Authors: Walter Moss. Janice Terry. Jiu-Hwa Upshur.
Paperback, 312 pages
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Humanities/Social Sciences/Languages
Publication Date: 1998-12-02
Edition: 1

Reviews :

    This is a collection of 75 selections, organized in 21 chapters, 3 chronological periods. The selections are accompanied by introductions to each period, chapter overviews, and selection introductions....

Authors: Tony McMichael.
Paperback, 430 pages
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Publication Date: 2001-07-16
Edition: 1

Reviews :

    Charting the relentless trajectory of humankind across time and geography, Tony McMichael highlights the changing survival patterns of our ancient ancestors, who roamed the African savannahs several million years ago, to today's populous, industrialized, and globalized world. McMichael explores the changes in human biology, culture, and surrounding environments that have influenced patterns of health and disease over the course of humankind's history, arguing that the health of populations is primarily a product of the interaction of human societies with the wider environment, its various ecosystems, and other life-support processes. Tony McMichael is professor of epidemiology, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. He has held positions in Australia, USA, and UK, and has taught widely in Asia, Africa, and Europe. He has advised WHO, UNEP, the World Bank and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on public health issues. His previous book, Planetary Overload (Cambridge University Press, 1993) was a widely acclaimed and influential account of global environmental change and the health of the human species....

Authors: Thomas Homer-Dixon.
Hardcover, 496 pages
Publisher: Knopf
Publication Date: 2000-10-17


Reviews :

    "Looking back from the year 2100, we'll see a period when our creations--technological, social, ecological--outstripped our understanding and we lost control of our destiny. And we will think: if only--if only we'd had the ingenuity and will to prevent some of that. I am convinced that there is still time to muster that ingenuity--but the hour is late."
--Thomas Homer-Dixon

In The Ingenuity Gap, Thomas Homer-Dixon asks: Is our world becoming too complex and fast-paced to manage? The challenges facing human societies--from international financial crises and global climate change to pandemics of tuberculosis and AIDS--converge, intertwine, and often remain largely beyond our understanding. Most of us suspect that the "experts" don't really know what's going on, and that we've released forces that are neither managed nor manageable. This is the "ingenuity gap," the term coined by Thomas Homer-Dixon, renowned political scientist and sometime adviser to the White House: the critical gap between our need for practical and innovative ideas to solve our complex problems and our actual supply of those ideas.

He shows us how, in today's world, while poor countries are particularly vulnerable to ingenuity gaps, our own rich countries are no longer immune, and we are all caught dangerously between a soaring requirement for ingenuity and an increasingly uncertain supply. As the gap widens, political disintegration and violent upheaval can result, reaching into our own economies and daily lives in subtle, unforeseen ways. In compelling and lucid prose, he makes real the problems we face and suggests how we might overcome them--in our own lives, our thinking, our businesses, and our societies....

    As the world becomes more complex, so do its problems--and the solutions to these problems become tougher to grasp, writes University of Toronto professor Thomas Homer-Dixon in The Ingenuity Gap. "As we strive to maintain or increase our prosperity and improve the quality of our lives, we must make far more sophisticated decisions, and in less time, than ever before," he writes. Is the day coming in which our ingenuity can't keep up? Homer-Dixon fears that it is: "the hour is late," and we're blindly "careening into the future." What we face, he says, is a "very real chasm that sometimes looms between our ever more difficult problems and our lagging ability to solve them." There are moments when Homer-Dixon comes close to sounding like a modern-day Malthus, with his never-ending worries about population growth, the environment, the strength of international financial institutions, civil wars, and so on. Yet parts of this book are downright fascinating; at its best, The Ingenuity Gap reads like one of Malcolm Gladwell's stories for The New Yorker (or his book The Tipping Point).

Homer-Dixon is very good when he tackles particular problems, and his interests are wide-ranging, moving from the psychology of an airplane cockpit during a crisis to the depletion of the world's fisheries to differences between the minds of Neanderthals and Homo sapiens. He also dredges up fine details. Did you know that "the largest human-made structure on the planet is not an Egyptian pyramid or a hydroelectric dam but the Staten Island Fresh Kills landfill near New York City, which has a depth of one hundred meters and an area of nine square kilometers"? There's plenty to argue with on these pages, and some readers will find Homer-Dixon's tendency to write in the first person a bit self-indulgent. Yet fans of big-think books like Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel, David Landes's The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, and Robert Wright's The Moral Animal will find The Ingenuity Gap riveting. --John J. Miller ...

Authors: David M. Levy.
Paperback, 240 pages
Publisher: Arcade Publishing
Publication Date: 2003-11


Reviews :

    We are surrounded by documents of all kinds, from receipts to letters, business memos to books, yet we rarely stop to reflect on their significance. Now, in this period of digital transition, our written forms as well as out reading and writing habits are being questioned and transformed by new technologies ad practices. What is the future of the book? Is paper about to disappear? With the Internet and World Wide Web, what will happen to libraries, copyright and education? Starting with a simple deli lunch receipt, SCROLLING FORWARD examines documents of all kinds from the perspectives of culture, history, and technology in order to show how they can work and what they say about us and the values we carry into the new age....

    What's up, doc? Information scientist David M. Levy wants us to look at the documents that fill our lives, and his book Scrolling Forward is a thoughtful reflection on their near-omnipresence. Levy has the perfect résumé for this job--after getting his Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1981, he took off for England to pursue the study of calligraphy and bookbinding. His love of books shows in his writing, which is rich with references and anecdotes from Walt Whitman to Woody Allen.

Drawing on examples as disparate as grocery store receipts, greeting cards, identity papers, and (of course) e-mail, Levy finds the common threads binding them together and explores how and why we use them in daily life. He looks at digitization closely, considering how speed, ease of editing, and potentially perfect copying changes our traditional considerations of documentation. Though he insists that he's looking at the present, not speculating about the future, it's hard to see how to avoid looking ahead after reading Scrolling Forward. --Rob Lightner...

Authors: Roger-Maurice Bonnet. Lodewyk Woltjer.
Hardcover, 422 pages
Publisher: Praxis
Publication Date: 2008-08-01
Edition: 1

Reviews :

   

The circumstances that will shape the long-term future of our planet will be constrained by what is physically possible and what is not. This book provides a quantitative view of our civilization over the next 100,000 years, in comparison to the 40-60,000 years it took for modern humans to emerge from Africa, on the basis of contemporary scientific and technological knowledge. The first 5 chapters provide the general scientific background, starting with a brief history of our planet, from its formation 4.5 billion years ago until the present day. The evolution of the Earth’s atmosphere and the origin of water are highlighted as being the most important factors for the emergence and the development of life, especially in comparison to Earth’s neighbours, Venus and Mars. The authors then consider both cosmic and natural hazards, pointing out that scientific information provided by satellites and communication systems on the ground could prevent many unnecessary casualties by forward planning and the installation of elementary precautions.

The changing climate in the past and in the future is considered, showing how atmospheric greenhouse gases CO₂ and methane played an important role in past climates, whereas future human industrial and agricultural emissions of greenhouse gases largely determine the future climate. The authors highlight the importance of long term monitoring and control of the atmospheric composition. Chapter 7 looks at future energy and inorganic resources, the needs for which in the year 100,000 will be five times larger than the present ones. The most likely sources will be from fusion, solar and wind energy, and storage facilities will be needed for the latter two. Water, agriculture and forests are considered in the following chapter: although adequate food and water should be available worldwide, inadequate management may cause some densely populated areas to experience shortages.

The colonization of other planets, in particular Mars and Venus, and the possibility of extracting resources from the Moon or asteroids are discussed in Chapter 9. The final chapters stress the importance of international collaboration to manage Earth’s future, together with the crucial role of space for its monitoring, surveillance and management. Cooperative world governance and global laws should be undertaken by the political, scientific and space worlds and encompass both the rich and poorer countries.

...

Authors: Neil Postman.
Hardcover, 222 pages
Publisher: Knopf
Publication Date: 1992-03-17
Edition: 1

Reviews :

    In this witty, often terrifying work of cultural criticism, the author of Amusing Ourselves to Death chronicles our transformation into a Technopoly: a society that no longer merely uses technology as a support system but instead is shaped by it--with radical consequences for the meanings of politics, art, education, intelligence, and truth.


From the Trade Paperback edition....

    Neil Postman is one of the most level-headed analysts of education, media, and technology, and in this book he spells out the increasing dependence upon technology, numerical quantification, and misappropriation of "Scientism" to all human affairs. No simple technophobe, Postman argues insightfully and writes with a stylistic flair, profound sense of humor, and love of language increasingly rare in our hastily scribbled e-mail-saturated world....

Authors:
Paperback, 326 pages
Publisher: Earthscan Publications Ltd.
Publication Date: 2008-01


Reviews :

    While changes in emissions and atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases are generally projected to be slow and smooth, there are increasing indications that the intensity and impacts of climate change on the environment and society could, at least on a regional basis, be abrupt and bumpy. Surprising and nonlinear responses are likely to result as warming exceeds certain thresholds, inducing relatively rapid changes in, for example, the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets, atmospheric wind and precipitation patterns, coastal inundation, the occurrence of wildfire, and the ranges of plant and animal species.

Written and edited by a transdisciplinary group of internationally respected researchers, this book explores the possibilities of such changes and their significance for our society. In addition to covering the status of the science in a number of the critical areas, it also provides indications that there is a significant potential (and need) for action to limit human-induced perturbations, which can occur more rapidly than governments are currently moving....

Authors: David Jennings.
Paperback, 258 pages
Publisher: Nicholas Brealey Publishing
Publication Date: 2007-10-01


Reviews :

    When it comes to discovering new music, films or games, today's fans are not sheep who can be herded towards some Next Big Thing. They look to collaborative websites, blogs and social networking sites for information and can switch their attention with just a few clicks. The technologies of Chris Anderson's long tail are profoundly changing consumer behavior. Author David Jennings profiles this new era of discovery that even iTunes and Google have to accommodate....

Authors: Stephen J. Thomas.
Hardcover, 356 pages
Publisher: Industrial Press
Publication Date: 2005-05


Reviews :

    This unique and innovative book explains how to improve your maintenance and reliability performance at the plant level by changing the organization’s culture. It is specifically intended for middle managers in the manufacturing and process industries. This book demystifies the concept of organizational culture and links it with the eight elements of change: leadership, work process, structure, group learning, technology, communication, interrelationships, and rewards. If you want to break the cycle of failed improvement programs and instead use cultural change to help make significant and lasting improvements in plant performance, this book will show you how.

Special Features
- Explains in-depth the eight elements of change and how they relate to cultural change.
- Discusses cultural change with a reliability focus.
- Presents the subject in a way that middle managers will be able to understand and apply.
- Includes a PowerPoint presentation with audio on the enclosed CD-ROM, together with a web survey model, the Web of Organizational Change....

Authors: Christine Zhen-Wei Qiang.
Paperback, 156 pages
Publisher: World Bank Publications
Publication Date: 2007-05-03
Edition: 1

Reviews :

    This report presents a comprehensive overview of the information, communication and technological sector in China, and the role it has played during economic and social transformation in the past decade. It provides guidance on the kind of reforms policy makers in China may wish to consider in pursuing the country's quest for continued ICT development. It also combines local perspectives with international experiences on how issues in areas such as legal and regulatory environment, telecommunications infrastructures, and IT industry have been addressed by other countries....