Download or read book Robo Sapiens written by Peter Menzel and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Information about intelligent robots and their makers, including photographis, interviews, behind-the-scenes information and technical date about machines that is easy to understand.

Download or read book Robo Sapiens Japanicus written by Jennifer Robertson and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Japan is arguably the first postindustrial society to embrace the prospect of human-robot coexistence. Over the past decade, Japanese humanoid robots designed for use in homes, hospitals, offices, and schools have become celebrated in mass and social media throughout the world. In Robo sapiens japanicus, Jennifer Robertson casts a critical eye on press releases and public relations videos that misrepresent robots as being as versatile and agile as their science fiction counterparts. An ethnography and sociocultural history of governmental and academic discourse of human-robot relations in Japan, this book explores how actual robots—humanoids, androids, and animaloids—are “imagineered” in ways that reinforce the conventional sex/gender system and political-economic status quo. In addition, Robertson interrogates the notion of human exceptionalism as she considers whether “civil rights” should be granted to robots. Similarly, she juxtaposes how robots and robotic exoskeletons reinforce a conception of the “normal” body with a deconstruction of the much-invoked Theory of the Uncanny Valley.

Download or read book Robo Sapiens Tales of Tomorrow Omnibus written by Toranosuke Shimada and published by Seven Seas Entertainment. This book was released on 2021-11-23 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the future, robots are more than machines. Autonomous "cyber-persons" with A.I. brains are part of society, interacting with humans while developing their own culture. In fact, they may be surpassing humans, as biological homo sapiens have begun to die out and give way to robo sapiens. But are humans truly disappearing, or are robots the newest form of humanity? This millennia-spanning, speculative science fiction manga of interconnected stories, both human and robotic, was awarded the Division Grand Prize at the 2020 Japan Media Arts Festival.

Download or read book Hibakusha Cinema written by Mick Broderick and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-11-05 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First Published in 1996. This collection of works is in response to American film scholar and long-term resident of Japan, Donald Richie, words:’ The Japanese failure to come to terms with Hiroshima is one which is shared by everybody in the world today,’ from over thirty years ago, when responding to the Japanese subgenre of cinema which had dealt with the atom bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Three decades on, the question lingers, does this appraisal remain valid? Hibakusha Cinema is an attempt - perhaps momentarily - to reorient critical focus upon a rarely discussed, yet important feature of Japanese cinema. The essays collected here represent a mix of Japanese and western (pan-Pacific) scholarship harnessing multidisciplinary methodologies, ranging from close textual analysis, archival and historical argument, anthropological assessment, literary and film comparative analyses to psychological and ideological hermeneutics.

Download or read book Our Molecular Future written by Douglas Mulhall and published by Prometheus Books. This book was released on 2010-01-28 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a vital book for those who care about the environment, society and deploying new technology to check the destructive power of humankind.- Allan Thornton, President, Environmental Investigation Agency, Washington, DC., and recipient of the Albert Schweitzer MedalThis book will shake conventional environmental wisdom to its roots. ... A landmark work that should be read by environmentalists and businesspersons alike.- Patrick Moore, cofounder, Greenpeace; president, GreenspiritIn Our Molecular Future [Mulhall] neatly outlines why our increasing ability to manipulate single atoms and molecules is a concern, and lays out the opportunities and threats this technology presents. And it''s surprisingly readable, unlike most of the nanobabble in the science journals. In the end, as Mulhall admits, he poses more questions than he answers. But that''s a good place to start.-New ScientistI just finished reading Douglas Mulhall''s outstanding new book Our Molecular Future . . . and I highly recommend it. Put this one at the top of your list! . . . In an easy to read format, with very few forays into geek-speak, Mulhall presents his well considered and thoroughly researched theories. Overall, an excellent overview for those who wish to understand how disruptive and enabling technologies may save us from ourselves and from mother nature. And along the way you will learn a lot about how nanoscale technologies may enhance our lives, provide abundance for all, and greatly raise the standard of living for everyone. . . . Rating: five stars out of five.- Rocky Rawstern, Nanotech NowWhat Alvin Toffler''s Future Shock was to the 20th century, Our Molecular Future will be to the 21st century.'What will happen to our jobs, health care, and investments when the molecular revolution hits?How might artificial intelligence transform our lives?How can molecular technologies help us cope with climate changes, earthquakes, and other extreme natural threats?Our Molecular Future explores some intriguing possibilities that answer these questions and many others. Douglas Mulhall describes the exponential changes that are about to be wrought by the nanotechnology and robotic revolutions, which promise to reduce the scale of computing to the nanometerùa billionth of a meterùwhile increasing computing power to almost unimaginable levels.The resulting convergence of genetics, robotics, and artificial intelligence may give us hitherto undreamed-of capacities to transform our environment and ourselves. In the not-so-distant future, our world may include machines that scour our arteries to prevent heart disease, cars and clothes that change color at our whim, exotic products built in our own desktop factories, and enhancements to our personal financial security despite greatly accelerated obsolescence.But while technology is making these fantastic leaps, we may also encounter surprises that throw us into disarray: climate changes, earthquakes, or even a seemingly improbable asteroid collision. These extremes are not the nightmare scenarios of sensationalists, Mulhall stresses, nor are many of them human induced. Instead, they may be part of nature''s cycleùrecurring more often than we''ve thought possible.The good news is that this convergence of catastrophe and technological transformation may work to our advantage. If we''re smart, according to Mulhall, we can use molecular machines to protect ourselves from nature''s worst extremes, and harness their potential benefits to usher in an economic renaissance.This visionary link between future technology and past disasters is a valuable guide for every one of us who wants to be prepared for the twenty-first century.Further Praise for OUR MOLECULAR FUTURE:A provocative and profoundly convincing message from the future.- Graham Hancock, archaeological journalist and author of Fingerprints of the GodsIn a breezy, journalistic style, Our Molecular Future takes us on a tour through some of the issues that will preoccupy ma

Download or read book The Stone Gods written by Jeanette Winterson and published by HMH. This book was released on 2009-05-06 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Whitbread Prize–winning author of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit delivers a novel that “transports us to something like the future of our own planet” (The Washington Post Book World). On the airwaves, all the talk is of the new blue planet—pristine and habitable, like our own was sixty-five million years ago, before we took it to the edge of destruction. Off the air, Billie Crusoe and the renegade Robo sapien Spike are falling in love. Along with Captain Handsome and Pink, they’re assigned to colonize the new blue planet. But when a technical maneuver intended to make it inhabitable backfires, Billie and Spike’s flight to the future becomes a surprising return to the distant past—“Everything is imprinted forever with what it once was.” What will happen when their story combines with the world’s story? Will they—and we—ever find a safe landing place? Playful, passionate, polemical, and frequently very funny, The Stone Gods will change forever the stories we tell about the earth, about love, and about stories themselves. “Scary, beautiful, witty and wistful by turns, dipping into the known past as it explores potential futures.” —The New York Times Book Review “[A book] that you don’t so much read as drink in, refuse to put down, cast inside of like a hunting dog, seeking against all odds the insight that will illuminate everything, a true answer to the fix we’re in.” —Los Angeles Times “A vivid, cautionary tale—or, more precisely, a keen lament for our irremediably incautious species.” —Ursula K. Le Guin, bestselling author of Changing Planes

Download or read book Branding Japanese Food written by Katarzyna J. Cwiertka and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2020-02-29 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Branding Japanese Food is the first book in English on the use of food for the purpose of place branding in Japan. At the center of the narrative is the 2013 inscription of “Washoku, traditional dietary cultures of the Japanese, notably for the celebration of New Year” on UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. The authors challenge the very definition of washoku as it was presented in the UNESCO nomination, and expose the multitude of contradictions and falsehoods used in the promotion of Japanese cuisine as part of the nation-branding agenda. Cwiertka and Yasuhara argue further that the manipulation of historical facts in the case of washoku is actually a continuation of similar practices employed for centuries in the branding of foods as iconic markers of tourist attractions. They draw parallels with gastronomic meibutsu (famous products) and edible omiyage (souvenirs), which since the early modern period have been persistently marketed through questionable connections with historical personages and events. Today, meibutsu and omiyage play a central role in the travel experience in Japan and comprise a major category in the practices of gift exchange. Few seem to mind that the stories surrounding these foods are hardly ever factual, despite the fact that the stories, rather than the food itself, constitute the primary attraction. The practice itself is derived from the intellectual exercise of evoking specific associations and sentiments by referring to imaginary landscapes, known as utamakura or meisho. At first restricted to poetry, this exercise was expanded to the visual arts, and by the early modern period familiarity with specific locations and the culinary associations they evoked had become a fixed component of public collective knowledge. The construction of the myths of meibutsu, omiyage, and washoku as described in this book not only enriches the understanding of Japanese culinary culture, but also highlights the dangers of tweaking history for branding purposes, and the even greater danger posed by historians remaining silent in the face of this irreversible reshaping of the past into a consumable product for public enjoyment.

Download or read book The Robosapien Companion written by James Samans and published by Apress. This book was released on 2007-04-29 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: * Dr. Mark Tilden, the inventor of Robosapien,has provided the author with exclusive access to the Robosapien v2 program. * Provides access to the 20-plus "Easter eggs" (the hidden secrets) programmed into Robosapien. * Over 2 million Robosapiens have sold since 2004.

Download or read book Barren Cove written by Ariel S. Winter and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2016-04-26 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Los Angeles Times Book Prize nominee Ariel S. Winter’s Barren Cove, humans are nearly extinct and robots are now the dominant life-form on Earth. The aged robot Sapien is the recent victim of a debilitating accident. The socially acceptable thing to do in robot culture is deactivate, but Sapien is not ready to end his life. Instead he orders spare parts for himself and rents a remote beach house in order to repair and ponder why he wants to go on. While there, he becomes obsessed with his landlords, the peculiar robot family living on the rambling estate perched at the top of the cliff. He is convinced that the elusive and enigmatic Beachstone, the head of the family, holds the answers to his existential quandary. Invoking the works of the great supernatural and science fiction writers Mary Shelley, Isaac Asimov, and Philip K. Dick, Barren Cove is a gothic tale in an unusual future.

Download or read book Robo sapiens written by C. Robert Cargill and published by . This book was released on 2019-05-13 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Empire of Hope written by David Leheny and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-11-15 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Empire of Hope asks how emotions become meaningful in political life. In a diverse array of cases from recent Japanese history, David Leheny shows how sentimental portrayals of the nation and its global role reflect a durable story of hopefulness about the country's postwar path. From the medical treatment of conjoined Vietnamese children, victims of Agent Orange, the global promotion of Japanese popular culture, a tragic maritime accident involving a US Navy submarine, to the 2011 tsunami and nuclear disaster, this story has shaped the way in which political figures, writers, officials, and observers have depicted what the nation feels. Expressions of national emotion do several things: they construct the boundaries of the national body, they inform and discipline appropriate expression, and they depoliticize messy problems that threaten to produce divisive questions about winners and losers. Most important, they work because they appear to be natural, simple and expected expressions of how the nation shares feeling, even when they paper over the extraordinary divergence in how the nation's citizens experience each incident. In making its arguments, Empire of Hope challenges how we read the relations between emotion and politics by arguing—unlike those who build from the neuroscientific turn in the social sciences or those developing affect theory in the humanities—that the focus should be on emotional representation rather than on emotion itself.

Download or read book Gods and Robots written by Adrienne Mayor and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-04-21 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traces the story of how ancient cultures envisioned artificial life, automata, self-moving devices and human enhancements, sharing insights into how the mythologies of the past related to and shaped ancient machine innovations.

Download or read book Cognitive Robotics written by Hooman Samani and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2015-10-16 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The kimono-clad android robot that recently made its debut as the new greeter at the entrance of Tokyo's Mitsukoshi department store is just one example of the rapid advancements being made in the field of robotics.Cognitive robotics is an approach to creating artificial intelligence in robots by enabling them to learn from and respond to real-worl

Download or read book Material World written by Peter Menzel and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A photo-journey through the homes and lives of 30 families, revealing culture and economic levels around the world.

Download or read book Family Values written by Melinda Cooper and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2017-02-01 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why was the discourse of family values so pivotal to the conservative and free-market revolution of the 1980s and why has it continued to exert such a profound influence on American political life? Why have free-market neoliberals so often made common cause with social conservatives on the question of family, despite their differences on all other issues? In this book, Melinda Cooper challenges the idea that neoliberalism privileges atomized individualism over familial solidarities, and contractual freedom over inherited status. Delving into the history of the American poor laws, she shows how the liberal ethos of personal responsibility was always undergirded by a wider imperative of family responsibility and how this investment in kinship obligations recurrently facilitated the working relationship between free-market liberals and social conservatives. Neoliberalism, she argues, must be understood as an effort to revive and extend the poor law tradition in the contemporary idiom of household debt. As neoliberal policymakers imposed cuts to health, education, and welfare budgets, they simultaneously identified the family as a wholesale alternative to the twentieth-century welfare state. And as the responsibility for deficit spending shifted from the state to the household, the private debt obligations of family were defined as foundational to socio-economic order. Despite their differences, neoliberals and social conservatives were in agreement that the bonds of family needed to be encouraged — and at the limit enforced — as a necessary counterpart to market freedom. In a series of case studies ranging from Clinton’s welfare reform to the AIDS epidemic, and from same-sex marriage to the student loan crisis, Cooper explores the key policy contributions made by neoliberal economists and legal theorists. Only by restoring the question of family to its central place in the neoliberal project, she argues, can we make sense of the defining political alliance of our times, that between free-market economics and social conservatism.

Download or read book Hungry Planet written by Faith d' Aluisio and published by Material World. This book was released on 2007-09 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provides an overview of what families around the world eat by featuring portraits of thirty families from twenty-four countries with a week's supply of food.

Download or read book Miyazakiworld written by Susan Napier and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-04 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki's life and work, including his significant impact on Japan and the world A thirtieth-century toxic jungle, a bathhouse for tired gods, a red-haired fish girl, and a furry woodland spirit—what do these have in common? They all spring from the mind of Hayao Miyazaki, one of the greatest living animators, known worldwide for films such as My Neighbor Totoro, Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, Howl’s Moving Castle, and The Wind Rises. Japanese culture and animation scholar Susan Napier explores the life and art of this extraordinary Japanese filmmaker to provide a definitive account of his oeuvre. Napier insightfully illuminates the multiple themes crisscrossing his work, from empowered women to environmental nightmares to utopian dreams, creating an unforgettable portrait of a man whose art challenged Hollywood dominance and ushered in a new chapter of global popular culture.