Download or read book The Truth Machine written by James L. Halperin and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 1999-09-29 with total page 492 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Prepare to have your conception of truth rocked to its very foundation. It is the year 2004. Violent crime is the number one political issue in America. Now, the Swift and Sure Anti-Crime Bill guarantees a previously convicted violent criminal one fair trial, one quick appeal, then immediate execution. To prevent abuse of the law, a machine must be built that detects lies with 100 percent accuracy. Once perfected, the Truth Machine will change the face of the world. Yet the race to finish the Truth Machine forces one man to commit a shocking act of treachery, burdening him with a dark secret that collides with everything he believes in. Now he must conceal the truth from his own creation . . . or face his execution. By turns optimistic and chilling--and always profound--The Truth Machine is nothing less than a history of the future, a spellbinding chronicle that resonates with insight, wisdom . . . and astounding possibility. "PROFOUND." --Associated Press

Download or read book The Truth Machine written by Paul Vigna and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2018-02-27 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Views differ on bitcoin, but few doubt the transformative potential of Blockchain technology. The Truth Machine is the best book so far on what has happened and what may come along. It demands the attention of anyone concerned with our economic future." —Lawrence H. Summers, Charles W. Eliot University Professor and President Emeritus at Harvard, Former Treasury Secretary From Michael J. Casey and Paul Vigna, the authors of The Age of Cryptocurrency, comes the definitive work on the Internet’s Next Big Thing: The Blockchain. Big banks have grown bigger and more entrenched. Privacy exists only until the next hack. Credit card fraud is a fact of life. Many of the “legacy systems” once designed to make our lives easier and our economy more efficient are no longer up to the task. Yet there is a way past all this—a new kind of operating system with the potential to revolutionize vast swaths of our economy: the blockchain. In The Truth Machine, Michael J. Casey and Paul Vigna demystify the blockchain and explain why it can restore personal control over our data, assets, and identities; grant billions of excluded people access to the global economy; and shift the balance of power to revive society’s faith in itself. They reveal the disruption it promises for industries including finance, tech, legal, and shipping. Casey and Vigna expose the challenge of replacing trusted (and not-so-trusted) institutions on which we’ve relied for centuries with a radical model that bypasses them. The Truth Machine reveals the empowerment possible when self-interested middlemen give way to the transparency of the blockchain, while highlighting the job losses, assertion of special interests, and threat to social cohesion that will accompany this shift. With the same balanced perspective they brought to The Age of Cryptocurrency, Casey and Vigna show why we all must care about the path that blockchain technology takes—moving humanity forward, not backward.

Download or read book The Truth Machines written by Jinee Lokaneeta and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Using case studies and the results of extensive fieldwork, this book considers the nature of state power and legal violence in liberal democracies by focusing on the interaction between law, science, and policing in India. The postcolonial Indian police have often been accused of using torture in both routine and exceptional criminal cases, but they, and forensic psychologists, have claimed that lie detectors, brain scans, and narcoanalysis (the use of "truth serum," Sodium Pentothal) represent a paradigm shift away from physical torture; most state high courts in India have upheld this rationale. The Truth Machines examines the emergence and use of these three scientific techniques to analyze two primary themes. First, the book questions whether existing theoretical frameworks for understanding state power and legal violence are adequate to explain constant innovations of the state. Second, it explores the workings of law, science, and policing in the everyday context to generate a theory of state power and legal violence, challenging the monolithic frameworks about this relationship, based on a study of both state and non-state actors. Jinee Lokaneeta argues that the attempt to replace physical torture with truth machines in India fails because it relies on a confessional paradigm that is contiguous with torture. Her work also provides insights into a police institution that is founded and refounded in its everyday interactions between state and non-state actors. Theorizing a concept of Contingent State, this book demonstrates the disaggregated, and decentered nature of state power and legal violence, creating possible sites of critique and intervention"--

Download or read book Truth Machine written by Michael Lynch and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-02-15 with total page 415 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DNA profiling—commonly known as DNA fingerprinting—is often heralded as unassailable criminal evidence, a veritable “truth machine” that can overturn convictions based on eyewitness testimony, confessions, and other forms of forensic evidence. But DNA evidence is far from infallible. Truth Machine traces the controversial history of DNA fingerprinting by looking at court cases in the United States and United Kingdom beginning in the mid-1980s, when the practice was invented, and continuing until the present. Ultimately, Truth Machine presents compelling evidence of the obstacles and opportunities at the intersection of science, technology, sociology, and law.

Download or read book The Truth Machine written by Geoffrey C. Bunn and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2012-06 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For centuries, all manner of truth-seekers have used the lie detector. In this eye-opening book, Geoffrey C Bunn unpacks the history of this device and explores the interesting and often surprising connection between technology and popular culture.

Download or read book To Be a Machine written by Mark O'Connell and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2018-01-16 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “This gonzo-journalistic exploration of the Silicon Valley techno-utopians’ pursuit of escaping mortality is a breezy romp full of colorful characters.” —New York Times Book Review (editor's choice) Transhumanism is a movement pushing the limits of our biology—of our senses, intelligence, and lifespans—with technology. Its supporters have reached a critical mass and now include some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley and beyond, among them Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and Ray Kurzweil. In this provocative and eye-opening account, journalist Mark O’Connell explores the staggering (and terrifying) possibilities that present themselves when you think of your body as an outmoded device. He visits the world’s foremost cryonics facility to witness how some have chosen to forestall death, discovers an underground collective of biohackers boosting their senses by implanting electronics under their skin, and meets with members of a team urgently investigating how to protect mankind from rogue artificial superintelligence. In investigating what it means to be a machine, O’Connell shines a light on our ancient desire to transcend the animal condition—and offers a surprising meditation on what it means to be human.

Download or read book The Truth Machine written by Norman Whitney and published by . This book was released on 1992 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Saudi Terror Machine written by Pierre Conesa and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2018-09-25 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The religious diplomacy of Saudi Arabia constitutes a strange black hole in the analysis of radicalism that affects Islam and the Middle East today. Why has Salafism, the most intolerant and sectarian movement of Islam, become so prevalent? Of all the religious radicalisms that rot the planet, it is the only one to enjoy the constant support of a country endowed with immense means: the Saudi kingdom. This study, whose collaborators wanted to remain anonymous, reveals how the two sides of the kingdom – the conciliatory one of the Saud dynasty and the more aggressive Salafism, propagandist of jihad – has for decades developed a religious strategy to conquer the Muslim community and the West without appearing as an enemy. One of the most striking examples is the absence of sanctions or even accusations by George W. Bush towards Saudi Arabia in the aftermath of the September 11th attacks even with fifteen identified Saudis among the terrorists. The kingdom's influence is largely unknown but undoubtedly acts as a key player throughout the Muslim world through their financing of conservative Koranic schools, universities and mosques, as well as other international public and private organizations. But after years of financing radical Islamists in foreign lands, Saudi Arabia now finds itself threatened in their own territory, the monster they have given birth to turned against them.

Download or read book The Impossible Machine written by Adam Sitze and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2013-07-30 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fresh, though counterintuitive, understanding of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s legal, political, and cultural heritage

Download or read book The Twittering Machine written by Richard Seymour and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2020-09-22 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A brilliant probe into the political and psychological effects of our changing relationship with social media Former social media executives tell us that the system is an addiction-machine. We are users, waiting for our next hit as we like, comment and share. We write to the machine as individuals, but it responds by aggregating our fantasies, desires and frailties into data, and returning them to us as a commodity experience. The Twittering Machine is an unflinching view into the calamities of digital life: the circus of online trolling, flourishing alt-right subcultures, pervasive corporate surveillance, and the virtual data mines of Facebook and Google where we spend considerable portions of our free time. In this polemical tour de force, Richard Seymour shows how the digital world is changing the ways we speak, write, and think. Through journalism, psychoanalytic reflection and insights from users, developers, security experts and others, Seymour probes the human side of the machine, asking what we’re getting out of it, and what we’re getting into. Social media held out the promise that we could make our own history–to what extent did we choose the nightmare that it has become?

Download or read book The Hype Machine written by Sinan Aral and published by Currency. This book was released on 2020-09-15 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A landmark insider’s tour of how social media affects our decision-making and shapes our world in ways both useful and dangerous, with critical insights into the social media trends of the 2020 election and beyond “The book might be described as prophetic. . . . At least two of Aral’s three predictions have come to fruition.”—New York NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY WIRED • LONGLISTED FOR THE PORCHLIGHT BUSINESS BOOK AWARD Social media connected the world—and gave rise to fake news and increasing polarization. It is paramount, MIT professor Sinan Aral says, that we recognize the outsize effect social media has on us—on our politics, our economy, and even our personal health—in order to steer today’s social technology toward its great promise while avoiding the ways it can pull us apart. Drawing on decades of his own research and business experience, Aral goes under the hood of the most powerful social networks to tackle the critical question of just how much social media actually shapes our choices, for better or worse. He shows how the tech behind social media offers the same set of behavior influencing levers to everyone who hopes to change the way we think and act—from Russian hackers to brand marketers—which is why its consequences affect everything from elections to business, dating to health. Along the way, he covers a wide array of topics, including how network effects fuel Twitter’s and Facebook’s massive growth, the neuroscience of how social media affects our brains, the real consequences of fake news, the power of social ratings, and the impact of social media on our kids. In mapping out strategies for being more thoughtful consumers of social media, The Hype Machine offers the definitive guide to understanding and harnessing for good the technology that has redefined our world overnight.

Download or read book The Machine Stops Illustrated written by E.M. Forster and published by Strelbytskyy Multimedia Publishing. This book was released on 2023-12-08 with total page 48 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The Machine Stops" by E.M. Forster, now presented in a beautifully illustrated edition, is a visionary and thought-provoking novella that explores the perils of technological dependency and the potential consequences of a society overly reliant on machines. Set in a future where humanity lives underground, isolated in individual cells, their every need attended to by an all-encompassing Machine, the story follows Vashti, a lecturer and true believer in the Machine's omnipotence. However, as the Machine begins to show signs of malfunction, Vashti's worldview is challenged, leading to a series of events that question the very foundations of her society. "The Machine Stops" remains a compelling exploration of the dangers of sacrificing human connections for the convenience of technology. This illustrated edition provides a fresh perspective on Forster's timeless work, making it an engaging and visually captivating experience for both new and returning readers.

Download or read book The Knowledge Machine How Irrationality Created Modern Science written by Michael Strevens and published by Liveright Publishing. This book was released on 2020-10-13 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “The Knowledge Machine is the most stunningly illuminating book of the last several decades regarding the all-important scientific enterprise.” —Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, author of Plato at the Googleplex A paradigm-shifting work, The Knowledge Machine revolutionizes our understanding of the origins and structure of science. • Why is science so powerful? • Why did it take so long—two thousand years after the invention of philosophy and mathematics—for the human race to start using science to learn the secrets of the universe? In a groundbreaking work that blends science, philosophy, and history, leading philosopher of science Michael Strevens answers these challenging questions, showing how science came about only once thinkers stumbled upon the astonishing idea that scientific breakthroughs could be accomplished by breaking the rules of logical argument. Like such classic works as Karl Popper’s The Logic of Scientific Discovery and Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, The Knowledge Machine grapples with the meaning and origins of science, using a plethora of vivid historical examples to demonstrate that scientists willfully ignore religion, theoretical beauty, and even philosophy to embrace a constricted code of argument whose very narrowness channels unprecedented energy into empirical observation and experimentation. Strevens calls this scientific code the iron rule of explanation, and reveals the way in which the rule, precisely because it is unreasonably close-minded, overcomes individual prejudices to lead humanity inexorably toward the secrets of nature. “With a mixture of philosophical and historical argument, and written in an engrossing style” (Alan Ryan), The Knowledge Machine provides captivating portraits of some of the greatest luminaries in science’s history, including Isaac Newton, the chief architect of modern science and its foundational theories of motion and gravitation; William Whewell, perhaps the greatest philosopher-scientist of the early nineteenth century; and Murray Gell-Mann, discoverer of the quark. Today, Strevens argues, in the face of threats from a changing climate and global pandemics, the idiosyncratic but highly effective scientific knowledge machine must be protected from politicians, commercial interests, and even scientists themselves who seek to open it up, to make it less narrow and more rational—and thus to undermine its devotedly empirical search for truth. Rich with illuminating and often delightfully quirky illustrations, The Knowledge Machine, written in a winningly accessible style that belies the import of its revisionist and groundbreaking concepts, radically reframes much of what we thought we knew about the origins of the modern world.

Download or read book Truth from Trash written by Chris Thornton and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chris Thornton makes the compelling claim that learning is not a passive discovery operation but an active process involving creativity on the part of the learner. This study of learning in autonomous agents offers a bracing intellectual adventure. Chris Thornton makes the compelling claim that learning is not a passive discovery operation but an active process involving creativity on the part of the learner. Although theorists of machine learning tell us that all learning methods contribute some form of bias and thus involve a degree of creativity, Thornton carries the idea much further. He describes an incremental process, recursive relational learning, in which the results of one learning step serve as the basis for the next. Very high-level recodings are then substantially the creative artifacts of the learner's own processing. Lower-level recodings are more "objective" in that their properties are more severely constrained by the source data. Thornton sees consciousness as a process at the outer fringe of relational learning, just prior to the onset of creativity. According to this view, we cannot assume consciousness to be an exclusively human phenomenon, but rather the expected feature of any cognitive mechanism able to engage in extended flights of relational learning. Thornton presents key background material in an entertaining manner, using extensive mental imagery and a minimum of mathematics. Anecdotes and dialogue add to the text's informality.

Download or read book Big Lies written by Joe Conason and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2004-06-15 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A powerful rebuttal to the likes of Ann Coulter, Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity, this is essential reading in an era of right-wing bullying and political conformity.

Download or read book The Gray Lady Winked written by Ashley Rindsberg and published by Midnight Oil Publishers. This book was released on 2021-05-03 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Think a newspaper can’t be responsible for mass murder? Think again. As flagship of the American news media, the New York Times is the world’s most powerful news outlet. With thousands of reporters covering events from all corners of the globe, the Times has the power to influence wars, foment revolution, shape economies and change the very nature of our culture. It doesn’t just cover the news: it creates it. The Gray Lady Winked pulls back the curtain on this illustrious institution to reveal a quintessentially human organization where ideology, ego, power and politics compete with the more humble need to present the facts. In its 10 gripping chapters, The Gray Lady Winked offers readers an eye-opening, often shocking, look at the New York Times’s greatest journalistic failures, so devastating they changed the course of history. How its World War II Berlin bureau chief, a known Nazi collaborator, skewed coverage in favor of the Third Reich for over a decade. Its notorious coverup of the Ukraine Famine, a genocide committed by Stalin, showing that it was the newspaper's owners who directed the coverup in order to advance their own financial and ideological interests. The “1619 Project," a cynical, ideologically driven attempt to revise American history by rooting the nation's birth in slavery instead of liberty. The result is an essential look at the tangled relationship between media, power and politics in a post-truth world told with novelistic flair to reveal a uniquely powerful institution’s tortured relationship with the truth. Most importantly of all, The Gray Lady Winked presents a cautionary tale that shows what happens when the guardians of the truth abandon that sacred value in favor of self-interest and ideology—and what this means for our future as much as for our past.

Download or read book Machine of Death written by Ryan North and published by Machines of Death LLC. This book was released on 2010 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: MACHINE OF DEATH tells thirty-four different stories about people who know how they will die. Prepare to have your tears jerked, your spine tingled, your funny bone tickled, your mind blown, your pulse quickened, or your heart warmed. Or better yet, simply prepare to be surprised. Because even when people do have perfect knowledge of the future, there's no telling exactly how things will turn out.