A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY
2042 books about Technology & Engineering and 33
start with U
2042 books about Technology & Engineering and 33
2042 books about Technology & Engineering
33 start with U start with U
33 start with U start with U
The Ultimate Terrorists
Jessica Stern
Harvard University Press, 1999
As bad as they are, why aren't terrorists worse? With biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons at hand, they easily could be. And, as this chilling book suggests, they soon may well be. A former member of the National Security Council staff, Jessica Stern guides us expertly through a post-Cold War world in which the threat of all-out nuclear war, devastating but highly unlikely, is being replaced by the less costly but much more imminent threat of terrorist attacks with weapons of mass destruction.
According to SternThe Ultimate Terrorists depicts a not-very-distant future in which both independent and state-sponsored terrorism using weapons of mass destruction could actually occur. But Stern also holds out hope for new technologies that might combat this trend, and for legal and political remedies that would improve public safety without compromising basic constitutional rights.
[more]
Ultracapacitor Applications
John M. Miller
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2011
Energy storage and in particular electrical storage of energy has become a very talked about topics in circles, ranging from lay person in regard to hybrid and battery electric vehicles, to professional and certainly by legislators and energy policy makers in government. But even to professional the distinction between physical and chemical forms of electric energy storage are unclear and at times poorly understood, if at all. This book takes a critical look at physical storage of electricity in the devices known collectively as electrochemical capacitors and particularly as ultracapacitors. In its 12 chapters, this text covers ultracapacitors and advances battery topics with emphasis on clear understanding of fundamental principles, models and applications. The reader will appreciates the case studies ranging from commercial to industrial to automotive applications of not only ultracapacitors but these power device components in combination with energy dense battery technologies.
[more]
Ultrawideband Radar Measurements
Analysis and processing
L.Y. Astanin
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 1997
Interest in the applications of ultrawideband (UWB) radar systems is increasing rapidly all over the world. This is evident from the number of monographs recently published on the subject and from the many papers presented at international conferences on the general problems involved in UWB radar and on its promising new applications. Conventional (classical) methods seem to have exhausted their potential and studies in the field are undergoing a profound change. This book presents some of the novel approaches to radar system analysis now being investigated.
[more]
Ultra-Wideband Surveillance Radar
Mark E. Davis
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2021
Ultra-Wideband Surveillance Radar is an emerging technology for detecting and characterizing targets and cultural features for military and geosciences applications. To characterize objects near and under severe clutter, it is necessary to have fine range and cross range resolution. The resultant wide bandwidth classifies the systems as ultra-wideband, requiring special treatment in system technology and frequency allocation.
[more]
UML for Systems Engineering
Watching the wheels
Jon Holt
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2004
Up until a few years ago there were many different modelling languages available to software developers. However, this vast array of choice only served to hinder communication and as a result the Unified Modelling Language (UML) was born. Although the UML has its roots firmly in the software world, the benefits of adopting a standard visual notation have been recognised in many other fields, not least of which is the field of systems engineering. This book concentrates on systems-based applications, rather than the traditional software applications that are more usually associated with the UML. Now fully updated to reflect the changes to UML for its version 2.0 release, this new edition has been substantially re-written and includes new material on systems architectures and life cycle management.
[more]
The Unaccountability Machine
Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions—and How the World Lost Its Mind
Dan Davies
University of Chicago Press, 2025
Longlisted for the 2024 Financial Times Book of the Year. How life and the economy became a black box—a collection of systems no one understands, producing outcomes no one likes.
Passengers get bumped from flights. Phone menus disconnect. Automated financial trades produce market collapse. Of all the challenges in modern life, some of the most vexing come from our relationships with automation: a large system does us wrong, and there’s nothing we can do about it.
The problem, economist Dan Davies shows, is accountability sinks: systems in which decisions are delegated to a complex rule book or set of standard procedures, making it impossible to identify the source of mistakes when they happen. In our increasingly unhuman world—lives dominated by algorithms, artificial intelligence, and large organizations—these accountability sinks produce more than just aggravation. They make life and economy unknowable—a black box for no reason.
In The Unaccountability Machine, Davies lays bare how markets, institutions, and even governments systematically generate outcomes that no one—not even those involved in making them—seems to want. Since the earliest days of the computer age, theorists have foreseen the dangers of complex systems without personal accountability. In response, British business scholar Stafford Beer developed an accountability-first approach to management called “cybernetics,” which might have taken off had his biggest client (the Chilean government) not fallen to a bloody coup in 1973.
With his signature blend of economic and journalistic rigor, Davies examines what’s gone wrong since Beer, including what might have been had the world embraced cybernetics when it had the chance. The Unaccountability Machine is a revelatory and resonant account of how modern life became predisposed to dysfunction.
Passengers get bumped from flights. Phone menus disconnect. Automated financial trades produce market collapse. Of all the challenges in modern life, some of the most vexing come from our relationships with automation: a large system does us wrong, and there’s nothing we can do about it.
The problem, economist Dan Davies shows, is accountability sinks: systems in which decisions are delegated to a complex rule book or set of standard procedures, making it impossible to identify the source of mistakes when they happen. In our increasingly unhuman world—lives dominated by algorithms, artificial intelligence, and large organizations—these accountability sinks produce more than just aggravation. They make life and economy unknowable—a black box for no reason.
In The Unaccountability Machine, Davies lays bare how markets, institutions, and even governments systematically generate outcomes that no one—not even those involved in making them—seems to want. Since the earliest days of the computer age, theorists have foreseen the dangers of complex systems without personal accountability. In response, British business scholar Stafford Beer developed an accountability-first approach to management called “cybernetics,” which might have taken off had his biggest client (the Chilean government) not fallen to a bloody coup in 1973.
With his signature blend of economic and journalistic rigor, Davies examines what’s gone wrong since Beer, including what might have been had the world embraced cybernetics when it had the chance. The Unaccountability Machine is a revelatory and resonant account of how modern life became predisposed to dysfunction.
[more]
The Unaccountability Machine
Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions—and How the World Lost Its Mind
Dan Davies
University of Chicago Press, 2025
This is an audiobook version of this book.
Longlisted for the 2024 Financial Times Book of the Year. How life and the economy became a black box—a collection of systems no one understands, producing outcomes no one likes.
Passengers get bumped from flights. Phone menus disconnect. Automated financial trades produce market collapse. Of all the challenges in modern life, some of the most vexing come from our relationships with automation: a large system does us wrong, and there’s nothing we can do about it.
The problem, economist Dan Davies shows, is accountability sinks: systems in which decisions are delegated to a complex rule book or set of standard procedures, making it impossible to identify the source of mistakes when they happen. In our increasingly unhuman world—lives dominated by algorithms, artificial intelligence, and large organizations—these accountability sinks produce more than just aggravation. They make life and economy unknowable—a black box for no reason.
In The Unaccountability Machine, Davies lays bare how markets, institutions, and even governments systematically generate outcomes that no one—not even those involved in making them—seems to want. Since the earliest days of the computer age, theorists have foreseen the dangers of complex systems without personal accountability. In response, British business scholar Stafford Beer developed an accountability-first approach to management called “cybernetics,” which might have taken off had his biggest client (the Chilean government) not fallen to a bloody coup in 1973.
With his signature blend of economic and journalistic rigor, Davies examines what’s gone wrong since Beer, including what might have been had the world embraced cybernetics when it had the chance. The Unaccountability Machine is a revelatory and resonant account of how modern life became predisposed to dysfunction.
Longlisted for the 2024 Financial Times Book of the Year. How life and the economy became a black box—a collection of systems no one understands, producing outcomes no one likes.
Passengers get bumped from flights. Phone menus disconnect. Automated financial trades produce market collapse. Of all the challenges in modern life, some of the most vexing come from our relationships with automation: a large system does us wrong, and there’s nothing we can do about it.
The problem, economist Dan Davies shows, is accountability sinks: systems in which decisions are delegated to a complex rule book or set of standard procedures, making it impossible to identify the source of mistakes when they happen. In our increasingly unhuman world—lives dominated by algorithms, artificial intelligence, and large organizations—these accountability sinks produce more than just aggravation. They make life and economy unknowable—a black box for no reason.
In The Unaccountability Machine, Davies lays bare how markets, institutions, and even governments systematically generate outcomes that no one—not even those involved in making them—seems to want. Since the earliest days of the computer age, theorists have foreseen the dangers of complex systems without personal accountability. In response, British business scholar Stafford Beer developed an accountability-first approach to management called “cybernetics,” which might have taken off had his biggest client (the Chilean government) not fallen to a bloody coup in 1973.
With his signature blend of economic and journalistic rigor, Davies examines what’s gone wrong since Beer, including what might have been had the world embraced cybernetics when it had the chance. The Unaccountability Machine is a revelatory and resonant account of how modern life became predisposed to dysfunction.
[more]
Uncertainty Quantification of Electromagnetic Devices, Circuits, and Systems
Sourajeet Roy
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2022
Uncertainty Quantification of Electromagnetic Devices, Circuits, and Systems describes the advances made over the last decade in the topic of uncertainty quantification (UQ) and stochastic analysis. The primary goal of the book is to educate and inform electronics engineers about the most recent numerical techniques, mathematical theories, and computational methods to perform UQ for electromagnetic devices, circuits, and systems.
[more]
Undead Science
Science Studies and the Afterlife of Cold Fusion
Simon, Bart
Rutgers University Press, 2002
Undead Science examines the story of cold fusion, one of the most publicized scientific controversies of the late twentieth century. In 1989 two Utah-based “discoverers” claimed to have developed an electrochemical process that produced more energy than was required to initiate the process. Finding no other explanation, the researchers described their findings as some kind of nuclear reaction. If they were correct, an important new energy source would have been found. Objections surfaced quickly, and in the year that followed, hundreds of scientists worldwide attempted to reproduce these results. Most, though not all, failed, and the controversy became increasingly antagonistic. By 1990, general scientific opinion favored the skeptics and experimental work went into a steep decline. Nevertheless, many scientists continue to do research in what Bart Simon calls this “undead science.”
Simon argues that in spite of widespread skepticism in the scientific community, there has been a continued effort to make sense of the controversial phenomenon. Researchers in well-respected laboratories continue to produce new and rigorous work. In this manner, cold fusion research continues to exist long after the controversy has subsided, even though the existence of cold fusion is circumscribed by the widespread belief that the phenomenon is not real.
The survival of cold fusion signals the need for a more complex understanding of the social dynamics of scientific knowledge making, the boundaries between experts, intermediaries, and the lay public, and the conceptualization of failure in the history of science and technology.
[more]
Under the Wire
How the Telegraph Changed Diplomacy
David Paull Nickles
Harvard University Press, 2003
How did the telegraph, a new and revolutionary form of communication, affect diplomats, who tended to resist change? In a study based on impressive multinational research, David Paull Nickles examines the critical impact of the telegraph on the diplomacy of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Case studies in crisis diplomacy--the War of 1812, the Trent affair during the U.S. Civil War, and the famous 1917 Zimmermann telegram--introduce wide-ranging thematic discussions on the autonomy of diplomats; the effects of increased speed on decision making and public opinion; the neglected role of clerks in diplomacy; and the issues of expense, garbled text, espionage, and technophobia that initially made foreign ministries wary of telegraphy. Ultimately, the introduction of the telegraph contributed to the centralization of foreign ministries and the rising importance of signals intelligence. The faster pace of diplomatic disputes invited more emotional decisions by statesmen, while public opinion often exercised a belligerent influence on crises developing over a shorter time period.
Under the Wire offers a fascinating new perspective on the culture of diplomacy and the social history of technology.
[more]
Underground Leviathan
Corporate Sovereignty and Mining in the Americas
Israel G. Solares
University of Nevada Press, 2024
Underground Leviathan explores the emergence, dynamics, and lasting impacts of a mining firm, the United States Company. Through its exercise of sovereign power across the borders of North America in the early twentieth century, the transnational US Company shaped the business, environmental, political, and scientific landscape. Between its initial incorporation in Maine in 1906 and its final demise in the 1980s, the mining company held properties in Utah, Colorado, California, Nevada, Alaska, Mexico, and Canada. The firm was a prototypical management-ruled corporation, which strategically planned and manipulated the technological, production, economic, urban, environmental, political, and cultural activities wherever it operated, all while shaping social actors internationally, including managers, engineers, workers, neighbors, and farmers.
Author Israel G. Solares examines how the twentieth century multinational firm established and articulated multinational corporate sovereignty in ways that reflect other multinational titans, like the East Asian Trade companies, and presages the digital giants and space corporations of the twenty-first century. Bridging the domineering practices used during the colonization of Southern Asia with the futuristic colonies on the Moon, Underground Leviathan documents the cost of a corporation’s unyielding desire to consume the secrets at the center of the Earth.
Author Israel G. Solares examines how the twentieth century multinational firm established and articulated multinational corporate sovereignty in ways that reflect other multinational titans, like the East Asian Trade companies, and presages the digital giants and space corporations of the twenty-first century. Bridging the domineering practices used during the colonization of Southern Asia with the futuristic colonies on the Moon, Underground Leviathan documents the cost of a corporation’s unyielding desire to consume the secrets at the center of the Earth.
[more]
The Undersea Network
Nicole Starosielski
Duke University Press, 2015
In our “wireless” world it is easy to take the importance of the undersea cable systems for granted, but the stakes of their successful operation are huge, as they are responsible for carrying almost all transoceanic Internet traffic. In The Undersea Network Nicole Starosielski follows these cables from the ocean depths to their landing zones on the sandy beaches of the South Pacific, bringing them to the surface of media scholarship and making visible the materiality of the wired network. In doing so, she charts the cable network’s cultural, historical, geographic and environmental dimensions. Starosielski argues that the environments the cables occupy are historical and political realms, where the network and the connections it enables are made possible by the deliberate negotiation and manipulation of technology, culture, politics and geography. Accompanying the book is an interactive digital mapping project, where readers can trace cable routes, view photographs and archival materials, and read stories about the island cable hubs.
[more]
Understandable Electric Circuits
Meizhong Wang
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2010
There are many 'Electric Circuits' books on the market but this unique Understandable Electric Circuits book provides an understandable and effective introduction to the fundamentals of DC/AC circuits. It covers current, voltage, power, resistors, capacitors, inductors, impedance, admittance, dependent/independent sources, the basic circuit laws/rules (Ohm's law, KVL/KCL, voltage/current divider rules), series/parallel and wye/ delta circuits, methods of DC/AC analysis (branch current and mesh/node analysis), the network theorems (superposition, Thevenin's/Norton's theorems, maximum power transfer, Millman's and substitution theorems), transient analysis, RLC circuits and resonance, mutual inductance, transformers, and more.
[more]
Understandable Electric Circuits
Key concepts
Meizhong Wang
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2019
In this digital age, as the role of electronic circuits becomes ever broader and more complex, a thorough understanding of the key concepts of circuits is a great advantage. This book offers a thorough reference guide to the theory, elements and design of basic electric circuits, providing a solid foundation for those who plan to move into the field of electronics engineering, and essential information for anyone who uses electric circuitry in their profession or research. The book is designed to be accessible to newcomers to the field while also providing a useful review for more advanced readers. It has been extensively revised and expanded for this new edition to provide a clear source of information on this complex topic. Materials are presented visually with less text and more outlines so that readers can quickly get to the heart of each topic, making studying and reviewing more effective.
[more]
Understandable Electronic Devices
Key concepts and circuit design
Meizhong Wang
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2022
An electronic device is a physical component of an electronic circuit or system, which is used to affect electrons and their associated fields in accordance with the function of that system. Such systems have a very broad range of applications, the main ones being, Industrial automation and motion control, information processing, telecommunication, and signal processing.
[more]
Understanding and Managing Power Quality Issues
Sincy George
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2025
The increasing complexity of today's power systems, and the growing numbers of power electronic devices that are being introduced, adds to the risk of power quality problems caused by harmonics. Non-linear loads into power systems, non-sinusoidal and distorted current waveforms, and voltage distortion have become more common, and these phenomena can lead to power losses and damage to equipment.
[more]
Understanding Radar Systems
Simon Kingsley
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 1999
What is radar? What systems are currently in use? How do they work? Understanding Radar Systems provides engineers and scientists with answers to these critical questions, focusing on actual radar systems in use today. It's the perfect resource for those just entering the field or a quick refresher for experienced practitioners. The book leads readers through the specialized language and calculations that comprise the complex world of modern radar engineering as seen in dozens of state-of-the-art radar systems. The authors stress practical concepts that apply to all radar, keeping math to a minimum. Most of the book is based on real radar systems rather than theoretical studies. The result is a valuable, easy-to-use guide that makes the difficult parts of the field easier and helps readers do performance calculations quickly and easily.
[more]
Understanding Telecommunications Business
Andy Valdar
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2015
We all enjoy the benefits of the 'information age' but we may not be aware of the range of technologies and infrastructure that underpins the Internet and the services that it supports. There are many companies involved in the business of providing and operating such resources. This book attempts to explain the complex interplay between the companies, how their businesses operate, and how they seek to make a profit.
[more]
Understanding Telecommunications Networks
Andy Valdar
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2017
A telecommunications network is an electronic system of links, nodes and the controls that govern their operations to allow voice and data transfer among users and devices. Examples of telecommunications networks are the telephone networks, computer networks and the Internet. Understanding Telecommunications Networks provides a comprehensive explanation of how various systems and technologies link together to construct fixed and mobile telecommunications networks and provide services. It uses straightforward language supported by block-schematic diagrams so that non-engineers and engineers alike can learn about the principles.
[more]
Understanding Telecommunications Networks
Andy Valdar
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2006
This book explains how telecommunications networks work. It uses straightforward language supported by copious block-schematic diagrams so that non-engineers and engineers alike can learn about the principles of fixed and mobile telecommunications networks carrying voice and data. The book covers all aspects of today's networks, including how they are planned, formed and operated, plus next generation networks and how they will be implemented.
[more]
Uninterruptible Power Supplies
John Platts
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 1992
Valuable data, essential services and production process plants are typical assets that can be lost or seriously disturbed by power supply breaks or contamination. An uninterruptible power supply (UPS) can avoid potentially catastrophic havoc caused by electricity supply line disturbances. Behind this protection, however, is the need for a sound UPS design based on a thorough specification to achieve reliable and consistent functioning.
[more]
Unleaded
How Changing Our Gasoline Changed Everything
Carrie Nielsen
Rutgers University Press, 2021
When leaded gasoline was first developed in the 1920s, medical experts were quick to warn of the public health catastrophes it would cause. Yet government regulators did not heed their advice, and for more than half a century, nearly all cars used leaded gasoline, which contributed to a nationwide epidemic of lead poisoning. By the 1970s, 99.8% of American children had significantly elevated levels of lead in their blood.
Unleaded tells the story of how crusading scientists and activists convinced the U.S. government to ban lead additives in gasoline. It also reveals how, for nearly fifty years, scientific experts paid by the oil and mining industries abused their authority to convince the public that leaded gasoline was perfectly harmless.
Combining environmental history, sociology, and neuroscience, Carrie Nielsen explores how lead exposure affects the developing brains of children and is linked to social problems including academic failure, teen pregnancies, and violent crime. She also shows how, even after the nationwide outrage over Flint’s polluted water, many poor and minority communities and communities of color across the United States still have dangerously high lead levels. Unleaded vividly depicts the importance of sound science and strong environmental regulations to protect our nation’s most vulnerable populations.
Unleaded tells the story of how crusading scientists and activists convinced the U.S. government to ban lead additives in gasoline. It also reveals how, for nearly fifty years, scientific experts paid by the oil and mining industries abused their authority to convince the public that leaded gasoline was perfectly harmless.
Combining environmental history, sociology, and neuroscience, Carrie Nielsen explores how lead exposure affects the developing brains of children and is linked to social problems including academic failure, teen pregnancies, and violent crime. She also shows how, even after the nationwide outrage over Flint’s polluted water, many poor and minority communities and communities of color across the United States still have dangerously high lead levels. Unleaded vividly depicts the importance of sound science and strong environmental regulations to protect our nation’s most vulnerable populations.
[more]
Unmanning
How Humans, Machines and Media Perform Drone Warfare
Katherine Fehr Chandler
Rutgers University Press, 2020
Unmanning studies the conditions that create unmanned platforms in the United States through a genealogy of experimental, pilotless planes flown between 1936 and 1992. Characteristics often attributed to the drone—including machine-like control, enmity and remoteness—are achieved by displacements between humans and machines that shape a mediated theater of war. Rather than primarily treating the drone as a result of the war on terror, this book examines contemporary targeted killing through a series of failed experiments to develop unmanned flight in the twentieth century. The human, machine and media parts of drone aircraft are organized to make an ostensibly not human framework for war that disavows its political underpinnings as technological advance. These experiments are tied to histories of global control, cybernetics, racism and colonialism. Drone crashes and failures call attention to the significance of human action in making technopolitics that comes to be opposed to “man” and the paradoxes at their basis.
[more]
The Unrepentant Renaissance
From Petrarch to Shakespeare to Milton
Richard Strier
University of Chicago Press, 2011
Dedicated to discussing writings of the European Renaissance that dissented from the dominant values of the period.
Who during the Renaissance could have dissented from the values of reason and restraint, patience and humility, rejection of the worldly and the physical? These widely articulated values were part of the inherited Christian tradition and were reinforced by key elements in the Renaissance, especially the revival of Stoicism and Platonism. This book is devoted to those who did dissent from them. Richard Strier reveals that many long-recognized major texts did question the most traditional values and belong to a Renaissance far more unconstrained and affirmative than much recent scholarship has allowed.
The Unrepentant Renaissance counters the prevalent view of the period as dominated by the regulation of bodies and passions; the book aims to reclaim the Renaissance as an era happily churning with surprising, worldly, and self-assertive energies. Reviving the perspective of Burckhardt and Nietzsche, Strier provides fresh and uninhibited readings of texts by Petrarch, Shakespeare (sonnets and plays), Loyola, Montaigne, Descartes, and Milton. Strier’s lively argument, expressed in lucid prose, is meant to stir debate throughout the field of Renaissance studies.
Who during the Renaissance could have dissented from the values of reason and restraint, patience and humility, rejection of the worldly and the physical? These widely articulated values were part of the inherited Christian tradition and were reinforced by key elements in the Renaissance, especially the revival of Stoicism and Platonism. This book is devoted to those who did dissent from them. Richard Strier reveals that many long-recognized major texts did question the most traditional values and belong to a Renaissance far more unconstrained and affirmative than much recent scholarship has allowed.
The Unrepentant Renaissance counters the prevalent view of the period as dominated by the regulation of bodies and passions; the book aims to reclaim the Renaissance as an era happily churning with surprising, worldly, and self-assertive energies. Reviving the perspective of Burckhardt and Nietzsche, Strier provides fresh and uninhibited readings of texts by Petrarch, Shakespeare (sonnets and plays), Loyola, Montaigne, Descartes, and Milton. Strier’s lively argument, expressed in lucid prose, is meant to stir debate throughout the field of Renaissance studies.
[more]
Upgrading Urban Power Grids
Juan M. Gers
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2024
Today, more than half the global population lives in cities, and two thirds are expected to do so by 2050. Cities need technologies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from energy, transport and heating, which requires distributed renewable electricity, from rooftop solar, small wind and other sources, in order to cleanly generate enough electricity to meet cities' needs. However, most urban electricity grids were not designed to manage distributed energy generation and the benefits of smart grids. Distribution systems therefore need to be strengthened and updated with the new technology offered by the hardware and software available, in order to maintain power quality and meet the requirements of reliability requested by regulatory bodies.
[more]
Uranium Frenzy
Saga of the Nuclear West
Raye C. Ringholz
Utah State University Press, 2002
Now expanded to include the story of nuclear testing and its consequences, Uranium Frenzy has become the classic account of the uranium rush that gripped the Colorado Plateau region in the 1950s. Instigated by the U.S. government's need for uranium to fuel its growing atomic weapons program, stimulated by Charlie Steen's lucrative Mi Vida strike in 1952, manned by rookie prospectors from all walks of life, and driven to a fever pitch by penny stock promotions, the boom created a colorful era in the Four Corners region and Salt Lake City (where the stock frenzy was centered) but ultimately went bust. The thrill of those exciting times and the good fortune of some of the miners were countered by the darker aspects of uranium and its uses. Miners were not well informed regarding the dangers of radioactive decay products. Neither the government nor anyone else expended much effort educating them or protecting their health and safety. The effects of exposure to radiation in poorly ventilated mines appeared over time.
The uranium boom is only part of the larger story of atomic weapons testing and its impact in the western United States. Nuclear explosions at the Nevada Test Site not only spurred uranium mining, they also had a disastrous impact on many Americans: downwinders in the eastward path of radiation clouds, military observers and guinea pigs in exposed positions, and Navajo and other uranium mill workers all became victims, as deaths from cancer and other radiation-caused diseases reached much higher than normal rates among them. Tons of radioactive waste left by mines, mills, and the nuclear industry and how to dispose of them are other nagging legacies of the nuclear era. Recent decades have brought multiple attempts by victims to obtain compensation from the federal government and other legal battles over disposal of nuclear waste. When courts refused to grant relief to downwinders and others, Congress eventually interceded and legislated compensation for a limited number of victims able to meet strict criteria, but did not adequately fund the program. Recently, Congress attempted to fix this shortfall, but in the meantime many downwinders and others holding compensation IOUs had died. Congressional and other efforts to dispose of waste have lately focused on Nevada and Utah, two states all too familiar with nuclear issues and reluctant to take on further radioactive burdens.
The uranium boom is only part of the larger story of atomic weapons testing and its impact in the western United States. Nuclear explosions at the Nevada Test Site not only spurred uranium mining, they also had a disastrous impact on many Americans: downwinders in the eastward path of radiation clouds, military observers and guinea pigs in exposed positions, and Navajo and other uranium mill workers all became victims, as deaths from cancer and other radiation-caused diseases reached much higher than normal rates among them. Tons of radioactive waste left by mines, mills, and the nuclear industry and how to dispose of them are other nagging legacies of the nuclear era. Recent decades have brought multiple attempts by victims to obtain compensation from the federal government and other legal battles over disposal of nuclear waste. When courts refused to grant relief to downwinders and others, Congress eventually interceded and legislated compensation for a limited number of victims able to meet strict criteria, but did not adequately fund the program. Recently, Congress attempted to fix this shortfall, but in the meantime many downwinders and others holding compensation IOUs had died. Congressional and other efforts to dispose of waste have lately focused on Nevada and Utah, two states all too familiar with nuclear issues and reluctant to take on further radioactive burdens.
[more]
Urban Bikeway Design Guide, Third Edition
National Association of City Transportation Officials, NACTO
Island Press, 2024
Over a decade ago, the first edition of the NACTO Urban Bikeway Design Guide sparked a design revolution in cities. City streets are now understood as key elements in confronting the intertwined safety, equity, and climate crises in North America.
The completely revised and updated third edition of the NACTO Urban Bikeway Design Guide sets a new standard for street design in North America. Developed for cities, by cities, the new guide is more than a permission slip for better street design--it's a prescription for safe, connected, equitable bike networks. It captures lessons learned and emerging practices to set a new bar for the design of city streets.
The NACTO Urban Bikeway Design Guide, Third Edition, will help city leaders and street designers meet the needs of our time. New topics address critical gaps in existing guidance for planning and project development. Contextual guidance for bikeway design encompasses the needs of a wider swath of potential riders, across genders, ages, races, ethnicities, incomes, and abilities. The guide offers substantive guidance for safe intersection design, with a focus on conflict reduction. It is a blueprint for implementing safe, connected, and equitable bike networks. Every transportation professional, from design to maintenance and from field staff to executives, needs a copy for their daily work.
Praise for the second edition
“NACTO's Urban Bikeway Design Guide gives American planners and designers the tools they need to make cycling accessible to more people.”
—Janette Sadik-Khan, former New York City Transportation Commissioner
“This is an extraordinary piece of work that's long overdue.”
—Ray LaHood, former United States Secretary of Transportation
“The guide will serve as an essential blueprint for safe, active, multi-modal streets.”
—Gabe Klein, former Chicago Transportation Commissioner
“A Must-read… Landscape architects, planners, and city officials should find this guide invaluable. Anyone who advocates for increasing bicycle infrastructure in our cities will find many useful tools for implementing best practice infrastructure.”
―ASLA's The Dirt
The completely revised and updated third edition of the NACTO Urban Bikeway Design Guide sets a new standard for street design in North America. Developed for cities, by cities, the new guide is more than a permission slip for better street design--it's a prescription for safe, connected, equitable bike networks. It captures lessons learned and emerging practices to set a new bar for the design of city streets.
The NACTO Urban Bikeway Design Guide, Third Edition, will help city leaders and street designers meet the needs of our time. New topics address critical gaps in existing guidance for planning and project development. Contextual guidance for bikeway design encompasses the needs of a wider swath of potential riders, across genders, ages, races, ethnicities, incomes, and abilities. The guide offers substantive guidance for safe intersection design, with a focus on conflict reduction. It is a blueprint for implementing safe, connected, and equitable bike networks. Every transportation professional, from design to maintenance and from field staff to executives, needs a copy for their daily work.
Praise for the second edition
“NACTO's Urban Bikeway Design Guide gives American planners and designers the tools they need to make cycling accessible to more people.”
—Janette Sadik-Khan, former New York City Transportation Commissioner
“This is an extraordinary piece of work that's long overdue.”
—Ray LaHood, former United States Secretary of Transportation
“The guide will serve as an essential blueprint for safe, active, multi-modal streets.”
—Gabe Klein, former Chicago Transportation Commissioner
“A Must-read… Landscape architects, planners, and city officials should find this guide invaluable. Anyone who advocates for increasing bicycle infrastructure in our cities will find many useful tools for implementing best practice infrastructure.”
―ASLA's The Dirt
[more]
Urban Traffic Analysis and Control
The key challenges in the era of ITS
Roberta Di Pace
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2025
Urban Traffic Analysis and Control: The key challenges in the era of ITS explores urban traffic control strategies. It provides a comprehensive overview of traffic management methods, focusing on both static and dynamic applications. The book addresses issues related to transportation planning, or simpler cases where real-time adaptive control is not necessary, as well as traffic control applications based on real-time monitoring and dynamic models or data-driven methods for flow prediction.
[more]
The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual
The United States Army and Marine Corps
University of Chicago Press, 2007
The handbook the US military created to fight counterinsurgencies in the twenty-first century.
When the U.S. military invaded Iraq, it lacked a common understanding of the problems inherent in counterinsurgency campaigns. It had neither studied them, nor developed doctrine and tactics to deal with them. It is fair to say that in 2003, most Army officers knew more about the U.S. Civil War than they did about counterinsurgency.
The U.S. Army / Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual was written to fill that void. The result of unprecedented collaboration among top U.S. military experts, scholars, and practitioners in the field, the manual espouses an approach to combat that emphasizes constant adaptation and learning, the importance of decentralized decision-making, the need to understand local politics and customs, and the key role of intelligence in winning the support of the population. The manual also emphasizes the paradoxical and often counterintuitive nature of counterinsurgency operations: sometimes the more you protect your forces, the less secure you are; sometimes the more force you use, the less effective it is; sometimes doing nothing is the best reaction.
An new introduction by Sarah Sewall, director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, places the manual in critical and historical perspective, explaining the significance and potential impact of this revolutionary challenge to conventional U.S. military doctrine.
An attempt by our military to redefine itself in the aftermath of 9/11 and the new world of international terrorism, The U.S. Army / Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual will play a vital role in American military campaigns for years to come.
The University of Chicago Press will donate a portion of the proceeds from this book to the Fisher House Foundation, a private-public partnership that supports the families of America’s injured servicemen. To learn more about the Fisher House Foundation, visit www.fisherhouse.org.
When the U.S. military invaded Iraq, it lacked a common understanding of the problems inherent in counterinsurgency campaigns. It had neither studied them, nor developed doctrine and tactics to deal with them. It is fair to say that in 2003, most Army officers knew more about the U.S. Civil War than they did about counterinsurgency.
The U.S. Army / Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual was written to fill that void. The result of unprecedented collaboration among top U.S. military experts, scholars, and practitioners in the field, the manual espouses an approach to combat that emphasizes constant adaptation and learning, the importance of decentralized decision-making, the need to understand local politics and customs, and the key role of intelligence in winning the support of the population. The manual also emphasizes the paradoxical and often counterintuitive nature of counterinsurgency operations: sometimes the more you protect your forces, the less secure you are; sometimes the more force you use, the less effective it is; sometimes doing nothing is the best reaction.
An new introduction by Sarah Sewall, director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, places the manual in critical and historical perspective, explaining the significance and potential impact of this revolutionary challenge to conventional U.S. military doctrine.
An attempt by our military to redefine itself in the aftermath of 9/11 and the new world of international terrorism, The U.S. Army / Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual will play a vital role in American military campaigns for years to come.
The University of Chicago Press will donate a portion of the proceeds from this book to the Fisher House Foundation, a private-public partnership that supports the families of America’s injured servicemen. To learn more about the Fisher House Foundation, visit www.fisherhouse.org.
[more]
U.S. Engineering in a Global Economy
Edited by Richard B. Freeman and Hal Salzman
University of Chicago Press, 2018
Since the late 1950s, the engineering job market in the United States has been fraught with fears of a shortage of engineering skill and talent. U.S. Engineering in a Global Economy brings clarity to issues of supply and demand in this important market. Following a general overview of engineering-labor market trends, the volume examines the educational pathways of undergraduate engineers and their entry into the labor market, the impact of engineers working in firms on productivity and innovation, and different dimensions of the changing engineering labor market, from licensing to changes in demand and guest worker programs.
The volume provides insights on engineering education, practice, and careers that can inform educational institutions, funding agencies, and policy makers about the challenges facing the United States in developing its engineering workforce in the global economy.
The volume provides insights on engineering education, practice, and careers that can inform educational institutions, funding agencies, and policy makers about the challenges facing the United States in developing its engineering workforce in the global economy.
[more]
User-Centric Privacy and Security in Biometrics
Claus Vielhauer
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2018
The interplay of privacy, security and user-determination is an important consideration in the roll-out of biometric technologies. It brings into play requirements such as privacy of biometric data in systems, communication and databases, soft biometric profiling, biometric recognition of persons across distributed systems and in nomadic scenarios, and the convergence between user convenience, usability and authentication reliability.
[more]
A User's Guide to the Age of Tech
Grant Wythoff
University of Minnesota Press, 2025
How users experience and influence technological change—when so much of that change feels out of our control
Every day, we casually employ one of the most complex tools ever created, using it to read the news, plan our day, and connect with friends. In A User’s Guide to the Age of Tech, Grant Wythoff investigates the process by which now-ubiquitous technologies like our phones become integrated into our lives, showing how the “gadget” stage—before devices are widely adopted—opens the door for users to co-create these technologies and adapt them toward unexpected ends.
In this elegant, approachable work, Wythoff offers a view of how users make new technology their own, subverting dominant power structures and imagining uses never intended by their creators. Rooted in a detailed look into the history of technique (focusing on how we do things with tools rather than the tools themselves), A User’s Guide to the Age of Tech proceeds to complicate, and influence, discussion of subjects like the digital divide and AI.
Drawing on a range of sources, including novels, patents, and newspapers, Wythoff explores the vernacular philosophies that have emerged from users and their diverse, everyday practices, bringing down to earth the conversation about digital titans, away from the abstracted domains of server farms and algorithms. Lodging a passionate argument that we know ourselves better than the data brokers who appear to wield influence over our psyches, Wythoff invites readers (and tech users) to imagine their own digital technique, acknowledge their vast expertise, and see its immense value.
Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with images accompanied by short alt text and/or extended descriptions.
[more]
Utility-scale Wind Turbines and Wind Farms
Ahmad Vasel-Be-Hagh
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2021
Wind power is a pillar of low emission energy systems. Designing more efficient wind turbines and farms, and increasing reliability and flexibility, is an area of intense research and development. In order to overcome the intermittent character of wind power, both the individual turbines and the wind farm as a whole must be considered.
[more]
READERS
Browse our collection.
PUBLISHERS
See BiblioVault's publisher services.
STUDENT SERVICES
Files for college accessibility offices.
RECENTLY PUBLISHED
UChicago Accessibility Resources
home | accessibility | search | about | contact us
BiblioVault ® 2001 - 2025
The University of Chicago Press