BiblioVault - Books about Code

Code and Clay, Data and Dirt

Five Thousand Years of Urban Media

Shannon Mattern

University of Minnesota Press, 2017

For years, pundits have trumpeted the earthshattering changes that big data and smart networks will soon bring to our cities. But what if cities have long been built for intelligence, maybe for millennia? In Code and Clay, Data and Dirt Shannon Mattern advances the provocative argument that our urban spaces have been “smart” and mediated for thousands of years.

Offering powerful new ways of thinking about our cities, Code and Clay, Data and Dirt goes far beyond the standard historical concepts of origins, development, revolutions, and the accomplishments of an elite few. Mattern shows that in their architecture, laws, street layouts, and civic knowledge—and through technologies including the telephone, telegraph, radio, printing, writing, and even the human voice—cities have long negotiated a rich exchange between analog and digital, code and clay, data and dirt, ether and ore.

Mattern’s vivid prose takes readers through a historically and geographically broad range of stories, scenes, and locations, synthesizing a new narrative for our urban spaces. Taking media archaeology to the city’s streets, Code and Clay, Data and Dirt reveals new ways to write our urban, media, and cultural histories.

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Code

From Information Theory to French Theory

Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan

Duke University Press, 2022

In Code Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan reconstructs how Progressive Era technocracy as well as crises of industrial democracy and colonialism shaped early accounts of cybernetics and digital media by theorists including Norbert Wiener, Warren Weaver, Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roman Jakobson, Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, and Luce Irigaray. His analysis casts light on how media-practical research forged common epistemic cause in programs that stretched from 1930s interwar computing at MIT and eugenics to the proliferation of seminars and laboratories in 1960s Paris. This mobilization ushered forth new fields of study such as structural anthropology, family therapy, and literary semiology while forming enduring intellectual affinities between the humanities and informatics. With Code, Geoghegan offers a new history of French theory and the digital humanities as transcontinental and political endeavors linking interwar colonial ethnography in Dutch Bali to French sciences in the throes of Cold War-era decolonization and modernization.

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Code of Peace

Ethics and Security in the World of the Warlord States

Dorothy V. Jones

University of Chicago Press, 1991

Is it possible, in our world of differing beliefs and diverse cultures, to find an ethical framework that can guide actual international relations? In Code of Peace, Dorothy V. Jones sets forth her surprising answer to this perplexing question: Not only is a consensus on ethical principles possible, but it has already been achieved.

Jones focuses on the progressive development of international law to disclose an underlying code of ethics that enjoys broad support in the world community. Unlike studies that concentrate on what others think that states ought to do, Code of Peace analyzes what states themselves consider proper behavior. Using history as both narrative and argument, Jones shows how the existing ethical code has evolved cumulatively since World War I from a complex interplay between theory and practice. More than an abstract treatise or a merely technical analysis, Jones's study is grounded in the circumstances of war and peace in this century. Treaties and agreements, she argues, are forging a consensus on such principles as human rights, self-determination, and cooperation between states. Jones shows how leaders and representatives of nations, drawing on a rich heritage of philosophical thoughts as well as on their own experiences in a violent world of self-interested conflict, have shaped their thought to the taming of that world in the cause of peace. That is the striking thing about this code: states whose relations are marked by so frequent a recourse to war that they can fairly be called "warlords" have created and pledged themselves to a code of peace.

The implications of Code of Peace for establishing a normative foundation for peace are profound. Historically sound and timely, impeccably researched and elegantly written, the book will be of immediate and lasting value to anyone concerned with the stability of the modern world.

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Code of Practice

Competence for Safety Related Systems Practitioners

The Institution of Engineering and Technology

The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2017

This Code of Practice is designed to help companies assess and maintain the competence of their engineering staff particularly in safety critical areas and industries. It sets out the competencies expected and evidence required to prove competence in specific tasks and helps organisations create schemes for monitoring and measuring the competencies of its employees. Human error is still recognised as the most frequent cause of problems and the field of safety critical systems and functional safety continues to develop along with the complexity of systems.

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Code of Practice for Building Automation and Control Systems

The Institution of Engineering and Technology

The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2020

Within the modern built environment, advanced engineering systems allow us to go about our daily lives in a relative degree of safety, comfort and security. Often, we do not give too much thought about what is happening behind the scenes.

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Code of Practice for Connected Systems Integration in Buildings

IET Standards TC4.1 Connected Systems Integration

The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2016

The Code of Practice for Connected Systems Integration in Buildings aims to promote good practice in the specification, design and integration of connected systems in buildings, as well as providing a reference to practitioners on design, integration practice and technological considerations working to meet key functionality and customer requirements.

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Code of Practice for Cyber Security in the Built Environment

The Institution of Engineering and Technology

The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2014

This Code of Practice explains why and how cyber security should be considered throughout a building's lifecycle and explains good practice, focusing on building-related systems and all connections to the wider cyber environment.

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Code of Practice for Electric Vehicle Charging Equipment Installation

The Institution of Engineering and Technology

The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2023

This well established and authoritative IET Code of Practice provides a clear explanation of electric vehicle charging equipment and installation. It sets out the considerations and planning needed in advance and the necessary physical and electrical requirements during the installation process. It also details what needs to be considered when undertaking electrical work on charging equipment in various different locations - such as domestic dwellings, on-street locations, and commercial and industrial premises.

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Code of Practice for Electric Vehicle Charging Equipment Installation

The Institution of Engineering and Technology

The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2020

This Code of Practice provides a clear overview of EV charging equipment, as well as setting out the considerations needed prior to installations and the necessary physical and electrical installation requirements. It also details what needs to be considered when installing electric vehicle charging equipment in various different locations - such as domestic dwellings, on-street locations, and commercial and industrial premises.

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Code of Practice for Electric Vehicle Charging Equipment Installation

The Institution of Engineering and Technology

The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2018

This Code of Practice provides a clear overview of EV charging equipment, as well as setting out the considerations needed prior to installation and the necessary physical and electrical installation requirements. It also details what needs to be considered when installing electric vehicle charging equipment in various different locations - such as domestic dwellings, on-street locations, and commercial and industrial premises.

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Code of Practice for Electric Vehicle Charging Equipment Installation

The Institution of Engineering and Technology

The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2015

The Code of Practice for Electric Vehicle Charging Equipment Installation, 2nd Edition has been updated to align with the current requirements of BS 7671. This includes updated guidance on the electrical installation requirements of BS 7671:2008 Amendment 2 (Section 722 Electric vehicle charging installations) published in September 2013 and Amendment 3 published in January 2015.

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Code of Practice for Electrical Energy Storage Systems

The Institution of Engineering and Technology

The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2024

Electrical Energy Storage Systems (EESS) provide storage of electrical energy so that it can be used later. EESS may be installed for a variety of reasons, for example increasing the 'self-consumption' of buildings fitted with renewable energy systems; arbitrage services; ancillary services and providing a back-up or alternative power supply.

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Code of Practice for Electrical Energy Storage Systems

The Institution of Engineering and Technology

The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2021

Electrical Energy Storage Systems (EESS) provide storage of electrical energy so that it can be used later. EESS may be installed for a variety of reasons, for example increasing the 'self-consumption' of buildings fitted with renewable energy systems; arbitrage services; ancillary services and providing a back-up or alternative power supply.

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Code of Practice for Electrical Energy Storage Systems

The Institution of Engineering and Technology

The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2017

The purpose of this Code of Practice is to provide a reference to practitioners on the safe, effective and competent application of electrical energy storage systems.

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Code of Practice for Electrical Safety Management

The Institution of Engineering and Technology

The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2023

The aim of this Code of Practice is to provide good practice guidance to enable individuals and their organisations to have a level of knowledge and understanding to manage the risks associated with an electrical system. There are many technical publications that provide guidance on certain aspects of electrical safety but not in a way that provides a process for managing electrical safety.

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Code of Practice for Electrical Safety Management

The Institution of Engineering and Technology

The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2013

The aim of the Code of Practice for Electrical Safety Management is to provide good practice guidance to enable individuals and their organisations to have a level of knowledge and understanding to manage the risks associated with an electrical system. There are many technical publications that provide guidance on certain aspects of electrical safety but not in a way that provides a process for managing electrical safety.

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Code of Practice for Grid-connected Solar Photovoltaic Systems

The Institution of Engineering and Technology

The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2023

This Code of Practice sets out the requirements for the design, specification, installation, commissioning, operation, and maintenance of grid-connected solar photovoltaic (PV) systems.

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Code of Practice for Grid-connected Solar Photovoltaic Systems

Design, specification, installation, commissioning, operation and maintenance

The Institution of Engineering and Technology

The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2015

This Code of Practice sets out the requirements for the design, specification, installation, commissioning, operation and maintenance of grid-connected solar photovoltaic (PV) systems installed in the UK. It is aimed at ensuring safe, effective and competently installed solar PV systems.

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Code of Practice for In-service Inspection and Testing of Electrical Equipment

The Institution of Engineering and Technology

The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2020

This is the 5th edition of the IET's Code of Practice for In-service Inspection and Testing of Electrical Equipment.

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Code of Practice for In-service Inspection and Testing of Electrical Equipment

The Institution of Engineering and Technology

The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2012

This is the 4th edition of the IET's Code of Practice for In-service Inspection and Testing of Electrical Equipment.

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Code of Practice for Low and Extra Low Voltage Direct Current Power Distribution in Buildings

The Institution of Engineering and Technology

The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2015

Low voltage direct current distribution of power within buildings offers advantages over the traditional mains power supply solutions for an increasing number of services.

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Code of Practice for the Application of LED Lighting Systems

The Institution of Engineering and Technology

The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2021

LED lighting is a fast-developing technology with many advantages over filament and gas discharge lighting systems. However, inappropriate design, application and poor-quality installation of LED lighting systems could negate these advantages and result in inadequate lighting, failure to meet lifetime performance expectations, potential public health and safety issues or even interference with other technology due to poor systems integration.

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Code of Practice for the Application of LED Lighting Systems

The Institution of Engineering and Technology

The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2014

LED lighting is a fast-developing technology that is becoming more popular as people begin to realise the advantages it provides, such as energy efficiency, controllability and longevity. However, poor quality installation of LED lighting systems could negate these advantages and result in inadequate lighting, failure to meet lifetime performance expectations, potential public health and safety issues or even interference with other technology due to poor systems integration.

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Code of the Quipu

A Study in Media, Mathematics, and Culture

Marcia Ascher and Robert Ascher

University of Michigan Press

This book explores Inca use of knotted cords to transmit information and the problem of interpreting artifacts from distant cultures.

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Code of the Suburb

Inside the World of Young Middle-Class Drug Dealers

Scott Jacques and Richard Wright

University of Chicago Press, 2015

When we think about young people dealing drugs, we tend to picture it happening on urban streets, in disadvantaged, crime-ridden neighborhoods. But drugs are used everywhere—even in upscale suburbs and top-tier high schools—and teenage users in the suburbs tend to buy drugs from their peers, dealers who have their own culture and code, distinct from their urban counterparts.

In Code of the Suburb, Scott Jacques and Richard Wright offer a fascinating ethnography of the culture of suburban drug dealers. Drawing on fieldwork among teens in a wealthy suburb of Atlanta, they carefully parse the complicated code that governs relationships among buyers, sellers, police, and other suburbanites. That code differs from the one followed by urban drug dealers in one crucial respect: whereas urban drug dealers see violent vengeance as crucial to status and security, the opposite is true for their suburban counterparts. As Jacques and Wright show, suburban drug dealers accord status to deliberate avoidance of conflict, which helps keep their drug markets more peaceful—and, consequently, less likely to be noticed by law enforcement.

Offering new insight into both the little-studied area of suburban drug dealing, and, by extension, the more familiar urban variety, Code of the Suburb will be of interest to scholars and policy makers alike.

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Doubletalk

The Language, Code, and Jargon of a Presidential Election

Chuck McCutcheon and David Mark

University Press of New England, 2016

The only time most Americans care anything about politics is during the presidential election cycle. This quadrennial flood of posturing and blame, once confined to the July conventions and the November election, has spread like a greasy lake across the landscape and calendar of our politics. From the first exploratory rumblings of the hopefuls sometime after the midterm elections to the tsunami of Super Tuesday, the political language of the presidential election has become a reflecting pool of our polity. Doubletalk casts a warm ray of sunlight on the campaign trail as an add-on to last year’s Dog Whistles, Walk-backs, and Washington Handshakes, with over 100 new terms, phrases, and epithets combining wit, humor, truth, and dubious taste and propriety.

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From Russia with Code

Programming Migrations in Post-Soviet Times

Mario Biagioli and Vincent Antonin Lepinay, editors

Duke University Press, 2019

While Russian computer scientists are notorious for their interference in the 2016 US presidential election, they are ubiquitous on Wall Street and coveted by international IT firms and often perceive themselves as the present manifestation of the past glory of Soviet scientific prowess. Drawing on over three hundred in-depth interviews, the contributors to From Russia with Code trace the practices, education, careers, networks, migrations, and lives of Russian IT professionals at home and abroad, showing how they function as key figures in the tense political and ideological environment of technological innovation in post-Soviet Russia. Among other topics, they analyze coders' creation of both transnational communities and local networks of political activists; Moscow's use of IT funding to control peripheral regions; brain drain and the experiences of coders living abroad in the United Kingdom, United States, Israel, and Finland; and the possible meanings of Russian computing systems in a heterogeneous nation and industry. Highlighting the centrality of computer scientists to post-Soviet economic mobilization in Russia, the contributors offer new insights into the difficulties through which a new entrepreneurial culture emerges in a rapidly changing world.

Contributors. Irina Antoschyuk, Mario Biagioli, Ksenia Ermoshina, Marina Fedorova, Andrey Indukaev, Alina Kontareva, Diana Kurkovsky, Vincent Lépinay, Alexandra Masalskaya, Daria Savchenko, Liubava Shatokhina, Alexandra Simonova, Ksenia Tatarchenko, Zinaida Vasilyeva, Dimitrii Zhikharevich

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Interactive Journalism

Hackers, Data, and Code

Nikki Usher

University of Illinois Press, 2016

Interactive journalism has transformed the newsroom. Emerging out of changes in technology, culture, and economics, this new specialty uses a visual presentation of storytelling that allows users to interact with the reporting of information. Today it stands at a nexus: part of the traditional newsroom, yet still novel enough to contribute innovative practices and thinking to the industry.

Nikki Usher brings together a comprehensive portrait of nothing less than a new journalistic identity. Usher provides a history of the impact of digital technology on reporting, photojournalism, graphics, and other disciplines that define interactive journalism. Her eyewitness study of the field's evolution and accomplishments ranges from the interactive creation of Al Jazeera English to the celebrated data desk at the Guardian to the New York Times' Pulitzer-endowed efforts in the new field. What emerges is an illuminating, richly reported profile of the people coding a revolution that may reverse the decline and fall of traditional journalism.

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Mechanicity

The Material Force of Code in International Politics

Vic Castro

University of Michigan Press, 2027

Despite their seeming relegation to the digital world, code and software can have material, large-scale, and even violent effects. In just one example, the NotPetya ransomware paralyzed one-fifth of world maritime trade in 2017. Mechanicity is a philosophical investigation of what happens when the force of language merges with material force, and what this means for the great ideas of politics: political action, international anarchy, and the very concept of sovereign state.

In this book, Vic Castro returns to Thomas Hobbes’s idea of the mechanical as a force both determinate and unruly, just like machines and software, and examines the human body—both in Hobbes’s political philosophy and in mishaps of genetic code—as that which brings together language and materiality in political society. To develop the framework of mechanicity, Castro also revives the Copenhagen School’s poststructuralist realism, the Derridian approach to traditional International Relations, and particularly actor-network theory (ANT). Using the case studies on Apple’s 2016 encrypted iPhone and NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware, Mechanicity shows how software is not just constrained to immaterial cyberspace; it also reshapes the physical world and the politics possible therein.

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Rhetorical Machines

Writing, Code, and Computational Ethics

Edited by John Jones and Lavinia Hirsu

University of Alabama Press, 2019

A landmark volume that explores the interconnected nature of technologies and rhetorical practice

Rhetorical Machines addresses new approaches to studying computational processes within the growing field of digital rhetoric. While computational code is often seen as value-neutral and mechanical, this volume explores the underlying, and often unexamined, modes of persuasion this code engages. In so doing, it argues that computation is in fact rife with the values of those who create it and thus has powerful ethical and moral implications. From Socrates’s critique of writing in Plato’s Phaedrus to emerging new media and internet culture, the scholars assembled here provide insight into how computation and rhetoric work together to produce social and cultural effects.

This multidisciplinary volume features contributions from scholar-practitioners across the fields of rhetoric, computer science, and writing studies. It is divided into four main sections: “Emergent Machines” examines how technologies and algorithms are framed and entangled in rhetorical processes, “Operational Codes” explores how computational processes are used to achieve rhetorical ends, “Ethical Decisions and Moral Protocols” considers the ethical implications involved in designing software and that software’s impact on computational culture, and the final section includes two scholars’ responses to the preceding chapters. Three of the sections are prefaced by brief conversations with chatbots (autonomous computational agents) addressing some of the primary questions raised in each section.

At the heart of these essays is a call for emerging and established scholars in a vast array of fields to reach interdisciplinary understandings of human-machine interactions. This innovative work will be valuable to scholars and students in a variety of disciplines, including but not limited to rhetoric, computer science, writing studies, and the digital humanities.

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Voices in the Code

A Story about People, Their Values, and the Algorithm They Made

David G. Robinson

Russell Sage Foundation, 2022

Algorithms—rules written into software—shape key moments in our lives: from who gets hired or admitted to a top public school, to who should go to jail or receive scarce public benefits. Such decisions are both technical and moral. Today, the logic of high stakes software is rarely open to scrutiny, and central moral questions are often left for the technical experts to answer. Policymakers and scholars are seeking better ways to share the moral decisionmaking within high stakes software—exploring ideas like public participation, transparency, forecasting, and algorithmic audits. But there are few real examples of those techniques in use.

In Voices in the Code, scholar David G. Robinson tells the story of how one community built a life-and-death algorithm in an inclusive, accountable way. Between 2004 and 2014, a diverse group of patients, surgeons, clinicians, data scientists, public officials and advocates collaborated and compromised to build a new kidney transplant matching algorithm—a system to offer donated kidneys to particular patients from the U.S. national waiting list. Drawing on interviews with key stakeholders, unpublished archives, and a wide scholarly literature, Robinson shows how this new Kidney Allocation System emerged and evolved over time, as participants gradually built a shared understanding both of what was possible, and of what would be fair. Robinson finds much to criticize, but also much to admire, in this story. It ultimately illustrates both the promise and the limits of participation, transparency, forecasting and auditing of high stakes software. The book’s final chapter draws out lessons for the broader struggle to build technology in a democratic and accountable way.

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