The Impossible Machine

The Impossible Machine PDF Author: Adam Sitze
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 047202910X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 380

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Book Description
Adam Sitze meticulously traces the origins of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission back to two well-established instruments of colonial and imperial governance: the jurisprudence of indemnity and the commission of inquiry. This genealogy provides a fresh, though counterintuitive, understanding of the TRC’s legal, political, and cultural importance. The TRC’s genius, Sitze contends, is not the substitution of “forgiving” restorative justice for “strict” legal justice but rather the innovative adaptation of colonial law, sovereignty, and government. However, this approach also contains a potential liability: if the TRC’s origins are forgotten, the very enterprise intended to overturn the jurisprudence of colonial rule may perpetuate it. In sum, Sitze proposes a provocative new means by which South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission should be understood and evaluated.

The Impossible Machine

The Impossible Machine PDF Author: Adam Sitze
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472118757
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 393

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Book Description
A fresh, though counterintuitive, understanding of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s legal, political, and cultural heritage

The Impossible Machine

The Impossible Machine PDF Author: Adam Sitze
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 047202910X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 380

Get Book

Book Description
Adam Sitze meticulously traces the origins of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission back to two well-established instruments of colonial and imperial governance: the jurisprudence of indemnity and the commission of inquiry. This genealogy provides a fresh, though counterintuitive, understanding of the TRC’s legal, political, and cultural importance. The TRC’s genius, Sitze contends, is not the substitution of “forgiving” restorative justice for “strict” legal justice but rather the innovative adaptation of colonial law, sovereignty, and government. However, this approach also contains a potential liability: if the TRC’s origins are forgotten, the very enterprise intended to overturn the jurisprudence of colonial rule may perpetuate it. In sum, Sitze proposes a provocative new means by which South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission should be understood and evaluated.

The Mathematical Corporation

The Mathematical Corporation PDF Author: Josh Sullivan
Publisher: PublicAffairs
ISBN: 1610397894
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
The most powerful weapon in business today is the alliance between the mathematical smarts of machines and the imaginative human intellect of great leaders. Together they make the mathematical corporation, the business model of the future. We are at a once-in-a-decade breaking point similar to the quality revolution of the 1980s and the dawn of the internet age in the 1990s: leaders must transform how they run their organizations, or competitors will bring them crashing to earth--often overnight. Mathematical corporations--the organizations that will master the future--will outcompete high-flying rivals by merging the best of human ingenuity with machine intelligence. While smart machines are weapon number one for organizations, leaders are still the drivers of breakthroughs. Only they can ask crucial questions to capitalize on business opportunities newly discovered in oceans of data. This dynamic combination will make possible the fulfillment of missions that once seemed out of reach, even impossible to attain. Josh Sullivan and Angela Zutavern's extraordinary examples include the entrepreneur who upended preventive health care, the oceanographer who transformed fisheries management, and the pharmaceutical company that used algorithm-driven optimization to boost vaccine yields. Together they offer a profoundly optimistic vision for a dazzling new phase in business, and a playbook for how smart companies can manage the essential combination of human and machine.

The Twittering Machine

The Twittering Machine PDF Author: Richard Seymour
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1788739310
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
A brilliant probe into the political and psychological effects of our changing relationship with social media Former social media executives tell us that the system is an addiction-machine. We are users, waiting for our next hit as we like, comment and share. We write to the machine as individuals, but it responds by aggregating our fantasies, desires and frailties into data, and returning them to us as a commodity experience. The Twittering Machine is an unflinching view into the calamities of digital life: the circus of online trolling, flourishing alt-right subcultures, pervasive corporate surveillance, and the virtual data mines of Facebook and Google where we spend considerable portions of our free time. In this polemical tour de force, Richard Seymour shows how the digital world is changing the ways we speak, write, and think. Through journalism, psychoanalytic reflection and insights from users, developers, security experts and others, Seymour probes the human side of the machine, asking what we’re getting out of it, and what we’re getting into. Social media held out the promise that we could make our own history–to what extent did we choose the nightmare that it has become?

Modern Thermodynamics for Chemists and Biochemists

Modern Thermodynamics for Chemists and Biochemists PDF Author: Dennis Sherwood
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191085820
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 928

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Book Description
Thermodynamics is fundamental to university and college curricula in chemistry, physics, engineering and many life sciences around the world. It is also notoriously difficult for students to understand, learn and apply. What makes this book different, and special, is the clarity of the text. The writing style is fluid, natural and lucid, and everything is explained in a logical and transparent manner. Thermodynamics is a deep, and important, branch of science, and this book does not make it "easy". But it does make it intelligible. This book introduces a new, 'Fourth Law' of Thermodynamics' based on the notion of Gibbs free energy, which underpins almost every application of thermodynamics and which the authors claim is worthy of recognition as a 'law'. The last four chapters bring thermodynamics into the twenty-first century, dealing with bioenergetics (how living systems capture and use free energy), macromolecule assembly (how proteins fold), and macromolecular aggregation (how, for example, virus capsids assemble). This is of great current relevance to students of biochemistry, biochemical engineering and pharmacy, and is covered in very few other texts on thermodynamics. The book also contains many novel and effective examples, such as the explanation of why friction is irreversible, the proof of the depression of the freezing point, and the explanation of the biochemical standard state.

The Equality Machine

The Equality Machine PDF Author: Orly Lobel
Publisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 1541774736
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
AN ECONOMIST BEST BOOK OF 2022 At a time when AI and digital platforms are under fire, Orly Lobel, a renowned tech policy scholar, defends technology as a powerful tool we can harness to achieve equality and a better future. Much has been written about the challenges tech presents to equality and democracy. But we can either criticize big data and automation or steer it to do better. Lobel makes a compelling argument that while we cannot stop technological development, we can direct its course according to our most fundamental values. With provocative insights in every chapter, Lobel masterfully shows that digital technology frequently has a comparative advantage over humans in detecting discrimination, correcting historical exclusions, subverting long-standing stereotypes, and addressing the world’s thorniest problems: climate, poverty, injustice, literacy, accessibility, speech, health, and safety. Lobel's vivid examples—from labor markets to dating markets—provide powerful evidence for how we can harness technology for good. The book’s incisive analysis and elegant storytelling will change the debate about technology and restore human agency over our values.

The Perpetual Motion Machine

The Perpetual Motion Machine PDF Author: Paul Scheerbart
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780984115549
Category : Perpetual motion
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
In the last days of 1907, the German novelist and exponent of glass architecture Paul Scheerbart embarked upon an attempt to invent a perpetual motion machine. For the next two and a half years he would document his ongoing efforts (and failures) from his laundry-room-cum-laboratory, hiring plumbers and mechanics to construct his models while spinning out a series of imagined futures that his invention-in-the-making was going to enable. The Perpetual Motion Machine: The Story of an Invention, originally published in German in 1910, is an indefinable blend of diary, diagrams and digression that falls somewhere between memoir and reverie: a document of what poet and translator Andrew Joron calls a "two-and-a-half-year-long tantrum of the imagination." Shifting ambiguously from irony to enthusiasm and back, Scheerbart's unique amalgamation of visionary humor and optimistic failure ultimately proves to be a more literary invention than scientific: a perpetual motion of a fevered imagination that reads as if Robert Walser had tried his hand at science fiction. With "toiling wheels" inextricably embedded in his head, Scheerbart's visions of rising globalization, ecological devastation, militaristic weapons of mass destruction and the possible end of literature soon lead him to dread success more than failure. The Perpetual Motion Machine is an ode to the fertility of misery and a battle cry of the imagination against praxis.

The Machine as Metaphor and Tool

The Machine as Metaphor and Tool PDF Author: Hermann Haken
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 3642777112
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 169

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Book Description
The chapters in this book centre around one main theme, the concept of the machine and its use as metaphor in a variety of contexts. This concept is deeply rooted in western culture and is frequently used to interpret complex systems in nature and society. With the advent of electronic computers, the machine metaphor applied to thinking and the brain has becOIne even more pertinent. The idea of a machine has changed over time. In this book these transformations are made trans parent, various aspects of the machine metaphor are discussed and limitations and pitfalls of the metaphor are elaborated. The chapters are written in a non-technical fashion and are accessible to a large readership of scientists and also laymen interested in the scientific per spectives and logical foundations of the machine concept that has been so influential in western thinking. The idea of the book has its origin in a workshop held at the Sci entific Station in Abisko, Sweden, in May 1990, where several of the present authors participated. The meeting was organized and spon sored by the Swedish Council for Planning and Coordination of Re search (FRN). Since 1983, the FRN has actively promoted a series of such annual events at Abisko, all of which have been devoted to the exploration of various aspects of complex systems and their evolution.

Spying on Spies

Spying on Spies PDF Author: Marissa Moss
Publisher: Abrams
ISBN: 1647009782
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
Bestselling and award-winning author-illustrator Marissa Moss tells the gripping story of America’s first female cryptanalyst, Elizebeth Smith Friedman, who busted Nazi spy rings. Praised for her accessible blend of narrative nonfiction with graphic novel-style chapter openers in The Woman Who Split the Atom: The Life of Lise Meitner, Marissa Moss’s Spying on Spies: How Elizebeth Smith Friedman Broke the Nazis’ Secret Codes is another fascinating story of a groundbreaking woman in STEM. One of the founders of US cryptology who would eventually become one of the world’s greatest code breakers, Elizebeth Smith Friedman (1892–1980) was a brilliant mind behind many important battles throughout the 20th century, saving many lives through her intelligence and heroism. Whip-smart and determined, Elizebeth displayed a remarkable aptitude for language and recognizing patterns from a young age. After getting her start by looking for linguistic clues to the true authorship of Shakespeare’s writings, she and her husband, William Friedman, were tasked with heading up the first government code-breaking unit in America, training teams and building their own sophisticated code systems during the lead-up to World War I. Elizebeth’s solo career was even more impressive. She became the Treasury Department’s and Coast Guard’s first female codebreaker and created her own top-notch codebreaking unit, where she trained and led many male colleagues. During Prohibition in the 1920s, her work solving and intercepting coded messages from mobsters and criminal gangs lead to hundreds of high-profile criminal prosecutions, including members of Al Capone’s gang. Her crowning achievement came during World War II, when Elizebeth uncovered an intricate network of Nazi spies operating in South America, a feat that neither law enforcement nor intelligence agencies had been able to accomplish. Despite her unparalleled accomplishments, Elizebeth was largely written out of history books and overshadowed by her husband. Only in very recent years has her name begun to receive the attention it deserves, including the US Coast Guard naming a ship in her honor and the US Senate passing a 2019 resolution to honor her life and legacy. Back matter includes codes for kids to learn!

The Plot Machine

The Plot Machine PDF Author: Kai Mikkonen
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9789042015968
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
This book presents a new and exciting theory of the modern French novel by developing the notion of the narrative as a "textual machine". Many turn-of-the-century French novels thematically identified their means of narration through the various machines that they depicted. The narrative devices that were particularly important in this self-reflection included: the temporal order of the plot, the question of a narrative's beginning and end, the hierarchy of narrative voices, and the techniques of the point of view. The question of mechanization became central on all these fronts. Has the novel become automated or machine-like? At the same time, the machine metaphors in the novels of Alfred Jarry, Emile Zola, Jules Verne, Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Raymond Roussel combined the question of the narrative form with new ways to think about man's relationship with technology and the cultural environment. The early modernist texts drew upon contradictory notions of technological promise and threat while they also depicted new forms of identity and behavior, related to or modeled after machines. These texts highlighted cultural assumptions concerning technological innovations and critiqued, mainly through parody and through various figures of man-machine fusion, the positivistic belief in progress. Such writers looked for evidence of advanced forms of consciousness arising out of encounters with new technology such as: telephones, trains, bicycles, telegraphy, phonographs and electricity. This volume will be of interest to anyone working in the field of modern French literary and cultural history. It will especially appeal to anyone intrigued with the origins of the modernist novel, the history of narrative forms, and the question of how the experience of new technology may be portrayed in literary texts.