Authors: Richard Spinello.
Paperback, 272 pages
Publisher: Jones & Bartlett Pub
Publication Date: 2006-03-01
Edition: 3

Reviews :

    CyberEthics: Morality and Law in Cyberspace, Third Edition takes an in-depth look at the social costs and moral problems that have arisen by the expanded use of the internet, and offers up-to-date legal and philosophical perspectives. The text focuses heavily on content control and free speech, intellectual property, privacy and security, and has added NEW coverage on Blogging. Case studies featured throughout the text offer real-life scenarios and include coverage of numerous hot topics, including the latest decisions on digital music and movie downloads, the latest legal developments on the Children's Internet Protection Act, and other internet governance and regulation updates. In the process of examining these issues, the text identifies some of the legal disputes that will likely become paradigm cases for more complex situations yet to come....

Authors: Wendy Hui Kyong Chun.
Paperback, 364 pages
Publisher: The MIT Press
Publication Date: 2008-10-31


Reviews :

    How has the Internet, a medium that thrives on control, been accepted as a medium of freedom? Why is freedom increasingly indistinguishable from paranoid control? In Control and Freedom, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun explores the current political and technological coupling of freedom with control by tracing the emergence of the Internet as a mass medium. The parallel (and paranoid) myths of the Internet as total freedom/total control, she says, stem from our reduction of political problems into technological ones.

Drawing on the theories of Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault and analyzing such phenomena as Webcams and face-recognition technology, Chun argues that the relationship between control and freedom in networked contact is experienced and negotiated through sexuality and race. She traces the desire for cyberspace to cyberpunk fiction and maps the transformation of public/private into open/closed. Analyzing "pornocracy," she contends that it was through cyberporn and the government's attempts to regulate it that the Internet became a marketplace of ideas and commodities. Chun describes the way Internet promoters conflated technological empowerment with racial empowerment and, through close examinations of William Gibson's Neuromancer and Mamoru Oshii's Ghost in the Shell, she analyzes the management of interactivity in narratives of cyberspace.

The Internet's potential for democracy stems not from illusory promises of individual empowerment, Chun argues, but rather from the ways in which it exposes us to others (and to other machines) in ways we cannot control. Using fiber optic networks—light coursing through glass tubes—as metaphor and reality, Control and Freedom engages the rich philosophical tradition of light as a figure for knowledge, clarification, surveillance, and discipline, in order to argue that fiber-optic networks physically instantiate, and thus shatter, enlightenment....

Authors: Jeffrey R. Yost.
Hardcover, 288 pages
Publisher: Greenwood Press
Publication Date: 2005-06-30


Reviews :

    Originally a military and scientific computational tool of a small number of government, scientific, and corporate elites in the late 1940s, the computer has evolved significantly in less than 70 years to become a revolutionary technology and the basis for one the largest industries in America. The Internet, email and personal computer have become necessities in most offices and college dorm rooms and many homes. Narrative chapters trace the emergence and development of the computer industry in the United States as seen in the economic, historical, and social context of its times from the early 20th century to the present. From punched cards and tabulating machines to the first digital computer companies in the early 1950s, Yost clearly describes how the concept of the computer was born in the late 1800s but did not evolve into the personal computer until the late 1970s and 1980s. The computer has emerged from a relatively narrow scientific computational machine to a vast data processing and communication technology. Such well-known concepts and terms as IBM and Bill Gates, Apple and Macintosh, and the Internet and the World Wide Web, along with lesser known histories of the mainframe digital computer, the invention of the transistor, software development, supercomputing and minicomputing are discussed. Includes an appendix of over twenty company profiles of key businesses in the industry, a timeline, and suggestions for further reading and research. Ideal for students and general readers interested in the development of computers and related technology, such as its software and hardware, and the history of the computer industry....

Authors: Johannes Fabian.
Paperback, 152 pages
Publisher: Duke University Press
Publication Date: 2008


Reviews :

    The Internet allows ethnographers to deposit the textual materials on which they base their writing in virtual archives. Electronically archived fieldwork documents can be accessed at any time by the writer, his or her readers, and the people studied. Johannes Fabian, a leading theorist of anthropological practice, argues that virtual archives have the potential to shift the emphasis in ethnographic writing from the monograph to commentary. In this insightful study, he returns to the recording of a conversation he had with a ritual healer in the Congolese town of Lubumbashi more than three decades ago. Fabian’s transcript and translation of the exchange have been deposited on a website (Language and Popular Culture in Africa), and in Ethnography as Commentary he provides a model of writing in the presence of a virtual archive.

In his commentary, Fabian reconstructs his meeting with the healer Kahenga Mukonkwa Michel, in which the two discussed the ritual that Kahenga performed to protect Fabian’s home from burglary. Fabian reflects on the expectations and terminology that shape his description of Kahenga’s ritual and meditates on how ethnographic texts are made, considering the settings, the participants, the technologies, and the linguistic medium that influence the transcription and translation of a recording and thus fashion ethnographic knowledge. Turning more directly to Kahenga—as a practitioner, a person, and an ethnographic subject—and to the questions posed to him, Fabian reconsiders questions of ethnic identity, politics, and religion. While Fabian hopes that emerging anthropologists will share their fieldwork through virtual archives, he does not suggest that traditional ethnography will disappear. It will become part of a broader project facilitated by new media....

Authors: Thomas Foster.
Paperback, 344 pages
Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press
Publication Date: 2005-05-01
Edition: 1

Reviews :

    ...

Authors:
Hardcover, 340 pages
Publisher: Chapman & Hall/CRC
Publication Date: 2006-07-20
Edition: 1

Reviews :

    The rising tide of threats, from financial cybercrime to asymmetric military conflicts, demands greater sophistication in tools and techniques of law enforcement, commercial and domestic security professionals, and terrorism prevention. Concentrating on computational solutions to determine or anticipate an adversary's intent, Adversarial Reasoning: Computational Approaches to Reading the Opponent's Mind discusses the technologies for opponent strategy prediction, plan recognition, deception discovery and planning, and strategy formulation that not only applies to security issues but also to game industry and business transactions. Addressing a broad range of practical problems, including military planning and command, military and foreign intelligence, antiterrorism, network security, as well as simulation and training systems, this reference presents an overview of each problem and then explores various approaches and applications to understand the minds and negate the actions of your opponents. The techniques discussed originate from a variety of disciplines such as stochastic processes, artificial intelligence planning, cognitive modeling, robotics and agent theory, robust control, game theory, and machine learning, among others. The beginning chapters outline the key concepts related to discovering the opponent's intent and plans while the later chapters journey into mathematical methods for counterdeception. The final chapters employ a range of techniques, including reinforcement learning within a stochastic dynamic games context to devise strategies that combat opponents. By answering specific questions on how to create practical applications that require elements of adversarial reasoning while also exploring theoretical developments, Adversarial Reasoning: Computational Approaches to Reading the Opponent's Mind is beneficial for practitioners as well as researchers....

Authors: Betty A. Toole.
Paperback, 323 pages
Publisher: Critical Connection
Publication Date: 1998-12


Reviews :

    Many people get their first introduction to Lady Ada Lovelace, daughter of poet Lord Byron and companion to Charles Babbage, in William Gibsonand and Bruce Sterling's groundbreaking The Difference Engine. It's easy to imagine why Gibson and Sterling chose to weave her into their 1991 thriller, portraying her as the enigmatic, iconic Queen of Engines. Inspired by the real-life Lady Ada, the character is sharp, strong-minded, and eccentric.

Betty Alexander Toole's Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers bears out this view. By presenting and annotating more than 25 years of correspondence from Ada, Toole paints an endearing portrait of an inarguably remarkable woman, called by some--perhaps a bit gushingly--"the world's first hacker," because of her work with computing pioneer Charles Babbage. Although the reams of lovingly transcribed letters provide an intimate and material look at Ada's life, the accompanying analysis isn't always as useful, with objectivity taking a back seat to adoration at times. The up side of this enthusiasm is that you'd be hard pressed to find a better start for learning more about the fascinating Ada; her letters are complemented by a detailed timeline, glossary, bibliography, index, online references, and even discussion questions. --Paul Hughes...

Authors: Elisabeth de Graaff.
Paperback, 66 pages
Publisher: iUniverse, Inc.
Publication Date: 2007-12-19
Edition: 0

Reviews :

    Elisabeth “Bep” de Graaff was just entering her teen years in Holland when World War II invaded her life. For the next five years, her life was turned upside down as she and her family struggled through the Nazi occupation. From watching bombing raids to hiding Jews to enduring the terrible “Hunger Winter” of 1944–45, Bep experienced more before she was 18 than most of us experience in a lifetime.

This, in her own words, is Bep’s story. She shares her memories of that time in her life, and how her faith in God has carried her through the trauma of war and her experiences afterward.

The Girl From Rotterdam is a touching story of growing up in wartime, and how spiritual faith can help one through the harshest of hardships.

...

Authors: Dan Woods. Gautam Guliani.
Paperback, 234 pages
Publisher: O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Publication Date: 2005-07-27


Reviews :

    Open source software is changing the world of Information Technology. But making it work for your company is far more complicated than simply installing a copy of Linux. If you are serious about using open source to cut costs, accelerate development, and reduce vendor lock-in, you must institutionalize skills and create new ways of working. You must understand how open source is different from commercial software and what responsibilities and risks it brings. Open Source for the Enterprise is a sober guide to putting open source to work in the modern IT department.

Open source software is software whose code is freely available to anyone who wants to change and redistribute it. New commercial support services, smaller licensing fees, increased collaboration, and a friendlier platform to sell products and services are just a few of the reasons open source is so attractive to IT departments. Some of the open source projects that are in current, widespread use in businesses large and small include Linux, FreeBSD, Apache, MySQL, PostgreSQL, JBOSS, and Perl. These have been used to such great effect by Google, Amazon, Yahoo!, and major commercial and financial firms, that a wave of publicity has resulted in recent years, bordering on hype. Large vendors such as IBM, Novell, and Hewlett Packard have made open source a lynchpin of their offerings. Open source has entered a new area where it is being used as a marketing device, a collaborative software development methodology, and a business model.

This book provides something far more valuable than either the cheerleading or the fear-mongering one hears about open source. The authors are Dan Woods, former CTO of TheStreet.com and a consultant and author of several books about IT, and Gautam Guliani, Director of Software Architecture at Kaplan Test Prep & Admissions. Each has used open source software for some 15 years at IT departments large and small. They have collected the wisdom of a host of experts from IT departments, open source communities, and software companies.

Open Source for the Enterprise provides a top to bottom view not only of the technology, but of the skills required to manage it and the organizational issues that must be addressed. Here are the sorts of questions answered in the book:

• Why is there a "productization gap" in most open source projects?
• How can the maturity of open source be evaluated?
• How can the ROI of open source be calculated?
• What skills are needed to use open source?
• What sorts of open source projects are appropriate for IT departments at the beginner, intermediate, advanced, and expert levels?
• What questions need to be answered by an open source strategy?
• What policies for governance can be instituted to control the adoption of open source?
• What new commercial services can help manage the risks of open source?
• Do differences in open source licenses matter?
• How will using open source transform an IT department?

Praise for Open Source for the Enterprise: "Open Source has become a strategic business issue; decisions on how and where to choose to use Open Source now have a major impact on the overall direction of IT abilities to support the business both with capabilities and by controlling costs. This is a new game and one generally not covered in existing books on Open Source which continue to assume that the readers are 'deep dive' technologists, Open Source for the Enterprise provides everyone from business managers to technologists with the balanced view that has been missing. Well worth the time to read, and also worth encouraging others in your enterprise to read as well." ----Andy Mulholland - Global CTO Capgemini

"Open Source for the Enterprise is required reading for anyone working with or looking to adopt open source technologies in a corporate environment. Its practical, no-BS approach will make sure you're armed with the information you need to deploy applications successfully (as well as helping you know when to say "no"). If you're trying to sell open source to management, this book will give you the ammunition you need. If you're a manager trying to drive down cost using open source, this book will tell you what questions to ask your staff. In short, it's a clear, concise explanation of how to successfully leverage open source without making the big mistakes that can get you fired." ----Kevin Bedell - founding editor of LinuxWorld Magazine

...

Authors: Herman H. Goldstine.
Paperback, 365 pages
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Publication Date: 1980-10-01


Reviews :

   

In 1942, Lt. Herman H. Goldstine, a former mathematics professor, was stationed at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. It was there that he assisted in the creation of the ENIAC, the first electronic digital computer. The ENIAC was operational in 1945, but plans for a new computer were already underway. The principal source of ideas for the new computer was John von Neumann, who became Goldstine's chief collaborator. Together they developed EDVAC, successor to ENIAC. After World War II, at the Institute for Advanced Study, they built what was to become the prototype of the present-day computer. Herman Goldstine writes as both historian and scientist in this first examination of the development of computing machinery, from the seventeenth century through the early 1950s. His personal involvement lends a special authenticity to his narrative, as he sprinkles anecdotes and stories liberally through his text.

...