The Geek Manifesto

The Geek Manifesto PDF Author: Mark Henderson
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1446438848
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
Whether we want to improve education or cut crime, to enhance public health or to generate clean energy, we need the experimental methods of science - the best tool humanity has yet developed for working out what works. Yet from the way we're governed to the news we're fed by the media we're let down by a lack of understanding and respect for its insights and evidence. In The Geek Manifesto Mark Henderson explains why and how we need to entrench scientific thinking more deeply into every aspect of our society. A new movement is gathering. Let's turn it into a force our leaders cannot ignore. This edition includes an appendix: 'A Geek Manifesto for America' by David Dobbs.

The Geek Manifesto

The Geek Manifesto PDF Author: Mark Henderson
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1446438848
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 340

Get Book

Book Description
Whether we want to improve education or cut crime, to enhance public health or to generate clean energy, we need the experimental methods of science - the best tool humanity has yet developed for working out what works. Yet from the way we're governed to the news we're fed by the media we're let down by a lack of understanding and respect for its insights and evidence. In The Geek Manifesto Mark Henderson explains why and how we need to entrench scientific thinking more deeply into every aspect of our society. A new movement is gathering. Let's turn it into a force our leaders cannot ignore. This edition includes an appendix: 'A Geek Manifesto for America' by David Dobbs.

Soft Machines

Soft Machines PDF Author: Richard A. L. Jones
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191567248
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
Enthusiasts look forward to a time when tiny machines reassemble matter and process information with unparalleled power and precision. But is their vision realistic? Where is the science heading? As nanotechnology (a new technology that many believe will transform society in the next one hundred years) rises higher in the news agenda and popular consciousness, there is a real need for a book which discusses clearly the science on which this technology will be based. Whilst it is most easy to simply imagine these tiny machines as scaled-down versions of the macroscopic machines we are all familiar with, the way things behave on small scales is quite different to the way they behave on large scales. Engineering on the nanoscale will use very different principles to those we are used to in our everyday lives, and the materials used in nanotehnology will be soft and mutable, rather than hard and unyielding. "Soft Machines" explains in a lively and very accessible manner why the nanoworld is so different to the macro-world which we are all familiar with. Why does nature engineer things in the way it does, and how can we learn to use these unfamiliar principles to create valuable new materials and artefacts which will have a profound effect on medicine, electronics, energy and the environment in the twenty-first century. With a firmer understanding of the likely relationship between nanotechnology and nature itself, we can gain a much clearer notion of what dangers this powerful technology may potentially pose, as well as come to realise that nanotechnology will have more in common with biology than with conventional engineering.

The Manifesto on How to be Interesting

The Manifesto on How to be Interesting PDF Author: Holly Bourne
Publisher: Usborne Publishing Ltd
ISBN: 1409579573
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 393

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Book Description
Apparently I'm boring. A nobody. But that's all about to change. Because I am starting a project. Here. Now. For myself. And if you want to come along for the ride then you're very welcome. Bree is by no means popular. Most of the time, she hates her life, her school, her never-there parents. So she writes. But when Bree is told she needs to stop shutting the world out and start living a life worth writing about, The Manifesto on How to Be Interesting is born. A manifesto that will change everything... ...but the question is, at what cost?

Geek Girls Unite

Geek Girls Unite PDF Author: Leslie Simon
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0062099027
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 349

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Book Description
What do Amy Poehler, Bjork, Felicia Day, Martha Stewart, Miranda July, and Zooey Deschanel have in common? They’re just a few of the amazing women proving that “geek” is no longer a four-letter word. In recent years, male geeks have taken the world by storm. But what about their female counterparts? After all, fangirls are just like fanboys—they put on their Imperial Stormtrooper Lycra pants one leg at a time. Geek Girls Unite is a call to arms for every girl who has ever obsessed over music, comics, film, comedy, books, crafts, fashion, or anything else under the Death Star. Music geek girl Leslie Simon offers an overview of the geek elite by covering groundbreaking women, hall-of-famers, ultimate love matches, and potential frenemies, along with her top picks for playlists, books, movies, and websites. This smart and hilarious tour through girl geekdom is a must-have for any woman who has ever wondered where her sassy rebel sisters have been hiding.

The Geek Manifesto

The Geek Manifesto PDF Author: Callum Jacobs
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN: 9781484024744
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
White hats, red teams and black ops. "How would it feel to wake up one day and find that everything in your life had changed?" Alex Wilde, recently promoted head of the government's Digital Future project, finds his world plunged into chaos when it appears he may be responsible for the collapse of London's entire television network. Along with new friends the charismatic but unpredictable drifter Szandor and PhD student Minal, Alex finds himself facing a drunken raid on Highgate Cemetery, an LSD-laced chocolate fountain and a tiger fight, as he gets caught up with a shadowy group of idealistic computer hackers in a battle for control of the nation's media. Callum Jacobs' darkly comic second novel explores the best and worst of cyber society. Edward Abbey's The Monkey Wrench Gang for the Facebook generation.

Geek Heresy

Geek Heresy PDF Author: Kentaro Toyama
Publisher: PublicAffairs
ISBN: 1610395298
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
In 2004, Kentaro Toyama, an award-winning computer scientist, moved to India to start a new research group for Microsoft. Its mission: to explore novel technological solutions to the world's persistent social problems. Together with his team, he invented electronic devices for under-resourced urban schools and developed digital platforms for remote agrarian communities. But after a decade of designing technologies for humanitarian causes, Toyama concluded that no technology, however dazzling, could cause social change on its own. Technologists and policy-makers love to boast about modern innovation, and in their excitement, they exuberantly tout technology's boon to society. But what have our gadgets actually accomplished? Over the last four decades, America saw an explosion of new technologies – from the Internet to the iPhone, from Google to Facebook – but in that same period, the rate of poverty stagnated at a stubborn 13%, only to rise in the recent recession. So, a golden age of innovation in the world's most advanced country did nothing for our most prominent social ill. Toyama's warning resounds: Don't believe the hype! Technology is never the main driver of social progress. Geek Heresy inoculates us against the glib rhetoric of tech utopians by revealing that technology is only an amplifier of human conditions. By telling the moving stories of extraordinary people like Patrick Awuah, a Microsoft millionaire who left his lucrative engineering job to open Ghana's first liberal arts university, and Tara Sreenivasa, a graduate of a remarkable South Indian school that takes children from dollar-a-day families into the high-tech offices of Goldman Sachs and Mercedes-Benz, Toyama shows that even in a world steeped in technology, social challenges are best met with deeply social solutions.

Geek Sublime

Geek Sublime PDF Author: Vikram Chandra
Publisher: Graywolf Press
ISBN: 1555973264
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
The nonfiction debut from the author of the international bestseller Sacred Games about the surprising overlap between writing and computer coding Vikram Chandra has been a computer programmer for almost as long as he has been a novelist. In this extraordinary new book, his first work of nonfiction, he searches for the connections between the worlds of art and technology. Coders are obsessed with elegance and style, just as writers are, but do the words mean the same thing to both? Can we ascribe beauty to the craft of writing code? Exploring such varied topics as logic gates and literary modernism, the machismo of tech geeks, the omnipresence of an "Indian Mafia" in Silicon Valley, and the writings of the eleventh-century Kashmiri thinker Abhinavagupta, Geek Sublime is both an idiosyncratic history of coding and a fascinating meditation on the writer's art. Part literary essay, part technology story, and part memoir, it is an engrossing, original, and heady book of sweeping ideas.

I Find Your Lack of Faith Disturbing

I Find Your Lack of Faith Disturbing PDF Author: A. D. Jameson
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374717079
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
"Funny, incisive, and timely ... Jameson does for geeks what geek culture does for its superheroes: he takes them seriously, respects their power, and refuses to hide his deep affection." —Lawrence Kasdan, co-screenwriter of The Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi, The Force Awakens, and Solo: A Star Wars Story In I Find Your Lack of Faith Disturbing, A. D. Jameson takes geeks and non-geeks alike on a surprising and insightful journey through the science fiction, fantasy, and superhero franchises that now dominate pop culture. Walking us through the rise of geekdom from its underground origins to the top of the box office and bestseller lists, Jameson takes in franchises like The Lord of the Rings, Guardians of the Galaxy, Harry Potter, Star Trek, and, in particular, Star Wars—as well as phenomena like fan fiction, cosplay, and YouTube parodies. Along the way, he blasts through the clichés surrounding geek culture: that its fans are mindless consumers who will embrace all things Spider-Man or Batman, regardless of quality; or that the popularity and financial success of Star Wars led to the death of ambitious filmmaking. A lifelong geek, Jameson shines a new light on beloved classics, explaining the enormous love (and hate) they are capable of inspiring in fan and non-fan alike, while exploding misconceptions as to how and why they were made. I Find Your Lack of Faith Disturbing tells the story of how the geeks have inherited the earth.

She's Such a Geek!

She's Such a Geek! PDF Author: Annalee Newitz
Publisher: Seal Press (CA)
ISBN: 9781580051903
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 231

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Book Description
A lighthearted celebration of the contributions of women in male-dominated arenas features essays on a range of topics, from computer technology and Dungeons and Dragons to comic books and cyberlaw, in an anthology that includes pieces by such contributors as Ellen Spertus, Wendy Seltzer, and Devin Grayson. Original.

Decomposition

Decomposition PDF Author: Andrew Durkin
Publisher: Pantheon
ISBN: 0307911764
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 538

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Book Description
Decomposition is a bracing, revisionary, and provocative inquiry into music—from Beethoven to Duke Ellington, from Conlon Nancarrow to Evelyn Glennie—as a personal and cultural experience: how it is composed, how it is idiosyncratically perceived by critics and reviewers, and why we listen to it the way we do. Andrew Durkin, best known as the leader of the West Coast–based Industrial Jazz Group, is singular for his insistence on asking tough questions about the complexity of our presumptions about music and about listening, especially in the digital age. In this winning and lucid study he explodes the age-old concept of musical composition as the work of individual genius, arguing instead that in both its composition and reception music is fundamentally a collaborative enterprise that comes into being only through mediation. Drawing on a rich variety of examples—Big Jay McNeely’s “Deacon’s Hop,” Biz Markie’s “Alone Again,” George Antheil’s Ballet Mécanique, Frank Zappa’s “While You Were Art,” and Pauline Oliveros’s “Tuning Meditation,” to name only a few—Durkin makes clear that our appreciation of any piece of music is always informed by neuroscientific, psychological, technological, and cultural factors. How we listen to music, he maintains, might have as much power to change it as music might have to change how we listen.