Download or read book The Computer in the United States written by James W. Cortada and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-09-16 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book studies how a technological innovation -- in this case the computer -- progresses from its origin as an idea in someone's mind to its eventual manifestation as a useable and marketable consumer product.

Download or read book Fundable Knowledge written by A.D. Van Nostrand and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-11-05 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Knowledge is the basic output of the defense technology establishment in the United States; it is what enables the development of weapon systems. From this premise, this volume explores the process of knowledge production in defense technology from the beginnings of the Cold War to the present time. Produced through the process of research and development (R&D), technical knowledge for defense is an economic commodity. It is "fundable" in the sense of having future value. Like other commodities in the futures market, it is purchased before it is produced. But unlike those other commodities, this knowledge is typically produced through the joint efforts of the customer and the vendor. This study highlights two polar aspects of knowledge production: technology development and technology transfer. It centers on the present, shifting concept of defense conversion that is redefining defense technology policy. The book also includes cited documents pertaining to the transactions that engage customers and vendors in the process of knowledge production. The documents constitute a literature of needs and claims, and they reveal two chief properties: problem formulation and tactical positioning. Apart from the substantive yield of these particular documents, the strategy of evidence in this volume has broad implications for further study, suggesting a means of analyzing knowledge production in other large social systems.

Download or read book Biotechnology and Software Patent Law written by Arezzo, E. Ghidini, G. and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2011 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'The art of editing is to bring contributions together, which melt into one book. This is what Emanuela Arezzo and Gustavo Ghidini have achieved with their own critical mind by composing a book of papers, in which internationally renowned experts measure the tensions created for the patent system by the needs and problems of protecting biotechnological and software inventions. All together, they present a comparative law challenge to the very fundaments of patent protection. As such, they are or may become a "must read".' Hanns Ullrich, College of Europe, Bruges, Belgium 'Arezzo and Ghidini have put together a fine collection of essays addressing developments in patent law from general themes to emerging ones in the infotech and biotech sectors. It is notable that the international array of authors includes contributions from both established and rising young scholars, all of them ably tackling difficult issues that merit our attention.' Rudolph J.R. Peritz, New York Law School, US The new millennium has carried several challenges for patent law. This up-to-date book provides readers with an important overview of the most critical issues patent law is still facing today at the beginning of the twenty first century, on both sides of the Atlantic. New technological sectors have emerged, each one with its own features with regard to innovation process and pace. From the most controversial cases in biotech to the most recent decisions in the field of software and business methods patent, patent law has tried to stretch its boundaries in a way to accommodate such new and controversial subject matters into its realm. Biotechnology and Software Patent Law will strongly appeal to postgraduate students specializing in IP law, international law, commercial and business law, competition law as well as IP scholars, academics and lawyers.

Download or read book The Era Was Lost written by Glenn Dyer and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2024-10-25 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exciting yet relatively unknown episode in American labor history took place in New York City between 1965 and 1975. Rank-and-file members of numerous unions caught a "strike fever" as they challenged the entrenched power of some of the country's most powerful politicians, employers, and union leaders in a wave of contract rejections, wildcat strikes, and electoral campaigns. Workers in unions across New York wanted more than better contracts: they contested control of the work process, racism on the job, and workers' place in America's socioeconomic hierarchy while implicitly and explicitly demanding greater democratic control of their representative organizations. Some initial challenges were effective and succeeded in delivering better contracts and unseating undemocratic leaders. However, those early successes were short-lived. Glenn Dyer traces the way workers were met with employer recalcitrance and union attacks that proved too powerful to organize against. In the face of this resistance, workers retreated into a survivalist attitude of accommodation and resignation, contributing to the decline of social democratic New York and working-class power in the city. Ultimately, Dyer argues, the failures of the rank-and-file organizing efforts in New York City, which was the biggest center of organized labor in the country, shows how stunted workers' aspirations and numerous defeats not only uprooted the foundations of New York's uniquely social democratic polity but also ushered in a national era of increased working-class subservience that has resonance today.

Download or read book Unheard Witness written by Jo Scott-Coe and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2023-10-17 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unheard Witness foregrounds a young woman’s experience of domestic abuse, resistance, and survival before the mass shooting at the University of Texas at Austin in 1966. In 1966, Kathy Leissner Whitman was a twenty-three-year-old teacher dreaming of a better future. She was an avid writer of letters, composing hundreds in the years before she was stabbed to death by her husband, Charles Whitman, who went on to commit a mass shooting from the tower at the University of Texas at Austin. Kathy’s writing provides a rare glimpse of how one woman described, and sought to change, her short life with a coercive, controlling, and violent partner. Unheard Witness provides a portrait of Kathy’s life, doing so at a time when Americans are slowly grasping the link between domestic abuse and mass shootings. Public violence often follows violence in the home, yet such private crimes continue to be treated separately and even erased in the public imagination. Jo Scott-Coe shows how Kathy's letters go against the grain of the official history, which ignored Kathy’s perspective. With its nuanced understanding of abuse and survival, Unheard Witness is an intimate, real-time account of trust and vulnerability—in its own way, a prologue to our age of atrocities.

Download or read book Quantification and the Quest for Medical Certainty written by J. Rosser Mathews and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-09-14 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since its inception in World War II, the clinical trial has evolved into a standard procedure in determining therapeutic efficacy in many Western industrial democracies. Its features include a "control" group of patients that do not receive the experimental treatment, the random allocation of patients to either the experimental or control group, and the use of blind assessment so that the researchers do not know which patients are in either group. Even though it has been only within the past generation that the clinical trial has moved to the forefront of medical research, comparative statistics in a therapeutic context has a much longer history. From that history J. Rosser Matthews chooses to discuss three crucial debates: that among clinicians before the Parisian Academy of Medicine in 1837, the debate in the German physiological literature during the 1850s, and, in the early twentieth century, the debate over the bacteriologist's diagnostic technique involving the "opsonic index." Matthews demonstrates that despite the very real differences separating clinician, physiologist, and bacteriologist, they all shared an antipathy toward the methods of the statistician. Since they viewed medical judgment as a form of "tacit knowledge," they downplayed the concerns of the medical statistician who was attempting to make medical inference into something explicit and quantitative. Only when "medical decision-making" moved from the cloistered confines of professional medical expertise into the arena of open political debate could the medical statistician (and the clinical trial) gain the upper hand.

Download or read book Cities written by Ian Douglas and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2013-05-30 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cities are amongst our greatest creations. Yet, with cities now home to over half the world's population, there is increasing concern over their unchecked expansion and the detrimental effect this is having on the planet. This unfettered growth is affecting every ecosystem on Earth, from the deepest oceans to the highest mountains, as induced climate change and ever increasing demands upon the world's resources take effect. As the pace of urbanisation quickens, how can we make the world's cities more sustainable? Ian Douglas tells the story of cities. He shows why they exist, how they have evolved and the problems they have encountered, revealing how from the very beginning environmental management played a key role in urban life. He addresses specific problems, such as noise and air pollution, water supply and waste management, as well as the vulnerability of cities to hazards such as earthquakes and flooding. And he considers strategies to make cities more sustainable and help them adapt to climate change, such as waste recycling, energy conservation, dual water systems, sustainable housing, as well as initiatives to retrofit existing cities. Written by an acknowledged international authority, this unique volume will be welcomed by students and specialists in environment, planning, geography, ecology and the built environment.

Download or read book Accidents in History written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-01-29 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There is now an extensive literature on the social and environmental consequences of living in the risk society. Studies of trauma are also increasingly prominent. But scant attention has been paid to perceptions of risk and danger in the past — in particular, to the history of accidents and the meanings of the accidental. This collection of interdisciplinary essays addresses this lacuna providing a theoretically informed historical sociology of the accident and risk. It explores the social and cultural contexts in which ‘acts of God', calamities, catastrophes, disasters, injuries, casualties, and other category of ‘mishaps' were experienced, conceptualized and responded to. Drawing on the skills of British, European and North American scholars, Accidents in History combines philosophical, sociological and ecological overviews with in-depth historical case-studies. It spans the period from the eighteenth century to the present, probing the epistemological, social and political roots of the accidental. The authors differentiate between industrial and other forms of injury; trace the origins of the normalization of accidents; and analyze the interactions and gendered discrepancies between domestic and non-domestic mishaps. They also investigate the medicalization of sudden injury, and discuss the emergence of new socio-medical and humanitarian discourses around the organization of relief for victims.

Download or read book Picturing Knowledge written by Brian S. Baigrie and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 1996-05-25 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The traditional concept of scientific knowledge places a premium on thinking, not visualizing. Scientific illustrations are still generally regarded as devices that serve as heuristic aids when reasoning breaks down. When scientific illustration is not used in this disparaging sense as a linguistic aid, it is most often employed as a metaphor with no special visual content. What distinguishes pictorial devices as resources for doing science, and the special problems that are raised by the mere presence of visual elements in scientific treatises, tends to be overlooked. The contributors to this volume examine the historical and philosophical issues concerning the role that scientific illustration plays in the creation of scientific knowledge. They regard both text and picture as resources that scientists employ in their practical activities, their value as scientific resources deriving from their ability to convey information.

Download or read book Experiments in Practice written by Astrid Schwarz and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-10-06 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traditionally experimentation has been understood as an activity performed within the laboratory, but in the twenty-first century this view is being challenged. Schwarz uses ecological and environmental case studies to show how scientific experiments can transcend the laboratory.

Download or read book Historical Abstracts written by and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 1000 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Information Technology as Business History written by James W. Cortada and published by Praeger. This book was released on 1996-08-23 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ...looks at computing as business history...from the perspective of the business historian and business manager.

Download or read book Proceedings in Print written by and published by . This book was released on 1995 with total page 756 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Designing Reform written by Cole Roskam and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2021-11-30 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Investigating the rich architecture of post-Mao China and its broad cultural impact In the years following China's Cultural Revolution, architecture played an active role in the country's reintegration into the global economy and capitalist world. Looking at the ways in which political and social reform transformed Chinese architecture and how, in turn, architecture gave structure to the reforms, Cole Roskam underlines architecture's unique ability to shape space as well as behavior. Roskam traces how foreign influences like postmodernism began to permeate Chinese architectural discourse in the 1970s and 1980s and how figures such as Kevin Lynch, I. M. Pei, and John Portman became key forces in the introduction of Western educational ideologies and new modes of production. Offering important insights into architecture's relationship to the politics, economics, and diplomacy of post-Mao China, this unprecedented interdisciplinary study examines architecture's multivalent status as an art, science, and physical manifestation of cultural identity.

Download or read book The Mangle of Practice written by Andrew Pickering and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1995-08-15 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This ambitious book by one of the most original and provocative thinkers in science studies offers a sophisticated new understanding of the nature of scientific, mathematical, and engineering practice and the production of scientific knowledge. Andrew Pickering offers a new approach to the unpredictable nature of change in science, taking into account the extraordinary number of factors—social, technological, conceptual, and natural—that interact to affect the creation of scientific knowledge. In his view, machines, instruments, facts, theories, conceptual and mathematical structures, disciplined practices, and human beings are in constantly shifting relationships with one another—"mangled" together in unforeseeable ways that are shaped by the contingencies of culture, time, and place. Situating material as well as human agency in their larger cultural context, Pickering uses case studies to show how this picture of the open, changeable nature of science advances a richer understanding of scientific work both past and present. Pickering examines in detail the building of the bubble chamber in particle physics, the search for the quark, the construction of the quarternion system in mathematics, and the introduction of computer-controlled machine tools in industry. He uses these examples to address the most basic elements of scientific practice—the development of experimental apparatus, the production of facts, the development of theory, and the interrelation of machines and social organization.

Download or read book Proceedings of Seminar on Flexible Manufacturing Technologies written by and published by . This book was released on 1992 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Working in Greece and Turkey written by Leda Papastefanaki and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2020-07-01 with total page 478 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As was the case in many other countries, it was only in the early years of this century that Greek and Turkish labour historians began to systematically look beyond national borders to investigate their intricately interrelated histories. The studies in Working in Greece and Turkey provide an overdue exploration of labour history on both sides of the Aegean, before as well as after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. Deploying the approaches of global labour history as a framework, this volume presents transnational, transcontinental, and diachronic comparisons that illuminate the shared history of Greece and Turkey.