Download or read book Systems Experts and Computers written by Agatha C. Hughes and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2011-01-21 with total page 526 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This groundbreaking book charts the origins and spread of the systems movement. After World War II, a systems approach to solving complex problems and managing complex systems came into vogue among engineers, scientists, and managers, fostered in part by the diffusion of digital computing power. Enthusiasm for the approach peaked during the Johnson administration, when it was applied to everything from military command and control systems to poverty in American cities. Although its failure in the social sphere, coupled with increasing skepticism about the role of technology and "experts" in American society, led to a retrenchment, systems methods are still part of modern managerial practice. This groundbreaking book charts the origins and spread of the systems movement. It describes the major players including RAND, MITRE, Ramo-Wooldrige (later TRW), and the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis—and examines applications in a wide variety of military, government, civil, and engineering settings. The book is international in scope, describing the spread of systems thinking in France and Sweden. The story it tells helps to explain engineering thought and managerial practice during the last sixty years.
Download or read book Artificial Experts written by Harry M. Collins and published by Mit Press. This book was released on 1992-11-13 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An in-depth look at the ordinary and extraordinary things computers can do.
Download or read book Computer Related Risks written by Peter G. Neumann and published by Addison-Wesley Professional. This book was released on 1994-10-18 with total page 576 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This sobering description of many computer-related failures throughout our world deflates the hype and hubris of the industry. Peter Neumann analyzes the failure modes, recommends sequences for prevention and ends his unique book with some broadening reflections on the future." —Ralph Nader, Consumer Advocate This book is much more than a collection of computer mishaps; it is a serious, technically oriented book written by one of the world's leading experts on computer risks. The book summarizes many real events involving computer technologies and the people who depend on those technologies, with widely ranging causes and effects. It considers problems attributable to hardware, software, people, and natural causes. Examples include disasters (such as the Black Hawk helicopter and Iranian Airbus shootdowns, the Exxon Valdez, and various transportation accidents); malicious hacker attacks; outages of telephone systems and computer networks; financial losses; and many other strange happenstances (squirrels downing power grids, and April Fool's Day pranks). Computer-Related Risks addresses problems involving reliability, safety, security, privacy, and human well-being. It includes analyses of why these cases happened and discussions of what might be done to avoid recurrences of similar events. It is readable by technologists as well as by people merely interested in the uses and limits of technology. It is must reading for anyone with even a remote involvement with computers and communications—which today means almost everyone. Computer-Related Risks: Presents comprehensive coverage of many different types of risks Provides an essential system-oriented perspective Shows how technology can affect your life—whether you like it or not!
Download or read book Computer Systems that Learn written by Sholom M. Weiss and published by Morgan Kaufmann Publishers. This book was released on 1991 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This text is a practical guide to classification learning systems and their applications, which learn from sample data and make predictions for new cases. The authors examine prominent methods from each area, using an engineering approach and taking the practitioner's point of view.
Download or read book How Computers Really Work written by Matthew Justice and published by No Starch Press. This book was released on 2020-12-29 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An approachable, hands-on guide to understanding how computers work, from low-level circuits to high-level code. How Computers Really Work is a hands-on guide to the computing ecosystem: everything from circuits to memory and clock signals, machine code, programming languages, operating systems, and the internet. But you won't just read about these concepts, you'll test your knowledge with exercises, and practice what you learn with 41 optional hands-on projects. Build digital circuits, craft a guessing game, convert decimal numbers to binary, examine virtual memory usage, run your own web server, and more. Explore concepts like how to: Think like a software engineer as you use data to describe a real world concept Use Ohm's and Kirchhoff's laws to analyze an electrical circuit Think like a computer as you practice binary addition and execute a program in your mind, step-by-step The book's projects will have you translate your learning into action, as you: Learn how to use a multimeter to measure resistance, current, and voltage Build a half adder to see how logical operations in hardware can be combined to perform useful functions Write a program in assembly language, then examine the resulting machine code Learn to use a debugger, disassemble code, and hack a program to change its behavior without changing the source code Use a port scanner to see which internet ports your computer has open Run your own server and get a solid crash course on how the web works And since a picture is worth a thousand bytes, chapters are filled with detailed diagrams and illustrations to help clarify technical complexities. Requirements: The projects require a variety of hardware - electronics projects need a breadboard, power supply, and various circuit components; software projects are performed on a Raspberry Pi. Appendix B contains a complete list. Even if you skip the projects, the book's major concepts are clearly presented in the main text.
Download or read book Expert Systems written by John Durkin and published by Macmillan College. This book was released on 1994 with total page 1204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents a step-by-step methodology for designing expert systems. Each chapter on design methodology starts with a problem and leads the reader through the design of a system which solves that problem.
Download or read book Systems Performance written by Brendan Gregg and published by Pearson Education. This book was released on 2014 with total page 777 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Complete Guide to Optimizing Systems Performance Written by the winner of the 2013 LISA Award for Outstanding Achievement in System Administration Large-scale enterprise, cloud, and virtualized computing systems have introduced serious performance challenges. Now, internationally renowned performance expert Brendan Gregg has brought together proven methodologies, tools, and metrics for analyzing and tuning even the most complex environments. Systems Performance: Enterprise and the Cloud focuses on Linux(R) and Unix(R) performance, while illuminating performance issues that are relevant to all operating systems. You'll gain deep insight into how systems work and perform, and learn methodologies for analyzing and improving system and application performance. Gregg presents examples from bare-metal systems and virtualized cloud tenants running Linux-based Ubuntu(R), Fedora(R), CentOS, and the illumos-based Joyent(R) SmartOS(TM) and OmniTI OmniOS(R). He systematically covers modern systems performance, including the "traditional" analysis of CPUs, memory, disks, and networks, and new areas including cloud computing and dynamic tracing. This book also helps you identify and fix the "unknown unknowns" of complex performance: bottlenecks that emerge from elements and interactions you were not aware of. The text concludes with a detailed case study, showing how a real cloud customer issue was analyzed from start to finish. Coverage includes - Modern performance analysis and tuning: terminology, concepts, models, methods, and techniques - Dynamic tracing techniques and tools, including examples of DTrace, SystemTap, and perf - Kernel internals: uncovering what the OS is doing - Using system observability tools, interfaces, and frameworks - Understanding and monitoring application performance - Optimizing CPUs: processors, cores, hardware threads, caches, interconnects, and kernel scheduling - Memory optimization: virtual memory, paging, swapping, memory architectures, busses, address spaces, and allocators - File system I/O, including caching - Storage devices/controllers, disk I/O workloads, RAID, and kernel I/O - Network-related performance issues: protocols, sockets, interfaces, and physical connections - Performance implications of OS and hardware-based virtualization, and new issues encountered with cloud computing - Benchmarking: getting accurate results and avoiding common mistakes This guide is indispensable for anyone who operates enterprise or cloud environments: system, network, database, and web admins; developers; and other professionals. For students and others new to optimization, it also provides exercises reflecting Gregg's extensive instructional experience.
Download or read book Principles of Expert Systems written by Peter Lucas and published by Addison Wesley Publishing Company. This book was released on 1991 with total page 544 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Computers in Context written by Bo Dahlbom and published by Wiley-Blackwell. This book was released on 1993-10-08 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When software systems are delivered too late, when they fail to meet the needs of their users, when only a fraction of their capacity is used, when their maintenance costs more than their development, when changes are impossible – then there is a frantic search for new and better engineering techniques and tools. Dahlbom ande Mathiassen advocate a different approach to these problems: pausing and reflection. Surprisingly little time in the education of systems developers is devoted to a consideration of the methods, goals and politics of computerization. The core of the book is an examination of the notion of quality itself. The effective computer professional must arrive at his or her sense of what quality can and should mean in a particular situation in order to resolve the inevitable creative tensions between the nature of people and that of computers, between structured systems and the process of change. The authors draw on a rich range of literature from philosophy, organizational theory, and technology and social change to support their points. But, adducing many real-life examples they avoid jargon and presuppose no formal background. Computer in Context will help students, computer professionals, and managers alike understand better what it is they are trying to do with computer systems, how and why.
Download or read book Software Optimization for High performance Computing written by Kevin R. Wadleigh and published by Prentice Hall Professional. This book was released on 2000 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The hands-on guide to high-performance coding and algorithm optimization. This hands-on guide to software optimization introduces state-of-the-art solutions for every key aspect of software performance - both code-based and algorithm-based. Two leading HP software performance experts offer comparative optimization strategies for RISC and for the new Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing (EPIC) design used in Intel IA-64 processors. Using many practical examples, they offer specific techniques for: Predicting and measuring performance - and identifying your best optimization opportunities Storage optimization: cache, system memory, virtual memory, and I/0 Parallel processing: distributed-memory and shared-memory (SMP and ccNUMA) Compilers and loop optimization Enhancing parallelism: compiler directives, threads, and message passing Mathematical libraries and algorithms Whether you're a developer, ISV, or technical researcher, if you need to optimize high-performance software on today's leading processors, one book delivers the advanced techniques and code examples you need: Software Optimization for High Performance Computing.
Download or read book Machines We Trust written by Marcello Pelillo and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2021-08-24 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Experts from disciplines that range from computer science to philosophy consider the challenges of building AI systems that humans can trust. Artificial intelligence-based algorithms now marshal an astonishing range of our daily activities, from driving a car ("turn left in 400 yards") to making a purchase ("products recommended for you"). How can we design AI technologies that humans can trust, especially in such areas of application as law enforcement and the recruitment and hiring process? In this volume, experts from a range of disciplines discuss the ethical and social implications of the proliferation of AI systems, considering bias, transparency, and other issues. The contributors, offering perspectives from computer science, engineering, law, and philosophy, first lay out the terms of the discussion, considering the "ethical debts" of AI systems, the evolution of the AI field, and the problems of trust and trustworthiness in the context of AI. They go on to discuss specific ethical issues and present case studies of such applications as medicine and robotics, inviting us to shift the focus from the perspective of a "human-centered AI" to that of an "AI-decentered humanity." Finally, they consider the future of AI, arguing that, as we move toward a hybrid society of cohabiting humans and machines, AI technologies can become humanity's allies.
Download or read book Computers at Risk written by National Research Council and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 1990-02-01 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Computers at Risk presents a comprehensive agenda for developing nationwide policies and practices for computer security. Specific recommendations are provided for industry and for government agencies engaged in computer security activities. The volume also outlines problems and opportunities in computer security research, recommends ways to improve the research infrastructure, and suggests topics for investigators. The book explores the diversity of the field, the need to engineer countermeasures based on speculation of what experts think computer attackers may do next, why the technology community has failed to respond to the need for enhanced security systems, how innovators could be encouraged to bring more options to the marketplace, and balancing the importance of security against the right of privacy.
Download or read book Computer Systems written by J. Stanley Warford and published by Jones & Bartlett Learning. This book was released on 2009-06-23 with total page 731 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Computer Architecture/Software Engineering
Download or read book Computer Systems written by Randal E.. Bryant and published by . This book was released on 2013-07-23 with total page 962 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For Computer Systems, Computer Organization and Architecture courses in CS, EE, and ECE departments. Few students studying computer science or computer engineering will ever have the opportunity to build a computer system. On the other hand, most students will be required to use and program computers on a near daily basis. Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective introduces the important and enduring concepts that underlie computer systems by showing how these ideas affect the correctness, performance, and utility of application programs. The text's hands-on approach (including a comprehensive set of labs) helps students understand the under-the-hood operation of a modern computer system and prepares them for future courses in systems topics such as compilers, computer architecture, operating systems, and networking.
Download or read book The Business Value of Computers written by Paul A. Strassmann and published by Information Economics Press. This book was released on 1990 with total page 558 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book addresses the practical needs of executives responsible for planning, budgeting & justifying information technology expenditures. Written by the former chief information executive (1956-1978) & vice president of strategic planning (1978-1985), author of the widely acclaimed & translated INFORMATION PAYOFF - THE TRANSFORMATION OF WORK IN THE ELECTRONIC AGE (Free Press, 1985), lecturer & university professor. Reviews: "A New Bible for Management Information Systems. An eminently readable book made more so by a playful sense of humor" -Information Week-; "Strips away obfuscation that has concealed the real value of computers." (The Financial Post); "A true path to the Holy Grail of business value." (Computer Weekly); "Some surprising answers to familiar questions cast new light on investing profitably in computer hardware & software." (The Conference Board); "All those either transfixed or baffled by the powers & potential of computers would do well to heed Strassmann's advice." (Daily Telegraph); "Measuring managerial productivity is the key to knowing how to invest in information technology. Strassmann's new book sets out the results of his research in detail. His argument comes through clearly." (The Financial Times).
Download or read book The Closed World written by Paul N. Edwards and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Closed World offers a radically new alternative to the canonical histories of computers and cognitive science. Arguing that we can make sense of computers as tools only when we simultaneously grasp their roles as metaphors and political icons, Paul Edwards shows how Cold War social and cultural contexts shaped emerging computer technology--and were transformed, in turn, by information machines. The Closed World explores three apparently disparate histories--the history of American global power, the history of computing machines, and the history of subjectivity in science and culture--through the lens of the American political imagination. In the process, it reveals intimate links between the military projects of the Cold War, the evolution of digital computers, and the origins of cybernetics, cognitive psychology, and artificial intelligence. Edwards begins by describing the emergence of a "closed-world discourse" of global surveillance and control through high-technology military power. The Cold War political goal of "containment" led to the SAGE continental air defense system, Rand Corporation studies of nuclear strategy, and the advanced technologies of the Vietnam War. These and other centralized, computerized military command and control projects--for containing world-scale conflicts--helped closed-world discourse dominate Cold War political decisions. Their apotheosis was the Reagan-era plan for a " Star Wars" space-based ballistic missile defense. Edwards then shows how these military projects helped computers become axial metaphors in psychological theory. Analyzing the Macy Conferences on cybernetics, the Harvard Psycho-Acoustic Laboratory, and the early history of artificial intelligence, he describes the formation of a "cyborg discourse." By constructing both human minds and artificial intelligences as information machines, cyborg discourse assisted in integrating people into the hyper-complex technological systems of the closed world. Finally, Edwards explores the cyborg as political identity in science fiction--from the disembodied, panoptic AI of 2001: A Space Odyssey, to the mechanical robots of Star Wars and the engineered biological androids of Blade Runner--where Information Age culture and subjectivity were both reflected and constructed. Inside Technology series
Download or read book Privacy Is Hard and Seven Other Myths written by Jaap-Henk Hoepman and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2023-10-03 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An expert on computer privacy and security shows how we can build privacy into the design of systems from the start. We are tethered to our devices all day, every day, leaving data trails of our searches, posts, clicks, and communications. Meanwhile, governments and businesses collect our data and use it to monitor us without our knowledge. So we have resigned ourselves to the belief that privacy is hard--choosing to believe that websites do not share our information, for example, and declaring that we have nothing to hide anyway. In this informative and illuminating book, a computer privacy and security expert argues that privacy is not that hard if we build it into the design of systems from the start. Along the way, Jaap-Henk Hoepman debunks eight persistent myths surrounding computer privacy. The website that claims it doesn't collect personal data, for example; Hoepman explains that most data is personal, capturing location, preferences, and other information. You don't have anything to hide? There's nothing wrong with wanting to keep personal information--even if it's not incriminating or embarrassing--private. Hoepman shows that just as technology can be used to invade our privacy, it can be used to protect it, when we apply privacy by design. Hoepman suggests technical fixes, discussing pseudonyms, leaky design, encryption, metadata, and the benefits of keeping your data local (on your own device only), and outlines privacy design strategies that system designers can apply now.
