front cover of Science Communication Online
Science Communication Online
Engaging Experts and Publics on the Internet
Ashley Rose Mehlenbacher
The Ohio State University Press, 2019
Uncloistered by the web, science is finding its way into previously unimagined audiences. Whether collecting data in one’s backyard to help wildlife experts manage wolf populations or even funding research out of one’s own pocket, nonexperts can engage science at an unprecedented scale. As science communication has moved online, a range of important new genres have emerged that put professionals and the public into conversation with each other. In Science Communication Online: Engaging Experts and Publics on the Internet, Ashley Rose Mehlenbacher takes up these “trans-scientific” genres to explore how scientists are adapting their communications, how publics are increasingly involved in science, and how boundaries between experts and nonexperts continue to shift.
Bringing together genre studies and the rhetoric of science, Mehlenbacher examines a range of new forms of science communication that challenge traditional presumptions about experts and nonexperts—including Twitter and Reddit AMAs, crowdfunding proposals such as Kickstarter and Experiment.com, civic-minded databases such as Safecast, and the PLOS blogging network. Science Communication Online illustrates the unique features of these genres and connects them to their rhetorical functions and the larger context leading to their emergence and evolution—from the democratization of science, challenges to expertise and expert status, and new political economies. Science Communication Online captures the important moment we find ourselves in now—one not defined by science and society but science in society.
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Science in the Age of Computer Simulation
Eric Winsberg
University of Chicago Press, 2010

Computer simulation was first pioneered as a scientific tool in meteorology and nuclear physics in the period following World War II, but it has grown rapidly to become indispensible in a wide variety of scientific disciplines, including astrophysics, high-energy physics, climate science, engineering, ecology, and economics. Digital computer simulation helps study phenomena of great complexity, but how much do we know about the limits and possibilities of this new scientific practice? How do simulations compare to traditional experiments? And are they reliable? Eric Winsberg seeks to answer these questions in Science in the Age of Computer Simulation.

Scrutinizing these issue with a philosophical lens, Winsberg explores the impact of simulation on such issues as the nature of scientific evidence; the role of values in science; the nature and role of fictions in science; and the relationship between simulation and experiment, theories and data, and theories at different levels of description. Science in the Age of Computer Simulation will transform many of the core issues in philosophy of science, as well as our basic understanding of the role of the digital computer in the sciences.

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Screen Genealogies
From Optical Device to Environmental Medium
Craig Buckley
Amsterdam University Press, 2020
Against the grain of the growing literature on screens, *Screen Genealogies* argues that the present excess of screens cannot be understood as an expansion and multiplication of the movie screen nor of the video display. Rather, screens continually exceed the optical histories in which they are most commonly inscribed. As contemporary screens become increasingly decomposed into a distributed field of technologically interconnected surfaces and interfaces, we more readily recognize the deeper spatial and environmental interventions that have long been a property of screens. For most of its history, a screen was a filter, a divide, a shelter, or a camouflage. A genealogy stressing transformation and descent rather than origins and roots emphasizes a deeper set of intersecting and competing definitions of the screen, enabling new thinking about what the screen might yet become.
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Security and Privacy for Big Data, Cloud Computing and Applications
Wei Ren
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2019
As big data becomes increasingly pervasive and cloud computing utilization becomes the norm, the security and privacy of our systems and data becomes more critical with emerging security and privacy threats and challenges. This book presents a comprehensive view on how to advance security and privacy in big data, cloud computing, and their applications. Topics include cryptographic tools, SDN security, big data security in IoT, privacy preserving in big data, security architecture based on cyber kill chain, privacy-aware digital forensics, trustworthy computing, privacy verification based on machine learning, and chaos-based communication systems. This book is an essential reading for networking, computing, and communications professionals, researchers, students and engineers, working with big data and cloud computing.
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Security and Privacy of Electronic Healthcare Records
Concepts, paradigms and solutions
Sudeep Tanwar
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2020
Hospitals, medical practices and healthcare organizations are implementing new technologies at breakneck speed. Yet privacy and security considerations are often an afterthought, putting healthcare organizations at risk of data security and privacy issues, fines, damage to their reputations, with serious potential consequences for the patients. Electronic Health Record systems (EHRs) consist of clinical notes, patient listings, lab results, imaging results and screening tests. EHRs are growing in complexity over time and requiring increasing amounts of data storage.
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Seeing Silicon Valley
Life inside a Fraying America
Mary Beth Meehan and Fred Turner
University of Chicago Press, 2021
Acclaimed photographer Mary Beth Meehan and Silicon Valley culture expert Fred Turner join forces to give us an unseen view of the heart of the tech world.

It’s hard to imagine a place more central to American mythology today than Silicon Valley. To outsiders, the region glitters with the promise of extraordinary wealth and innovation. But behind this image lies another Silicon Valley, one segregated by race, class, and nationality in complex and contradictory ways. Its beautiful landscape lies atop underground streams of pollutants left behind by decades of technological innovation, and while its billionaires live in compounds, surrounded by redwood trees and security fences, its service workers live in their cars.

With arresting photography and intimate stories, Seeing Silicon Valley makes this hidden world visible. Instead of young entrepreneurs striving for efficiency in minimalist corporate campuses, we see portraits of struggle—families displaced by an impossible real estate market, workers striving for a living wage, and communities harmed by environmental degradation. If the fate of Silicon Valley is the fate of America—as so many of its boosters claim—then this book gives us an unvarnished look into the future.
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Seeing the Past with Computers
Experiments with Augmented Reality and Computer Vision for History
Kevin Kee and Timothy Compeau, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 2019
Recent developments in computer technology are providing historians with new ways to see—and seek to hear, touch, or smell—traces of the past. Place-based augmented reality applications are an increasingly common feature at heritage sites and museums, allowing historians to create immersive, multifaceted learning experiences. Now that computer vision can be directed at the past, research involving thousands of images can recreate lost or destroyed objects or environments, and discern patterns in vast datasets that could not be perceived by the naked eye.

Seeing the Past with Computers is a collection of twelve thought-pieces on the current and potential uses of augmented reality and computer vision in historical research, teaching, and presentation. The experts gathered here reflect upon their experiences working with new technologies, share their ideas for best practices, and assess the implications of—and imagine future possibilities for—new methods of historical study. Among the experimental topics they explore are the use of augmented reality that empowers students to challenge the presentation of historical material in their textbooks; the application of seeing computers to unlock unusual cultural knowledge, such as the secrets of vaudevillian stage magic; hacking facial recognition technology to reveal victims of racism in a century-old Australian archive; and rebuilding the soundscape of an Iron Age village with aural augmented reality.

This volume is a valuable resource for scholars and students of history and the digital humanities more broadly. It will inspire them to apply innovative methods to open new paths for conducting and sharing their own research.
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Selected Papers on Analysis of Algorithms
Donald E. Knuth
CSLI, 2000
Analysis of Algorithms is the fourth in a series of collected works by world-renowned computer scientist Donald Knuth. This volume is devoted to an important subfield of Computer Science that Knuth founded in the 1960s and still considers his main life's work. This field, to which he gave the name Analysis of Algorithms, deals with quantitative studies of computer techniques, leading to methods for understanding and predicting the efficiency of computer programs. Analysis of Algorithms, which has grown to be a thriving international discipline, is the unifying theme underlying Knuth's well known book The Art of Computer Programming. More than 30 of the fundamental papers that helped to shape this field are reprinted and updated in the present collection, together with historical material that has not previously been published. Although many ideas come and go in the rapidly changing world of computer science, the basic concepts and techniques of algorithmic analysis will remain important as long as computers are used.
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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.
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Shareveillance
The Dangers of Openly Sharing and Covertly Collecting Data
Clare Birchall
University of Minnesota Press, 2017

Cracking open the politics of transparency and secrecy

In an era of open data and ubiquitous dataveillance, what does it mean to “share”? This book argues that we are all “shareveillant” subjects, called upon to be transparent and render data open at the same time as the security state invests in practices to keep data closed. Drawing on Jacques Rancière’s “distribution of the sensible,” Clare Birchall reimagines sharing in terms of a collective political relationality beyond the veillant expectations of the state.

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front cover of Signal Processing and Machine Learning for Brain-Machine Interfaces
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.
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Silicon Valley, Planet Startup
Disruptive Innovation, Passionate Entrepreneurship and Hightech Startups
Peter Ester and Arne Maas
Amsterdam University Press, 2016
For decades now, Silicon Valley has been the home of the future. It’s the birthplace of the world’s most successful high-tech companies—including Apple, Yahoo!, Google, Facebook, Twitter, and many more. So what’s the secret? What is it about Silicon Valley that fosters entrepreneurship and innovation?

With Silicon Valley: Planet Startup, Peter Ester and Arne Maas argue that the answer lies in Silicon Valley’s culture—a corporate culture that values risk-taking, creativity, invention, and sharing. Through extensive interviews with Dutch entrepreneurs working in the area, Ester and Maas show that Silicon Valley is above all a mindset: a belief in thinking, with passion and ambition, far beyond the here and now. Scholars and business and budding entrepreneurs alike are sure to find both inspiration and illumination in the stories and analysis Ester and Maas have assembled here.
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Simulating Good and Evil
The Morality and Politics of Videogames
Marcus Schulzke
Rutgers University Press, 2020
Simulating Good and Evil shows that the moral panic surrounding violent videogames is deeply misguided, and often politically motivated, but that games are nevertheless morally important. Simulated actions are morally defensible because they take place outside the real world and do not inflict real harms. Decades of research purporting to show that videogames are immoral has failed to produce convincing evidence of this. However, games are morally important because they simulate decisions that would have moral weight if they were set in the real world. Videogames should be seen as spaces in which players may experiment with moral reasoning strategies without taking any actions that would themselves be subject to moral evaluation. Some videogame content may be upsetting or offensive, but mere offense does not necessarily indicate a moral problem. Upsetting content is best understood by applying existing theories for evaluating political ideologies and offensive speech.
 
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Sites of Translation
What Multilinguals Can Teach Us about Digital Writing and Rhetoric
Laura Gonzales
University of Michigan Press, 2018

Winner of the 2016 Sweetland Digital Rhetoric Collaborative Book Prize

Sites of Translation illustrates the intricate rhetorical work that multilingual communicators engage in as they translate information for their communities. Blending ethnographic and empirical methods from multiple disciplines, Laura Gonzales provides methodological examples of how linguistic diversity can be studied in practice, both in and outside the classroom, and provides insights into the rhetorical labor that is often unacknowledged and made invisible in multilingual communication. Sites of Translation is relevant to researchers and teachers of writing as well as technology designers interested in creating systems, pedagogies, and platforms that will be more accessible and useful to multilingual audiences. Gonzales presents multilingual communication as intellectual labor that should be further valued in both academic and professional spaces, and supported by multilingual technologies and pedagogies that center the expertise of linguistically diverse communicators.
 

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front cover of Situation Theory and Its Applications, Volume 1
Situation Theory and Its Applications, Volume 1
Edited by Robin Cooper, Kuniaki Mukai, and John Perry
CSLI, 1990
Situation Theory grew out of attempts by Jon Barwise in the late 1970s to provide semantics for "naked-infinitive" perceptual reports such as 'Claire saw Jon run'. Barwise's intuition was that Claire didn't just see Jon, an individual, but Jon doing something, a situation. Situations are individuals having properties and standing in relations. A theory of situations would allow us to study and compare various types of situations or situation-like entities, such as facts, events and scenes. One of the central themes of situation theory is that a theory of meaning and reference should be set within a general theory of information, one moreover that is rich enough to do justice to perception, communication and thought. By now many people have contributed to the development and application of situation theory, constrained by the need to account for certain kinds of semantic phenomena, and by the need to give a rigorous mathematical account of the principles of information that underwrite the theory. This volume presents work that evolved out of the First Conference on Situation Theory and Its Applications held by CSLI at Asilomar, California, in March 1989. The nineteen papers included here fall into three categories. Those in Part I explore logical and mathematical issues that arise within situation theory. The papers in Part II connect situation theory with other approaches to logical issues, while those in Part III apply various version of situation theory to a number of linguistic issues.
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front cover of Situation Theory and Its Applications, Volume 2
Situation Theory and Its Applications, Volume 2
Edited by Jon Barwise, Jean Mark Gawron, Gordon Plotkin, and Syun Tutiya
CSLI, 1991
Situation theory is the result of an interdisciplinary effort to create a full-fledged theory of information. Created by scholars and scientists from cognitive science, computer science, AI, linguistics, logic, philosophy, and mathematics, the theory is forging a common set of tools for the analysis of phenomena from all these fields. This volume presents work that evolved out of the Second Conference on Situation Theory and its Applications. Twenty-six essays exhibit the wide range of the theory, covering such topics as natural language semantics, philosophical issues about information, mathematical aplications, and the visual representation of the information in computer systems. Jon Barwise is a professor of philosophy, mathematics, and logic at indiana university in Bloomington. Jean Mark Gawron is a researcher at SRI International and a consultant at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories. Gordon Plotkin is a professor of theoretical computer science at the University of Edinburgh. Syun Tutiya is in the philosophy department at Chiba University in Japan. Center for the Study of Language and Information- Lecture Notes, Number 26
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front cover of Situation Theory and Its Applications, Volume 3
Situation Theory and Its Applications, Volume 3
Edited by Peter Aczel, David Israel, Stanley Peters, and Yasuhiro Katagiri
CSLI, 1993
These essays evolved from research presented at the Third International Conference on situation theory and its applications. Situation Theory is the result of an interdisciplinary effort to create a full-fledged theory of information. Created by scholars and scientists from cognitive science, computer science and AI, linguistics, logic, philosophy, and mathematics, it aims to provide a common set of tools for the analysis of phenomena from all of these fields. The research presented in this volume reflects a growing international and interdisciplinary activity of importance to many fields concerned with the information. Peter Aczel is professor of mathematical logic and computer logic at Manchester University. David Israel is a senoir computer scientist in the Artificial Intelligence Center at SRI International abd a consulting professor in the Philosophy Department at Stanford University. Yasuhiro Katagiri is a research scientist in the Information Science Research Laboratory of NTT Basic Research Laboratories. Stanley Peters is professor of linguistics and symbolic systems at Stanford University.
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front cover of A Social Edition of the Devonshire Manuscript (BL MS Add 17,492)
A Social Edition of the Devonshire Manuscript (BL MS Add 17,492)
Edited by Raymond Siemens, Karin Armstrong, and Constance Crompton
Iter Press, 2015
Described by Colin Burrow as 'the richest surviving record of early Tudor poetry and of the literary activities of 16th-century women,' the Devonshire Manuscript (BL MS Add. 17492) is a verse miscellany belonging to the 1530s and early 1540s, including some 194 items including complete poems, verse fragments and excerpts from longer works, anagrams, and other ephemeral jottings attributed to Thomas Wyatt, Henry Howard Earl of Surrey, Lady Margaret Douglas, Richard Hattfield, Mary Fitzroy (née Howard), Thomas Howard, Edmund Knyvett, Anthony Lee, and Henry Stewart, as well transcriptions of the work of others or original works by prominent court figures such as Mary Shelton, Lady Margaret Douglas, Mary (Howard) Fitzroy, Lord Thomas Howard, and, possibly, Anne Boleyn.  This edition publishes the contents of the manuscript in their entirety, documenting well the manuscript's place as the earliest sustained example in English of men and women writing together in a community.
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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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Social Knowledge Creation in the Humanities
Volume 2
Edited by Aaron Mauro
Iter Press, 2022
In the humanities, the field of “social knowledge creation” has helped define how social media platforms and other collaborative spaces have shaped humanistic critique in the twenty-first century. The ability to access and organize information and people has been profoundly liberating in some online contexts, but social media also presents many issues which come to light in the often-overlapping domains of politics, media studies, and disinformation.

While these countervailing influences are all around us, the essays collected in this volume represent a humanistic ethics of generosity, compassion, and care. Social knowledge creation refreshingly returns to humanist values, emphasizing that people matter more than networks, facts matter more than opinion, and ideas matter more than influence. As a result, the speed and scale of digital culture has challenged humanists from many disciplines to more clearly define the values of education, collaboration, and new knowledge in pursuit of human justice and equality. In short, online culture has presented a new opportunity to define how and why the humanities matter in the age of social media.
 
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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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Social Theory After the Internet
Media, Technology, and Globalization
Ralph Schroeder
University College London, 2018
The internet has fundamentally transformed society in the past twenty-five years, yet existing theories of communication have not kept pace with the digital world. This book focuses on everyday effects of the internet—including information-seeking, big data, and the growing importance of smartphone use—to explain how the internet surpasses traditional media. Synthesizing global perspectives, Ralph Schroeder posits a theory on the internet’s role, and how both technological and social forces shape its significance.
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The Souls of Cyberfolk
Posthumanism as Vernacular Theory
Thomas Foster
University of Minnesota Press, 2005
In The Souls of Cyberfolk, Thomas Foster traces the transformation of cyberpunk from a literary movement into a multimedia cultural phenomenon. He examines how cyberpunk defined a framework for thinking about the cultural implications of new technologies - a framework flexible enough to incorporate issues of gender, queer sexualities, and ethnic and racial differences as well as developments in nationalist models of citizenship and global economic flows. Beginning with William Gibson's paradigmatic text Neuromancer, and continuing through the works of Maureen McHugh, Melissa Scott, Neal Stephenson, Greg Egan, and Ken MacLeod, Foster measures cyberpunk's reach into social and philosophical movements (the Extropy Institute), commercial art (Hajime Sorayama's gynoids or sexy robot illustrations), comic books (Deathlok), film (Robocop), and music video (from Billy Idol's Cyberpunk album). The central challenge that cyberpunk poses for cultural critics, Foster argues, is to understand what happens when the technological denaturalization of physical embodiment becomes the norm. This question acquires urgency as the focus of his book moves beyond the typical technocultural concerns with gender and sexuality to consider race and models of citizenship - a shift that constitutes one of the book's most original contributions to scholarship on the topic.
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SpecLab
Digital Aesthetics and Projects in Speculative Computing
Johanna Drucker
University of Chicago Press, 2009

Nearly a decade ago, Johanna Drucker cofounded the University of Virginia’s SpecLab, a digital humanities laboratory dedicated to risky projects with serious aims. In SpecLab she explores the implications of these radical efforts to use critical practices and aesthetic principles against the authority of technology based on analytic models of knowledge.

            Inspired by the imaginative frontiers of graphic arts and experimental literature and the technical possibilities of computation and information management, the projects Drucker engages range from Subjective Meteorology to Artists’ Books Online to the as yet unrealized ’Patacritical Demon, an interactive tool for exposing the structures that underlie our interpretations of text. Illuminating the kind of future such experiments could enable, SpecLab functions as more than a set of case studies at the intersection of computers and humanistic inquiry. It also exemplifies Drucker’s contention that humanists must play a role in designing models of knowledge for the digital age—models that will determine how our culture will function in years to come.

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Star Worlds
Freedom Versus Control in Online Gameworlds
William Sims Bainbridge
University of Michigan Press, 2016
Star Worlds explores the future-oriented universe of online virtual worlds connected with popular science fiction—specifically, with Star Wars and Star Trek—that have been inhabited for over a decade by computer gamers. The Star Wars and Star Trek franchises, both of which have shaped the dominant science fiction mythologies of the last half-century, offer profound conceptions of the tension between freedom and control in human economic, political, and social interactions. Bainbridge investigates the human and technological dynamics of four online virtual worlds based on these two very different traditions: the massive multiplayer online games Star Wars Galaxies; Star Wars: The Old Republic; Star Trek Online; and the Star Trek community in the non-game, user-created virtual environment, Second Life.

The four “star worlds” explored in this book illustrate the dilemmas concerning the role of technology as liberator or oppressor in our post-industrial society, and represent computer simulations of future possibilities of human experience. Bainbridge considers the relationship between a real person and the role that person plays, the relationship of an individual to society, and the relationship of human beings to computing technology. In addition to collecting ethnographic and quantitative data about the social behavior of other players, he has immersed himself in each of these worlds, role-playing 14 avatars with different skills and goals to gain new insights into the variety of player experience from a personal perspective.

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Stepping Motors
A guide to theory and practice
Paul Acarnley
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2002
Stepping motor technology is well established and used for motion control, most notably for computer peripherals but also wherever digital control is employed. This book provides an introductory text which will enable the reader to both appreciate the essential characteristics of stepping motor systems and understand how these characteristics are being exploited in the continuing development of new motors, drives and controllers. A basic theoretical approach relating to the more significant aspects of performance is presented, although it is assumed throughout that the reader has no previous experience of electrical machines and is primarily interested in the applications of stepping motors. Paul Acarnley's outstanding reference book is widely known and used, and this, the 4th edition, has been significantly updated to include many new applications that have emerged since the previous edition was published. Coverage includes: drive circuits, accurate load positioning, static torque characteristics, multi-step operation, torque/ speed characteristics, high-speed operation, open-loop control, closed-loop control and microprocessor-based stepping motor systems.
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Streaming Analytics
Concepts, architectures, platforms, use cases and applications
Pethuru Raj
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2022
When digitized entities, connected devices and microservices interact purposefully, we end up with a massive amount of multi-structured streaming (real-time) data that is continuously generated by different sources at high speed. Streaming analytics allows the management, monitoring, and real-time analytics of live streaming data. The topic has grown in importance due to the emergence of online analytics and edge and IoT platforms. A real digital transformation is being achieved across industry verticals through meticulous data collection, cleansing and crunching in real time. Capturing and subjecting those value-adding events is considered to be the prime task for achieving trustworthy and timely insights.
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front cover of Studies in Weak Arithmetics, Volume 1
Studies in Weak Arithmetics, Volume 1
Edited by Patrick Cégielski
CSLI, 2009

The field of weak arithmetics is an application of logical methods to number theory that was developed by mathematicians, philosophers, and theoretical computer scientists. In this volume, after a general presentation of weak arithmetics, the following topics are studied: the properties of integers of a real closed field equipped with exponentiation; conservation results for the induction schema restricted to first-order formulas with a finite number of alternations of quantifiers; a survey on a class of tools called pebble games; the fact that the reals e and pi have approximations expressed by first-order formulas using bounded quantifiers; properties of infinite pictures depending on the universe of sets used; a language that simulates in a sufficiently nice manner all  algorithms of a certain restricted class; the logical complexity of the axiom of infinity in some variants of set theory without the axiom of  foundation; and the complexity to determine whether a trace is included in another one.

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front cover of Studies in Weak Arithmetics, Volume 3
Studies in Weak Arithmetics, Volume 3
Edited by Patrick Cegielski, Ali Enayat, and Roman Kossak
CSLI, 2013
The field of weak arithmetics is an application of logical methods to number theory that was developed by mathematicians, philosophers, and theoretical computer scientists. This third volume in the weak arithmetics collection contains nine substantive papers based on lectures delivered during the two last meetings of the conference series Journées sur les Arithmétiques, held in 2014 at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, and in 2015 at the City University of New York Graduate Center.
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A Study of Crisis
Michael Brecher and Jonathan Wilkenfeld
University of Michigan Press, 2000
As the twentieth century draws to a close, it is time to look back on an epoch of widespread turmoil, including two world wars, the end of the colonial era in world history, and a large number of international crises and conflicts. This book is designed to shed light on the causes and consequences of military-security crises since the end of World War I, in every region, across diverse economic and political regimes, and cultures. The primary aim of this volume is to uncover patterns of crises, conflicts and wars and thereby to contribute to the advancement of international peace and world order.
The culmination of more than twenty years of research by Michael Brecher and Jonathan Wilkenfeld, the book analyzes crucial themes about crisis, conflict, and war and presents systematic knowledge about more than 400 crises, thirty-one protracted conflicts and almost 900 state participants. The authors explore many aspects of conflict, including the ethnic dimension, the effect of different kinds of political regimes--notably the question whether democracies are more peaceful than authoritarian regimes, and the role of violence in crisis management. They employ both case studies and aggregate data analysis in a Unified Model of Crisis to focus on two levels of analysis--hostile interactions among states, and the behavior of decision-makers who must cope with the challenge posed by a threat to values, time pressure, and the increased likelihood that military hostilities will engulf them.
This book will appeal to scholars in history, political science, sociology, and economics as well as policy makers interested in the causes and effects of crises in international relations. The rich data sets will serve researchers for years to come as they probe additional aspects of crisis, conflict and war in international relations.
Michael Brecher is R. B. Angus Professor of Political Science, McGill University. Jonathan Wilkenfeld is Professor and Chair of the Department of Government and Politics, University of Maryland. They are the coauthors of Crises in the Twentieth Century: A Handbook of International Crisis, among other books and articles.
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Studying Social Networks
A Guide to Empirical Research
Marina Hennig, Ulrik Brandes, Jürgen Pfeffer, and Ines Mergel
Campus Verlag, 2012
Studying Social Networks provides a concise, comprehensive introduction to the process of empirical network research. Students and practitioners new to social research will find easily understandable learning goals, numerous examples, and helpful exercises all in one compact volume. The authors have integrated  different disciplinary perspectives, while stressing the importance of substance-specific orientation while studying networks. Scholars will find Studying Social Networks a helpful tool not only for teaching, but also as a guide for their own empirical research.

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front cover of The Success of Open Source
The Success of Open Source
Steven Weber
Harvard University Press, 2004

Much of the innovative programming that powers the Internet, creates operating systems, and produces software is the result of “open source” code, that is, code that is freely distributed—as opposed to being kept secret—by those who write it. Leaving source code open has generated some of the most sophisticated developments in computer technology, including, most notably, Linux and Apache, which pose a significant challenge to Microsoft in the marketplace. As Steven Weber discusses, open source’s success in a highly competitive industry has subverted many assumptions about how businesses are run, and how intellectual products are created and protected.

Traditionally, intellectual property law has allowed companies to control knowledge and has guarded the rights of the innovator, at the expense of industry-wide cooperation. In turn, engineers of new software code are richly rewarded; but, as Weber shows, in spite of the conventional wisdom that innovation is driven by the promise of individual and corporate wealth, ensuring the free distribution of code among computer programmers can empower a more effective process for building intellectual products. In the case of Open Source, independent programmers—sometimes hundreds or thousands of them—make unpaid contributions to software that develops organically, through trial and error.

Weber argues that the success of open source is not a freakish exception to economic principles. The open source community is guided by standards, rules, decisionmaking procedures, and sanctioning mechanisms. Weber explains the political and economic dynamics of this mysterious but important market development.

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front cover of Swarm Intelligence
Swarm Intelligence
Applications, Volume 3
Ying Tan
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2018
Swarm Intelligence (SI) is one of the most important and challenging paradigms under the umbrella of computational intelligence. It focuses on the research of collective behaviours of a swarm in nature and/or social phenomenon to solve complicated and difficult problems which cannot be handled by traditional approaches. Thousands of papers are published each year presenting new algorithms, new improvements and numerous real world applications. This makes it hard for researchers and students to share their ideas with other colleagues; follow up the works from other researchers with common interests; and to follow new developments and innovative approaches. This complete and timely collection fills this gap by presenting the latest research systematically and thoroughly to provide readers with a full view of the field of swarm. Students will learn the principles and theories of typical swarm intelligence algorithms; scholars will be inspired with promising research directions; and practitioners will find suitable methods for their applications of interest along with useful instructions.
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Swarm Intelligence
Innovation, new algorithms and methods, Volume 2
Ying Tan
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2018
Swarm Intelligence (SI) is one of the most important and challenging paradigms under the umbrella of computational intelligence. It focuses on the research of collective behaviours of a swarm in nature and/or social phenomenon to solve complicated and difficult problems which cannot be handled by traditional approaches. Thousands of papers are published each year presenting new algorithms, new improvements and numerous real world applications. This makes it hard for researchers and students to share their ideas with other colleagues; follow up the works from other researchers with common interests; and to follow new developments and innovative approaches. This complete and timely collection fills this gap by presenting the latest research systematically and thoroughly to provide readers with a full view of the field of swarm. Students will learn the principles and theories of typical swarm intelligence algorithms; scholars will be inspired with promising research directions; and practitioners will find suitable methods for their applications of interest along with useful instructions.
[more]

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Swarm Intelligence
Principles, current algorithms and methods, Volume 1
Ying Tan
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2018
Swarm Intelligence (SI) is one of the most important and challenging paradigms under the umbrella of computational intelligence. It focuses on the research of collective behaviours of a swarm in nature and/or social phenomenon to solve complicated and difficult problems which cannot be handled by traditional approaches. Thousands of papers are published each year presenting new algorithms, new improvements and numerous real world applications. This makes it hard for researchers and students to share their ideas with other colleagues; follow up the works from other researchers with common interests; and to follow new developments and innovative approaches. This complete and timely collection fills this gap by presenting the latest research systematically and thoroughly to provide readers with a full view of the field of swarm. Students will learn the principles and theories of typical swarm intelligence algorithms; scholars will be inspired with promising research directions; and practitioners will find suitable methods for their applications of interest along with useful instructions.
[more]

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The Switch
An Off and On History of Digital Humans
Jason Puskar
University of Minnesota Press, 2024

From the telegraph to the touchscreen, how the development of binary switching transformed everyday life and changed the shape of human agency
 

The Switch traces the sudden rise of a technology that has transformed everyday life for billions of people: the binary switch. By chronicling the rapid growth of binary switching since the mid-nineteenth century, Jason Puskar contends that there is no human activity as common today as pushing a button or flipping a switch—the deceptively simple act of turning something on or off. More than a technical history, The Switch offers a cultural and political analysis of how reducing so much human action to binary alternatives has profoundly reshaped modern society.

 

Analyzing this history, Puskar charts the rapid shift from analog to digital across a range of devices—keyboards, cameras, guns, light switches, computers, game controls, even the “nuclear button”—to understand how nineteenth-century techniques continue to influence today’s pervasive digital technologies. In contexts that include musical performance, finger counting, machine writing, voting methods, and immersive play, Puskar shows how the switch to switching led to radically new forms of action and thought.

 

The innovative analysis in The Switch makes clear that binary inputs have altered human agency by making choice instantaneous, effort minimal, and effects more far-reaching than ever. In the process, it concludes, switching also fosters forms of individualism that, though empowering for many, also preserve a legacy of inequality and even domination.

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Switching Codes
Thinking Through Digital Technology in the Humanities and the Arts
Edited by Thomas Bartscherer and Roderick Coover
University of Chicago Press, 2011
 

Half a century into the digital era, the profound impact of information technology on intellectual and cultural life is universally acknowledged but still poorly understood. The sheer complexity of the technology coupled with the rapid pace of change makes it increasingly difficult to establish common ground and to promote thoughtful discussion. 

Responding to this challenge, Switching Codes brings together leading American and European scholars, scientists, and artists—including Charles Bernstein, Ian Foster, Bruno Latour, Alan Liu, and Richard Powers—to consider how the precipitous growth of digital information and its associated technologies are transforming the ways we think and act. Employing a wide range of forms, including essay, dialogue, short fiction, and game design, this book aims to model and foster discussion between IT specialists, who typically have scant training in the humanities or traditional arts, and scholars and artists, who often understand little about the technologies that are so radically transforming their fields. Switching Codes will be an indispensable volume for anyone seeking to understand the impact of digital technology on contemporary culture, including scientists, educators, policymakers, and artists, alike.

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Synthetic Worlds
The Business and Culture of Online Games
Edward Castronova
University of Chicago Press, 2006
From EverQuest to World of Warcraft, online games have evolved from the exclusive domain of computer geeks into an extraordinarily lucrative staple of the entertainment industry. People of all ages and from all walks of life now spend thousands of hours—and dollars—partaking in this popular new brand of escapism. But the line between fantasy and reality is starting to blur. Players have created virtual societies with governments and economies of their own whose currencies now trade against the dollar on eBay at rates higher than the yen. And the players who inhabit these synthetic worlds are starting to spend more time online than at their day jobs.

In Synthetic Worlds, Edward Castronova offers the first comprehensive look at the online game industry, exploring its implications for business and culture alike. He starts with the players, giving us a revealing look into the everyday lives of the gamers—outlining what they do in their synthetic worlds and why. He then describes the economies inside these worlds to show how they might dramatically affect real world financial systems, from potential disruptions of markets to new business horizons. Ultimately, he explores the long-term social consequences of online games: If players can inhabit worlds that are more alluring and gratifying than reality, then how can the real world ever compete? Will a day ever come when we spend more time in these synthetic worlds than in our own? Or even more startling, will a day ever come when such questions no longer sound alarmist but instead seem obsolete?

With more than ten million active players worldwide—and with Microsoft and Sony pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into video game development—online games have become too big to ignore. Synthetic Worlds spearheads our efforts to come to terms with this virtual reality and its concrete effects.

“Illuminating. . . . Castronova’s analysis of the economics of fun is intriguing. Virtual-world economies are designed to make the resulting game interesting and enjoyable for their inhabitants. Many games follow a rags-to-riches storyline, for example. But how can all the players end up in the top 10%? Simple: the upwardly mobile human players need only be a subset of the world's population. An underclass of computer-controlled 'bot' citizens, meanwhile, stays poor forever. Mr. Castronova explains all this with clarity, wit, and a merciful lack of academic jargon.”—The Economist
 
Synthetic Worlds is a surprisingly profound book about the social, political, and economic issues arising from the emergence of vast multiplayer games on the Internet. What Castronova has realized is that these games, where players contribute considerable labor in exchange for things they value, are not merely like real economies, they are real economies, displaying inflation, fraud, Chinese sweatshops, and some surprising in-game innovations.”—Tim Harford, Chronicle of Higher Education

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SysML for Systems Engineering
Jon Holt
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2008
Systems modelling is an essential enabling technique for any systems engineering enterprise. These modelling techniques, in particular the unified modelling language (UML), have been employed widely in the world of software engineering and very successfully in systems engineering for many years. However, in recent years there has been a perceived need for a tailored version of the UML that meets the needs of today's systems engineering professional. This book provides a pragmatic introduction to the systems engineering modelling language, the SysML, aimed at systems engineering practitioners at any level of ability, ranging from students to experts. The theoretical aspects and syntax of SysML are covered and each concept is explained through a number of example applications. The book also discusses the history of the SysML and shows how it has evolved over a number of years. All aspects of the language are covered and are discussed in an independent and frank manner, based on practical experience of applying the SysML in the real world.
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SysML for Systems Engineering
A model-based approach
Jon Holt
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2019
Systems Modelling Language (SysML) is a tailored version of the unified modelling language (UML) that meets the needs of today's systems engineering professionals and engineers. It supports the specification, analysis, design, verification and validation of a broad range of systems and systems-of-systems, including hardware, software, information, personnel, procedures, and facilities in a graphical notation.
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SysML for Systems Engineering
A model-based approach
Jon Holt
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2013
This new edition of this popular text has been fully updated to reflect SysML 1.3, the latest version of the standard, and the discussion has been extended to show the power of SysML as a tool for systems engineering in an MBSE context. Beginning with a thorough introduction to the concepts behind MBSE, and the theoretical aspects and syntax of SysML, the book then describes how to implement SysML and MBSE in an organisation, and how to model real projects effectively and efficiently, illustrated using an extensive case study.
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