Author: Walter Cummins
Publisher: Praeger
ISBN:
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 248
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Book Description
In this timely examination of television and American identity, Cummins and Gordon take readers on an informed walk through the changes that TV has already wrought-and those still likely to confront us. Commercial television in America is less than 60 years old, yet it has had an enormous impact on what we like, what we do, what we know, and how we think. A family transplanted from the 1940s to the present day would certainly be stunned by a fundamentally different world: instead of gathering in the living room for a shared evening of radio, they would be scattered around the house to indulge their individual interests on one of a hundred cable channels; instead of a society with rigid racial and ethnic divisions, they would see people of different ethnicities in passionate embraces; and certainly they would see very different sets of values reflected across the board. They would, in short, find themselves in an unrecognizable America, one both reflected in and shaped by television, a medium that has been shown to have an unprecedented influence on our lives both for better and for worse. By focusing on the development of television within the cultural context that surrounds it, and drawing on such phenomena as quiz shows, comedy hours, the Kennedy assassination, the Olympics, sitcoms, presidential ads, political debates, MTV, embedded journalism, and reality TV, the authors reveal television's impact on essential characteristics of American life. They cover topics as diverse as politics, crime, medicine, sports, our perceptions, our values, our assumptions about privacy, and our unquenchable need for more things. In addition, they consider the future of the medium in the light of the proliferation of programming options, the prevalence of cameras and receivers in our lives, the growing links between TV and computers, and the crossed boundaries of television throughout the world.
Author: Walter Cummins
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313076162
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 241
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Book Description
In this timely examination of television and American identity, Cummins and Gordon take readers on an informed walk through the changes that TV has already wrought-and those still likely to confront us. Commercial television in America is less than 60 years old, yet it has had an enormous impact on what we like, what we do, what we know, and how we think. A family transplanted from the 1940s to the present day would certainly be stunned by a fundamentally different world: instead of gathering in the living room for a shared evening of radio, they would be scattered around the house to indulge their individual interests on one of a hundred cable channels; instead of a society with rigid racial and ethnic divisions, they would see people of different ethnicities in passionate embraces; and certainly they would see very different sets of values reflected across the board. They would, in short, find themselves in an unrecognizable America, one both reflected in and shaped by television, a medium that has been shown to have an unprecedented influence on our lives both for better and for worse. By focusing on the development of television within the cultural context that surrounds it, and drawing on such phenomena as quiz shows, comedy hours, the Kennedy assassination, the Olympics, sitcoms, presidential ads, political debates, MTV, embedded journalism, and reality TV, the authors reveal television's impact on essential characteristics of American life. They cover topics as diverse as politics, crime, medicine, sports, our perceptions, our values, our assumptions about privacy, and our unquenchable need for more things. In addition, they consider the future of the medium in the light of the proliferation of programming options, the prevalence of cameras and receivers in our lives, the growing links between TV and computers, and the crossed boundaries of television throughout the world.
Author: Peter Seibel
Publisher: Apress
ISBN: 1430219491
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 619
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Book Description
Peter Seibel interviews 15 of the most interesting computer programmers alive today in Coders at Work, offering a companion volume to Apress’s highly acclaimed best-seller Founders at Work by Jessica Livingston. As the words “at work” suggest, Peter Seibel focuses on how his interviewees tackle the day-to-day work of programming, while revealing much more, like how they became great programmers, how they recognize programming talent in others, and what kinds of problems they find most interesting. Hundreds of people have suggested names of programmers to interview on the Coders at Work web site: www.codersatwork.com. The complete list was 284 names. Having digested everyone’s feedback, we selected 15 folks who’ve been kind enough to agree to be interviewed: Frances Allen: Pioneer in optimizing compilers, first woman to win the Turing Award (2006) and first female IBM fellow Joe Armstrong: Inventor of Erlang Joshua Bloch: Author of the Java collections framework, now at Google Bernie Cosell: One of the main software guys behind the original ARPANET IMPs and a master debugger Douglas Crockford: JSON founder, JavaScript architect at Yahoo! L. Peter Deutsch: Author of Ghostscript, implementer of Smalltalk-80 at Xerox PARC and Lisp 1.5 on PDP-1 Brendan Eich: Inventor of JavaScript, CTO of the Mozilla Corporation Brad Fitzpatrick: Writer of LiveJournal, OpenID, memcached, and Perlbal Dan Ingalls: Smalltalk implementor and designer Simon Peyton Jones: Coinventor of Haskell and lead designer of Glasgow Haskell Compiler Donald Knuth: Author of The Art of Computer Programming and creator of TeX Peter Norvig: Director of Research at Google and author of the standard text on AI Guy Steele: Coinventor of Scheme and part of the Common Lisp Gang of Five, currently working on Fortress Ken Thompson: Inventor of UNIX Jamie Zawinski: Author of XEmacs and early Netscape/Mozilla hacker
Author: Donald E. Johnson
Publisher: Big Mac Publishers
ISBN: 0982355467
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 136
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Book Description
"This is currently the best book covering the relationship between genome and computer architectures." - JOHNATHAN BARTLETT, Author / Publisher / Speaker / Director of Technology ----- This book highlights the informational aspects of life that are generally overlooked or ignored in chemical and biological evolutionary scenarios. Each cell of an organism has millions of interacting computers reading and processing digital information, using digital programs and digital codes to communicate and translate information. Life is an intersection of physical science and information science. Both domains are critical for any life to exist, and each must be investigated using that domain's principles. Yet most scientists have been attempting to use physical science to explain life's information domain, a practice which has no scientific justification. -- As you can tell by the preceding words this research is a fascinating approach to the question of the origin of life. - (PUBLISHER) ----- "Programming of Life is an excellent freshman level review of the formal programming, coding/decoding, integration, organization, Prescriptive Information (PI), memory, regulation and control required for a physical object to find itself 'alive.' DONALD E. JOHNSON is uniquely qualified to unpackage the strong parallels between everyday cybernetic design and engineering and the workings of the cell. I highly recommend this book." -DAVID L. ABEL, Director, The Gene Emergence Project Department of ProtoBioCybernetics and ProtoBioSemiotics The Origin of Life Science Foundation, Inc. ----- (ABOUT THE AUTHOR: ) DR. DON JOHNSON has earned Ph.D.s in both Computer & Information Sciences from the University of Minnesota and in Chemistry from Michigan State University. He was a senior research scientist for 10 years in pharmaceutical and medical / scientific instrument fields, served as president and technical expert in an independent computer consulting firm for many years, and taught for 20 years in universities in Wisconsin, Minnesota, California, and Europe. He now maintains scienceintegrity.net to expose unsubstantiated claims in science and has made presentations on most continents.
Author: Ellen Ullman
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 0374711410
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 286
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Book Description
The never-more-necessary return of one of our most vital and eloquent voices on technology and culture, the author of the seminal Close to the Machine The last twenty years have brought us the rise of the internet, the development of artificial intelligence, the ubiquity of once unimaginably powerful computers, and the thorough transformation of our economy and society. Through it all, Ellen Ullman lived and worked inside that rising culture of technology, and in Life in Code she tells the continuing story of the changes it wrought with a unique, expert perspective. When Ellen Ullman moved to San Francisco in the early 1970s and went on to become a computer programmer, she was joining a small, idealistic, and almost exclusively male cadre that aspired to genuinely change the world. In 1997 Ullman wrote Close to the Machine, the now classic and still definitive account of life as a coder at the birth of what would be a sweeping technological, cultural, and financial revolution. Twenty years later, the story Ullman recounts is neither one of unbridled triumph nor a nostalgic denial of progress. It is necessarily the story of digital technology’s loss of innocence as it entered the cultural mainstream, and it is a personal reckoning with all that has changed, and so much that hasn’t. Life in Code is an essential text toward our understanding of the last twenty years—and the next twenty.
Author: Daniel Higginbotham
Publisher: No Starch Press
ISBN: 1593277237
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 329
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Book Description
For weeks, months—nay!—from the very moment you were born, you’ve felt it calling to you. At long last you’ll be united with the programming language you’ve been longing for: Clojure! As a Lisp-style functional programming language, Clojure lets you write robust and elegant code, and because it runs on the Java Virtual Machine, you can take advantage of the vast Java ecosystem. Clojure for the Brave and True offers a "dessert-first" approach: you’ll start playing with real programs immediately, as you steadily acclimate to the abstract but powerful features of Lisp and functional programming. Inside you’ll find an offbeat, practical guide to Clojure, filled with quirky sample programs that catch cheese thieves and track glittery vampires. Learn how to: –Wield Clojure’s core functions –Use Emacs for Clojure development –Write macros to modify Clojure itself –Use Clojure’s tools to simplify concurrency and parallel programming Clojure for the Brave and True assumes no prior experience with Clojure, the Java Virtual Machine, or functional programming. Are you ready, brave reader, to meet your true destiny? Grab your best pair of parentheses—you’re about to embark on an epic journey into the world of Clojure!
Author: Annette Vee
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262340240
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 375
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Book Description
How the theoretical tools of literacy help us understand programming in its historical, social and conceptual contexts. The message from educators, the tech community, and even politicians is clear: everyone should learn to code. To emphasize the universality and importance of computer programming, promoters of coding for everyone often invoke the concept of “literacy,” drawing parallels between reading and writing code and reading and writing text. In this book, Annette Vee examines the coding-as-literacy analogy and argues that it can be an apt rhetorical frame. The theoretical tools of literacy help us understand programming beyond a technical level, and in its historical, social, and conceptual contexts. Viewing programming from the perspective of literacy and literacy from the perspective of programming, she argues, shifts our understandings of both. Computer programming becomes part of an array of communication skills important in everyday life, and literacy, augmented by programming, becomes more capacious. Vee examines the ways that programming is linked with literacy in coding literacy campaigns, considering the ideologies that accompany this coupling, and she looks at how both writing and programming encode and distribute information. She explores historical parallels between writing and programming, using the evolution of mass textual literacy to shed light on the trajectory of code from military and government infrastructure to large-scale businesses to personal use. Writing and coding were institutionalized, domesticated, and then established as a basis for literacy. Just as societies demonstrated a “literate mentality” regardless of the literate status of individuals, Vee argues, a “computational mentality” is now emerging even though coding is still a specialized skill.
Author: Jonathan E. Steinhart
Publisher: No Starch Press
ISBN: 1593279701
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 505
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Book Description
A primer on the underlying technologies that allow computer programs to work. Covers topics like computer hardware, combinatorial logic, sequential logic, computer architecture, computer anatomy, and Input/Output. Many coders are unfamiliar with the underlying technologies that make their programs run. But why should you care when your code appears to work? Because you want it to run well and not be riddled with hard-to-find bugs. You don't want to be in the news because your code had a security problem. Lots of technical detail is available online but it's not organized or collected into a convenient place. In The Secret Life of Programs, veteran engineer Jonathan E. Steinhart explores--in depth--the foundational concepts that underlie the machine. Subjects like computer hardware, how software behaves on hardware, as well as how people have solved problems using technology over time. You'll learn: How the real world is converted into a form that computers understand, like bits, logic, numbers, text, and colors The fundamental building blocks that make up a computer including logic gates, adders, decoders, registers, and memory Why designing programs to match computer hardware, especially memory, improves performance How programs are converted into machine language that computers understand How software building blocks are combined to create programs like web browsers Clever tricks for making programs more efficient, like loop invariance, strength reduction, and recursive subdivision The fundamentals of computer security and machine intelligence Project design, documentation, scheduling, portability, maintenance, and other practical programming realities. Learn what really happens when your code runs on the machine and you'll learn to craft better, more efficient code.
Author: Scott Rosenberg
Publisher: Crown Currency
ISBN: 1400082471
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 415
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Book Description
Our civilization runs on software. Yet the art of creating it continues to be a dark mystery, even to the experts. To find out why it’s so hard to bend computers to our will, Scott Rosenberg spent three years following a team of maverick software developers—led by Lotus 1-2-3 creator Mitch Kapor—designing a novel personal information manager meant to challenge market leader Microsoft Outlook. Their story takes us through a maze of abrupt dead ends and exhilarating breakthroughs as they wrestle not only with the abstraction of code, but with the unpredictability of human behavior— especially their own.
Author: Chris Pine
Publisher: Pragmatic Bookshelf
ISBN: 1680508725
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 317
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Book Description
It's easier to learn how to program a computer than it has ever been before. Now everyone can learn to write programs for themselves - no previous experience is necessary. Chris Pine takes a thorough, but lighthearted approach that teaches you the fundamentals of computer programming, with a minimum of fuss or bother. Whether you are interested in a new hobby or a new career, this book is your doorway into the world of programming. Computers are everywhere, and being able to program them is more important than it has ever been. But since most books on programming are written for other programmers, it can be hard to break in. At least it used to be. Chris Pine will teach you how to program. You'll learn to use your computer better, to get it to do what you want it to do. Starting with small, simple one-line programs to calculate your age in seconds, you'll see how to write interactive programs, to use APIs to fetch live data from the internet, to rename your photos from your digital camera, and more. You'll learn the same technology used to drive modern dynamic websites and large, professional applications. Whether you are looking for a fun new hobby or are interested in entering the tech world as a professional, this book gives you a solid foundation in programming. Chris teaches the basics, but also shows you how to think like a programmer. You'll learn through tons of examples, and through programming challenges throughout the book. When you finish, you'll know how and where to learn more - you'll be on your way. What You Need: All you need to learn how to program is a computer (Windows, macOS, or Linux) and an internet connection. Chris Pine will lead you through setting set up with the software you will need to start writing programs of your own.
