270 books match the query 'Technology' and 11 start with d

cover of Decade of Disaster

Decade of Disaster

Ann Larabee

University of Illinois Press, 2000

Focusing on the spectacular disasters of the 1980s—the Exxon Valdez oil spill, the Chernobyl meltdown, the Challenger space shuttle explosion, the Bhopal chemical plant release, and the HIV/AIDS pandemic—Ann Larabee examines how culture is reconstructed after disaster through victims' stories, media coverage, and official efforts to restore faith in technology.
  Decade of Disaster gives voice to a diverse cast of disaster participants, including Bhopal widows, people with AIDS, Chernobyl tourists, NASA administrators, international nuclear power authorities, and corporate spokespeople. Integrating sources ranging from official reports and scientific studies to news stories, movies, and science fiction novels, Larabee explores the fierce debates that followed these disasters, as government agencies, corporations, public interest groups, academics, and local communities fought to control their meaning.   An incisive commentary at the intersection of cultural history and cultural studies, Decade of Disaster peels away layers and screens of rhetoric to expose the underlying process of cultural negotiation.
 
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cover of DeepAesthetics: Computational Experience in a Time of Machine Learning

DeepAesthetics

Computational Experience in a Time of Machine Learning

Anna Munster

Duke University Press, 2025

Computation has now been reconfigured by machine learning: those technical processes and operations that yoke together statistics and computer science to create artificial intelligence (AI) by furnishing vast datasets to learn tasks and predict outcomes. In DeepAesthetics, Anna Munster examines the range of more-than-human experiences this transformation has engendered and considers how those experiences can be qualitative as well as quantitative. Drawing on process philosophy, Munster approaches computational experience through its relations and operations. She combines deep learning—the subfield of machine learning that uses neural network architectures—and aesthetics to offer a way to understand the insensible and frequently imperceptible forms of nonlinear and continuously modulating statistical function. Attending to the domains and operations of image production, statistical racialization, AI conversational agents, and critical AI art, Munster analyzes how machine learning is operationally entangled with racialized, neurotypical, and cognitivist modes of producing knowledge and experience. She approaches machine learning as events through which a different sensibility registers, one in which AI is populated by oddness, disjunctions, and surprises, and where artful engagement with machine learning fosters indeterminate futures.
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cover of Designing Experimental Research in Archaeology: Examining Technology through Production and Use

Designing Experimental Research in Archaeology

Examining Technology through Production and Use

Jeffrey R. Ferguson

University Press of Colorado, 2010

Designing Experimental Research in Archaeology is a guide for the design of archaeological experiments for both students and scholars. Experimental archaeology provides a unique opportunity to corroborate conclusions with multiple trials of repeatable experiments and can provide data otherwise unavailable to archaeologists without damaging sites, remains, or artifacts.

Each chapter addresses a particular classification of material culture-ceramics, stone tools, perishable materials, composite hunting technology, butchering practices and bone tools, and experimental zooarchaeology-detailing issues that must be considered in the development of experimental archaeology projects and discussing potential pitfalls. The experiments follow coherent and consistent research designs and procedures and are placed in a theoretical context, and contributors outline methods that will serve as a guide in future experiments. This degree of standardization is uncommon in traditional archaeological research but is essential to experimental archaeology.

The field has long been in need of a guide that focuses on methodology and design. This book fills that need not only for undergraduate and graduate students but for any archaeologist looking to begin an experimental research project.

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cover of Designing Multilingual Experiences in Technical Communication

Designing Multilingual Experiences in Technical Communication

Laura Gonzales

Utah State University Press, 2022

As technical communicators continue advocating for justice, the field should pay closer attention to how language diversity shapes all research and praxis in contemporary global contexts. Designing Multilingual Experiences in Technical Communication provides frameworks, strategies, and best practices for researchers engaging in projects with multilingual communities.
 
Through grounded case studies of multilingual technical communication projects in the US, Mexico, and Nepal, Laura Gonzales illustrates the multiple tensions at play in transnational research and demonstrates how technical communicators can leverage contemporary translation practices and methodologies to engage in research with multilingual communities that is justice-driven, participatory, and reciprocal.
 
Designing Multilingual Experiences in Technical Communication is of value to researchers and students across fields who are interested in designing projects alongside multilingual communities from historically marginalized backgrounds.
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cover of Developing to Scale: Technology and the Making of Global Health

Developing to Scale

Technology and the Making of Global Health

Heidi Morefield

University of Chicago Press, 2023

The first critical book on “appropriate technology,” Developing to Scale shows how global health came to be understood as a problem to be solved with the right technical interventions.
 
In 1973, economist E. F. Schumacher published Small Is Beautiful, which introduced a mainstream audience to his theory of “appropriate technology”: the belief that international development projects in the Global South were most sustainable when they were small-scale, decentralized, and balanced between the traditional and the modern. His theory gained widespread appeal, as cuts to the foreign aid budget, the national interests of nations seeking greater independence, postcolonial activism, and the rise of the United States’ tech sector drove stakeholders across public and private institutions toward cheaper tools. In the ensuing decades, US foreign assistance shifted away from massive modernization projects, such as water treatment facilities, toward point-of-use technologies like village water pumps and oral rehydration salts. This transition toward the small scale had massive implications for the practice of global health.
 
Developing to Scale tells the history of appropriate technology in international health and development, relating the people, organizations, and events that shaped this consequential idea. Heidi Morefield examines how certain technologies have been defined as more or less “appropriate” for the Global South based on assumptions about gender, race, culture, and environment. Her study shows appropriate technology to be malleable, as different constituencies interpreted its ideas according to their own needs. She reveals how policymakers wielded this tool to both constrain aid to a scale that did not threaten Western interests and to scale the practice of global health through the development and distribution of technical interventions.
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cover of Developing to Scale: Technology and the Making of Global Health

Developing to Scale

Technology and the Making of Global Health

Heidi Morefield

University of Chicago Press, 2023

This is an auto-narrated audiobook version of this book.

The first critical book on “appropriate technology,” Developing to Scale shows how global health came to be understood as a problem to be solved with the right technical interventions.

 
In 1973, economist E. F. Schumacher published Small Is Beautiful, which introduced a mainstream audience to his theory of “appropriate technology”: the belief that international development projects in the Global South were most sustainable when they were small-scale, decentralized, and balanced between the traditional and the modern. His theory gained widespread appeal, as cuts to the foreign aid budget, the national interests of nations seeking greater independence, postcolonial activism, and the rise of the United States’ tech sector drove stakeholders across public and private institutions toward cheaper tools. In the ensuing decades, US foreign assistance shifted away from massive modernization projects, such as water treatment facilities, toward point-of-use technologies like village water pumps and oral rehydration salts. This transition toward the small scale had massive implications for the practice of global health.
 
Developing to Scale tells the history of appropriate technology in international health and development, relating the people, organizations, and events that shaped this consequential idea. Heidi Morefield examines how certain technologies have been defined as more or less “appropriate” for the Global South based on assumptions about gender, race, culture, and environment. Her study shows appropriate technology to be malleable, as different constituencies interpreted its ideas according to their own needs. She reveals how policymakers wielded this tool to both constrain aid to a scale that did not threaten Western interests and to scale the practice of global health through the development and distribution of technical interventions.
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cover of Diesel: Technology And Society In Industrial Germany

Diesel

Technology And Society In Industrial Germany

Donald E. Thomas Jr.

University of Alabama Press, 1987

A case study of the technological, economic, and intellectual trends during Germany’s industrial revolution

The life of Rudolf Diesel, a man who achieved a power plant with the potential for revolutionizing industry and transportation. Diesel demonstrated that he possessed both the scientific insight and technical skill needed to create the diesel engine.
 
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cover of Digital Twins for 6G: Fundamental theory, technology and applications

Digital Twins for 6G

Fundamental theory, technology and applications

Hamed Ahmadi

The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2024

Digital twin (DT) technology is a real-time evolving digital duplicate of a physical object or process that contains all its history. It is enabled by massive real-time multi-source data collection and analysis. While 6G is considered as an enabler of digital twins, DT can also be a facilitator for integrating AI and 6G towards reliable, pervasive and efficient intelligent technologies.
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cover of Disrupt This!: MOOCs and the Promises of Technology

Disrupt This!

MOOCs and the Promises of Technology

Karen J. Head

University Press of New England, 2017

In this smart and incisive work, Karen J. Head describes her experience teaching a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) and the attendant pressure on professors, especially those in the humanities, to embrace new technologies in the STEM era. And yet, as she argues, MOOCs are just the latest example of the near-religious faith that some universities have in the promise of technological advances. As a teacher of rhetoric, Head is well versed at sniffing out the sophistry embedded in the tech jargon increasingly rife in the academy. Disrupt This! is a broader-based critique of the promises of technological “disruption” and the impact of Silicon Valley thinking on an unsuspecting, ill-prepared, and often gullible university community grasping for relevance, while remaining in thrall to the technologists.
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cover of Dorsality: Thinking Back through Technology and Politics

Dorsality

Thinking Back through Technology and Politics

David Wills

University of Minnesota Press, 2008

In this highly original book David Wills rethinks not only our nature before all technology but also what we understand to be technology. Rather than considering the human being as something natural that then develops technology, Wills argues, we should instead imagine an originary imbrication of nature and machine that begins with a dorsal turn-a turn that takes place behind our back, outside our field of vision.

With subtle and insightful readings, Wills pursues this sense of what lies behind our idea of the human by rescuing Heidegger’s thinking from a reductionist dismissal of technology, examining different angles on Lévinas’s face-to-face relation, and tracing a politics of friendship and sexuality in Derrida and Sade. He also analyzes versions of exile in Joyce’s rewriting of Homer and Broch’s rewriting of Virgil and discusses how Freud and Rimbaud exemplify the rhetoric of soil and blood that underlies every attempt to draw lines between nations and discriminate between peoples. In closing, Wills demonstrates the political force of rhetoric in a sophisticated analysis of Nietzsche’s oft-quoted declaration that “God is dead.”

Forward motion, Wills ultimately reveals, is an ideology through which we have favored the front-what can be seen-over the aspects of the human and technology that lie behind the back and in the spine-what can be sensed otherwise-and shows that this preference has had profound environmental, political, sexual, and ethical consequences.

David Wills is professor of French and English at the University of Albany (SUNY). He is the author of Prosthesis and Matchbook: Essays in Deconstruction as well as the translator of works by Jacques Derrida, including The Gift of Death.

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cover of Dream Lovers: The Gamification of Relationships

Dream Lovers

The Gamification of Relationships

Alfie Bown

Pluto Press, 2022

'An exciting, astute analysis of how our capacity for desire has been slotted into the grooves of digital capitalism, and made to work for profit - from porn to Pokémon' - Richard Seymour

We are in the middle of a 'desirevolution' - a fundamental and political transformation of the way we desire as human beings. Perhaps as always, new technologies - with their associated and inherited political biases - are organizing and mapping the future. What we don't seem to notice is that the primary way in which our lives are being transformed is through the manipulation and control of desire itself.

Our very impulses, drives and urges are 'gamified' to suit particular economic and political agendas, changing the way we relate to everything from lovers and friends to food and politicians. Digital technologies are transforming the subject at the deepest level of desire - re-mapping its libidinal economy - in ways never before imagined possible.

From sexbots to smart condoms, fitbits to VR simulators and AI to dating algorithms, the 'love industries' are at the heart of the future smart city and the social fabric of everyday life. This book considers these emergent technologies and what they mean for the future of love, desire, work and capitalism.

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