Showing titles in History & Culture

Between 1959 and 1989, Soviet scientists and officials made numerous attempts to network their nation - to construct a nationwide computer network. None of these attempts succeeded, and the enterprise had been abandoned by the time the Soviet Union fell apart. Meanwhile, ARPANET, the American precursor to the Internet, went online in 1969. Why did the Soviet network, with top-level scientists and patriotic incentives, fail while the American network succeeded? Find out.

In this brilliant, smart-thinking book about the power and influence of social media, Professor Sinan Aral shows how ‘hyper-socialisation’ has profoundly changed us. Why does fake news spread faster than the truth? Do products and ideas become popular because they are good or because they are rated highly online? How does influence actually work and what does it mean to be influential? Which strategies and tactics can help businesses survive and thrive in the New Social Age?

Outrage Machine reveals how to navigate a world that has been thoroughly disrupted by technology. It demystifies the underlying machinery that has come to control us and will help guide listeners toward reflection rather than reaction. Pulling together 15 years of research and inquiry, Rose-Stockwell gives listeners a language with which to comprehend what is happening to society, and offer new mental models for how to manage our time, our technology, and our attention, as well as big-picture recommendations for the way forward.

Big Tech has sold us the illusion that artificial intelligence is a frictionless technology that will bring wealth and prosperity to humanity. But hidden beneath this smooth surface lies the grim reality of a precarious global workforce of millions that labour under often appalling conditions to make AI possible. Feeding the Machine presents an urgent, riveting investigation of the intricate network of organisations that maintain this exploitative system, revealing the untold truth of AI.

Instagram. Whisper. Yik Yak. Vine. YouTube. Kik. Ask.fm. Tinder. The dominant force in the lives of girls coming of age in America today is social media. What it is doing to an entire generation of young women is the subject of award-winning Vanity Fair writer Nancy Jo Sales' riveting and explosive American Girls.

Sociologist Felicia Wu Song has spent years considering the personal and collective dynamics of living in digital ecosystems. In this book she combines psychological, neurological, and sociological insights with theological reflection to explore two major questions: What kind of people are we becoming with personal technologies in hand? And who do we really want to be? Song unpacks the soft tyranny of the digital age, including the values embedded in our apps and the economic systems that drive our habits and their subtle yet pervasive effects.

Boost productivity, save time, and make smarter decisions—no tech expertise required! Curious about artificial intelligence (AI) but unsure where to start? Practical AI for Beginners makes AI accessible, showing you how to integrate it seamlessly into your daily life.

Have you ever actually engaged with someone’s lame dance video on Instagram? Probably not, if you’re being honest. Gimmicks just don’t work, but the pressure of having an online presence can make people do weird things. Eventually, you have to call bullsh*t. The good news is that when you cut out excuses and ditch the self-sabotaging performances, you can learn to be a real human on the internet.

On the evening of April 13, 1970, the three astronauts aboard Apollo 13 were just hours from the third lunar landing in history. But as they soared through space, 200,000 miles from Earth, an explosion badly damaged their spacecraft. Thirteen is the shocking and miraculous true story of how the astronauts and ground crew guided Apollo 13 back to Earth. Expanding on dispatches written for The New Yorker, Henry S. F. Cooper Jr. brings listeners unparalleled detail on the moment-by-moment developments of one of NASA’s most dramatic missions.

In Electronic Dreams, Tom Lean tells the story of how computers invaded British homes for the first time, as people set aside their worries of electronic brains and Big Brother and embraced the wonder technology of the 1980s. This book charts the history of the rise and fall of the home computer, the family of futuristic and quirky machines that took computing from the realm of science and science fiction to being a user-friendly domestic technology.

Almost 24 hours to the minute since the tsunami hit Fukushima Daiichi, Unit 1 exploded. The building wrenched apart, sending shards of irradiated concrete and metal knifing through the air in all directions. The reactor’s massive heavy-duty gantry crane bent like a twig and collapsed onto the refueling floor control room, crushing everything that wasn’t expelled in the blast. Outside, chunks of debris rained down on the fire crew, injuring five and shredding the hoses they had just laid.

Artificial intelligence surrounds us. More and more of the systems and services you interact with every day are based on AI technology. Most AI is narrowly specific; that is, it can only do a single thing, in a single context. Human intelligence is different. We can solve a variety of tasks, including those we have not seen before. In Artificial General Intelligence, Julian Togelius explores technical approaches to developing more general artificial intelligence and asks what general AI would mean for human civilization.

The Internet of Money by Andreas M. Antonopoulos contains 11 of his most inspiring and thought-provoking talks, including: Introduction to Bitcoin; Blockchain vs Bullshit; Fake News, Fake Money; Currency Wars; Bubble Boy and the Sewer Rat; Rocket Science and Ethereum's Killer App; and many more!

In Like, bestselling author and renowned strategist Martin Reeves and coauthor Bob Goodson—Silicon Valley veteran and participant in the invention of the like button—take listeners along on a fascinating quest to find out what's behind the world's friendliest icon. It's a story that starts out as simply as a thumbs-up cartoon but ends up presenting surprises and new mysteries at every turn, some of them as deep as anthropological history and others as speculative as the AI-charged future.

Based on the author’s experience in the world of inventing and promotion, Hardcore Inventing offers the kind of advice you can only learn from experience: how to developing an idea into an invention, how to build a prototype for show, how to safeguard intellectual property, how to market both strategically and in “guerilla" mode, how find investors, and much more. And all of that is based on his IP 3 Tacitical Method which breaks everything down to Invent, Protect, Promote, and Profit.

It used to be that to diagnose an illness, interpret legal documents, analyze foreign policy, or write a newspaper article you needed a human being with specific skills - and maybe an advanced degree or two. These days, high-level tasks are increasingly being handled by algorithms that can do precise work not only with speed but also with nuance. These "bots" started with human programming and logic, but now their reach extends beyond what their creators ever expected.

Few of us give much thought to computer code or how it comes to be. The very word “code” makes it sound immutable or even inevitable. “You Are Not Expected to Understand This” demonstrates that, far from being preordained, computer code is the result of very human decisions, ones we all live with when we use social media, take photos, drive our cars, and engage in a host of other activities.

For most of human existence, people lived in a somewhat similar fashion. Everything that has been produced, from food and raw materials to clothing and other finished products, has been done either solely by hand or with some help of animal power. This was the same across the eras and throughout the world, no matter how advanced or backward the various civilizations were. Yet, our lives today couldn’t be more different.

Outposts on the Frontier reveals how the Soviets and the Americans combined strengths to build space stations over the past 50 years. At the heart of these scientific advances are people of both greatness and modesty. Jay Chladek documents the historical tapestry of the people, the early attempts at space station programs, and how astronauts and engineers have contributed to and shaped the ISS in surprising ways.

Throughout history, technological revolutions have been driven by the invention of machines. But today, the power of the technology transforming our world lies in an intangible and impenetrable cosmos of software: algorithmic code. So symbiotic has our relationship with this code become that we barely notice it anymore. We can't see it, are not even sure how to think about it, and yet we do almost nothing that doesn't depend on it. In a world increasingly governed by technologies that so few can comprehend, who—or what—controls the future?