The Telephone Gambit

The Telephone Gambit PDF Author: Seth Shulman
Publisher: W. W. Norton
ISBN: 9780393062069
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Barcelona is a city that has been written and rewritten by its inhabitants for over 2000 years. The writer Joan Barril invites us to discover it in a pleasant and colourful stroll, through its human, artistic and architectural wealth. Includes fold-out panoramic views.

The Telephone Gambit

The Telephone Gambit PDF Author: Seth Shulman
Publisher: W. W. Norton
ISBN: 9780393062069
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Barcelona is a city that has been written and rewritten by its inhabitants for over 2000 years. The writer Joan Barril invites us to discover it in a pleasant and colourful stroll, through its human, artistic and architectural wealth. Includes fold-out panoramic views.

The Telephone Gambit: Chasing Alexander Graham Bell's Secret

The Telephone Gambit: Chasing Alexander Graham Bell's Secret PDF Author: Seth Shulman
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 039333368X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
Telephone.

The Moral Arc

The Moral Arc PDF Author: Michael Shermer
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 0805096930
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 590

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Book Description
Bestselling author Michael Shermer's exploration of science and morality that demonstrates how the scientific way of thinking has made people, and society as a whole, more moral From Galileo and Newton to Thomas Hobbes and Martin Luther King, Jr., thinkers throughout history have consciously employed scientific techniques to better understand the non-physical world. The Age of Reason and the Enlightenment led theorists to apply scientific reasoning to the non-scientific disciplines of politics, economics, and moral philosophy. Instead of relying on the woodcuts of dissected bodies in old medical texts, physicians opened bodies themselves to see what was there; instead of divining truth through the authority of an ancient holy book or philosophical treatise, people began to explore the book of nature for themselves through travel and exploration; instead of the supernatural belief in the divine right of kings, people employed a natural belief in the right of democracy. In The Moral Arc, Shermer will explain how abstract reasoning, rationality, empiricism, skepticism--scientific ways of thinking--have profoundly changed the way we perceive morality and, indeed, move us ever closer to a more just world.

A Troublesome Inheritance

A Troublesome Inheritance PDF Author: Nicholas Wade
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0698163796
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
Drawing on startling new evidence from the mapping of the genome, an explosive new account of the genetic basis of race and its role in the human story Fewer ideas have been more toxic or harmful than the idea of the biological reality of race, and with it the idea that humans of different races are biologically different from one another. For this understandable reason, the idea has been banished from polite academic conversation. Arguing that race is more than just a social construct can get a scholar run out of town, or at least off campus, on a rail. Human evolution, the consensus view insists, ended in prehistory. Inconveniently, as Nicholas Wade argues in A Troublesome Inheritance, the consensus view cannot be right. And in fact, we know that populations have changed in the past few thousand years—to be lactose tolerant, for example, and to survive at high altitudes. Race is not a bright-line distinction; by definition it means that the more human populations are kept apart, the more they evolve their own distinct traits under the selective pressure known as Darwinian evolution. For many thousands of years, most human populations stayed where they were and grew distinct, not just in outward appearance but in deeper senses as well. Wade, the longtime journalist covering genetic advances for The New York Times, draws widely on the work of scientists who have made crucial breakthroughs in establishing the reality of recent human evolution. The most provocative claims in this book involve the genetic basis of human social habits. What we might call middle-class social traits—thrift, docility, nonviolence—have been slowly but surely inculcated genetically within agrarian societies, Wade argues. These “values” obviously had a strong cultural component, but Wade points to evidence that agrarian societies evolved away from hunter-gatherer societies in some crucial respects. Also controversial are his findings regarding the genetic basis of traits we associate with intelligence, such as literacy and numeracy, in certain ethnic populations, including the Chinese and Ashkenazi Jews. Wade believes deeply in the fundamental equality of all human peoples. He also believes that science is best served by pursuing the truth without fear, and if his mission to arrive at a coherent summa of what the new genetic science does and does not tell us about race and human history leads straight into a minefield, then so be it. This will not be the last word on the subject, but it will begin a powerful and overdue conversation.

Infinite Reality

Infinite Reality PDF Author: Jim Blascovich
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 006204169X
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 378

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Book Description
“Enough with speculation about our digital future. Infinite Reality is the straight dope on what is and isn’t happening to us right now, from two of the only scientists working on the boundaries between real life and its virtual extensions.” —Douglas Rushkoff, author of Program or Be Programmed Can our brains recognize where "reality" ends and "virtual" begins? Where will technology lead us in five, fifty, or five hundred years? An unrivaled guide to our digital future that has been cited by the Supreme Court, Infinite Reality is a mind-bending "journey through the virtual universe" (Wall Street Journal). Jim Blascovich and Jeremy Bailenson, two pioneering authorities, explore the profound potential of emerging technologies and reveal how our brains behave in digital worlds. Along the way, Bailenson and Blascovich examine the timeless philosophical questions of the self and "reality" that arise through the digital experience; explain how virtual reality's latest and future forms—including immersive video games and social-networking sites—will soon be seamlessly integrated into our lives; show the many surprising practical applications of virtual reality, from education and medicine to sex and warfare; and probe further-off possibilities like "total personality downloads" that would allow your great-great-grandchildren to have a conversation with "you" a century or more after your death. Equally fascinating, farsighted, and profound, Infinite Reality is an essential guide to our virtual future, where the experience of being human will be deeply transformed.

Exploding the Phone

Exploding the Phone PDF Author: Phil Lapsley
Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic
ISBN: 0802193757
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 432

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Book Description
“A rollicking history of the telephone system and the hackers who exploited its flaws.” —Kirkus Reviews, starred review Before smartphones, back even before the Internet and personal computers, a misfit group of technophiles, blind teenagers, hippies, and outlaws figured out how to hack the world’s largest machine: the telephone system. Starting with Alexander Graham Bell’s revolutionary “harmonic telegraph,” by the middle of the twentieth century the phone system had grown into something extraordinary, a web of cutting-edge switching machines and human operators that linked together millions of people like never before. But the network had a billion-dollar flaw, and once people discovered it, things would never be the same. Exploding the Phone tells this story in full for the first time. It traces the birth of long-distance communication and the telephone, the rise of AT&T’s monopoly, the creation of the sophisticated machines that made it all work, and the discovery of Ma Bell’s Achilles’ heel. Phil Lapsley expertly weaves together the clandestine underground of “phone phreaks” who turned the network into their electronic playground, the mobsters who exploited its flaws to avoid the feds, the explosion of telephone hacking in the counterculture, and the war between the phreaks, the phone company, and the FBI. The product of extensive original research, Exploding the Phone is a groundbreaking, captivating book that “does for the phone phreaks what Steven Levy’s Hackers did for computer pioneers” (Boing Boing). “An authoritative, jaunty and enjoyable account of their sometimes comical, sometimes impressive and sometimes disquieting misdeeds.” —The Wall Street Journal “Brilliantly researched.” —The Atlantic “A fantastically fun romp through the world of early phone hackers, who sought free long distance, and in the end helped launch the computer era.” —The Seattle Times

AC/DC

AC/DC PDF Author: Tom McNichol
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1118047028
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 187

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Book Description
AC/DC tells the little-known story of how Thomas Edison wrongly bet in the fierce war between supporters of alternating current and direct current. The savagery of this electrical battle can hardly be imagined today. The showdown between AC and DC began as a rather straightforward conflict between technical standards, a battle of competing methods to deliver essentially the same product, electricity. But the skirmish soon metastasized into something bigger and darker. In the AC/DC battle, the worst aspects of human nature somehow got caught up in the wires; a silent, deadly flow of arrogance, vanity, and cruelty. Following the path of least resistance, the war of currents soon settled around that most primal of human emotions: fear. AC/DC serves as an object lesson in bad business strategy and poor decision making. Edison's inability to see his mistake was a key factor in his loss of control over the ?operating system? for his future inventions?not to mention the company he founded, General Electric.

The Invention of Miracles

The Invention of Miracles PDF Author: Katie Booth
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1501167111
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 416

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Book Description
"An astonishingly revisionist biography of Alexander Graham Bell, telling the true-and troubling-story of the inventor of the telephone. We think of Alexander Graham Bell as the inventor of the telephone, but that's not how he saw his own career. Bell was an elocution teacher by profession. As the son of a deaf woman and, later, husband to another, his goal in life from adolescence was to teach the deaf to speak. Even his tinkering sprang from his teaching work; the telephone had its origins as a speech reading machine. And yet by the end of his life, despite his best efforts-or perhaps, more accurately, because of them-Bell had become the American Deaf community's most powerful enemy. The Invention of Miracles recounts an extraordinary piece of forgotten history. Weaving together a moving love story with a fascinating tale of innovation, it follows the complicated tragedy of a brilliant young man who set about stamping out what he saw as a dangerous language: Sign. The book offers a heartbreaking look at how heroes can become villains and how good intentions are, unfortunately, nowhere near enough-as well as a powerful account of the dawn of a civil rights movement and the triumphant tale of how the Deaf community reclaimed their once-forbidden language. Katie Booth has been researching this story for over a decade, poring over Bell's papers, Library of Congress archives, and the records of deaf schools around America. But she's also lived with this story for her entire life. Witnessing the damaging impact of Bell's legacy on her family would set her on a path that upturned everything she thought she knew about language, power, deafness, and the telephone"--

Invented by Law

Invented by Law PDF Author: Christopher Beauchamp
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674368061
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 283

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Book Description
Christopher Beauchamp debunks the myth of Alexander Graham Bell as the telephone’s sole inventor, exposing that story’s origins in the arguments advanced by Bell’s lawyers during fiercely contested battles for patent monopoly. The courts anointed Bell father of the telephone—likely the most consequential intellectual property right ever granted.

Term Paper Resource Guide to Nineteenth-Century U.S. History

Term Paper Resource Guide to Nineteenth-Century U.S. History PDF Author: Kathleen W. Craver
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313348111
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 424

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Book Description
Major help for those inevitable American History term paper projects has arrived to enrich and stimulate students in challenging and enjoyable ways. Students from high school age to undergraduate will be able to get a jumpstart on assignments with the hundreds of term paper projects and research information offered here in an easy-to-use format. Users can quickly choose from the 100 important events of the nineteenth century, carefully selected to be appealing to students, and delve right in. Each event entry begins with a brief summary to pique interest and then offers original and thought-provoking term paper ideas in both standard and alternative formats that incorporate the latest in electronic media, such as iPod and iMovie. The best in primary and secondary sources for further research are then annotated, followed by vetted, stable Web site suggestions and multimedia resources for further viewing and listening. Librarians and faculty will want to use this as well. Students dread term papers, but with this book, the research experience is transformed and elevated. Term Paper Resource Guide to Nineteenth-Century U.S. History is a superb source to motivate and educate students who have a wide range of interests and talents. The provided topics on events, people, inventions, cultural contributions, wars, and technological advances reflect the country's nineteenth-century character and experience. Some examples of the topics are Barbary Pirate Wars, the Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings liaison, Tecumseh and the Prophet, the Santa Fe Trail, Immigration in the 1840s, the Seneca Falls Convention, the Purchase of Alaska, Boss Tweed's Ring, Wyatt Earp and the Gunfight at O.K. Corral, United States v. Wong Kim Ark, and Scott Joplin and Ragtime Music.