Authors: Eric Lott.
Hardcover, 328 pages
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Publication Date: 1993-10-28


Reviews :

    For over two centuries, America has celebrated the very black culture it attempts to control and repress, and nowhere is this phenomenon more apparent than in the strange practice of blackface performance. Born of extreme racial and class conflicts, the blackface minstrel show sometimes usefully intensified them. Based on the appropriation of black dialect, music, and dance, minstrelsy at once applauded and lampooned black culture, ironically contributing to a "blackening of America." Drawing on recent research in cultural studies and social history, Eric Lott examines the role of the blackface minstrel show in the political struggles of the years leading up to the Civil War. Reading minstrel music, lyrics, jokes, burlesque skits, and illustrations in tandem with working-class racial ideologies and the sex/gender system, Love and Theft argues that blackface minstrelsy both embodied and disrupted the racial tendencies of its largely white, male, working-class audiences. Underwritten by envy as well as repulsion, sympathetic identification as well as fear--a dialectic of "love and theft"--the minstrel show continually transgressed the color line even as it enabled the formation of a self-consciously white working class. Lott exposes minstrelsy as a signifier for multiple breaches: the rift between high and low cultures, the commodification of the dispossessed by the empowered, the attraction mixed with guilt of whites caught in the act of cultural thievery....

Authors: Jon Watson.
Paperback, 60 pages
Publisher: Nimble Books LLC
Publication Date: 2008-06-27


Reviews :

    Unix, DOS, Lisa, Macintosh, Windows, Linux...

Authors: Bernard Diederich.
Paperback, 216 pages
Publisher: iUniverse, Inc.
Publication Date: 2007-11-16
Edition: 0

Reviews :

   

The Dictator Beat, a nonfiction historical thriller by an award-winning foreign correspondent, and set in the second-largest island of the Caribbean, is akin to a Hitchcockian suspense drama. Two side-by-side dictators—Francois (Papa Doc) Duvalier in Kreyòl and French-speaking Haiti and Generalissimo Rafael (Chapita) Trujillo Molina in the Spanish-speaking Dominican Republic, sharing the island that Columbus named Hispaniola—were in the year 1960 each endeavoring to crush rising dissatisfaction among their peoples.

Though very different in their personas, the two tyrants bore the same contempt for human life, which filled their respective countries with the unmarked graves of their countless victims.

In Haiti, Papa Doc Duvalier, though elected president three years earlier, had assumed virtually absolute power. His murderous “Tontons Macoutes” thugs roamed at will, striking fear into all. On the Dominican side, Trujillo, after nearly three decades in power, was finally losing his grip. Yet his dreaded secret police still cruised the streets at night, reinforcing Trujillo’s long siege of terror. The question was: What would be the fate of these two tyrants themselves? The answer is provided in this mesmerizing book by Author Bernard Diederich, who spent years reporting from both countries.

...

Authors:
Hardcover, 266 pages
Publisher: Iowa State Press
Publication Date: 1990-05-30

Authors: Mark C. Taylor.
Paperback, 304 pages
Publisher: University Of Chicago Press
Publication Date: 1999-07-01


Reviews :

    ...

Authors: Janet Ward Schofield.
Paperback, 283 pages
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Publication Date: 1995-10-27


Reviews :

    As important as it is to realize the potential of computer technology to improve education, it is just as important to understand how the social organization of schools and classrooms influences the use of computers, and in turn is affected by that technology in unanticipated ways. In Computers and Classroom Culture, Janet Schofield observes the fascinating dynamics of the computer-age classroom. Among her many discoveries, Schofield describes how the use of an artificially-intelligent tutor in a geometry class unexpectedly changes aspects such as the level of peer competition and the teacher's grading practices. She also discusses why many teachers fail to make significant instructional use of computers and how gender appears to have a crucial impact on students' reactions to computer use. All educators, sociologists, and psychologists concerned with educational computing and the changing shape of the classroom will find themselves compellingly engaged....

Authors: James W. Haefner.
Hardcover, 480 pages
Publisher: Springer
Publication Date: 2005-05-06
Edition: 2nd

Reviews :

   

This is the second edition of a textbook currently published by Springer for a course in mathematical modeling and computer simulation for biologists at the advanced undergraduate and introductory graduate level. The audience for this edition is similar to that of the previous one: advanced level courses in computational biology, as well as researchers retooling themselves. This new edition includes a CD-ROM with real examples of models as teaching tools.

...

Authors: Peter G. Neumann.
Paperback, 384 pages
Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
Publication Date: 1994-10-28


Reviews :

    Based on data gathered by the author as part of ACM's International Risks Forum, this book contains accounts of mishaps attributed to computers and the people using them--some humorous, and some tragic. Neumann characterizes different kinds of computer-related risks, discusses risk causes and effects, and considers their implications. He also suggests ways to minimize risks in the future....

Authors: Christos H. Papadimitriou.
Hardcover, 280 pages
Publisher: The MIT Press
Publication Date: 2003-11-01


Reviews :

    Our hero is Turing, an interactive tutoring program and namesake (or virtual emanation?) of Alan Turing, World War II code breaker and father of computer science. In this unusual novel, Turing's idiosyncratic version of intellectual history from a computational point of view unfolds in tandem with the story of a love affair involving Ethel, a successful computer executive, Alexandros, a melancholy archaeologist, and Ian, a charismatic hacker. After Ethel (who shares her first name with Alan Turing's mother) abandons Alexandros following a sundrenched idyll on Corfu, Turing appears on Alexandros's computer screen to unfurl a tutorial on the history of ideas. He begins with the philosopher-mathematicians of ancient Greece—"discourse, dialogue, argument, proof... can only thrive in an egalitarian society"—and the Arab scholar in ninth-century Baghdad who invented algorithms; he moves on to many other topics, including cryptography and artificial intelligence, even economics and developmental biology. (These lessons are later critiqued amusingly and developed further in postings by a fictional newsgroup in the book's afterword.) As Turing's lectures progress, the lives of Alexandros, Ethel, and Ian converge in dramatic fashion, and the story takes us from Corfu to Hong Kong, from Athens to San Francisco—and of course to the Internet, the disruptive technological and social force that emerges as the main locale and protagonist of the novel.

Alternately pedagogical and romantic, Turing (A Novel about Computation) should appeal both to students and professionals who want a clear and entertaining account of the development of computation and to the general reader who enjoys novels of ideas....

Authors: Deborah A. Dell. J. Gerry Purdy.
Hardcover, 502 pages
Publisher: Sams
Publication Date: 1999-09
Edition: 1st

Reviews :

    ThinkPad: A Different Shade of Blue tells the exciting inside story behind the creation of one of the most successful brand names in computing. Through interviews with the ThinkPad Team and IBM executives, and access to internal documents and memoranda, the book provides a rare inside view into the workings of an IBM brand team. Here is the inside scoop on the cultural and personality differences that almost killed one of the most significant development efforts in IBM history. More importantly, it offers valuable lessons on what it takes to build a world-class, enduring brand or product. ...