment.
[more]
Self-Organizing Dynamic Agents for the Operation of Decentralized Smart Grids
Alfredo Vaccaro
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2024
Integrating intermittent distributed generation, distributed storage systems, electric vehicles, and flexible loads will present security, stability, and power quality challenges in future smart grids. The amount of data to be processed to face these issues can overwhelm grid operation tools and conventional IT-based applications, limiting situational awareness and decision support. Decentralized and self-organizing technologies can help with that problem. In a self-organizing system, information processing is based on local interactions of its elementary parts (dynamic agents), enabling the cooperative solution of complex decision-making problems by only requiring local information exchange without needing a fusion center for data collection and processing.
[more]
Selling Outer Space
Kennedy, the Media, and Funding for Project Apollo, 1961-1963
James Kauffman
University of Alabama Press, 2009
Examines how the Kennedy administration and the media constructed the space program in ways designed to win congressional and public approval
Examines the Kennedy administration’s rhetorical campaign to persuade Congress and the public to adopt a manned flight to the moon. In so doing, the study addresses three key themes.
First, it illuminates the contrasting nature of technical and narrative arguments and explores how those arguments play different roles in public discussion of social policy. Second, the book examines how both the executive branch and the news media function to help set the agenda in American politics. Offering a case study of the increasingly complex relationship between the government and the media.
Finally, Selling Outer Space explores the power of technology to shape and direct human action.
Examines the Kennedy administration’s rhetorical campaign to persuade Congress and the public to adopt a manned flight to the moon. In so doing, the study addresses three key themes.
First, it illuminates the contrasting nature of technical and narrative arguments and explores how those arguments play different roles in public discussion of social policy. Second, the book examines how both the executive branch and the news media function to help set the agenda in American politics. Offering a case study of the increasingly complex relationship between the government and the media.
Finally, Selling Outer Space explores the power of technology to shape and direct human action.
[more]
Selling Power
Economics, Policy, and Electric Utilities Before 1940
John L. Neufeld
University of Chicago Press, 2016
We remember Thomas Edison as the inventor of the incandescent light bulb, but he deserves credit for something much larger, an even more singular invention that profoundly changed the way the world works: the modern electric utility industry. Edison’s light bulb was the first to work within a system where a utility generated electricity and distributed it to customers for lighting. The story of how electric utilities went within one generation from prototype to an indispensable part of most Americans’ lives is a story about the relationships between political and technological change.
John L. Neufeld offers a comprehensive historical treatment of the economics that shaped electric utilities. Compared with most industries, the organization of the electric utility industry is not—and cannot be—economically efficient. Most industries are kept by law in a state of fair competition, but the capital necessary to start an electric company—generators, transmission and distribution systems, and land and buildings—is so substantial that few companies can enter the market and compete. Therefore, the natural state of the electric utility industry since its inception has been a monopoly subject to government oversight. These characteristics of electric utilities—and electricity’s importance—have created over time sharp political controversies, and changing public policies have dramatically changed the industry’s structure to an extent matched by few other industries. Neufeld outlines the struggles that shaped the industry’s development, and shows how the experience of electric utilities provides insight into the design of economic institutions, including today’s new large-scale markets.
John L. Neufeld offers a comprehensive historical treatment of the economics that shaped electric utilities. Compared with most industries, the organization of the electric utility industry is not—and cannot be—economically efficient. Most industries are kept by law in a state of fair competition, but the capital necessary to start an electric company—generators, transmission and distribution systems, and land and buildings—is so substantial that few companies can enter the market and compete. Therefore, the natural state of the electric utility industry since its inception has been a monopoly subject to government oversight. These characteristics of electric utilities—and electricity’s importance—have created over time sharp political controversies, and changing public policies have dramatically changed the industry’s structure to an extent matched by few other industries. Neufeld outlines the struggles that shaped the industry’s development, and shows how the experience of electric utilities provides insight into the design of economic institutions, including today’s new large-scale markets.
[more]
Selling the Air
A Critique of the Policy of Commercial Broadcasting in the United States
Thomas Streeter
University of Chicago Press, 1996
In this interdisciplinary study of the laws and policies associated with commercial radio and television, Thomas Streeter reverses the usual take on broadcasting and markets by showing that government regulation creates rather than intervenes in the market. Analyzing the processes by which commercial media are organized, Streeter asks how it is possible to take the practice of broadcasting—the reproduction of disembodied sounds and pictures for dissemination to vast unseen audiences—and constitute it as something that can be bought, owned, and sold.
With an impressive command of broadcast history, as well as critical and cultural studies of the media, Streeter shows that liberal marketplace principles—ideas of individuality, property, public interest, and markets—have come into contradiction with themselves. Commercial broadcasting is dependent on government privileges, and Streeter provides a searching critique of the political choices of corporate liberalism that shape our landscape of cultural property and electronic intangibles.
With an impressive command of broadcast history, as well as critical and cultural studies of the media, Streeter shows that liberal marketplace principles—ideas of individuality, property, public interest, and markets—have come into contradiction with themselves. Commercial broadcasting is dependent on government privileges, and Streeter provides a searching critique of the political choices of corporate liberalism that shape our landscape of cultural property and electronic intangibles.
[more]
Semiconductor Lasers and Diode-based Light Sources for Biophotonics
Peter E. Andersen
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2019
Semiconductor lasers are small, reliable, low cost, high-performance and user-friendly optical devices which make them highly suitable for a variety of biomedical applications.
[more]
Semi-custom IC Design and VLSI
P.J. Hicks
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 1983
The contents of this book were first presented as a series of lectures at the first IEE Vacation School on Semi-Custom IC Design and VLSI held at the University of Edinburgh on 4-8 July 1983. The earlier chapters provide an introduction to silicon IC technology and include descriptions of the various processing techniques employed in the manufacture of microelectronic components. Different types of semi-custom IC are then reviewed and the factors that have to be considered in choosing a semi-custom technique are examined in detail. Logic design is next presented as an activity that is best carried out at a higher level of abstraction than the customary/logic gate level by using the algorithmic state machine (ASM) method. In the sections that follow, computer aids to design and design automation tools are introduced as essential requirements for the rapid and error-free design of semicustom ICs. Testing strategies and the need to design for testability are also covered in some detail.
[more]
Sensors, Actuators, and Their Interfaces
A multidisciplinary introduction
Nathan Ida
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2020
Sensors and actuators are used daily in countless applications to ensure more accurate and reliable workflows and safer environments. Many students and young engineers with engineering and science backgrounds often come prepared with circuits and programming skills but have little knowledge of sensors and sensing strategies and their interfacing.
[more]
Sensors, Actuators, and their Interfaces
A multidisciplinary introduction
Nathan Ida
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2014
As sensors and actuators are normally not (and have not been) treated in academic curricula as a subject in its own right; many students and current professionals often find themselves limited in their knowledge and dealing with topics and issues based on material they may have never encountered. Until now.
[more]
Sensors for Ranging and Imaging
Graham Brooker
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2022
Sensors for Ranging and Imaging is a comprehensive textbook and professional reference that provides a solid background in active sensing technology. This new edition has been comprehensively updated and expanded to include the latest radar technologies.
[more]
Sensors in the Age of the Internet of Things
Technologies and applications
Octavian Adrian Postolache
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2019
The IoT is the inter-networking of connected and smart devices, buildings, vehicles and other items which are embedded with electronics, software, sensors, actuators, and network connectivity that enable these objects to collect and exchange data. A sensor is a detection device that measures, records, or responds to a physical property. Sensors represent the front end of information processing. Progress in communication technologies is part of the multi-factorial advances in electronics, sensors, embedded computing, signal processing and machine learning methods that has led to the development of new capabilities in the IoT.
[more]
Sensory Systems for Robotic Applications
Ravinder Dahiya
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2022
Robots have come a long way thanks to advances in sensing and computer vision technologies and can be found today in healthcare, medicine and industry. Researchers have been looking at providing them with senses such as the ability to see, smell, hear and perceive touch in order to mimic and interact with humans and their surrounding environments.
[more]
Sevick's Transmission Line Transformers
Theory and practice
Raymond A. Mack
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2014
The long awaited revision of the classic book Transmission Line Transformers, by Jerry Sevick, is now in its fifth edition and has been updated and reorganised by Raymond Mack to provide communication engineers with a clear technical presentation of both the theory and practical applications of the transmission of radio communication.
[more]
SF6 Switchgear
H.M. Ryan
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 1989
This book provides an extensive review of recent developments in SF6 Switchgear and covers fundamental properties of SF6 interrupter types, characteristics and associated operating mechanisms, arc modelling and computer aided methods for interrupter design and evaluation. The impact of SF6 Technology upon (i) Transmission Switchgear (ii) Distribution and Utility Switchgear and (iii) Regulations, Testing and Instrumentation is dealt with comprehensively.
[more]
Shadowing Function from Randomly Rough Surfaces
Derivation and applications
Christophe Bourlier
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2019
The shadowing function is an important element in the simulation and calculation of how electromagnetic waves scatter at randomly rough surfaces. Its derivation and use is an active, interdisciplinary area of research with practical applications in fields such as radar, optics, acoustics, geoscience, computer graphics and remote sensing.
[more]
Shaping Science and Technology Policy
The Next Generation of Research
Edited by David H. Guston and Daniel Sarewitz
University of Wisconsin Press, 2006
With scientific progress occurring at a breathtaking pace, science and technology policy has never been more important than it is today. Yet there is a very real lack of public discourse about policy-making, and government involvement in science remains shrouded in both mystery and misunderstanding. Who is making choices about technology policy, and who stands to win or lose from these choices? What criteria are being used to make decisions and why? Does government involvement help or hinder scientific research?
Shaping Science and Technology Policy brings together an exciting and diverse group of emerging scholars, both practitioners and academic experts, to investigate current issues in science and technology policy. Essays explore such topics as globalization, the shifting boundary between public and private, informed consent in human participation in scientific research, intellectual property and university science, and the distribution of the costs and benefits of research.
Contributors: Charlotte Augst, Grant Black, Mark Brown, Kevin Elliott, Patrick Feng, Pamela M. Franklin, Carolyn Gideon, Tené N. Hamilton, Brian A. Jackson, Shobita Parthasarathy, Jason W. Patton, A. Abigail Payne, Bhaven Sampat, Christian Sandvig, Sheryl Winston Smith, Michael Whong-Barr
[more]
Shaping Science
Organizations, Decisions, and Culture on NASA’s Teams
Janet Vertesi
University of Chicago Press, 2020
Drawing on a decade of immersive ethnography with NASA’s robotic spacecraft teams to create a comparative account of two great space missions of the early 2000s, Janet Vertesi uncovers how the social organization of a scientific team affects their scientific practices and results.
In Shaping Science, Janet Vertesi draws on a decade of immersive ethnography with NASA’s robotic spacecraft teams to create a comparative account of two great space missions of the early 2000s. Although these missions featured robotic explorers on the frontiers of the solar system bravely investigating new worlds, their commands were issued from millions of miles away by a very human team. By examining the two teams’ formal structures, decision-making techniques, and informal work practices in the day-to-day process of mission planning, Vertesi shows just how deeply entangled a team’s local organizational context is with the knowledge they produce about other worlds.
Using extensive, embedded experiences on two NASA spacecraft teams, this is the first book to apply organizational studies of work to the laboratory environment in order to analyze the production of scientific knowledge itself. Engaging and deeply researched, Shaping Science demonstrates the significant influence that the social organization of a scientific team can have on the practices of that team and the results they yield.
In Shaping Science, Janet Vertesi draws on a decade of immersive ethnography with NASA’s robotic spacecraft teams to create a comparative account of two great space missions of the early 2000s. Although these missions featured robotic explorers on the frontiers of the solar system bravely investigating new worlds, their commands were issued from millions of miles away by a very human team. By examining the two teams’ formal structures, decision-making techniques, and informal work practices in the day-to-day process of mission planning, Vertesi shows just how deeply entangled a team’s local organizational context is with the knowledge they produce about other worlds.
Using extensive, embedded experiences on two NASA spacecraft teams, this is the first book to apply organizational studies of work to the laboratory environment in order to analyze the production of scientific knowledge itself. Engaging and deeply researched, Shaping Science demonstrates the significant influence that the social organization of a scientific team can have on the practices of that team and the results they yield.
[more]
Shared Mobility and Automated Vehicles
Responding to socio-technical changes and pandemics
Ata M. Khan
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2022
Shared vehicles are a key part of any future intelligent and clean transport system, as they can allow for the sharing and potentially more efficient use of transport resources and fuel. Shared mobility has been gaining attention in the private and public sectors as a possible strategy for taming auto ownership, vehicle miles/kilometers travelled, and emissions.
[more]
Shoddy
From Devil’s Dust to the Renaissance of Rags
Hanna Rose Shell
University of Chicago Press, 2020
The history of modern-day old clothes recycling begins with a thing called shoddy. Starting in the early 1800s, shoddy was the name given to a new material made from reclaimed wool, and to one of the earliest forms of industrial recycling. Old rags and leftover fabric clippings were ground to bits by a machine known as “the devil” and then re-used. Usually undisclosed, shoddy–also known as reworked wool–became suit jackets, army blankets, mattress stuffing, and much more. Shoddy is the afterlife of rags. And Shoddy, the book, reveals hidden worlds of textile intrigue.
In Shoddy: From Devil’s Dust to the Renaissance of Rags, Hanna Rose Shell takes readers on a journey to discover shoddy, from Haiti to the “shoddy towns” of West Yorkshire in England, to the United States, back in time to the British cholera epidemics and the American Civil War, and into agricultural fields, textile labs, and rag-shredding factories. Shell’s narrative is both literary and historical, drawing on an extraordinary range of sources, from court cases to military uniforms, mattress labels to medical textbooks, political cartoons to high art. Shoddy moves between genres, bringing richly drawn characters and unexpected objects to life. Along the way, shoddy becomes equally an evocative object and a portal into another world.
Almost since the time it first appeared, shoddy was both ubiquitous and controversial. In part because it was often so hard to detect, it was inherently suspicious. Public health experts worried about sanitation and disease—how could old clothes be disinfected? As well, the idea of wearing someone else’s old clothes so close to your own skin was discomforting in and of itself. Could you sleep peacefully knowing that your mattress was very likely to be stuffed with dead soldiers’ overcoats? The use of the term “virgin” wool, the idea of virginity in relation to clothes, in fact emerged as an effort by the wool industry to counter shoddy’s appeal: to make shoddy seem shoddy. Over time, shoddy would capture a host of personal, ethical, commercial, and societal failings. And yet, there was always, within shoddy, the alluring concept of regeneration, of what we today think of as conscious clothing, eco-fashion, sustainable textiles.
Shell exposes an interwoven tale of industrial espionage, political infighting, scientific inquiry, ethnic prejudices, and war profiteering. Discarded clothes may make many journeys over the course of several lifetimes. Not only in your garments, but under your rug, in your mattress pads, piano blankets, in the peculiar confetti-like stuffing in your mailing envelopes, even in the insulation in your walls. Though it began with wool, over the past century the shredding “devil” has turned to synthetics from nylon stockings to Kevlar. Shoddy is likely connected to something you are wearing right now. After reading, you will never use the word shoddy or think about your clothes, the environment, sustainability, or the intermingled world around you the same way again.
In Shoddy: From Devil’s Dust to the Renaissance of Rags, Hanna Rose Shell takes readers on a journey to discover shoddy, from Haiti to the “shoddy towns” of West Yorkshire in England, to the United States, back in time to the British cholera epidemics and the American Civil War, and into agricultural fields, textile labs, and rag-shredding factories. Shell’s narrative is both literary and historical, drawing on an extraordinary range of sources, from court cases to military uniforms, mattress labels to medical textbooks, political cartoons to high art. Shoddy moves between genres, bringing richly drawn characters and unexpected objects to life. Along the way, shoddy becomes equally an evocative object and a portal into another world.
Almost since the time it first appeared, shoddy was both ubiquitous and controversial. In part because it was often so hard to detect, it was inherently suspicious. Public health experts worried about sanitation and disease—how could old clothes be disinfected? As well, the idea of wearing someone else’s old clothes so close to your own skin was discomforting in and of itself. Could you sleep peacefully knowing that your mattress was very likely to be stuffed with dead soldiers’ overcoats? The use of the term “virgin” wool, the idea of virginity in relation to clothes, in fact emerged as an effort by the wool industry to counter shoddy’s appeal: to make shoddy seem shoddy. Over time, shoddy would capture a host of personal, ethical, commercial, and societal failings. And yet, there was always, within shoddy, the alluring concept of regeneration, of what we today think of as conscious clothing, eco-fashion, sustainable textiles.
Shell exposes an interwoven tale of industrial espionage, political infighting, scientific inquiry, ethnic prejudices, and war profiteering. Discarded clothes may make many journeys over the course of several lifetimes. Not only in your garments, but under your rug, in your mattress pads, piano blankets, in the peculiar confetti-like stuffing in your mailing envelopes, even in the insulation in your walls. Though it began with wool, over the past century the shredding “devil” has turned to synthetics from nylon stockings to Kevlar. Shoddy is likely connected to something you are wearing right now. After reading, you will never use the word shoddy or think about your clothes, the environment, sustainability, or the intermingled world around you the same way again.
[more]
Short-circuit Currents
J. Schlabbach
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2005
The calculation of short-circuit currents is a central task for Power System engineers, as they are essential parameters for the design of electrical equipment and installations, the operation of power systems and the analysis of outages and faults.
[more]
Short-Range Micro-Motion Sensing with Radar Technology
Changzhan Gu
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2019
Human hands are natural tools for performing actions and gestures that interact with the physical world. Radar technology allows for touchless wireless gesture sensing by transmitting radio frequency (RF) signals to the target, analyzing the backscattering reflections to extract the target's movements, and thereby accurately detecting gestures for Human Computer Interaction (HCI). A key advantage of this technology is that it allows interaction with machines without any need to attach a sensing device to the hands. Led by researchers from Google's Project Soli, the authors introduce the concept and underpinning technology, cover all design phases, and provide researchers and professionals with the latest advances and innovations in microwave and millimeter wave radar sensing to capture relative movements such as micro gestures.
[more]
SiC Power Devices and Applications
Li Ran
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2026
Semiconductor power switches are essential to the operation of power electronic converters and systems. Traditional silicon-based semiconductor power switches have intrinsic physical limits to their performance. Wide Bandgap (WBG) devices deliver higher efficiency, smaller size, and/or lighter weight. Applications in power grid electronics as well as in electromobility are on the rise, but WBG devices also pose new challenges, in particular due to their fast switching speed and the need for protection.
[more]
SiC Power Module Design
Performance, robustness and reliability
Alberto Castellazzi
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2022
High-frequency switching power semiconductor devices are at the heart of power electronic converters. To date, these devices have been dominated by the well-established silicon (Si) technology. However, their intrinsic physical limits are becoming a barrier to achieving higher performance power conversion. Wide Bandgap (WBG) semiconductor devices offer the potential for higher efficiency, smaller size, lighter weight, and/or longer lifetime. Applications in power grid electronics as well as in electromobility are on the rise, but a number of technological bottle-necks need to be overcome if applications are to become more widespread - particularly packaging.
[more]
Sidereus Nuncius, or The Sidereal Messenger
Galileo Galilei
University of Chicago Press, 2015
Galileo Galilei’s Sidereus Nuncius is arguably the most dramatic scientific book ever published. It announced new and unexpected phenomena in the heavens, “unheard of through the ages,” revealed by a mysterious new instrument. Galileo had ingeniously improved the rudimentary “spyglasses” that appeared in Europe in 1608, and in the autumn of 1609 he pointed his new instrument at the sky, revealing astonishing sights: mountains on the moon, fixed stars invisible to the naked eye, individual stars in the Milky Way, and four moons around the planet Jupiter. These discoveries changed the terms of the debate between geocentric and heliocentric cosmology and helped ensure the eventual acceptance of the Copernican planetary system.
Albert Van Helden’s beautifully rendered and eminently readable translation is based on the Venice 1610 edition’s original Latin text. An introduction, conclusion, and copious notes place the book in its historical and intellectual context, and a new preface, written by Van Helden, highlights recent discoveries in the field, including the detection of a forged copy of Sidereus Nuncius, and new understandings about the political complexities of Galileo’s work.
Albert Van Helden’s beautifully rendered and eminently readable translation is based on the Venice 1610 edition’s original Latin text. An introduction, conclusion, and copious notes place the book in its historical and intellectual context, and a new preface, written by Van Helden, highlights recent discoveries in the field, including the detection of a forged copy of Sidereus Nuncius, and new understandings about the political complexities of Galileo’s work.
[more]
Sidewalk City
Remapping Public Space in Ho Chi Minh City
Annette Miae Kim
University of Chicago Press, 2015
For most, the term “public space” conjures up images of large, open areas: community centers for meetings and social events; the ancient Greek agora for political debates; green parks for festivals and recreation. In many of the world’s major cities, however, public spaces like these are not a part of the everyday lives of the public. Rather, business and social lives have always been conducted along main roads and sidewalks. With increasing urban growth and density, primarily from migration and immigration, rights to the sidewalk are being hotly contested among pedestrians, street vendors, property owners, tourists, and governments around the world.
With Sidewalk City, Annette Miae Kim provides the first multidisciplinary case study of sidewalks in a distinctive geographical area. She focuses on Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, a rapidly growing and evolving city that throughout its history, her multicultural residents have built up alternative legitimacies and norms about how the sidewalk should be used. Based on fieldwork over 15 years, Kim developed methods of spatial ethnography to overcome habitual seeing, and recorded both the spatial patterns and the social relations of how the city’s vibrant sidewalk life is practiced.
In Sidewalk City, she transforms this data into an imaginative array of maps, progressing through a primer of critical cartography, to unveil new insights about the importance and potential of this quotidian public space. This richly illustrated and fascinating study of Ho Chi Minh City’s sidewalks shows us that it is possible to have an aesthetic sidewalk life that is inclusive of multiple publics’ aspirations and livelihoods, particularly those of migrant vendors.
With Sidewalk City, Annette Miae Kim provides the first multidisciplinary case study of sidewalks in a distinctive geographical area. She focuses on Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, a rapidly growing and evolving city that throughout its history, her multicultural residents have built up alternative legitimacies and norms about how the sidewalk should be used. Based on fieldwork over 15 years, Kim developed methods of spatial ethnography to overcome habitual seeing, and recorded both the spatial patterns and the social relations of how the city’s vibrant sidewalk life is practiced.
In Sidewalk City, she transforms this data into an imaginative array of maps, progressing through a primer of critical cartography, to unveil new insights about the importance and potential of this quotidian public space. This richly illustrated and fascinating study of Ho Chi Minh City’s sidewalks shows us that it is possible to have an aesthetic sidewalk life that is inclusive of multiple publics’ aspirations and livelihoods, particularly those of migrant vendors.
[more]
Signal Processing and Machine Learning for Brain-Machine Interfaces
Toshihisa Tanaka
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2018
Brain-machine interfacing or brain-computer interfacing (BMI/BCI) is an emerging and challenging technology used in engineering and neuroscience. The ultimate goal is to provide a pathway from the brain to the external world via mapping, assisting, augmenting or repairing human cognitive or sensory-motor functions.
[more]
Signal Processing for Fault Detection and Diagnosis in Electric Machines and Systems
Mohamed Benbouzid
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2021
Over the last three decades, the search for competitiveness and growth gains has driven the evolution of machine maintenance policies, and the industry has moved from passive maintenance to active maintenance with the aim of improving productivity. Active maintenance requires continuous monitoring of industrial systems in order to increase reliability, availability rates and guarantee the safety of people and property.
[more]
Signal Processing to Drive Human-Computer Interaction
EEG and eye-controlled interfaces
Spiros Nikolopoulos
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2020
The evolution of eye tracking and brain-computer interfaces has given a new perspective on the control channels that can be used for interacting with computer applications. In this book leading researchers show how these technologies can be used as control channels with signal processing algorithms and interface adaptations to drive a human-computer interface.
[more]
Signal Traffic
Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures
Edited by Lisa Parks and Nicole Starosielski
University of Illinois Press, 2015
The contributors to Signal Traffic investigate how the material artifacts of media infrastructure--transoceanic cables, mobile telephone towers, Internet data centers, and the like--intersect with everyday life. Essayists confront the multiple and hybrid forms networks take, the different ways networks are imagined and engaged with by publics around the world, their local effects, and what human beings experience when a network fails.
Some contributors explore the physical objects and industrial relations that make up an infrastructure. Others venture into the marginalized communities orphaned from the knowledge economies, technological literacies, and epistemological questions linked to infrastructural formation and use. The wide-ranging insights delineate the oft-ignored contrasts between industrialized and developing regions, rich and poor areas, and urban and rural settings, bringing technological differences into focus.
Contributors include Charles R. Acland, Paul Dourish, Sarah Harris, Jennifer Holt and Patrick Vonderau, Shannon Mattern, Toby Miller, Lisa Parks, Christian Sandvig, Nicole Starosielski, Jonathan Sterne, and Helga Tawil-Souri.
[more]
Signals and Systems
Theory and Applications
Fawwaz T. Ulaby and Andrew E. Yagle
Michigan Publishing Services, 2018
This book has been replaced by a new edition. The second edition can be purchased at https://services.publishing.umich.edu/Books/S/Signals-and-Systems2 or accessed online as a free download.
[more]
Signals and Systems
Theory and Applications
Fawwaz T. Ulaby and Andrew E. Yagle
Michigan Publishing Services, 2018
[From the Preface] This is a signals and systems textbook with a difference: Engineering applications of signals and systems are integrated into the presentation as equal partners with concepts and mathematical models, instead of just presenting the concepts and models and leaving the student to wonder how it all relates to engineering.
The first six chapters of this textbook cover the usual basic concepts of continuous-time signals and systems, including the Laplace and Fourier transforms. Chapters 7 and 8 present the discrete-time version of Chapters 1–6, emphasizing the similarities and analogies, and often using continuous-time results to derive discrete-time results. The two chapters serve to introduce the reader to the world of discrete-time signals and systems. Concepts highlighted in Chapters 1–8 include: compensator feedback configuration (Ch. 4); energy spectral density, group delay, expanded coverage of exponential Fourier series (Ch. 5); filtering of images, Hilbert transform, single-sideband (SSB), zero and first-order hold interpolation (Ch. 6); the Cooley-Tukey FFT (Ch. 7); bilateral z-transform and use for non-minimum-phase deconvolution (Ch. 8). Chapter 9 covers the usual concepts of discrete-time signal processing, including data windows, FIR and IIR filter design, multirate signal processing, and auto-correlation and crosscorrelation. It also includes some nontraditional concepts, including spectrograms, application of multirate signal processing, and the musical circle of fifths to audio signal processing, and some biomedical applications of autocorrelation and cross-correlation. Chapter 10 covers image processing, discrete-time wavelets (including the Smith-Barnwell condition and the Haar and Daubechies discrete-time wavelet expansions), and an introduction to compressed sensing. This is the first sophomore-junior level textbook the authors are aware of that allows students to apply compressed sensing concepts. Applications include: image denoising using 2-D filtering; image denoising using thresholding and shrinkage of image wavelet transforms; image deconvolution using Wiener filters; “valid” image deconvolution using ISTA; image inpainting; tomography and the projection-slice theorem, and image reconstruction from partial knowledge of 2-D DFT values. Problems allow students to apply these techniques to actual images and learn by doing, not by only reading.
The first six chapters of this textbook cover the usual basic concepts of continuous-time signals and systems, including the Laplace and Fourier transforms. Chapters 7 and 8 present the discrete-time version of Chapters 1–6, emphasizing the similarities and analogies, and often using continuous-time results to derive discrete-time results. The two chapters serve to introduce the reader to the world of discrete-time signals and systems. Concepts highlighted in Chapters 1–8 include: compensator feedback configuration (Ch. 4); energy spectral density, group delay, expanded coverage of exponential Fourier series (Ch. 5); filtering of images, Hilbert transform, single-sideband (SSB), zero and first-order hold interpolation (Ch. 6); the Cooley-Tukey FFT (Ch. 7); bilateral z-transform and use for non-minimum-phase deconvolution (Ch. 8). Chapter 9 covers the usual concepts of discrete-time signal processing, including data windows, FIR and IIR filter design, multirate signal processing, and auto-correlation and crosscorrelation. It also includes some nontraditional concepts, including spectrograms, application of multirate signal processing, and the musical circle of fifths to audio signal processing, and some biomedical applications of autocorrelation and cross-correlation. Chapter 10 covers image processing, discrete-time wavelets (including the Smith-Barnwell condition and the Haar and Daubechies discrete-time wavelet expansions), and an introduction to compressed sensing. This is the first sophomore-junior level textbook the authors are aware of that allows students to apply compressed sensing concepts. Applications include: image denoising using 2-D filtering; image denoising using thresholding and shrinkage of image wavelet transforms; image deconvolution using Wiener filters; “valid” image deconvolution using ISTA; image inpainting; tomography and the projection-slice theorem, and image reconstruction from partial knowledge of 2-D DFT values. Problems allow students to apply these techniques to actual images and learn by doing, not by only reading.
[more]
Silicide Technology for Integrated Circuits
Lih J. Chen
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2004
Silicide Technology for Integrated Circuits focuses on the task of developing and applying metal silicide technology as it emerges from the scientific to the prototype and manufacturing stages and provides guidance on the application of the latest emerging technology.
[more]
Silicon Solar Cell Metallization and Module Technology
Thorsten Dullweber
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2022
In solar cell production, metallization is the manufacturing of metal contacts at the surfaces of solar cells in order to collect the photo-generated current for use. Being one of the most expensive steps in solar cell fabrication, it plays both an electrical and an optical role, because the contacts contribute to shading, and to the series resistance of solar cells. In addition, metal contacts may reduce the solar cells voltage due to charge carrier recombination at the metal / silicon interface. Addressing these challenges could increase solar cell conversion efficiency while cutting their production costs.
[more]
Silicon Wafer Bonding Technology for VLSI and MEMS Applications
Subramanian S. Iyer
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2002
By bonding a thin wafer of active silicon to a thicker wafer via a layer of insulating oxide to form an SOI structure it is possible to substantially improve the performance and integration of microelectronic circuits produced by very large scale integration (VLSI). For example, the recently announced IBM Power 4 'server-ona- chip' integrates two microprocessors, a high bandwidth system switch, a large memory cache and input/output functions. SOI wafer bonding is also an enabling technology in the rapidly growing field of microelectromechanical systems (MEMS).
[more]
SIMOX
Maria J. Anc
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2004
SIMOX explores Separation-by-IMplanted-OXygen technology, a method of fabricating silicon-on-insulator structures and substrates by implanting high doses of oxygen and high temperature annealing.
[more]
Simulation and Analysis of Circuits for Power Electronics
Muhammad H. Rashid
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2025
Power electronics play a vital role in many spheres, including integrating renewable energy, ensuring the reliability of complex power distribution systems, and in increasing efficiency of electric vehicles and industrial machines. Simulation of power electronic circuitry is thus a key and cost-effective means to detect and avoid problems during development of circuitry in power generation, distribution and use. This is true for both novel and established circuit designs.
[more]
Singular Perturbation Methodology in Control Systems
D.S. Naidu
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 1988
Many realistic engineering systems are large in dimension and stiff for computation. Their analysis and control require extensive numerical algorithms. The methodology of singular perturbations and time scales (SPTS), crowned with the remedial features of order reduction and stiffness relief is a powerful technique to achieve computational simplicity.
[more]
Sir Charles Wheatstone FRS, 1802-1875
Brian Bowers
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2001
Charles Wheatstone began his life-long involvement with electrical engineering in the days when it was still at the stage of 'philosophical toys', yet he had a vision of telecommunications that could deliver printed messages around the world. With W.E. Cooke he developed the first practical electric telegraph. The problems of operating telegraphs over long distances led him into the field of electrical measurements.
[more]
Skills Development for Engineers
Innovative model for advanced learning in the workplace
Kevin Hoag
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2001
This book presents an innovative model for skills development for engineering professionals. Organizations operate in an increasingly competitive environment, which drives a need for continuous employee skills development. The rapid pace of technological change requires everyone to continue learning throughout life and this book questions the effectiveness of current employee learning in most organizations. Conversely, the new lifelong learning model described in this book has been proven very successful and less costly than existing systems. This highly readable book is amply illustrated with many practical examples and case studies based on the author's experience as a training manager in a large North American engineering company.
[more]
Sliding Mode Control of Vehicle Dynamics
Antonella Ferrara
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2017
The control of the longitudinal, lateral and vertical dynamics of two and four-wheeled vehicles, both of conventional type as well as fully-electric, is important not only for general safety of vehicular traffic in general, but also for future automated driving.
[more]
Slotted Waveguide Array Antennas
Theory, analysis and design
Lars Josefsson
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2018
Slotted waveguide antenna arrays are used in radar, communication and remote sensing systems for high frequencies. They have linear polarization with low cross-polarization and low losses but can also be designed for dual polarizations and phase steered beams.
[more]
Small Electric Motors
Helmut Moczala
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 1998
Users of small electric motors face the difficult task of selecting the best motor for their particular drive application. The technical requirements of the drive, the level of safety needed and the cost factor must all be considered. The choice is made more difficult by the continuous arrival of newly developed types of motor. This book, a translation from German, aims to help those involved in specifying, developing, manufacturing and marketing small motors by reporting the current state of the art.
[more]
Small Signal Microwave Amplifier Design
Theodore Grosch
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 1999
This book explains techniques and examples for designing stable amplifiers for high-frequency applications, in which the signal is small and the amplifier circuit is linear. An in-depth discussion of linear network theory provides the foundation needed to develop actual designs. Examples throughout the book will show you how to apply the knowledge gained in each chapter leading to the complex design of low noise amplifiers. Exercises at the end of each chapter will help students to practice their skills. The solutions to these design problems are available in an accompanying solutions booklet (Small Signal Microwave Amplifier Design: Solutions).
[more]
Small Signal Microwave Amplifier Design
Solutions
Theodore Grosch
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 1999
This book comprises 9 chapters, each containing the solutions to problems set in in the chapters of Grosch's Small Signal Microwave Amplifier Design.
[more]
Small Tech
The Culture of Digital Tools
Byron Hawk
University of Minnesota Press, 2008
The essays in Small Tech investigate the cultural impact of digital tools and provide fresh perspectives on mobile technologies such as iPods, digital cameras, and PDAs and software functions like cut, copy, and paste and WYSIWYG. Together they advance new thinking about digital environments.
Contributors: Wendy Warren Austin, Edinboro U; Jim Bizzocchi, Simon Fraser U; Collin Gifford Brooke, Syracuse U; Paul Cesarini, Bowling Green State U; Veronique Chance, U of London; Johanna Drucker, U of Virginia; Jenny Edbauer, Penn State U; Robert A. Emmons Jr., Rutgers U; Johndan Johnson-Eilola, Clarkson U; Richard Kahn, UCLA; Douglas Kellner, UCLA; Karla Saari Kitalong, U of Central Florida; Steve Mann, U of Toronto; Lev Manovich, U of California, San Diego; Adrian Miles, RMIT U; Jason Nolan, Ryerson U; Julian Oliver; Mark Paterson, U of the West of England, Bristol; Isabel Pedersen, Ryerson U; Michael Pennell, U of Rhode Island; Joanna Castner Post, U of Central Arkansas; Teri Rueb, Rhode Island School of Design; James J. Sosnoski; Lance State, Fordham U; Jason Swarts, North Carolina State U; Barry Wellman, U of Toronto; Sean D. Williams, Clemson U; Jeremy Yuille, RMIT U.
Byron Hawk is assistant professor of English at George Mason University.
David M. Rieder is assistant professor of English at North Carolina State University.
Ollie Oviedo is associate professor of English at Eastern New Mexico University.
[more]
Small Wind and Hydrokinetic Turbines
Philip Clausen
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2022
There is huge potential for smaller wind turbines to provide clean energy around the world. Small wind turbines come in a variety of designs, and have similarities in principles and technology to small hydrokinetic turbines (SHKTs). SHKTs, in turn, can play an important role in hydropower. Small wind and hydrokinetic systems can even work together, for example, to power farms, communities, campuses, rural as well as remote rural areas, and island regions.
[more]
Smart Citizens, Smarter State
The Technologies of Expertise and the Future of Governing
Beth Simone Noveck
Harvard University Press, 2015
Government “of the people, by the people, for the people” expresses an ideal that resonates in all democracies. Yet poll after poll reveals deep distrust of institutions that seem to have left “the people” out of the governing equation. Government bureaucracies that are supposed to solve critical problems on their own are a troublesome outgrowth of the professionalization of public life in the industrial age. They are especially ill-suited to confronting today’s complex challenges.
Offering a far-reaching program for innovation, Smart Citizens, Smarter State suggests that public decisionmaking could be more effective and legitimate if government were smarter—if our institutions knew how to use technology to leverage citizens’ expertise. Just as individuals use only part of their brainpower to solve most problems, governing institutions make far too little use of the skills and experience of those inside and outside of government with scientific credentials, practical skills, and ground-level street smarts. New tools—what Beth Simone Noveck calls technologies of expertise—are making it possible to match the supply of citizen expertise to the demand for it in government.
Drawing on a wide range of academic disciplines and practical examples from her work as an adviser to governments on institutional innovation, Noveck explores how to create more open and collaborative institutions. In so doing, she puts forward a profound new vision for participatory democracy rooted not in the paltry act of occasional voting or the serendipity of crowdsourcing but in people’s knowledge and know-how.
[more]
Smart Health Technologies for the COVID-19 Pandemic
Internet of medical things perspectives
Chinmay Chakraborty
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2022
Smart Health Technologies for the COVID-19 Pandemic: Internet of medical things perspectives looks at the role technology has played to monitor, map and fight the global COVID-19 pandemic. Chapters outline risk assessment methodologies and social distancing and infection control technologies in the face of this disease outbreak.
[more]
Smart Road Infrastructure
Innovative technologies
Runhua Guo
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2022
Smart roads are road infrastructures with integrated structural materials, sensors, information centres, and energy systems. They are intended to extend the road's service life and performance, reduce safety risks, and improve service quality. Several smart road pilot projects have been initiated, such as precast pavements with integrated optical fibres, self-healing asphalt material, self-snow-melting systems and solar pavements.
[more]
Smart Sensing for Traffic Monitoring
Nobuyuki Ozaki
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2021
Growth in urbanisation, particularly in emerging economies, is causing increased traffic congestion and affecting environmental conditions in cities. Cities need to manage this growth in traffic in an efficient way. Intelligent infrastructure for traffic monitoring and sensing offers a potential solution, and so this book explores the prospective role of this approach in managing congestion, the established and emerging related technologies, and routes to effective implementation.
[more]
Smarter Energy
From smart metering to the smart grid
Hongjian Sun
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2016
This book presents cutting-edge perspectives and research results in smart energy spanning multiple disciplines across four main topics: smart metering, smart grid modeling, control and optimization, and smart grid communications and networking.
[more]
Smartland Korea
Mobile Communication, Culture, and Society
Dal Yong Jin
University of Michigan Press, 2017
The dramatic advancement of cellphone technology has fundamentally changed our daily lives. Smartphones and their applications have created new capital for information and communication technology corporations and changed the way people communicate. Because of an interesting awareness of the significance for digital economy and people’s daily culture, many countries, from the U.S. to China, have massively invested in the smartphone industries since the early 21st century. Among them, South Korea has become one of the centers for technology development and digital culture, although the country was once lagging behind in the penetration of the phones and their apps. Yet within the last few years, the country has taken a big step toward their goal of becoming a ‘mobile game wonderland’ by appropriating smartphones and it now exists as a curious test-bed for the future of smartphone technology. Smartland Korea, as the first attempt to comprehensively analyze mobile communication in the context of Korean smartphones, looks into a largely neglected focus of inquiry, a localized mobile landscape, with particular reference to young Koreans’ engagement with their devices and applications. Dal Yong Jin focuses not only on the celebratory achievement of technological advancement, but also the significance of social milieu in the development of the smartphones. He situates the emergence of smartphones within the growth of mobile technologies and overall telecommunications industries embedded in Korea’s information and communication technologies. The book examines the technology’s innovation and the evolution, the digital economy through the lens of political economy, and the youth culture embedded in the Korean smartphone context.
[more]
Smoke and Tailings
An Environmental History of Butte and Anaconda, Montana, 1880–1930
Fredric L. Quivik
University of Nevada Press, 2025
Smoke and Tailings explores the environmental history of copper-smelting industry in Butte and Anaconda, Montana. Situating within the emerging “Envirotech” field, Smoke and Tailings blends environmental history and the history of technology. Author and historian Fredric L. Quivik integrates these disciplines with political, legal, and business history to provide a comprehensive analysis of the industry’s environmental legacy.
Butte’s history, a long-standing subject of historical inquiry, gains new depth as Quivik examines the technological developments pioneered by local mining companies. He challenges the simplistic narrative of a powerful corporation imposing its will on helpless agricultural communities. Local communities mounted strong opposition to the industry’s polluting methods; Quivik acknowledges this dynamic while also revealing efforts by the Anaconda Copper Mining Company to address environmental issues. The company developed and implemented technical solutions to minimize resource waste and mitigate damage, driven by both economic interests and litigation pressures. While these advancements lessened some of the environmental harm, they were insufficient to prevent long-term consequences. The operations in Butte and Anaconda ultimately created the largest Superfund complex in the United States, requiring billions of dollars in remediation.
Quivik’s nuanced approach opens the “black box” of technology, showing how innovations both alleviated and exacerbated the environmental challenges of mining, milling, and smelting. In addition to contributing to the rich literature on smelter smoke, this book breaks new ground by examining the underexplored environmental impacts of tailings, offering a fresh perspective on the intersection of industry, technology, and environmental change. The cultural landscapes of Butte and Anaconda retain many features of the region’s history of both environmental degradation and remediation. Smoke and Tailings is an essential addition to the study of Butte’s industrial and ecological history.
Butte’s history, a long-standing subject of historical inquiry, gains new depth as Quivik examines the technological developments pioneered by local mining companies. He challenges the simplistic narrative of a powerful corporation imposing its will on helpless agricultural communities. Local communities mounted strong opposition to the industry’s polluting methods; Quivik acknowledges this dynamic while also revealing efforts by the Anaconda Copper Mining Company to address environmental issues. The company developed and implemented technical solutions to minimize resource waste and mitigate damage, driven by both economic interests and litigation pressures. While these advancements lessened some of the environmental harm, they were insufficient to prevent long-term consequences. The operations in Butte and Anaconda ultimately created the largest Superfund complex in the United States, requiring billions of dollars in remediation.
Quivik’s nuanced approach opens the “black box” of technology, showing how innovations both alleviated and exacerbated the environmental challenges of mining, milling, and smelting. In addition to contributing to the rich literature on smelter smoke, this book breaks new ground by examining the underexplored environmental impacts of tailings, offering a fresh perspective on the intersection of industry, technology, and environmental change. The cultural landscapes of Butte and Anaconda retain many features of the region’s history of both environmental degradation and remediation. Smoke and Tailings is an essential addition to the study of Butte’s industrial and ecological history.
[more]
So Shall You Reap
Farming And Crops In Human Affairs
Otto T. Solbrig and Dorothy J. Solbrig
Island Press, 1994
So Shall You Reap is a broad-gauged exploration of the intersections of farming and history. Beginning with the prehistorical era, Otto and Dorothy Solbrig describe the evolution of farming. When and how did people learn to irrigate, to fertilize, to rotate their crops -- and why?
Along with its fundamental importance to history, farming has radically altered the physical world. Natural landscapes have been completely transformed to provide room for growth on a large scale of a few species of plants and even fewer species of domesticated animals. Agriculture has altered the earth's biosphere and changed its geosphere: The soil has been modified, forests have been felled, swamps have been drained, rivers have been dammed and diverted.
So Shall You Reap presents a fresh and informed perspective on how farming and the crops we grow have changed us and our environment. By understanding the nature of the origins and evolution of agriculture, we will be better prepared to anticipate what the future may hold in store, and what must be done to increase food production while minimizing environmental problems.
[more]
Social Knowledge Creation in the Humanities
Volume 1
Edited by Alyssa Arbuckle, Aaron Mauro, and Daniel Powell
Iter Press, 2017
The ubiquity of social media has transformed the scope and scale of scholarly communication in the arts and humanities. The consequences of this new participatory and collaborative environment for humanities research has allowed for fresh approaches to communicating research. Social Knowledge Creation takes up the norms and customs of online life to reorient, redistribute, and oftentimes flatten traditional academic hierarchies. This book discusses the implications of how humanists communicate with the world and looks to how social media shapes research methods. This volume addresses peer-review, open access publishing, tenure and promotion, mentorship, teaching, collaboration, and interdisciplinarity as a comprehensive introduction to these rapidly changing trends in scholarly communication, digital pedagogy, and educational technology. Collaborative structures are rapidly augmenting disciplinary focus of humanities curriculum and the public impact of humanities research teams with new organizational and disciplinary thinking. Social Knowledge Creation represents a particularly dynamic and growing field in which the humanities seeks to find new ways to communicate the legacy and traditions of humanities based inquiry in a 21st century context.
New Technologies in Medieval and Renaissance Studies Volume 7.
Edited by Alyssa Arbuckle, Aaron Mauro, and Daniel Powell
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The Social Life of Biometrics
George C Grinnell
Rutgers University Press, 2020
In The Social Life of Biometrics, biometrics is loosely defined as a discrete technology of identification that associates physical features with a legal identity. Author George Grinnell considers the social and cultural life of biometrics by examining what it is asked to do, imagined to do, and its intended and unintended effects. As a human-focused account of technology, the book contends that biometrics needs to be understood as a mode of thought that informs how we live and understand one another; it is not simply a neutral technology of identification. Placing our biometric present in historical and cultural perspective, The Social Life of Biometrics examines a range of human experiences of biometrics. It features individual stories from locations as diverse as Turkey, Canada, Qatar, Six Nations territory in New York State, Iraq, the skies above New York City, a university campus and Nairobi to give cultural accounts of identification and look at the ongoing legacies of our biometric ambitions. It ends by considering the ethics surrounding biometrics and human identity, migration, movement, strangers, borders, and the nature of the body and its coherence. How has biometric thought structured ideas about borders, race, covered faces, migration, territory, citizenship, and international responsibility? What might happen if identity was less defined by the question of “who’s there?” and much more by the question “how do you live?”
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The Socialist People's Car
Automobiles, Shortages and Consent in the Czechoslovak Road to Mass Production
Valentina Fava
Amsterdam University Press, 2013
From 1918 to 1968, Czechoslovak auto manufacturing was marked by the growing influence of the American model of mass production and by the Sovietization of Czechoslovak society and industry. In this book, Valentina Fava examines how the stratification of foreign technical and organizational knowledge shaped Czechoslovak car production practices, contributing to the formation of a specific technical and organizational culture. This book studies and raises questions typical of company cases in business history and relative to Škoda corporate structure, performance, production processes, and product quality.
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Soda Science
Making the World Safe for Coca-Cola
Susan Greenhalgh
University of Chicago Press, 2024
Takes readers deep inside the secret world of corporate science, where powerful companies and allied academic scientists mold research to meet industry needs.
The 1990s were tough times for the soda industry. In the United States, obesity rates were exploding. Public health critics pointed to sugary soda as a main culprit and advocated for soda taxes that might decrease the consumption of sweetened beverages—and threaten the revenues of the giant soda companies.
Soda Science tells the story of how industry leader Coca-Cola mobilized allies in academia to create a soda-defense science that would protect profits by advocating exercise, not dietary restraint, as the priority solution to obesity, a view few experts accept. Anthropologist and science studies specialist Susan Greenhalgh discovers a hidden world of science-making—with distinctive organizations, social networks, knowledge-making practices, and ethical claims—dedicated to creating industry-friendly science and keeping it under wraps. By tracing the birth, maturation, death, and afterlife of the science they made, Greenhalgh shows how corporate science has managed to gain such a hold over our lives.
Spanning twenty years, her investigation takes her from the US, where the science was made, to China, a key market for sugary soda. In the US, soda science was a critical force in the making of today’s society of step-counting, fitness-tracking, weight-obsessed citizens. In China, this distorted science has left its mark not just on national obesity policies but on the apparatus for managing chronic disease generally. By following the scientists and their ambitious schemes to make the world safe for Coke, Greenhalgh offers an account that is more global—and yet more human—than the story that dominates public understanding today.
Coke’s research isn’t fake science, Greenhalgh argues; it was real science, conducted by real and eminent scientists, but distorted by its aim. Her gripping book raises crucial questions about conflicts of interest in scientific research, the funding behind familiar messages about health, and the cunning ways giant corporations come to shape our diets, lifestyles, and health to their own needs.
The 1990s were tough times for the soda industry. In the United States, obesity rates were exploding. Public health critics pointed to sugary soda as a main culprit and advocated for soda taxes that might decrease the consumption of sweetened beverages—and threaten the revenues of the giant soda companies.
Soda Science tells the story of how industry leader Coca-Cola mobilized allies in academia to create a soda-defense science that would protect profits by advocating exercise, not dietary restraint, as the priority solution to obesity, a view few experts accept. Anthropologist and science studies specialist Susan Greenhalgh discovers a hidden world of science-making—with distinctive organizations, social networks, knowledge-making practices, and ethical claims—dedicated to creating industry-friendly science and keeping it under wraps. By tracing the birth, maturation, death, and afterlife of the science they made, Greenhalgh shows how corporate science has managed to gain such a hold over our lives.
Spanning twenty years, her investigation takes her from the US, where the science was made, to China, a key market for sugary soda. In the US, soda science was a critical force in the making of today’s society of step-counting, fitness-tracking, weight-obsessed citizens. In China, this distorted science has left its mark not just on national obesity policies but on the apparatus for managing chronic disease generally. By following the scientists and their ambitious schemes to make the world safe for Coke, Greenhalgh offers an account that is more global—and yet more human—than the story that dominates public understanding today.
Coke’s research isn’t fake science, Greenhalgh argues; it was real science, conducted by real and eminent scientists, but distorted by its aim. Her gripping book raises crucial questions about conflicts of interest in scientific research, the funding behind familiar messages about health, and the cunning ways giant corporations come to shape our diets, lifestyles, and health to their own needs.
[more]
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