Download or read book The Heart and the Chip Our Bright Future with Robots written by Daniela Rus and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2024-03-05 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Daniela Rus, a leading roboticist and computer scientist, explores how we can use a new generation of smart machines to help humankind. There is a robotics revolution underway. A record 3.1 million robots are working in factories right now, doing everything from assembling computers to packing goods and monitoring air quality and performance. A far greater number of smart machines impact our lives in countless other ways—improving the precision of surgeons, cleaning our homes, extending our reach to distant worlds—and we’re on the cusp of even more exciting opportunities. In The Heart and the Chip, roboticist Daniela Rus and science writer Gregory Mone provide an overview of the interconnected fields of robotics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning, and reframe the way we think about intelligent machines while weighing the moral and ethical consequences of their role in society. Robots aren’t going to steal our jobs: they’re going to make us more capable, productive, and precise. At once optimistic and realistic, Rus and Mone envision a world in which these technologies augment and enhance our skills and talents, both as individuals and as a species—a world in which the proliferation of robots allows us all to be more human.

Download or read book The Mind s Mirror Risk and Reward in the Age of AI written by Daniela Rus and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2024-08-06 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exciting introduction to the true potential of AI from the director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Imagine a technology capable of discovering new drugs in days instead of years, helping scientists map distant galaxies and decode the language of whales, and aiding the rest of us in mundane daily tasks, from drafting email responses to preparing dinner. Now consider that this same technology poses risks to our jobs and society as a whole. Artificial Intelligence is no longer science fiction; it is upending our world today. As advances in AI spark fear and confusion, The Mind’s Mirror reminds us that in spite of the very real and pressing challenges, AI is a force with enormous potential to improve human life. Computer scientist and AI researcher Daniela Rus, along with science writer Gregory Mone, offers an expert perspective as a leader in the field who has witnessed many technological hype cycles. Rus and Mone illustrate the ways in which AI can help us become more productive, knowledgeable, creative, insightful, and even empathetic, along with the many risks associated with misuse. The Mind’s Mirror shows readers how AI works and explores what we, as individuals and as a society, must do to mitigate dangerous outcomes and ensure a positive impact for as many people as possible. The result is an accessible and lively exploration of the underlying technology and its limitations and possibilities—a book that illuminates our possible futures in the hopes of forging the best path forward.

Download or read book The Truth About Santa written by Gregory Mone and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2009-11-03 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We all know Santa Claus: fat, jolly, omniscient, swift. Lives in a nice home in the Arctic, with the missus and a pack of elves. Well, forget what you know. Santa Claus is from Greenpoint, Brooklyn, as it turns out, and he's not as fat as he used to be. Here's something else you didn't know: he's been dabbling in some futuristic technology, and has found myriad ways to make his job possible. How can Santa know who's been naughty and nice? Simple: implant listening devices into your ornaments. How can he make it to every house Christmas Eve? That's nothing a little cloning and some wormholes can't solve. And he has plenty of other tactics: quantum entanglement, organ replacement, drug-induced hibernation, and unmanned aerial vehicles, to name just a few. In this fantastically illustrated, affectionate, and hilarious book, Gregory Mone uses science and technology to overturn the assumption that Santa can't be real. Drawing on the work of accomplished scientists and researchers, Mone gives us a whole new portrait of this remarkable man and the miracles he makes happen every year. With imaginative artwork and an eye-catching package, this book makes an outstanding Christmas gift for just about anyone.

Download or read book Atlantis The Accidental Invasion Atlantis Book 1 written by Gregory Mone and published by Abrams. This book was released on 2021-04-20 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Perfect for fans of Percy Jackson and Mr. Lemoncello’s Library, Atlantis: The Accidental Invasion is now in paperback! Kaya, raised in the undersea, high-tech world of Atlantis, has always been fascinated by the legends about life above the water. Despite the government’s insistence that they’re only stories, she can’t help but dream about the Sun People—and when a group of officials known as Erasers move to bury those legends for good, Kaya sets out to the surface to uncover the truth once and for all. In the world above, where climate change has led to giant tsunamis that threaten Earth’s coasts, all Lewis wants is to spend more time with his scientist father. When he stows away on his dad’s top-secret research trip, he finds himself thrown headfirst into an adventure much bigger than he bargained for. Fast-paced and action-packed, The Accidental Invasion brings readers into a world unlike anything they’ve seen before. Bonus content includes real scientific information about genetic modification, earthquakes, nuclear power, and plate tectonics.

Download or read book The Big Nine written by Amy Webb and published by PublicAffairs. This book was released on 2019-03-05 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A call-to-arms about the broken nature of artificial intelligence, and the powerful corporations that are turning the human-machine relationship on its head. We like to think that we are in control of the future of "artificial" intelligence. The reality, though, is that we -- the everyday people whose data powers AI -- aren't actually in control of anything. When, for example, we speak with Alexa, we contribute that data to a system we can't see and have no input into -- one largely free from regulation or oversight. The big nine corporations -- Amazon, Google, Facebook, Tencent, Baidu, Alibaba, Microsoft, IBM and Apple--are the new gods of AI and are short-changing our futures to reap immediate financial gain. In this book, Amy Webb reveals the pervasive, invisible ways in which the foundations of AI -- the people working on the system, their motivations, the technology itself -- is broken. Within our lifetimes, AI will, by design, begin to behave unpredictably, thinking and acting in ways which defy human logic. The big nine corporations may be inadvertently building and enabling vast arrays of intelligent systems that don't share our motivations, desires, or hopes for the future of humanity. Much more than a passionate, human-centered call-to-arms, this book delivers a strategy for changing course, and provides a path for liberating us from algorithmic decision-makers and powerful corporations.

Download or read book 48 Peaks written by Cheryl Suchors and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2018-09-11 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Floundering in her second career, the one she’s always wanted, forty-eight year old Cheryl Suchors resolves that, despite a fear of heights, her mid-life success depends on hiking the highest of the grueling White Mountains in New Hampshire. All forty-eight of them. She endures injuries, novice mistakes, and the heartbreaking loss of a best friend. When breast cancer threatens her own life, she seeks solace and recovery in the wild. Her quest takes ten years. Regardless of the need since childhood to feel successful and in control, climbing teaches her mastery isn’t enough and control is often an illusion. Connecting with friends and with nature, Suchors redefines success: she discovers a source of spiritual nourishment, spaces powerful enough to absorb her grief, and joy in the persistence of love and beauty. 48 Peaks inspires us to believe that, no matter what obstacles we face, we too can attain our summits.

Download or read book Geek Girl Rising written by Heather Cabot and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2017-05-23 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book "isn't about the famous tech trailblazers you already know, like Sheryl Sandberg and Marissa Mayer. Instead, veteran journalists Heather Cabot and Samantha Walravens introduce readers to the ... female entrepreneurs and technologists fighting at the grassroots level for an ownership stake in the revolution that's changing the way we live, work and connect to each other"--Amazon.com.

Download or read book Getting Started with Terraform written by Kirill Shirinkin and published by Packt Publishing Ltd. This book was released on 2017-07-31 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Build, Manage and Improve your infrastructure effortlessly. About This Book An up-to-date and comprehensive resource on Terraform that lets you quickly and efficiently launch your infrastructure Learn how to implement your infrastructure as code and make secure, effective changes to your infrastructure Learn to build multi-cloud fault-tolerant systems and simplify the management and orchestration of even the largest scale and most complex cloud infrastructures Who This Book Is For This book is for developers and operators who already have some exposure to working with infrastructure but want to improve their workflow and introduce infrastructure as a code practice. Knowledge of essential Amazon Web Services components (EC2, VPC, IAM) would help contextualize the examples provided. Basic understanding of Jenkins and Shell scripts will be helpful for the chapters on the production usage of Terraform. What You Will Learn Understand what Infrastructure as Code (IaC) means and why it matters Install, configure, and deploy Terraform Take full control of your infrastructure in the form of code Manage complete infrastructure, starting with a single server and scaling beyond any limits Discover a great set of production-ready practices to manage infrastructure Set up CI/CD pipelines to test and deliver Terraform stacks Construct templates to simplify more complex provisioning tasks In Detail Terraform is a tool used to efficiently build, configure, and improve the production infrastructure. It can manage the existing infrastructure as well as create custom in-house solutions. This book shows you when and how to implement infrastructure as a code practices with Terraform. It covers everything necessary to set up the complete management of infrastructure with Terraform, starting with the basics of using providers and resources. It is a comprehensive guide that begins with very small infrastructure templates and takes you all the way to managing complex systems, all using concrete examples that evolve over the course of the book. The book ends with the complete workflow of managing a production infrastructure as code—this is achieved with the help of version control and continuous integration. The readers will also learn how to combine multiple providers in a single template and manage different code bases with many complex modules. It focuses on how to set up continuous integration for the infrastructure code. The readers will be able to use Terraform to build, change, and combine infrastructure safely and efficiently. Style and approach This book will help and guide you to implement Terraform in your infrastructure. The readers will start by working on very small infrastructure templates and then slowly move on to manage complex systems, all by using concrete examples that will evolve during the course of the book.

Download or read book What We Know written by Vivian Nixon and published by The New Press. This book was released on 2020-06-30 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This is what we know, and we know it better than anyone else." —from the introduction by Vivian Nixon and Daryl V. Atkinson A thoughtful and surprising cornucopia of ideas for improving America's criminal justice system, from those most impacted by it When The New Press, the Center for American Progress, and the Formerly Incarcerated and Convicted Peoples and Family Movement issued a call for innovative reform ideas, over three hundred currently and formerly incarcerated individuals responded. What We Know collects two dozen of their best suggestions, each of which proposes a policy solution derived from their own lived experience. Ideas run the gamut: A man serving time in Indiana argues for a Prison Labor Standards Act, calling for us to reject prison slavery. A Nebraska man who served a federal prison term for white-collar crimes suggests offering courses in entrepreneurship as a way to break down barriers to employment for people returning from incarceration. A woman serving a life sentence in Georgia spells out a system of earned privileges that could increase safety and decrease stress inside prison. And a man serving a twenty-five-year term for a crime he committed at age fifteen advocates powerfully for eliminating existing financial incentives to charge youths as adults. With contributors including nationally known formerly incarcerated leaders in justice reform, twenty-three justice-involved individuals add a perspective that is too often left out of national reform conversations.

Download or read book Echo of Humanity written by Adele Mourad and published by AuthorHouse. This book was released on 2011-07-01 with total page 87 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a fast moving world of great inventions, Echo of Humanity examines the risks surrounding a life detached from its essentials; it dives into our struggle with values and higher ideals and focuses on thoughts and feelings we contend with often and yet dont give much attention to or discuss. Hence the immeasurable disparity between the speed of the human mind and the dynamics of human civilization becomes evident. The author highlights the danger of drifting while embracing change and modernization. To succeed as human beings in an advancing world, we must allow the intervention of higher ideals and values into our daily lives, for without it, civilizations decay. By tackling the complexities of our world, Echo of Humanity explores questions revolving around the purpose of existence and the mystique of life and death. The book provokes moments of self examination with a serious look into reality. It wraps a condensed layout of many thoughts into a quick to read format that todays reader might enjoy.

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 Caustics Catastrophes and Wave Fields written by Yu.A. Kravtsov and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Caustics, Catastrophes and Wave Fields in a sense continues the treatment of the earlier volume 6 "Geometrical Optics of Inhomogeneous Media" in the present book series, by analysing caustics and their fields on the basis of modern catastrophe theory. This volume covers the key generalisations of geometrical optics related to caustic asymptotic expansions: The Lewis-Kravtsov method of standard functions, Maslov's method of caonical operators, Orlov's method of interference integrals, as well as their modifications for penumbra, space-time, random and other types of caustics. All the methods are amply illustrated by worked problems concerning relevant wave-field applications.

Download or read book The Broad Fork written by Hugh Acheson and published by Clarkson Potter. This book was released on 2015-05-12 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From James Beard Award winner Hugh Acheson comes a seasonal cookbook of 200 recipes designed to make the most of your farmers' market bounty, your CSA box, or your grocery produce aisle. In The Broad Fork, Hugh narrates the four seasons of produce, inspired by the most-asked question at the market: "What the hell do I do with kohlrabi?" And so here are 50 ingredients—from kohlrabi to carrots, beets to Brussels sprouts—demystified or reintroduced to us through 200 recipes: three quick hits to get us excited and one more elaborate dish. For apples in the fall there's apple butter; snapper ceviche with apple and lime; and pork tenderloin and roasted apple. In the summer, Hugh explores uses for berries, offering recipes for blackberry vinegar, pickled blueberries, and raspberry cobbler with drop biscuits. Beautifully written, this book brings fresh produce to the center of your plate. It's what both your doctor and your grocery bill have been telling you to do, and Hugh gives us the knowledge and the inspiration to wrap ourselves around produce in new ways.

Download or read book Geek Lust written by Alex Langley and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2013-10-11 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Get Your Geek On! Unless you're horndog Howard Wolowitz from The Big Bang Theory, the words "geek" and "lust" are seldom found in the same sentence. Until now, bub. Whether it's the most recent tweet from Felicia Day, the newest book from Terry Pratchett, or the latest anything from Joss Whedon, the world is a smoking hot, happening place for Geeks. Geek Lust, a humorous celebration of Geekdom's frenzied desires, heats it up like 1.21 Giga-Suns. It spotlights some of the awesomest real and fictional geeks in history, including Einstein, Madame Curie, Nerdist Chris Hardwick, and Steve Urkel (!); features classic science fiction and horror stories; the greatest experiences to have playing video games; gadgets gone wild; various top lists such as the hottest cryptids; and things from Star Wars that could be euphemisms for your genitals. If you yearn for time travel, robotics and cloning; if Kirk still captains your imagination; and if, when all is said and done, you still can't decide between Linda Carter's Wonder Woman or Lucy Lawless's Xena, Warrior Princess, welcome to Geek Lust. And by the way, is it hot in here or did the next-generation iPhone just drop?

Download or read book Turned On written by Kate Devlin and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-10-18 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Illuminating, witty and written with a wide open mind' Sunday Times The idea of the seductive sex robot is the stuff of myth, legend and science fiction. From the myth of Laodamia in Ancient Greece to twenty-first century shows such as Westworld, robots in human form have captured our imagination, our hopes and our fears. But beyond the fantasies there are real and fundamental questions about our relationship with technology as it moves into the realm of robotics. Turned On explores how the emerging and future development of sexual companion robots might affect us and the society in which we live. It explores the social changes arising from emerging technologies, and our relationships with the machines that someday may care for us and about us. Sex robots are here, and here to stay, and more are coming. Computer scientist and sex-robot expert Kate Devlin is our guide as we seek to understand how this technology is developing. From robots in Greek myth and the fantastical automata of the Middle Ages through to the sentient machines of the future that embody the prominent AI debate, she explores the 'modern' robot versus the robot servants we were promised by twentieth century sci-fi, and delves into the psychological effects of the technology, and issues raised around gender politics, diversity, surveillance and violence. This book answers all the questions you've ever had about sex robots, as well as all the ones you haven't yet thought of.

Download or read book Jack and the Geniuses written by Bill Nye and published by Abrams. This book was released on 2017-04-04 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A contest to find a better way to create clean drinking water turns into a mystery when one of the scientists goes missing. Luckily, Jack and his genius siblings are on the case in Jack and the Geniuses: At the Bottom of the World, first in the New York Times bestselling series from Bill Nye and Gregory Mone—featuring illustrations by Nick Iluzada. Jack and his foster siblings, Ava and Matt, are not your typical kids—they’re geniuses. Well, Ava and Matt are. Ava speaks multiple languages and builds robots for fun, and Matt is an expert astronomer and math whiz. As for Jack, it’s hard to stand out when surrounded by geniuses all the time. Things get more complicated when the trio starts working for Dr. Hank Witherspoon, one of the world’s leading scientists. They travel to Antarctica with Hank for a prestigious award ceremony—but they quickly find that not all is as it seems: A scientist has gone missing. It’s up to Jack, Ava, and Matt to find her . . . and discover who’s behind it all. In the Jack and the Geniuses series, readers join Jack, Ava, and Matt on adventures around the world to tackle some of science’s biggest challenges, including new ways to create clean drinking water, to generate clean and renewable energy, and to extend information access to the entire planet. Each book in the series includes cool facts about the real-life science found in the story and a fun DIY project. Jack and the Geniuses series: Jack and the Geniuses: At the Bottom of the World (#1) Jack and the Geniuses: In the Deep Blue Sea (#2) Jack and the Geniuses: Lost in the Jungle (#3)

Download or read book Geek Love written by Katherine Dunn and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-05-25 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: National Book Award Finalist • Here is the unforgettable story of the Binewskis, a circus-geek family whose matriarch and patriarch have bred their own exhibit of human oddities—with the help of amphetamines, arsenic, and radioisotopes. One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years Their offspring include Arturo the Aquaboy, who has flippers for limbs and a megalomaniac ambition worthy of Genghis Khan . . . Iphy and Elly, the lissome Siamese twins . . . albino hunchback Oly, and the outwardly normal Chick, whose mysterious gifts make him the family’s most precious—and dangerous—asset. As the Binewskis take their act across the backwaters of the U.S., inspiring fanatical devotion and murderous revulsion; as its members conduct their own Machiavellian version of sibling rivalry, Geek Love throws its sulfurous light on our notions of the freakish and the normal, the beautiful and the ugly, the holy and the obscene. Family values will never be the same.