Computer Science History

From the Model T to the SUV, Autophobia reveals that our vexed relationship with the automobile is nothing new. In fact, debates over whether cars are forces of good or evil in our world have raged for over a century now, ever since the automobile was invented. According to Brian Ladd, this love and hate relationship we share with our cars is the defining quality of the automotive age.

Chaos and order clash in this riveting exploration of crime and punishment on the Internet. Once considered a borderless and chaotic virtual landscape, the Internet is now home to the forces of international law and order. It's not just computer hackers and cyber crooks who lurk in the dark corners of the Web - the cops are there, too. In The Internet Police, Ars Technica editor Nate Anderson takes readers on a behind-the-screens tour of landmark cybercrime cases, revealing how criminals continue to find digital and legal loopholes even as police hurry to cinch them closed.

Big data knows where you've been and who your friends are. It knows what you like and what makes you angry. It can predict what you'll buy, where you'll be the victim of crime and when you'll have a heart attack. Big data knows you better than you know yourself, or so it claims. But how well do you know big data? You've probably seen the phrase in newspaper headlines, at work in a marketing meeting, or on a fitness-tracking gadget. But can you understand it without being a Silicon Valley nerd who writes computer programs for fun? Yes. Yes, you can.

A former US Navy intelligence officer, David Locke Hall was a federal prosecutor when a bizarre-sounding website, CRACK99, came to his attention. It looked like Craigslist on acid, but what it sold was anything but amateurish: thousands of high-tech software products used largely by the military, and for mere pennies on the dollar. Want to purchase satellite tracking software? No problem. Aerospace and aviation simulations? No problem. Communications systems designs? No problem.

Every day, we produce loads of data about ourselves simply by living in the modern world: we click web pages, flip channels, and shop with credit cards. Now, in one of the greatest undertakings of the 21st century, a savvy group of mathematicians and computer scientists is beginning to sift through this data to profile us as workers, shoppers, patients, voters, potential terrorists, even lovers. Their goal? To manipulate our behavior.

Fakten, wissenschaftlich fundiert und eindeutig belegt, sind Gold wert. Besonders dann, wenn Fake News oder Halbwahrheiten die öffentliche Debatte bestimmen und ein sachlicher Diskurs nicht mehr möglich ist. Ob Klimawandel, Homöopathie, Feinstaub oder Erblichkeit von Intelligenz - die Wissenschaftsjournalistin Mai Thi Nguyen-Kim räumt bei diesen und anderen großen Streitthemen mit diesem Missstand auf. Klarsichtig und kurzweilig legt sie dar, was faktisch niemand mehr bestreiten kann und worauf wir uns alle einigen können.

Driven by eyewitness accounts and combining urban history with a life-and-death drama and a technological detective story, Floodpath grippingly reanimates the reality behind LA noir fictions like the classic film Chinatown. In an era of climate change, increasing demand on water resources, and a neglected American infrastructure, the tragedy of the St. Francis Dam has never been more relevant.

The power of hashtag activism became clear in 2011, when #IranElection served as an organizing tool for Iranians protesting a disputed election and offered a global audience a front-row seat to a nascent revolution. Since then, activists have used a variety of hashtags to advocate, mobilize, and communicate. In this book, Sarah Jackson, Moya Bailey, and Brooke Foucault Welles explore how and why Twitter has become an important platform for historically disenfranchised populations, including Black Americans, women, and transgender people.

Big Tech Tyrants boast riches beyond emperors of old but act like juveniles who don't want to grow up. They are modern-day robber barons. Big Tech Tyrants don't know the meaning of privacy, when it comes to you. They try to make you believe they will give their products away for free as a service to society, when really, they are vacuuming your personal data. They use this data to discover your deepest secrets. Big Tech Tyrants is an eye-opening, must-listen book for anyone living in the 21st century.

Silicon Valley is imperializing the planet. With nearly bottomless supplies of cash and ambition, a small group of companies have been gradually seizing symbolic and practical civic leadership in America and worldwide. But Silicon Valley does not answer to the electorate; nor have they been voted into office. And the perils of their influence are only now making themselves known.

For years, executive Martin Fiore has been advising leaders from a wide range of industries about technological trends that are reshaping the world of business, from artificial intelligence and the rise of autonomous systems to human/machine convergence. Now, in Humanity Reimagined, Fiore explores how these trends are disrupting industries, changing the world of work, transforming the economy, and creating both threats and opportunities for leaders at all levels, from entrepreneurs nurturing start-up businesses to C-suite leaders at the world's biggest corporations.

Immaginiamo un futuro in cui sapiens supertecnologici controlleranno, con le loro intelligenze aumentate, il mondo; mentre altri sapiens desueti, saranno relegati a un ruolo marginale. Uno scenario solo fantascientifico?Oggi l'intelligenza artificiale, le neuroscienze, le nanotecnologie, la genetica modificano in modo sempre più vertiginoso il rapporto tra l'uomo e la natura. Nella storia dell'umanità sta succedendo qualcosa che potrebbe anche portare alla fine di Homo sapiens.

The Internet and smartphone are just the latest in a 250-year-long cycle of disruption that has continuously changed the way we live, the way we work, and the way we interact. The coming Augmented Age, however, promises a level of disruption, behavioral shifts, and changes that are unparalleled. While consumers today are camping outside of an Apple store waiting to be one of the first to score a new Apple Watch or iPhone, the next generation of wearables will be able to predict if we're likely to have a heart attack and recommend a course of action.

Once we step on the treadmill of progress, it's hard to step off. Yet Edward Tenner shows that human ingenuity can be applied in self-preservation as well, and he sheds light on the ways in which the users of commonplace technology surprise designers and engineers, as when early typists developed the touch method still employed on today's keyboards. And he offers concrete advice for reaping benefits from the devices that we no longer seem able to live without. Although dependent on these objects, we can also use them to liberate ourselves.

AI is a present reality: we live at the threshold of an AI-dominated era. AI is more than a Technology wave. In the 21st century and beyond it is the very core source of power that fuels politics, business, and society: our minds, our work, and our homes. AI also rewrites the rules and forces us to lose no time in rethinking fundamental questions of our humanity. Our human brains will soon be required to adapt at hyper speed to a new paradigm of omnipresent machine intelligence. We all have to deal with both its opportunities and threats in a conscious manner.

With the ongoing advancement of AI and other technologies, our world is becoming increasingly intelligent. From chatbots to innovations in brain-computer interfaces to the possibility of superintelligences leading to the Singularity later this century, our reality is being transformed before our eyes. This is commonly seen as the natural result of progress, but what if there's more to it than that? What if intelligence is an inevitability, an underlying property of the universe?

From Amazon's Alexa to Japan's robot chefs, technology is becoming increasingly saturated into our everyday lives. Previous technological revolutions have come and gone, but this one is different. For the first time in economic history, productivity and employment are diverging, suggesting that humans are contributing less to economic growth.

A New York Times Magazine writer explores the Next Big Thing in tech - the impending revolution in voice recognition - and shows how it will upend Silicon Valley and transform how we use computers, the Web, and much more. Every decade or so brings a seismic shift in how people interact with tech, from the PC to the internet to the smartphone. James Vlahos shows that we are on the cusp of the next shift: to voice computing. Siri and Alexa are early forms of this technology, but soon we may talk as fluently with our phones, appliances, cars, etc. as we do with any human.

Edward Ashford Lee explores the ways that engineers use models and abstraction to build inventive artificial worlds and to give us things that we never dreamed of - for example, the ability to carry in our pockets everything humans have ever published. But he also attempts to counter the runaway enthusiasm of some technology boosters who claim everything in the physical world is a computation - that even such complex phenomena as human cognition are software operating on digital data.

For fans of The Astronaut Wives Club, The Mercury 13 reveals the little-known true story of the remarkable women who trained for NASA space flight. In 1961, just as NASA launched its first man into space, a group of women underwent secret testing in the hopes of becoming America’s first female astronauts. They passed the same battery of tests at the legendary Lovelace Foundation as did the Mercury 7 astronauts, but they were summarily dismissed by the boys’ club at NASA and on Capitol Hill.