EBookClubs

Read Books & Download eBooks Full Online

EBookClubs

Read Books & Download eBooks Full Online

Book The Deus Machine

Download or read book The Deus Machine written by Pierre Ouellette and published by . This book was released on 1995 with total page 446 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Book Deus Ex Machina

    Book Details:
  • Author : Andrew Foster Altschul
  • Publisher : Catapult
  • Release : 2011-02-01
  • ISBN : 1582436010
  • Pages : 209 pages

Download or read book Deus Ex Machina written by Andrew Foster Altschul and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2011-02-01 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On a distant island, reality show contestants battle for bragging rights and a slot on next week's episode. They've perfected their dramatic roles and are prepared to do whatever it takes to win. There's the take–no–prisoners Marine sergeant, the gay hairdresser, the ruthless lawyer, the brainy poet. But one player refuses to compete—Gloria Hamm, a sullen dental hygienist, voted least likely to win by the show's crew. The higher–ups are desperate for ratings and sensational twists to trump the plots of seasons past. But the producer—haunted by personal tragedies all too real—is losing control of the show and its crew. While he obsesses about Gloria, the crew plots mutiny, a contestant dances with insanity, and disease threatens to halt the show completely. When real catastrophes strike, the producer finds it harder and harder to navigate his surreal landscape, where boundaries of the real, imagined, and orchestrated have blurred beyond recognition. Deus Ex Machina deconstructs our notions of narrative, revealing how tricky it is for any auteur to disappear from his creation. In an age when people will seemingly do anything to be on television, it asks what is the true nature of "reality," and what is its cost?

Book The Deus Machine

    Book Details:
  • Author : Pierre Ouellette
  • Publisher : Pocket Books
  • Release : 1996
  • ISBN : 9780671536497
  • Pages : 532 pages

Download or read book The Deus Machine written by Pierre Ouellette and published by Pocket Books. This book was released on 1996 with total page 532 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In an original biothriller that crosses the scientific expertise of Michael Crichton with the chilling storytelling of Dean Koontz, Pierre Ouellette takes readers to the cutting edge of technological and medical science. "Well rounded characters and a lively story make this high-tech thriller a first choice for any fiction collection".--Booklist.

Book The Deus Machine

Download or read book The Deus Machine written by Pierre Ouellette and published by . This book was released on 1994 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Book Deus Ex Machina Sapiens

Download or read book Deus Ex Machina Sapiens written by David Ellis and published by Elysian Detroit. This book was released on 2011 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Watson's win on Jeopardy came as no surprise to those who had read Deus ex Machina sapiens. It was written largely during the 1990s, around the time that another IBM supercomputer--Deep Blue--was trouncing world chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov. The book has since been updated on a few points of detail but its primary message remains intact: the Machine is rapidly evolving as Man's rival if not replacement for the job of Steward of the Earth. Building upon the work of some of the world's greatest scientists, philosophers, and religious thinkers, and drawing particularly from developments in the computing and cognitive sciences--particularly, the field of artificial intelligence, or AI--the book reveals the evolutionary emergence of a machine that is not just intelligent but also self-conscious, emotional, and free-willed. In the 1980s and '90s you used to hear grandiose claims about AI. Machines would soon surpass humans in intelligence, it was claimed by some. The Japanese government spent a billion dollars on one project to make it happen. Well, it didn't happen, but that didn't stop the development of intelligence in machines. AI research simply went underground, and has ever since been quietly incorporated into the "ordinary" programs we use every day, without fanfare, without hype. There is still no machine that rivals Homo sapiens in overall intelligence, but today there are machines that far exceed human intellectual capacity in specific domains, from games to engineering to art, and the number of domains is growing exponentially big and exponentially fast. The disappearance of AI from front stage was good insofar as it allowed machines to develop in the right way; that is, through an evolutionary process, which is the only way for something of such complexity to develop. But it was bad insofar as we lost sight of the development of the intelligent machine. Deus brings Machina sapiens back to front stage, where it belongs. After describing the evolutionary development of intelligence in machines it goes on to describe the emotional, intellectual, and ethical attributes of what is no less than an emergent new life form. It asks the Big Question that can only be asked if you accept the very possibility of the new life form: Will it be serpent or savior? The question is answered in the book's title, which is intended to mean "God Emerging From the Intelligent Machine." The author confesses to having never studied Latin and to have concocted the title from two known Latin phrases: "Deus ex Machina" and "Homo sapiens." The concoction could be grammatically incorrect. The author would be pleased to be corrected.

Book Deus Ex Machina

    Book Details:
  • Author : Mel Croucher
  • Publisher : Andrews UK Limited
  • Release : 2016-04-04
  • ISBN : 1783336919
  • Pages : 341 pages

Download or read book Deus Ex Machina written by Mel Croucher and published by Andrews UK Limited. This book was released on 2016-04-04 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The billion dollar video games industry had to start somewhere, and this is the hilarious, heartbreaking, inside story of how it all began and where it's all headed. And in the middle of it all there was a game hailed as the best ever written. It was called Deus Ex Machina. It was a creative triumph and it was a commercial disaster. Meet the pirates, the nerds, the innovators, the charlatans, the superstars, the winners, the sinners, the good, the bad and the downright ugly. A remarkable story revealed by the founder of the industry himself, with gut-wrenching honesty and merciless humor. If you ever wondered how computer gaming turned us all into willing slaves, you're about to find out in glorious style.

Book Architectural Model as Machine

Download or read book Architectural Model as Machine written by Albert Smith and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2007-03-30 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers an explanation of why scale models are important to the design process. Albert Smith takes the reader through the history and significance of models in architecture from the magic of the Egyptian scale model to the present day. Through this description of the relationship between architecture and the scale model, Smith demonstrates the most effective process between concept and 'machine', between the idea and the final building. The great value of this book is to reveal the nature of the scale model and to unlock the tremendous potential of this design tool as a thinking and communicative advice. His chronological analysis goes on from Egypt through Rome to the relationship between the Greek paradigm scale model and then on to Medieval and Renaissance models. It concludes with the models of the Spanish architect Antonio Gaudi, the Russian Constructivists, the American architect Louis Khan and finally looks at the role of scale models in the present day through the work of the Polish/American architect Daniel Libeskind and the American Frank Gehry.

Book The Machine at Work

Download or read book The Machine at Work written by Keith Grint and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-06-28 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This highly topical book is a concise and accessible account of the relationship between technology and work. Firstly, it reviews and critically assesses a variety of recent approaches to the social and cultural dimensions of technology. Secondly, it examines the implications of these new approaches for existing ideas about the nature of technology and work organization. At the core of much thinking about technology is the assumption that the technical character and capacity of artefacts is given. The enduring image of deus ex machina captures the idea that it is the essential capacity 'within' a technology which, in the end, accounts for the way we organize ourselves, our work and other life experiences. Recent work in the sociology of technology, by contrast, sets out relativist and constructivist accounts of technology, which begin to challenge this central assumption. The Machine at Work includes a reinterpretation of the Luddites; a review of the social processes of development in information technology; a reassessment of theories of the role of technology in work; and an analysis of the common limitations of some constructivist and feminist perspectives on technology. The book argues that only a commitment to a particular conception of constructivism enables the kind of radical rethinking about technology and work relations that is needed. This engaging and informative text will be of interest to students in a range of subject areas - from sociology, organizational theory and behaviour, to industrial relations, management and business studies.

Book Dictionary of the Theatre

Download or read book Dictionary of the Theatre written by Patrice Pavis and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 1998-01-01 with total page 492 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An encyclopedic dictionary of technical and theoretical terms, the book covers all aspects of a semiotic approach to the theatre, with cross-referenced alphabetical entries ranging from absurd to word scenery.

Book Mechanisms and the Contingency of Social Causality

Download or read book Mechanisms and the Contingency of Social Causality written by Alexei Anisin and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2022-08-04 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mechanisms are frequently brought up across the natural and social sciences as supplements to laws and empirical regularities. Recent decades have seen an explosion in mechanistic explanations in which philosophers of science, natural scientists, and social scientists have advocated, debated, and criticized the usage of mechanisms in their respective disciplines. As the intensity of these debates has increased, our understanding of the historical origin of mechanisms remains incomplete. Of the explanations that have been put forward, it has been argued that the roots of mechanisms are to be found in mechanical philosophy. This book demonstrates that an important set of factors have been overlooked in our understanding of the ontology of mechanisms. In shifting attention to a never-before-explored terrain in the etymological and semantic evolution of what arguably is the most commonly used scientific term, “the mechanism,” this text discovers that the origin of mechanisms is to be witnessed in ideas about social causality that arose within Ancient Greek tragedy and theater. It takes readers on a journey through socio-cultural settings and changes in Ancient Greece, early Christianity, the Roman Empire, and the Middle Ages, as well as the rise of science and modernity, and finishes in our current era of digital technology. As such, the book reveals how understandings of mechanisms have changed and evolved across time.

Book International Symposium on History of Machines and Mechanisms

Download or read book International Symposium on History of Machines and Mechanisms written by Marco Ceccarelli and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2007-11-23 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The HMM2004 International Symposium on History of Machines and Mechanisms is the second event of a series that has been started in 2000 as main activity of the IFToMM Permanent Commission for History of MMS, Mechanism and Machine Science. The aim of the HMM Symposium is to be a forum to exchange views, opinions, and experiences on History of MMS from technical viewpoints in order to track the past but also to look at future developments in MMS. The HMM Symposium Series is devoted to the technical aspects of historical deve- pments and therefore it has been addressed mainly to the IFToMM Community. In fact, most the authors of the contributed papers are experts in MMS and related topics. This year HMM Symposium came back to Cassino, after the challenging first event in 2000. The HMM2004 International Symposium on History of Machines and Mechanisms was held at the University of Cassino, Italy, from 12 to 15 May 2004. These Proceedings contain 29 papers by authors from all around the world. These papers cover the wide field of the History of Mechanical Engineering and particularly the History of MMS. The contributions address mainly technical aspects of historical developments of Machines and Mechanisms. History of IFToMM, the International Federation for the Promotion of Mechanism and Machine Science is also outlined through the historical activities of some of its Commissions.

Book Advances in Mechanism and Machine Science

Download or read book Advances in Mechanism and Machine Science written by Tadeusz Uhl and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-06-13 with total page 4248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book gathers the proceedings of the 15th IFToMM World Congress, which was held in Krakow, Poland, from June 30 to July 4, 2019. Having been organized every four years since 1965, the Congress represents the world’s largest scientific event on mechanism and machine science (MMS). The contributions cover an extremely diverse range of topics, including biomechanical engineering, computational kinematics, design methodologies, dynamics of machinery, multibody dynamics, gearing and transmissions, history of MMS, linkage and mechanical controls, robotics and mechatronics, micro-mechanisms, reliability of machines and mechanisms, rotor dynamics, standardization of terminology, sustainable energy systems, transportation machinery, tribology and vibration. Selected by means of a rigorous international peer-review process, they highlight numerous exciting advances and ideas that will spur novel research directions and foster new multidisciplinary collaborations.

Book A Thousand Machines

    Book Details:
  • Author : Gerald Raunig
  • Publisher : MIT Press
  • Release : 2010-04-09
  • ISBN : 1584350857
  • Pages : 121 pages

Download or read book A Thousand Machines written by Gerald Raunig and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2010-04-09 with total page 121 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The machine as a social movement of today's “precariat”—those whose labor and lives are precarious. In this “concise philosophy of the machine,” Gerald Raunig provides a historical and critical backdrop to a concept proposed forty years ago by the French philosophers Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze: the machine, not as a technical device and apparatus, but as a social composition and concatenation. This conception of the machine as an arrangement of technical, bodily, intellectual, and social components subverts the opposition between man and machine, organism and mechanism, individual and community. Drawing from an unusual range of films, literature, and performance—from the role of bicycles in Flann O'Brien's fiction to Vittorio de Sica's Neorealist film The Bicycle Thieves, and from Karl Marx's “Fragment on Machines” to the deus ex machina of Greek drama—Raunig arrives at an enhanced conception of the machine as a social movement, finding its most apt and concrete manifestation in the Euromayday movement, which since 2001 has become a transnational activist and discursive practice focused upon the precarious nature of labor and lives.

Book State of the Art and Innovations in Mechanism and Machine Science

Download or read book State of the Art and Innovations in Mechanism and Machine Science written by Marco Ceccarelli and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2024-01-15 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book gathers invited contributions as survey and research reports in mechanism and machine science (MMS) ranging across the entire field, related in most instances to the works of late Prof. Carlos López Cajún, one of the field's most prominent scholars. The book provides state-of-the-art information and showcases the latest achievements and challenges of MMS. The book is an accessible avenue to understanding ideas and solutions by leading international scientists who offer much-needed historical insights into the MMS field with future perspectives.

Book The Third Pandemic

    Book Details:
  • Author : Pierre Ouellette
  • Publisher : Simon and Schuster
  • Release : 1997-04
  • ISBN : 0671525360
  • Pages : 420 pages

Download or read book The Third Pandemic written by Pierre Ouellette and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 1997-04 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On discovering a deadly virus, a woman scientist is told to keep quiet and to give her company time to prepare an antidote, so when the virus strikes they will have a monopoly. She refuses and the company resorts to violence. Fortunately, she meets Lieutenant Paris of the Seattle police.

Book Machine Habitus

    Book Details:
  • Author : Massimo Airoldi
  • Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
  • Release : 2021-12-13
  • ISBN : 1509543295
  • Pages : 200 pages

Download or read book Machine Habitus written by Massimo Airoldi and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2021-12-13 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We commonly think of society as made of and by humans, but with the proliferation of machine learning and AI technologies, this is clearly no longer the case. Billions of automated systems tacitly contribute to the social construction of reality by drawing algorithmic distinctions between the visible and the invisible, the relevant and the irrelevant, the likely and the unlikely – on and beyond platforms. Drawing on the work of Pierre Bourdieu, this book develops an original sociology of algorithms as social agents, actively participating in social life. Through a wide range of examples, Massimo Airoldi shows how society shapes algorithmic code, and how this culture in the code guides the practical behaviour of the code in the culture, shaping society in turn. The ‘machine habitus’ is the generative mechanism at work throughout myriads of feedback loops linking humans with artificial social agents, in the context of digital infrastructures and pre-digital social structures. Machine Habitus will be of great interest to students and scholars in sociology, media and cultural studies, science and technology studies and information technology, and to anyone interested in the growing role of algorithms and AI in our social and cultural life.

Book Deus ex Machina

    Book Details:
  • Author : Perry Slaughter
  • Publisher : Lulu.com
  • Release : 2014
  • ISBN : 1941928153
  • Pages : 118 pages

Download or read book Deus ex Machina written by Perry Slaughter and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2014 with total page 118 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the computer called ARTHUR, Cliff Peabody has made a major breakthrough in artificial intelligence. It should be the most triumphant event of his professional career--but why, then, is the federal government invading his laboratories? Why is half the country suffering an inexplicable power outage? And, most disturbing of all, why is reality itself going haywire in the vicinity of Cliff's office? To answer these questions, Cliff will need to sacrifice everything--and everybody--that has ever been precious to him. And even then, there's no guarantee that he'll like what he learns. Especially when it points to the overthrow of the Creator of the universe itself... First published in samizdat form in 1985, this rollicking, inventive, and blasphemous sci-fi adventure heralded the emergence of Perry Slaughter as a force to be reckoned with in American letters. Nearly three decades later, Deus ex Machina still retains its power to shock, astound, and entertain.