Download or read book The Machine That Changed the World written by James P. Womack and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2008-12-09 with total page 501 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When James Womack, Daniel Jones, and Daniel Roos wrote THE MACHINE THAT CHANGED THE WORLD in 1990, Japanese automakers, and Toyota in particular, were making a strong showing by applying the principles of lean production. However, the full power of lean principles was unproven, and they had not been applied outside of the auto industry. Today, the power of lean production has been conclusively proved by Toyota's unparalleled success, and the concepts have been widely applied in many industries. Based on MIT's pioneering global study of industrial competition, THE MACHINE THAT CHANGED THE WORLD offers a groundbreaking analysis of the entire lean business system, including product development, supplier management, sales, service, and production - an analysis even more relevant today as GM and Ford struggle to survive and a wide range of British abd American companies embrace lean production. A new Foreword by the authors brings the story up to date and details how their predictions were right. As a result, this reissue of a classic is as insightful and instructive today as when it was first published.
Download or read book Machine that Changed the World written by James P. Womack and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 1990 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Draws conclusions for the future of the industry in the USA.
Download or read book Heart of the Machine written by Richard Yonck and published by Arcade. This book was released on 2020-02-11 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For Readers of Ray Kurzweil and Michio Kaku, a New Look at the Cutting Edge of Artificial Intelligence Imagine a robotic stuffed animal that can read and respond to a child’s emotional state, a commercial that can recognize and change based on a customer’s facial expression, or a company that can actually create feelings as though a person were experiencing them naturally. Heart of the Machine explores the next giant step in the relationship between humans and technology: the ability of computers to recognize, respond to, and even replicate emotions. Computers have long been integral to our lives, and their advances continue at an exponential rate. Many believe that artificial intelligence equal or superior to human intelligence will happen in the not-too-distance future; some even think machine consciousness will follow. Futurist Richard Yonck argues that emotion, the first, most basic, and most natural form of communication, is at the heart of how we will soon work with and use computers. Instilling emotions into computers is the next leap in our centuries-old obsession with creating machines that replicate humans. But for every benefit this progress may bring to our lives, there is a possible pitfall. Emotion recognition could lead to advanced surveillance, and the same technology that can manipulate our feelings could become a method of mass control. And, as shown in movies like Her and Ex Machina, our society already holds a deep-seated anxiety about what might happen if machines could actually feel and break free from our control. Heart of the Machine is an exploration of the new and inevitable ways in which mankind and technology will interact. The paperback edition has a new foreword by Rana el Kaliouby, PhD, a pioneer in artificial emotional intelligence, as well as the cofounder and CEO of Affectiva, the acclaimed AI startup spun off from the MIT Media Lab.
Download or read book The Perpetual Motion Machine written by Brittany Ackerman and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inspired by a brother's high school science project--a perpetual motion machine that could save the world-- The Perpetual Motion Machine is a memoir in essays that attempts to save a sibling by depicting the visceral pain that accompanies longing for some past impossibility. The collection has been a science project in its study of memory, in the calculation and plotting of the moments that make up a childhood. The preparation has been "in the field" in that it is built upon the gathering of lived experience; the evidence is photo albums, family interviews, and anecdotes from friends. The project has been one giant experiment--to see if they can all make it out alive.
Download or read book Souls in the Great Machine written by Sean Mcmullen and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 1999-06-22 with total page 454 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An Australia destroyed by a nuclear holocaust is ruled by a computer made of human components imprisoned inside. When a component becomes defective it is shot.
Download or read book World Wide Mind written by Michael Chorost and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2011-02-15 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What if digital communication felt as real as being touched? This question led Michael Chorost to explore profound new ideas triggered by lab research around the world, and the result is the book you now hold. Marvelous and momentous, World Wide Mind takes mind-to-mind communication out of the realm of science fiction and reveals how we are on the verge of a radical new understanding of human interaction. Chorost himself has computers in his head that enable him to hear: two cochlear implants. Drawing on that experience, he proposes that our Paleolithic bodies and our Pentium chips could be physically merged, and he explores the technologies that could do it. He visits engineers building wearable computers that allow people to be online every waking moment, and scientists working on implanted chips that would let paralysis victims communicate. Entirely new neural interfaces are being developed that let computers read and alter neural activity in unprecedented detail. But we all know how addictive the Internet is. Chorost explains the addiction: he details the biochemistry of what makes you hunger to touch your iPhone and check your email. He proposes how we could design a mind-to-mind technology that would let us reconnect with our bodies and enhance our relationships. With such technologies, we could achieve a collective consciousness—a World Wide Mind. And it would be humankind’s next evolutionary step. With daring and sensitivity, Chorost writes about how he learned how to enhance his own relationships by attending workshops teaching the power of touch. He learned how to bring technology and communication together to find true love, and his story shows how we can master technology to make ourselves more human rather than less. World Wide Mind offers a new understanding of how we communicate, what we need to connect fully with one another, and how our addiction to email and texting can be countered with technologies that put us—literally—in each other’s minds.
Download or read book Mission World War 2 written by Susan Nanus and published by Bantam Books. This book was released on 1986-02-01 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The reader is transported back through time to Poland during World War II and becomes a fugitive fleeing the Nazis through the streets of Warsaw.
Download or read book The Doomsday Machine written by Daniel Ellsberg and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2017-12-05 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shortlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction Finalist for The California Book Award in Nonfiction The San Francisco Chronicle's Best of the Year List Foreign Affairs Best Books of the Year In These Times “Best Books of the Year" Huffington Post's Ten Excellent December Books List LitHub's “Five Books Making News This Week” From the legendary whistle-blower who revealed the Pentagon Papers, an eyewitness exposé of the dangers of America's Top Secret, seventy-year-long nuclear policy that continues to this day. Here, for the first time, former high-level defense analyst Daniel Ellsberg reveals his shocking firsthand account of America's nuclear program in the 1960s. From the remotest air bases in the Pacific Command, where he discovered that the authority to initiate use of nuclear weapons was widely delegated, to the secret plans for general nuclear war under Eisenhower, which, if executed, would cause the near-extinction of humanity, Ellsberg shows that the legacy of this most dangerous arms buildup in the history of civilization--and its proposed renewal under the Trump administration--threatens our very survival. No other insider with high-level access has written so candidly of the nuclear strategy of the late Eisenhower and early Kennedy years, and nothing has fundamentally changed since that era. Framed as a memoir--a chronicle of madness in which Ellsberg acknowledges participating--this gripping exposé reads like a thriller and offers feasible steps we can take to dismantle the existing "doomsday machine" and avoid nuclear catastrophe, returning Ellsberg to his role as whistle-blower. The Doomsday Machine is thus a real-life Dr. Strangelove story and an ultimately hopeful--and powerfully important--book about not just our country, but the future of the world.
Download or read book Slaves of the Machine written by Gregory J. E. Rawlins and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In "Moths to the Flame", Rawlins took lay readers on a tour of the exciting and sometimes scary world to which computers are leading us. Written in an accessible, anecdotal form, his newest book is for those who are new to computers and want to know what is "under the hood".
Download or read book The Machine Stops Illustrated written by E M Forster and published by . This book was released on 2020-12-31 with total page 56 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The Machine Stops" is a science fiction short story (12,300 words) by E. M. Forster. After initial publication in The Oxford and Cambridge Review (November 1909), the story was republished in Forster's The Eternal Moment and Other Stories in 1928. After being voted one of the best novellas up to 1965, it was included that same year in the populist anthology Modern Short Stories.[1] In 1973 it was also included in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume Two.The story, set in a world where humanity lives underground and relies on a giant machine to provide its needs, predicted technologies such as instant messaging and the Internet.
Download or read book Tell the Machine Goodnight written by Katie Williams and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2019-06-18 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: FINALIST FOR 2018 KIRKUS PRIZE NAMED ONE OF THE "BEST LITERARY FICTION OF 2018' BY KIRKUS REVIEWS "Sci-fi in its most perfect expression…Reading it is like having a lucid dream of six years from next week, filled with people you don't know, but will." —NPR "[Williams’s] wit is sharp, but her touch is light, and her novel is a winner." – San Francisco Chronicle "Between seasons of Black Mirror, look to Katie Williams' debut novel." —Refinery29 Smart and inventive, a page-turner that considers the elusive definition of happiness. Pearl's job is to make people happy. As a technician for the Apricity Corporation, with its patented happiness machine, she provides customers with personalized recommendations for greater contentment. She's good at her job, her office manager tells her, successful. But how does one measure an emotion? Meanwhile, there's Pearl's teenage son, Rhett. A sensitive kid who has forged an unconventional path through adolescence, Rhett seems to find greater satisfaction in being unhappy. The very rejection of joy is his own kind of "pursuit of happiness." As his mother, Pearl wants nothing more than to help Rhett--but is it for his sake or for hers? Certainly it would make Pearl happier. Regardless, her son is one person whose emotional life does not fall under the parameters of her job--not as happiness technician, and not as mother, either. Told from an alternating cast of endearing characters from within Pearl and Rhett's world, Tell the Machine Goodnight delivers a smartly moving and entertaining story about the advance of technology and the ways that it can most surprise and define us. Along the way, Katie Williams playfully illuminates our national obsession with positive psychology, our reliance on quick fixes. What happens when these obsessions begin to overlap? With warmth, humor, and a clever touch, Williams taps into our collective unease about the modern world and allows us see it a little more clearly.
Download or read book Lean Thinking written by James P. Womack and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2013-09-26 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lean Thinking was launched in the fall of 1996, just in time for the recession of 1997. It told the story of how American, European, and Japanese firms applied a simple set of principles called 'lean thinking' to survive the recession of 1991 and grow steadily in sales and profits through 1996. Even though the recession of 1997 never happened, companies were starving for information on how to make themselves leaner and more efficient. Now we are dealing with the recession of 2001 and the financial meltdown of 2002. So what happened to the exemplar firms profiled in Lean Thinking? In the new fully revised edition of this bestselling book those pioneering lean thinkers are brought up to date. Authors James Womack and Daniel Jones offer new guidelines for lean thinking firms and bring their groundbreaking practices to a brand new generation of companies that are looking to stay one step ahead of the competition.
Download or read book The Romantic Machine written by John Tresch and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2012-06-05 with total page 469 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introduction: Mechanical Romanticism -- DEVICES OF COSMIC UNITY -- Ampère's Experiments: Contours of a Cosmic Cubstance -- Humboldt's Instruments: Even the Tools Will Be Free -- Arago's Daguerreotype: The Labor Theory of Knowledge -- SPECTACLES OF CREATION AND METAMORPHOSIS -- The Devil's Opera: Fantastic Physiospiritualism -- Monsters, Machine-Men, Magicians: The Automaton in the Garden -- ENGINEERS OF ARTIFICIAL PARADISES -- Saint-Simonian Engines: Love and Conversions -- Leroux's Pianotype: The Organogenesis of Humanity -- Comte's Calendar: From Infinite Universe to Closed World -- Conclusion: Afterlives of the Romantic Machine.
Download or read book Lean Solutions written by Daniel T. Jones and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2013-09-12 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A massive disconnect exists today between consumers and providers. As consumers, we have a greater selection of higher quality goods and services to choose from, yet our experience of obtaining and using these items is more frustrating than ever. At the same time, companies find themselves with declining customer loyalty, greater challenges in fulfilling orders, and a general sense of dissatisfaction in connecting with their customers. In LEAN SOLUTIONS, lean production experts Womack and Jones show consumers and companies alike how they can align their goals to achieve greater value with less waste.
Download or read book The Machine That Changed the World written by James P. Womack and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2007-03-13 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The classic, nationally bestselling book that first articulated the principles of lean production, with a new foreword and afterword by the authors. When The Machine That Changed the World was first published in 1990, Toyota was half the size of General Motors. Twenty years later Toyota passed GM as the world’s largest auto maker. This management classic was the first book to reveal Toyota’s lean production system that is the basis for its enduring success. Authors Womack, Jones, and Roos provided a comprehensive description of the entire lean system. They exhaustively documented its advantages over the mass production model pioneered by General Motors and predicted that lean production would eventually triumph. Indeed, they argued that it would triumph not just in manufacturing but in every value-creating activity from health care to retail to distribution. Today The Machine That Changed the World provides enduring and essential guidance to managers and leaders in every industry seeking to transform traditional enterprises into exemplars of lean success.
Download or read book The Artist in the Machine written by Arthur I. Miller and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2019-10-01 with total page 429 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An authority on creativity introduces us to AI-powered computers that are creating art, literature, and music that may well surpass the creations of humans. Today's computers are composing music that sounds “more Bach than Bach,” turning photographs into paintings in the style of Van Gogh's Starry Night, and even writing screenplays. But are computers truly creative—or are they merely tools to be used by musicians, artists, and writers? In this book, Arthur I. Miller takes us on a tour of creativity in the age of machines. Miller, an authority on creativity, identifies the key factors essential to the creative process, from “the need for introspection” to “the ability to discover the key problem.” He talks to people on the cutting edge of artificial intelligence, encountering computers that mimic the brain and machines that have defeated champions in chess, Jeopardy!, and Go. In the central part of the book, Miller explores the riches of computer-created art, introducing us to artists and computer scientists who have, among much else, unleashed an artificial neural network to create a nightmarish, multi-eyed dog-cat; taught AI to imagine; developed a robot that paints; created algorithms for poetry; and produced the world's first computer-composed musical, Beyond the Fence, staged by Android Lloyd Webber and friends. But, Miller writes, in order to be truly creative, machines will need to step into the world. He probes the nature of consciousness and speaks to researchers trying to develop emotions and consciousness in computers. Miller argues that computers can already be as creative as humans—and someday will surpass us. But this is not a dystopian account; Miller celebrates the creative possibilities of artificial intelligence in art, music, and literature.
Download or read book Everyday Technology written by David Arnold and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013-06-07 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1909 Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, on his way back to South Africa from London, wrote his now celebrated tract Hind Swaraj, laying out his vision for the future of India and famously rejecting the technological innovations of Western civilization. Despite his protestations, Western technology endured and helped to make India one of the leading economies in our globalized world. Few would question the dominant role that technology plays in modern life, but to fully understand how India first advanced into technological modernity, argues David Arnold, we must consider the technology of the everyday. Everyday Technology is a pioneering account of how small machines and consumer goods that originated in Europe and North America became objects of everyday use in India in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Rather than investigate “big” technologies such as railways and irrigation projects, Arnold examines the assimilation and appropriation of bicycles, rice mills, sewing machines, and typewriters in India, and follows their impact on the ways in which people worked and traveled, the clothes they wore, and the kind of food they ate. But the effects of these machines were not limited to the daily rituals of Indian society, and Arnold demonstrates how such small-scale technologies became integral to new ways of thinking about class, race, and gender, as well as about the politics of colonial rule and Indian nationhood. Arnold’s fascinating book offers new perspectives on the globalization of modern technologies and shows us that to truly understand what modernity became, we need to look at the everyday experiences of people in all walks of life, taking stock of how they repurposed small technologies to reinvent their world and themselves.
