Download or read book The Stuff of Bits written by Paul Dourish and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2022-11-01 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An argument that the material arrangements of information—how it is represented and interpreted—matter significantly for our experience of information and information systems. Virtual entities that populate our digital experience, like e-books, virtual worlds, and online stores, are backed by the large-scale physical infrastructures of server farms, fiber optic cables, power plants, and microwave links. But another domain of material constraints also shapes digital living: the digital representations sketched on whiteboards, encoded into software, stored in databases, loaded into computer memory, and transmitted on networks. These digital representations encode aspects of our everyday world and make them available for digital processing. The limits and capacities of those representations carry significant consequences for digital society. In The Stuff of Bits, Paul Dourish examines the specific materialities that certain digital objects exhibit. He presents four case studies: emulation, the creation of a “virtual” computer inside another; digital spreadsheets and their role in organizational practice; relational databases and the issue of “the databaseable”; and the evolution of digital networking and the representational entailments of network protocols. These case studies demonstrate how a materialist account can offer an entry point to broader concerns—questions of power, policy, and polity in the realm of the digital.
Download or read book Bits to Bitcoin written by Mark Stuart Day and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2024-02-06 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An accessible guide to our digital infrastructure, explaining the basics of operating systems, networks, security, and other topics for the general reader. Most of us feel at home in front of a computer; we own smartphones, tablets, and laptops; we look things up online and check social media to see what our friends are doing. But we may be a bit fuzzy about how any of this really works. In Bits to Bitcoin, Mark Stuart Day offers an accessible guide to our digital infrastructure, explaining the basics of operating systems, networks, security, and related topics for the general reader. He takes the reader from a single process to multiple processes that interact with each other; he explores processes that fail and processes that overcome failures; and he examines processes that attack each other or defend themselves against attacks. Day tells us that steps are digital but ramps are analog; that computation is about “doing something with stuff” and that both the “stuff” and the “doing” can be digital. He explains timesharing, deadlock, and thrashing; virtual memory and virtual machines; packets and networks; resources and servers; secret keys and public keys; Moore's law and Thompson's hack. He describes how building in redundancy guards against failure and how endpoints communicate across the Internet. He explains why programs crash or have other bugs, why they are attacked by viruses, and why those problems are hard to fix. Finally, after examining secrets, trust, and cheating, he explains the mechanisms that allow the Bitcoin system to record money transfers accurately while fending off attacks.
Download or read book Blown to Bits written by Harold Abelson and published by Addison-Wesley Professional. This book was released on 2008 with total page 389 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Blown to Bits' is about how the digital explosion is changing everything. The text explains the technology, why it creates so many surprises and why things often don't work the way we expect them to. It is also about things the information explosion is destroying: old assumptions about who is really in control of our lives.
Download or read book Two Bits written by Christopher M. Kelty and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2008-06-09 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Two Bits, Christopher M. Kelty investigates the history and cultural significance of Free Software, revealing the people and practices that have transformed not only software but also music, film, science, and education. Free Software is a set of practices devoted to the collaborative creation of software source code that is made openly and freely available through an unconventional use of copyright law. Kelty explains how these specific practices have reoriented the relations of power around the creation, dissemination, and authorization of all kinds of knowledge. He also makes an important contribution to discussions of public spheres and social imaginaries by demonstrating how Free Software is a “recursive public”—a public organized around the ability to build, modify, and maintain the very infrastructure that gives it life in the first place. Drawing on ethnographic research that took him from an Internet healthcare start-up company in Boston to media labs in Berlin to young entrepreneurs in Bangalore, Kelty describes the technologies and the moral vision that bind together hackers, geeks, lawyers, and other Free Software advocates. In each case, he shows how their practices and way of life include not only the sharing of software source code but also ways of conceptualizing openness, writing copyright licenses, coordinating collaboration, and proselytizing. By exploring in detail how these practices came together as the Free Software movement from the 1970s to the 1990s, Kelty also considers how it is possible to understand the new movements emerging from Free Software: projects such as Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization that creates copyright licenses, and Connexions, a project to create an online scholarly textbook commons.
Download or read book The Science of Managing Our Digital Stuff written by Ofer Bergman and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2016-11-04 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why we organize our personal digital data the way we do and how design of new PIM systems can help us manage our information more efficiently. Each of us has an ever-growing collection of personal digital data: documents, photographs, PowerPoint presentations, videos, music, emails and texts sent and received. To access any of this, we have to find it. The ease (or difficulty) of finding something depends on how we organize our digital stuff. In this book, personal information management (PIM) experts Ofer Bergman and Steve Whittaker explain why we organize our personal digital data the way we do and how the design of new PIM systems can help us manage our collections more efficiently. Bergman and Whittaker report that many of us use hierarchical folders for our personal digital organizing. Critics of this method point out that information is hidden from sight in folders that are often within other folders so that we have to remember the exact location of information to access it. Because of this, information scientists suggest other methods: search, more flexible than navigating folders; tags, which allow multiple categorizations; and group information management. Yet Bergman and Whittaker have found in their pioneering PIM research that these other methods that work best for public information management don't work as well for personal information management. Bergman and Whittaker describe personal information collection as curation: we preserve and organize this data to ensure our future access to it. Unlike other information management fields, in PIM the same user organizes and retrieves the information. After explaining the cognitive and psychological reasons that so many prefer folders, Bergman and Whittaker propose the user-subjective approach to PIM, which does not replace folder hierarchies but exploits these unique characteristics of PIM.
Download or read book The Nasty Bits written by Anthony Bourdain and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2008-12-10 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New York Times Bestseller The good, the bad, and the ugly, served up Bourdain-style. Bestselling chef and Parts Unknown host Anthony Bourdain has never been one to pull punches. In The Nasty Bits, he serves up a well-seasoned hellbroth of candid, often outrageous stories from his worldwide misadventures. Whether scrounging for eel in the backstreets of Hanoi, revealing what you didn't want to know about the more unglamorous aspects of making television, calling for the head of raw food activist Woody Harrelson, or confessing to lobster-killing guilt, Bourdain is as entertaining as ever. Bringing together the best of his previously uncollected nonfiction--and including new, never-before-published material--The Nasty Bits is a rude, funny, brutal and passionate stew for fans and the uninitiated alike.
Download or read book Bits Pieces written by Jonathan Maberry and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2015-09-22 with total page 592 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Return to the zombie apocalypse wasteland that is the Rot & Ruin in this short story collection from Jonathan Maberry. Benny Imura’s zombie-infested adventures are well-chronicled in the gripping novels Rot & Ruin, Dust & Decay, Flesh & Bone, and Fire & Ash. But what else was happening while he was on his quest? Who were the others navigating the ravaged landscape full of zombies? Bits & Pieces fills in the gaps about what we know about First Night, surviving the plague, and traveling the land of Rot & Ruin. Eleven all-new short stories from Nix’s journal and eleven previously published stories, including “Dead & Gone” and “Tooth & Nail,” are now together and in print for the first time, along with the first-ever script for the Rot & Ruin comic books.
Download or read book The Ascent of Information written by Caleb Scharf and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2022-06-14 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Full of fascinating insights drawn from an impressive range of disciplines, The Ascent of Information casts the familiar and the foreign in a dramatic new light.” —Brian Greene, author of The Elegant Universe Your information has a life of its own, and it’s using you to get what it wants. One of the most peculiar and possibly unique features of humans is the vast amount of information we carry outside our biological selves. But in our rush to build the infrastructure for the 20 quintillion bits we create every day, we’ve failed to ask exactly why we’re expending ever-increasing amounts of energy, resources, and human effort to maintain all this data. Drawing on deep ideas and frontier thinking in evolutionary biology, computer science, information theory, and astrobiology, Caleb Scharf argues that information is, in a very real sense, alive. All the data we create—all of our emails, tweets, selfies, A.I.-generated text and funny cat videos—amounts to an aggregate lifeform. It has goals and needs. It can control our behavior and influence our well-being. And it’s an organism that has evolved right alongside us. This symbiotic relationship with information offers a startling new lens for looking at the world. Data isn’t just something we produce; it’s the reason we exist. This powerful idea has the potential to upend the way we think about our technology, our role as humans, and the fundamental nature of life. The Ascent of Information offers a humbling vision of a universe built of and for information. Scharf explores how our relationship with data will affect our ongoing evolution as a species. Understanding this relationship will be crucial to preventing our data from becoming more of a burden than an asset, and to preserving the possibility of a human future.
Download or read book Rare Bits written by Patricia Bunning Stevens and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rare Bits is an account of humankind's progression from skewering meat to whipping up a batch of Strawberries Sarah Bernhardt. Ranging from Bismarcks to Green Goddess dressing, Rare Bits provides much food for thought. Stevens delves always deeper into the stories behind the familiar recipes, brushing aside spurious anecdotes to find the truth. This is culinary history at its most appetizing. Stevens's lively and dedicated search reminds us that cooking may be one of the most civilized and civilizing of human activities. Understanding the serendipitous, eccentric, or historic origins of famous recipes deepens appreciation for the living gestures they represent.
Download or read book The Art of Cuphead written by Studio MDHR and published by Dark Horse Comics. This book was released on 2020-03-17 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Get transported back to the golden age of 1930s animation with an art book celebrating the acclaimed run & gun game, Cuphead! Each page of this curated collection of artwork is designed to capture the vintage look and feel of the 1930's. Take a gander at the game's traditional hand-drawn frame-by-frame animation. Peek at the early concepts, production work, and early ideas that went into the making of Cuphead's characters, bosses, stages and more including never-before-seen content from the upcoming DLC! Relive the most cherished and challenging moments of Cuphead and Mugman's adventure to reclaim their souls from The Devil, all in a way you've never seen before! Guided by personal insights from game directors Chad and Jared Moldenhauer, take a one-of-a-kind trip through the Inkwell Isles and discover an all-new appreciation for Cuphead's animation style and challenging retro gameplay. Dark Horse Books and Studio MDHR are thrilled to present The Art of Cuphead! This vintage-style art extravaganza is the perfect book for fans of Cuphead!
Download or read book Odd Bits written by Jennifer McLagan and published by Ten Speed Press. This book was released on 2011-09-13 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The eagerly anticipated follow-up to the author’s award-winning Bones and Fat, Odd Bits features over 100 recipes devoted to the “rest of the animal,” those under-appreciated but incredibly flavorful and versatile alternative cuts of meat. We’re all familiar with the prime cuts—the beef tenderloin, rack of lamb, and pork chops. But what about kidneys, tripe, liver, belly, cheek, and shank? Odd Bits will not only restore our taste for these cuts, but will also remove the mystery of cooking with offal, so food lovers can approach them as confidently as they would a steak. From the familiar (pork belly), to the novel (cockscomb), to the downright challenging (lamb testicles), Jennifer McLagan provides expert advice and delicious recipes to make these odd bits part of every enthusiastic cook’s repertoire.
Download or read book Primary Science Teaching The Tricky Bits written by Rutledge, Neil and published by McGraw-Hill Education (UK). This book was released on 2010-10-01 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a combination of practical lesson ideas and theory, focusing particularly on those areas that research has shown most trainee primary teachers struggle with. Each chapter provides a good range of practical and accessible ideas, hints and tips linked to how children learn.
Download or read book Just a Little Attention to Detail and Other Random Bits from My Head written by Catherine L. Kulkarni and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2008-03-16 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first part of the book is a short novel about the effect a caring set of foster parents has on a neglected ten-year-old boy. The other three are short stories; the first about a man's search for answers, the second about two friends growing up and the last about the adventures of a rebellious daughter.
Download or read book Bits of me are falling apart written by William Leith and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2013-08-22 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Very funny. He writes in a sort of whimsical stream of consciousness ... even his more random disquisitions contain glorious nuggets' - Observer With his trademark darkly humorous mix of personal story and social commentary, Leith attempts to answer the question: is everything really as bad as it seems? 'You'll read this book in a weekend ... Leith is, after all, a very good writer: succinct except when he's repeating himself for effect; amusing except when he's predicting the end of the world; perceptive except when he's pretending he can't remember who actually sang Pink Floyd's Time, or which Dutch explorer discovered Easter Island ... Leith's brain is sharper than most, and he deftly weaves solipsistic woe into more pressing concerns about the housing market and the failure of Western capitalism. This is a potentially important book for our times' Andrew Collins, Mail on Sunday
Download or read book Reality Media written by Jay David Bolter and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2021-11-16 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How augmented reality and virtual reality are taking their places in contemporary media culture alongside film and television. T This book positions augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) firmly in contemporary media culture. The authors view AR and VR not as the latest hyped technologies but as media—the latest in a series of what they term “reality media,” taking their places alongside film and television. Reality media inserts a layer of media between us and our perception of the world; AR and VR do not replace reality but refashion a reality for us. Each reality medium mediates and remediates; each offers a new representation that we implicitly compare to our experience of the world in itself but also through other media. The authors show that as forms of reality media emerge, they not only chart a future path for media culture, but also redefine media past. With AR and VR in mind, then, we can recognize their precursors in eighteenth-century panoramas and the Broadway lights of the 1930s. A digital version of Reality Media, available through the book’s website, invites readers to visit a series of virtual rooms featuring interactivity, 3-D models, videos, images, and texts that explore the themes of the book.
Download or read book Blown to Bits written by Hal Abelson and published by Addison-Wesley Professional. This book was released on 2021-03-08 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What you must know to protect yourself today The digital technology explosion has blown everything to bits—and the blast has provided new challenges and opportunities. This second edition of Blown to Bits delivers the knowledge you need to take greater control of your information environment and thrive in a world that's coming whether you like it or not. Straight from internationally respected Harvard/MIT experts, this plain-English bestseller has been fully revised for the latest controversies over social media, “fake news,” big data, cyberthreats, privacy, artificial intelligence and machine learning, self-driving cars, the Internet of Things, and much more. • Discover who owns all that data about you—and what they can infer from it • Learn to challenge algorithmic decisions • See how close you can get to sending truly secure messages • Decide whether you really want always-on cameras and microphones • Explore the realities of Internet free speech • Protect yourself against out-of-control technologies (and the powerful organizations that wield them) You'll find clear explanations, practical examples, and real insight into what digital tech means to you—as an individual, and as a citizen.
Download or read book Digital Transmission Systems written by David R. Smith and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2003-11-30 with total page 842 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Digital Transmission Systems, Third Edition, is a comprehensive overview of the theory and practices of digital transmission systems used in digital communication. This new edition has been completely updated to include the latest technologies and newest techniques in the transmission of digitized information as well as coverage of digital transmission design, implementation and testing.
