Authors: William Michael Cunningham.
Paperback, 376 pages
Publisher: Course Technology PTR
Publication Date: 2005-12-27
Edition: 1

Reviews :

    Houdini has long been a dominant tool used in the creation of some of the most awe-inspiring animation and cinematic effects ever made. It is preferred by numerous studios for their most demanding challenges. If you go to the theater and see something that blows your mind, it is a good bet that Houdini had a hand in it. Now you can conquer the amazing technology of Houdini with confidence. With this book, you will learn how to apply each of Houdini's breathtaking features to your projects as you take on modeling, character animation, particle effects animation, dynamic simulation animation, shading, digital asset creation, and rendering. The Magic of Houdini is full of exercises, tips, and illustrations to help you tackle each new skill. Get ready to experience the mystery, the majesty, the magic of Houdini!...

Authors: Thom Holmes.
Paperback, 462 pages
Publisher: Routledge
Publication Date: 2008-04-23
Edition: 1

Reviews :

    Electronic and Experimental Music provides a thorough treatment of the relevant history behind the marriage of technology and music that has led to the state of electronic music today. Drawing widely on innovations from the worlds of classical music, rock and roll, hip hop, popular music, jazz, and modern dance, it covers the chronology of electronic music in separate parts devoted to early history, analog synthesis and instruments, digital synthesis and computer music, and the music itself. The third edition incorporates a contemporary pedagogical design, offering a variety of learning aids designed to help readers understand and review basic concepts, history, and milestones in electronic music, including reader's guides and summaries at the beginning and end of each chapter, sidebars providing a unique profile of an influential individual in the field of electronic music, playlists of recommended listening covering every genre mentioned in the text, and timelines highlighting major technological and musical innovations discussed in each chapter....

Authors: John Arquilla.
Paperback, 352 pages
Publisher: RAND Corporation
Publication Date: 2002-01-25


Reviews :

    Netwar--like cyberwar--describes a new spectrum of conflict that is emerging in the wake of the information revolution. What distinguished netwar is the networked organizational structure of its practitioners and their quickness in coming together in swarming attacks. To confront this new type of conflict, it is crucial for governments, military, and law enforcement to begin networking themselves....

Authors:
Paperback, 224 pages
Publisher: Ashgate
Publication Date: 2008-05-12


Reviews :

    Digital interactive audio is the future of audio in media - most notably video games, but also web pages, theme parks, museums, art installations and theatrical events. Despite its importance to contemporary multimedia, this is the first book that provides a framework for understanding the history, issues and theories surrounding interactive audio. Karen Collins presents the work of academics, composers and sound programmers to introduce the topic from a variety of angles in order to provide a supplementary text for music and multimedia courses. The contributors cover practical and theoretical approaches, including historical perspectives, emerging theories, socio-cultural approaches to fandom, reception theory and case study analyses. The book offers a fresh perspective on media music, one that will complement film studies, but which will show the necessity of a unique approach when considering games music....

Authors: Eric G. Swedin. David L. Ferro.
Paperback, 192 pages
Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Publication Date: 2007-10-24
Edition: 1

Reviews :

   

A great technological and scientific innovation of the last half of the twentieth century, the computer has revolutionized how we organize information, how we communicate with each other, and even the way we think about the human mind. Computers have eased the drudgery of such tasks as calculating sums and clerical work, making them both more bearable and more efficient, whatever the occasional frustration they carry with them. The computer has become a standard fixture in our culture, a necessity for many aspects of business, recreation, and everyday life. In this book, Eric G. Swedin and David L. Ferro offer an accessible short history of this dynamic technology, covering its central themes from ancient times to the present day.

...

Authors: Theodore Roszak.
Paperback, 267 pages
Publisher: University of California Press
Publication Date: 1994-04-29


Reviews :

    As we devote ever-increasing resources to providing, or prohibiting, access to information via computer, Theodore Roszak reminds us that voluminous information does not necessarily lead to sound thinking. "Data glut" obscures basic questions of justice and purpose and may even hinder rather than enhance our productivity.
In this revised and updated edition of The Cult of Information, Roszak reviews the disruptive role the computer has come to play in international finance and the way in which "edutainment" software and computer games degrade the literacy of children. At the same time, he finds hopeful new ways in which the library and free citizens' access to the Internet and the national data-highway can turn computer technology into a democratic and liberating force. Roszak's examination of the place of computer technology in our culture is essential reading for all those who use computers, who are intimidated by computers, or who are concerned with the appropriate role of computers in the education of our children....

    The title notwithstanding, Theodore Roszak is no computer hater. But in an age that idolizes intelligent machines, he stands out as a rare cautionary voice. His book makes an eloquent case for a simple thesis: digital computing, far from being a panacea, has created as many problems as it solves. For Roszak, a fair measure of the fault lies with corporate hucksterism, a credulous educational establishment, and government's desire to control information. But the deeper worry is our own utopian techno-idealism--the belief that a scientific broom can sweep away our messy problems. The author challenges such computer messianism with a detailed, common-sense look at the history of what computing has actually brought us. The trends he sees--the conflation of data with knowledge, the erosion of human-centered values, and the rise of a digital oligarchy at just about everyone else's expense--are tough to deny. If you love computers, The Cult of Information is a provocative read, but one you shouldn't dodge....

Authors: Neil Barrett.
Hardcover, 320 pages
Publisher: WN
Publication Date: 2006-10-31


Reviews :

    ...

Authors: Peter H. Salus.
Paperback, 272 pages
Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
Publication Date: 1994-06-10


Reviews :

    On June 12, 1972, Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie wrote, "the number of UNIX installations has grown to 10, with more expected." Two years later the number was 50. It is estimated that there are over 3 million UNIX systems in operation today ...UNIX is a software system that is simple, elegant, portable, and powerful. It grew in popularity without the benefit of a large marketing organization. Programmers kept using it; big companies kept fighting it. After a decade, it was clear that the users had won. A Quarter Century of UNIX is the first book to explain this incredible success, using the words of its creators, developers, and users to illustrate how the sociology of a technical group can overwhelm the intent of multi-billion-dollar corporations. In preparing to write this book, Peter Salus interviewed over 100 of these key figures and gathered relevant information from Australia to Austria. This is the book that turns UNIX folklore into UNIX history.The book provides the first documented history of the development of the UNIX operating system, includes interviews with over 100 key figures in the UNIX community, contains classic photos and illustrations, and explains why UNIX succeeded. 0201547775B04062001...

Authors: David A. Mindell.
Paperback, 456 pages
Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Publication Date: 2004-09-10


Reviews :

   

Today, we associate the relationship between feedback, control, and computing with Norbert Wiener's 1948 formulation of cybernetics. But the theoretical and practical foundations for cybernetics, control engineering, and digital computing were laid earlier, between the two world wars. In Between Human and Machine: Feedback, Control, and Computing before Cybernetics, David A. Mindell shows how the modern sciences of systems emerged from disparate engineering cultures and their convergence during World War II.

Mindell examines four different arenas of control systems research in the United States between the world wars: naval fire control, the Sperry Gyroscope Company, the Bell Telephone Laboratories, and Vannevar Bush's laboratory at MIT. Each of these institutional sites had unique technical problems, organizational imperatives, and working environments, and each fostered a distinct engineering culture. Each also developed technologies to represent the world in a machine.

At the beginning of World War II, President Roosevelt established the National Defense Research Committee, one division of which was devoted to control systems. Mindell shows how the NDRC brought together representatives from the four pre-war engineering cultures, and how its projects synthesized conceptions of control, communications, and computing. By the time Wiener articulated his vision, these ideas were already suffusing through engineering. They would profoundly influence the digital world.

As a new way to conceptualize the history of computing, this book will be of great interest to historians of science, technology, and culture, as well as computer scientists and theorists. Between Human and Machine: Feedback, Control, and Computing before Cybernetics

...

Authors: Jo Ann Shroyer.
Hardcover, 240 pages
Publisher: Wiley
Publication Date: 1997-10-24


Reviews :

    "It's easy to feel watched in Los Alamos. During my first visit to the town several years ago, I stopped by the side of the road to take a picture of what I thought was just the Santa Fe National Forest. A small pickup truck did a quick U-turn and parked next to me until I left. When this happened again on another public highway in the area, I began to wonder whose woods these really were.

"Later I learned that the technical areas of Los Alamos National Laboratory extend far beyond the obvious cluster of gray and tan buildings at its center. They are spread out over forty-three square miles of woods and canyons and are hemmed in by national forest and parklands. It turns out I was nowhere near the heavily guarded areas of the lab, where picture taking would be considered a threat to national security. But I was quietly watched, nonetheless." —from the text

"It's easy to feel watched in Los Alamos," begins award-winning journalist Jo Ann Shroyer in this engrossing profile of life and work inside the world's most notorious science research center. Los Alamos is a world unto itself, rife with contradictions, haunted by its history, and yet bustling with an astonishing range of forefront science projects, from cancer research to the building of robotic ants. This is a town with the highest concentration of Ph.D.'s anywhere in the world; where children sometimes aren't allowed to know what their parents do for a living; and where weapons designers offer philosophical insights into why only deadly weapons can ensure lasting peace.

Created as a top-secret outpost on a desolate mesa in the New Mexico desert—exclusively for the purpose of assembling the world's first atomic weapon—Los Alamos was transformed during the Cold War into a high-powered science complex and full-blown "company town," with a population of 20,000, covering forty-three square miles and including schools, stores, churches, and a private ski slope. But even today, the town is tightly guarded by a 400-strong special security force, and glinting barriers of razor wire encircle research facilities protected by motion detectors and patrolled by armed guards.

As Shroyer probes behind closed doors, she finds a complex, colorful, and thoughtful community grappling with the legacy of its nuclear-tainted past and confronting the challenge of defining its future in the post-Cold War era. Drawing on extensive interviews with scientists and residents, from weapons designers to peace activists, she takes us into their labs and homes and explores the surprising range of their insights and research.

We accompany her as she "goes behind the fence" to visit the X-2 thermonuclear weapons facility and talk with weapons designer James "Jas" Mercer-Smith, who describes the lab's mission as "trying to keep people from killing themselves in vast numbers." We meet robot scientist Mark Tilden and witness the lively antics of the menagerie of mechanical creatures he calls his "Robot Jurassic Park." And we visit the bizarre junkyard overflowing with "techno trash" run by peace activist Ed Grothus, where he sells research materials, discarded by lab facilities that he ironically dubs nuclear waste.

A rich and evocative portrait of an intriguing, closed world, Secret Mesa ultimately offers a unique perspective on the complex questions surrounding the appropriate role, if any, for nuclear weapons in our future as well as the role of government-sponsored "big science" in spearheading much of the basic research so important to scientific progress....