Mechanica: Fables for an Information Age


Book Description

Swifian fables about two robot constructors who can make anything in the universe, and end up messing up the universe.







Global Political Economy in the Information Age


Book Description

This volume is an insightful, fresh and wide ranging evaluation of the conceptual challenges of globalization and the new information era.




Governing Fables


Book Description

Governing Fables: Learning from Public Sector Narratives advocates the importance of narrative for public servants, exemplifies it with a rigorously selected and analyzed set of narratives, and imparts narrative skills politicians and public servants need in their careers. Governing Fables turns to narratology, the inter-disciplinary study of narrative, for a conceptual framework that is applied to a set of narratives engaging life within public organizations, focusing on works produced during the last twenty-five years in the US and UK. The genres discussed include British government narratives inspired by and reacting to Yes Minister, British appeasement narratives, American political narratives, the Cuban Missile Crisis narrative, jury decision-making narratives, and heroic teacher narratives. In each genre lessons are presented regarding both effective management and essential narrative skills. Governing Fables is intended for public management and political science scholars and practitioners interested in leadership and management, as well as readers drawn to the political subject matter and to the genre of political films, novels, and television series.




The Work of Art in the Digital Age


Book Description

- Since the cave mornings of Cro-Magnon man has painted and decorated with colour solutions - In the Digital Age it will be natural - even compelling - to question the traditional painting, its status and legitimacy. - Has the traditional physical painting become a mere thing of the past, an antique, a relic or an artifact from the archives of art history? - In millenniums art has rebelled; shaking of every reductive determination, spoken appraisal and valuation - disobedient and rebellious - striding for freedom; thus it has achieved our highest esteem. - Today art turns to its absolute emancipation: it releases itself from materialism and catapulted out into virtual reality the picture will at the same time become ubiquitous and non-existent: in the Digital Age the picture does not even have to exist!... Perishability, is it bygone? - Thus, Yesterday is passé; the 21th century poses: a new world has sought us out and it doesn’t backtrack, it boasts itself in an unknown brash semiotic: gigabytes, GUI and GIF, can you Google it? IT is today to be; or bail out. - The magic words of our time are clipart, download, edutainment, freeware, hotspot, hyperlink, net-etiquette, screendump, webhotel ... and remember WYSIWYG isn’t always trustworthy. The world anno post-MM is a hip hypertext: to be or not to be down loaded... that is the question. - In the Digital Era everything is digitised and infused by virtuality - everything is constituted by; everything is this diffusion. Therefore, in the Digital Era it is expected that digitisation and virtualization will penetrate art, and vice versa that art will digitise itself. - The Work of Art in the Digital Age explores from a philosophical point of view (i) how this fusion takes place, (ii) the relationship between the digital image and traditional painting and especially (iii) the status and legitimacy of the traditional physical painting in the current Digital Era.




Fragmentation of the Photographic Image in the Digital Age


Book Description

Fragmentation of the Photographic Image in the Digital Age challenges orthodoxies of photographic theory and practice. Beyond understanding the image as a static representation of reality, it shows photography as a linchpin of dynamic developments in augmented intelligence, neuroscience, critical theory, and cybernetic cultures. Through essays by leading philosophers, political theorists, software artists, media researchers, curators, and experimental programmers, photography emerges not as a mimetic or a recording device but simultaneously as a new type of critical discipline and a new art form that stands at the crossroads of visual art, contemporary philosophy, and digital technologies.




Popular Mechanics


Book Description

Popular Mechanics inspires, instructs and influences readers to help them master the modern world. Whether it’s practical DIY home-improvement tips, gadgets and digital technology, information on the newest cars or the latest breakthroughs in science -- PM is the ultimate guide to our high-tech lifestyle.




Existing in the Information Dimension


Book Description

This book presents new insights into the nature of the human mind as a product of the brain. It does so by discussing how biological and technological information systems differ from their counterparts with physical functions, presenting Emergent Information Theory as a solution to the mind-body problem and overarching framework for all biological and technological information systems. Emergent Information Theory is a new theoretical approach to the specific type of information and emergence exploited by biological neural networks and digital systems. One of the conclusions of this theory is that these entities and processes are non-physical and exist in an information dimension connected to but distinct from the three dimensions of physical space. It is in this information dimension that our minds exist, making it ultimately more our home as sentient beings than the physical realm inhabited by our bodies. This book presents existing scientific and philosophical evidence that leads to this conclusion, followed by application of the theory to biological and technological information systems. The author concludes with a call to action for further research. This fascinating text will be of interest to any researcher of consciousness, the mind-body problem, or AI, as well as those working in related areas such as physical neuroscience and systems theory.




1,000 Books to Read Before You Die


Book Description

“The ultimate literary bucket list.” —THE WASHINGTON POST Celebrate the pleasure of reading and the thrill of discovering new titles in an extraordinary book that’s as compulsively readable, entertaining, surprising, and enlightening as the 1,000-plus titles it recommends. Covering fiction, poetry, science and science fiction, memoir, travel writing, biography, children’s books, history, and more, 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die ranges across cultures and through time to offer an eclectic collection of works that each deserve to come with the recommendation, You have to read this. But it’s not a proscriptive list of the “great works”—rather, it’s a celebration of the glorious mosaic that is our literary heritage. Flip it open to any page and be transfixed by a fresh take on a very favorite book. Or come across a title you always meant to read and never got around to. Or, like browsing in the best kind of bookshop, stumble on a completely unknown author and work, and feel that tingle of discovery. There are classics, of course, and unexpected treasures, too. Lists to help pick and choose, like Offbeat Escapes, or A Long Climb, but What a View. And its alphabetical arrangement by author assures that surprises await on almost every turn of the page, with Cormac McCarthy and The Road next to Robert McCloskey and Make Way for Ducklings, Alice Walker next to Izaac Walton. There are nuts and bolts, too—best editions to read, other books by the author, “if you like this, you’ll like that” recommendations , and an interesting endnote of adaptations where appropriate. Add it all up, and in fact there are more than six thousand titles by nearly four thousand authors mentioned—a life-changing list for a lifetime of reading. “948 pages later, you still want more!” —THE WASHINGTON POST




Jonathan Swift and the Millennium of Madness


Book Description

Casting aside critical shibboleths in place for centuries, Kenneth Craven's Jonathan Swift and the Millennium of Madness proposes a new view of intellectual history. This revisionary study documents Swift's intimate knowledge of seventeenth-century science from Bacon and the Invisible College at Oxford to the Newtonian synthesis within the context of Paracelsian medicine and the chemical-mechanical split. Craven shows that Swift joins the philosophies of a neoplatonic divine order, Epicurean atomism, the Reformation, and scientific millenarianism as permeating his time with millennial myths sure eventually to detonate the sense of composure of individuals and societies. In contradistinction, Swift elucidates links between the humors traditions in medicine and literature, saturnine melancholy and the dreaming god Kronos. He proposes the somber realism of the Kronos myth as providing awareness of the self-imposed restraints on ego needed to preclude the proliferation of modern information systems into trivialization of the human enterprise to meaninglessness. This fresh and exhaustive examination of the Anglo-Irish writer's first masterpiece, A Tale of a Tub (1704) unlocks barriers to seeing the nature of Swift's complex integrity, passion, and literary achievements throughout a career studded with disappointments. Specifically, this study authoritatively reveals the identity of unnamed victims of Swift's satire as the deist John Toland and his republican hero, John Milton, for their advocacy of the Puritan Revolution and regicide; Toland's mentor John Locke and another Lockean disciple, Lord Shaftesbury, who confused happiness and self-interest with delusion and the public weal; and his tormentors in the Church of Ireland, Narcissus Marsh and Peter Browne.