Authors: Patrice Flichy.
Paperback, 264 pages
Publisher: The MIT Press
Publication Date: 2008-10-31


Reviews :

    In The Internet Imaginaire, sociologist Patrice Flichy examines the collective vision that shaped the emergence of the Internet—the social imagination that envisioned a technological utopia in the birth of a new technology. By examining in detail the discourses surrounding the development of the Internet in the United States in the 1990s (and considering them an integral part of that development), Flichy shows how an entire society began a new technological era. The metaphorical "information superhighway" became a technical utopia that informed a technological program. The Internet imaginaire, Flichy argues, led software designers, businesses, politicians, and individuals to adopt this one technology instead of another.

Flichy draws on writings by experts—paying particular attention to the gurus of Wired magazine, but also citing articles in Time, Newsweek, and Business Week—from 1991 to 1995. He describes two main domains of the technical imaginaire: the utopias (and ideologies) associated with the development of technical devices and the depictions of an imaginary digital society. He analyzes the founding myths of cyberculture—the representations of technical systems expressing the dreams and experiments of designers and promoters that developed around information highways, the Internet, Bulletin Board systems, and virtual reality. And he offers a treatise on "the virtual society imaginaire," discussing visionaries from Teilhard de Chardin to William Gibson, the body and the virtual, cyberdemocracy and the end of politics, and the new economy of the immaterial....

Authors: Dr. X. Dr. X.
Paperback, 192 pages
Publisher: Carlton Books
Publication Date: 2000-10-01
Edition: 1

Reviews :

    For the first time in the 90s, The Hacker's Handbook looks at the whole phenomenon of computer hacking, from its beginning in the computer networks of the early 80s, through the basic tools that hacker's use today....

Authors: Jack Copeland.
Paperback, 328 pages
Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
Publication Date: 1993-12-15


Reviews :

    Presupposing no familiarity with the technical concepts of either philosophy or computing, this clear introduction reviews the progress made in AI since the inception of the field in 1956. Copeland goes on to analyze what those working in AI must achieve before they can claim to have built a thinking machine and appraises their prospects of succeeding.

There are clear introductions to connectionism and to the language of thought hypothesis which weave together material from philosophy, artificial intelligence and neuroscience. John Searle's attacks on AI and cognitive science are countered and close attention is given to foundational issues, including the nature of computation, Turing Machines, the Church-Turing Thesis and the difference between classical symbol processing and parallel distributed processing. The book also explores the possibility of machines having free will and consciousness and concludes with a discussion of in what sense the human brain may be a computer....

Authors:
Paperback, 595 pages
Publisher: The MIT Press
Publication Date: 2002-04-30
Edition: 1st

Reviews :

    2003 Susan Koppelman Award given by the Joint Women's Caucus of the Popular Culture/American Culture. Most writing on cyberculture is dominated by two almost mutually exclusive visions: the heroic image of the male outlaw hacker and the utopian myth of a gender-free cyberworld. Reload offers an alternative picture of cyberspace as a complex and contradictory place where there is oppression as well as liberation. It shows how cyberpunk’s revolutionary claims conceal its ultimate conservatism on matters of class, gender, and race. The cyberfeminists writing here view cyberculture as a social experiment with an as-yet-unfulfilled potential to create new identities, relationships, and cultures.

The book brings together women's cyberfiction—fiction that explores the relationship between people and virtual technologies—and feminist theoretical and critical investigations of gender and technoculture. From a variety of viewpoints, the writers consider the effects of rapid and profound technological change on culture, in particular both the revolutionary and reactionary effects of cyberculture on women’s lives. They also explore the feminist implications of the cyborg, a human-machine hybrid. The writers challenge the conceptual and institutional rifts between high and low culture, which are embedded in the texts and artifacts of cyberculture....

    Bucking the received wisdom of the wired elite, the authors collected in Reload: Rethinking Women Cyberculture suggest that when we log on, we take our genders with us. Editors Mary Flanagan and Austin Booth balance penetrating critical theory with examples of fiction from authors like Octavia Butler, Amy Thomson, and C.L. Moore. The mix can be thought-provoking, but requires some quick shifting of mental gears to follow the arguments from essay to fiction and back again.

Exposing some cherished cybermyths as groundless or at least unproven (e.g., identity is less ephemeral than the utopians would have us believe), the anthology also makes a compelling argument simply by its uniqueness: if gender doesn't matter, then why do these writings feel so different from men's writing on cyberculture? Those readers impatient with academic jargon will find some of the theory tiresome, but much is refreshingly clear. --Rob Lightner...

Authors:
Hardcover, 240 pages
Publisher: Springer
Publication Date: 2002-12-31
Edition: 1

Reviews :

    Elections, referenda and polls are very important processes and tools for the smooth operation of a modern democracy. They provide means for transferring power from citizens to their representatives. They can, also, support the citizen's trust and confidence in government and democracy. Election systems have been, until recently, the focus of attention of mainly politicians and election officials. However, the case of Florida US Presidential Election attracted international attention, by a very wide audience, on how elections are administered and what is - or may be - the role of technology in this process. As a result, the capabilities and limitations of electronic and Internet-based voting systems have been brought to the center of attention of many professionals, and are under intense scrutiny by policy makers, social scientists, computer and network engineers, and activist groups in several countries. Now the main issue is whether secure, reliable, robust, user-friendly, and less costly electronic voting systems could be developed. Such systems must meet strict security and privacy requirements, and comply with specific constitutional, legal and regulatory contexts.
Secure Electronic Voting is an edited volume, which includes chapters authored by leading experts in the field of security and voting systems. The chapters identify and describe the given capabilities and the strong limitations, as well as the current trends and future perspectives of electronic voting technologies, with emphasis in security and privacy. Secure Electronic Voting includes state-of-the-art material on existing and emerging electronic and Internet voting technologies, which may eventually lead to the development of adequately secure e-voting systems. This book also includes an overview of the legal framework with respect to voting, a description of the user requirements for the development of a secure e-voting system, and a discussion on the relevant technical and social concerns. Secure Electronic Voting includes, also, three case studies on the use and evaluation of e-voting systems in three different real world environments.
Secure Electronic Voting provides researchers and practitioners in computer science and engineering with an in-depth review on secure e-voting technologies. Election organizers, social scientists and legal experts can also benefit from the analysis of the socio-technical context of the e-voting systems and technologies. Secure Electronic Voting is designed to meet the needs of a wide audience in government, industry and academia and also graduate-level students in computer science and engineering....

Authors: John Pemberton.
Paperback, 320 pages
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Publication Date: 1994-12


Reviews :

    What are the limits of cultural critique? What are the horizons? What are the political implications? John Pemberton explores these questions in this far-reaching ethnographic and historical interpretation of cultural discourse in Indonesia since 1965.

"This is a wonderful book--insightful, funny, engrossing. Through the subject of 'Java,' it subtly but surely turns over the way we think about the culture of politics and the politics of culture. Everyone who cares about comparative cultural studies should read it."--Anna Tsing, author of In the Realm of the Diamond Queen: Marginality in an Out-of-the-Way Place...

Authors: Patrick Durusau. Patrick Durusau.
Paperback, 253 pages
Publisher: Duke University Press
Publication Date: 1998-12


Reviews :

    Originally published by Scholars Press
Now Available from Duke University Press

In this second edition of High Places in Cyberspace, Patrick Durusau provides an updated and expanded how-to and map of the internet focusing on meeting the needs of scholars in biblical studies, religion, classics, and archaeology. Durusau offers a practical introduction and reference to accessing internet resources, covering methods such as electronic mailing lists, ftp, on-line libraries, search engines, and the world wide web. This book includes an annotated topical listing of over 1,000 scholarly resoruces available on the internet, such as web sites displaying original scanned papyri, web sites with original texts, mailing lists between scholars and on-line library addresses....

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: Bruce Lawrence.
Paperback, 380 pages
Publisher: Alpha
Publication Date: 1999-12-17
Edition: 1

Reviews :

   

The Complete Idiot's Guide to Online Religion gives you key information about all the groups who are not Christian, marginally Christian or four-square Christian. It provides a road map for finding trustworthy data, exciting visual sites and new textual resources for almost any religious tradition worthy of the name. That is, if it--or one of its members--has discovered the WWW. Most have and The Complete Idiot's Guide to Online Religion makes it easier to find what you need, or want, to know about religion, spirituality and God than any other Web companion now available. And if your interest is "solely" to find a soul-mate, someone who shares your spiritual outlook, and with whom you would like to share info, or explore a new relationship, that option too is provided.

...

Authors:
Paperback, 416 pages
Publisher: Springer
Publication Date: 2008-10-24
Edition: 1

Reviews :

   

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 6th International Workshop on Ant Colony Optimization and Swarm Intelligence, ANTS 2008, held in Brussels, Belgium, in September 2008.

The 17 revised full papers, 24 revised short papers, and 10 extended abstracts presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 91 submissions. The papers cover theoretical and foundational aspects of computational intelligence and related disciplines with special focus on swarm intelligence and are devoted to behavioral models of social insects and new algorithmic approaches, empirical and theoretical research in swarm intelligence, applications such as ant colony optimization or particle swarm optimization, and theoretical and experimental research in swarm robotics systems.

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