Pinpoint: How GPS is Changing Technology, Culture, and Our Minds

Pinpoint: How GPS is Changing Technology, Culture, and Our Minds PDF Author: Greg Milner
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393244997
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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Book Description
"One of the most mesmerizing and exhilarating, yet alarming modern technology books…an extraordinary tale." —Gillian Tett, Financial Times Pinpoint tells the fascinating story of a hidden system that touches nearly every aspect of modern life. Tracking the development of GPS from its origins as a bomb guidance system to its present ubiquity, Greg Milner examines the technology’s double-edged effect on the way we live, work, and travel. Savvy and original, this sweeping scientific history offers startling insight into how humans understand their place in the world.

Pinpoint: How GPS is Changing Technology, Culture, and Our Minds

Pinpoint: How GPS is Changing Technology, Culture, and Our Minds PDF Author: Greg Milner
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393244997
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 277

Get Book Here

Book Description
"One of the most mesmerizing and exhilarating, yet alarming modern technology books…an extraordinary tale." —Gillian Tett, Financial Times Pinpoint tells the fascinating story of a hidden system that touches nearly every aspect of modern life. Tracking the development of GPS from its origins as a bomb guidance system to its present ubiquity, Greg Milner examines the technology’s double-edged effect on the way we live, work, and travel. Savvy and original, this sweeping scientific history offers startling insight into how humans understand their place in the world.

Perfecting Sound Forever

Perfecting Sound Forever PDF Author: Greg Milner
Publisher: Granta Books
ISBN: 1847086055
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
From our CD collections to iPods bursting with MP3s to the hallowed vinyl of DJs, recordings are the most common way we experience music. Perfecting Sound Forever tells the story of recorded music, introducing us to the innovators, musicians and producers who have affected the way we hear our favourite songs, from Thomas Edison to Phil Spector. Exploring the balance that recordings strike between the real and the represented, Greg Milner asks the questions which have divided sound recorders for the past century: should a recording document reality as faithfully as possible, or should it improve upon or somehow transcend the music it records? What does the perfect record sound like? The answers he uncovers will change the way we think about music.

Pinpoint

Pinpoint PDF Author: Greg Milner
Publisher: Granta Books
ISBN: 1847087108
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
Over the last fifty years, humanity has developed an extraordinary global utility which is omnipresent, universal, and available to all: the Global Positioning System (GPS). A network of twenty-four satellites and their monitoring stations on Earth, it makes possible almost all modern technology, from the smartphone in your pocket to the Mars rover. Neither the internet nor the cloud would work without it. And it is changing us in profound ways we've yet to come to terms with. While GPS has brought us breathtakingly accurate methods of timekeeping, navigation, and earthquake tracking, our overwhelming reliance on it is having unexpected consequences on our culture, and on ourselves. GPS is reshaping our thinking about privacy and surveillance, and brings with it the growing danger of GPS terrorism. Neuroscientists have even found that using GPS for navigation may be affecting our cognitive maps - possibly rearranging the grey matter in our heads - leading to the increasingly common phenomenon 'Death by GPS', in which drivers blindly follow their devices into deserts, lakes, and impassable mountains. Deeply researched, inventive and with fascinating insights into the way we think about our place in the world, Pinpoint reveals the way that the technologies we design to help us can end up shaping our lives. It is at once a grand history of science and a far-reaching book about contemporary culture.

Marconi

Marconi PDF Author: Marc Raboy
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199313601
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 888

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Book Description
A little over a century ago, the world went wireless. Cables and all their limiting inefficiencies gave way to a revolutionary means of transmitting news and information almost everywhere, instantaneously. By means of "Hertzian waves," as radio waves were initially known, ships could now make contact with other ships (saving lives, such as on the doomed S.S. Titanic); financial markets could coordinate with other financial markets, establishing the price of commodities and fixing exchange rates; military commanders could connect with the front lines, positioning artillery and directing troop movements. Suddenly and irrevocably, time and space telescoped beyond what had been thought imaginable. Someone had not only imagined this networked world but realized it: Guglielmo Marconi. As Marc Raboy shows us in this enthralling and comprehensive biography, Marconi was the first truly global figure in modern communications. Born to an Italian father and an Irish mother, he was in many ways stateless, working his cosmopolitanism to advantage. Through a combination of skill, tenacity, luck, vision, and timing, Marconi popularized--and, more critically, patented--the use of radio waves. Soon after he burst into public view at the age of 22 with a demonstration of his wireless apparatus in London, 1896, he established his Wireless Telegraph & Signal Company and seemed unstoppable. He was decorated by the Czar of Russia, named an Italian Senator, knighted by King George V of England, and awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics--all before the age of 40. Until his death in 1937, Marconi was at the heart of every major innovation in electronic communication, courted by powerful scientific, political, and financial interests. He established stations and transmitters in every corner of the globe, from Newfoundland to Buenos Aires, Hawaii to Saint Petersburg. Based on original research and unpublished archival materials in four countries and several languages, Raboy's book is the first to connect significant parts of Marconi's story, from his early days in Italy, to his groundbreaking experiments, to his protean role in world affairs. Raboy also explores Marconi's relationshps with his wives, mistresses, and children, and examines in unsparing detail the last ten years of the inventor's life, when he returned to Italy and became a pillar of Benito Mussolini's fascist regime. Raboy's engrossing biography, which will stand as the authoritative work of its subject, proves that we still live in the world Marconi created.

Living in Information

Living in Information PDF Author: Jorge Arango
Publisher: Rosenfeld Media
ISBN: 1933820942
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
Websites and apps are places where critical parts of our lives happen. We shop, bank, learn, gossip, and select our leaders there. But many of these places weren’t intended to support these activities. Instead, they're designed to capture your attention and sell it to the highest bidder. Living in Information draws upon architecture as a way to design information environments that serve our humanity.

The Age of Resilience

The Age of Resilience PDF Author: Jeremy Rifkin
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
ISBN: 1250093554
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
A sweeping new interpretation of the history of civilization and a transformative vision of how our species will thrive on an unpredictable Earth. The viruses keep coming, the climate is warming, and the Earth is rewilding. Our human family has no playbook to address the mayhem unfolding around us. If there is a change to reckon with, argues the renowned economic and social theorist Jeremy Rifkin, it’s that we are beginning to realize that the human race never had dominion over the Earth and that nature is far more formidable than we thought, while our species seems much smaller and less significant in the bigger picture of life on Earth, undermining our long-cherished worldview. The Age of Progress, once considered sacrosanct, is on a deathwatch while a powerful new narrative, the Age of Resilience, is ascending. In The Age of Resilience, Rifkin takes us on a new journey beginning with how we reconceptualize time and navigate space. During the Age of Progress, efficiency was the gold standard for organizing time, locking our species into the quest to optimize the expropriation, commodification, and consumption of the Earth’s bounty, at ever-greater speeds and in ever-shrinking time intervals, with the objective of increasing the opulence of human society, but at the expense of the depletion of nature. Space, observes Rifkin, became synonymous with passive natural resources, while a principal role of government and the economy was to manage nature as property. This long adhered to temporal-spatial orientation, writes Rifkin, has taken humanity to the commanding heights as the dominant species on Earth and to the ruin of the natural world. In the emerging era, says Rifkin, efficiency is giving way to adaptivity as the all-encompassing temporal value while space is perceived as animated, self-organizing, and fluid. A younger generation, in turn, is pivoting from growth to flourishing, finance capital to ecological capital, productivity to regenerativity, Gross Domestic Product to Quality of Life Indicators, hyper-consumption to eco-stewardship, globalization to glocalization, geopolitics to biosphere politics, nation-state sovereignty to bioregional governance, and representative democracy to citizen assemblies and distributed peerocracy. Future generations, suggests Rifkin, will likely experience existence less as objects and structures and more as patterns and processes and come to understand that each of us is literally an ecosystem made up of the microorganisms and elements that comprise the hydrosphere, lithosphere, atmosphere, and biosphere. The autonomous self of the Age of Progress is giving way to the ecological self of the Age of Resilience. The now worn scientific method that underwrote the Age of Progress is also falling by the wayside, making room for a new approach to science called Complex Adaptive Systems modeling. Likewise, detached reason is losing cachet while empathy and biophilia become the norm. At a moment when the human family is deeply despairing of the future, Rifkin gives us a window into a promising new world and a radically different future that can bring us back into nature’s fold, giving life a second chance to flourish on Earth.

The Psychology of Social Media

The Psychology of Social Media PDF Author: Ciarán Mc Mahon
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351692437
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 116

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Book Description
Are we really being ourselves on social media? Can we benefit from connecting with people we barely know online? Why do some people overshare on social networking sites? The Psychology of Social Media explores how so much of our everyday lives is played out online, and how this can impact our identity, wellbeing and relationships. It looks at how our online profiles, connections, status updates and sharing of photographs can be a way to express ourselves and form connections, but also highlights the pitfalls of social media including privacy issues. From FOMO to fraping, and from subtweeting to selfies, The Psychology of Social Media shows how social media has developed a whole new world of communication, and for better or worse is likely to continue to be an essential part of how we understand our selves.

Metamodernism and Changing Literacy: Emerging Research and Opportunities

Metamodernism and Changing Literacy: Emerging Research and Opportunities PDF Author: Hill, Valerie J.
Publisher: IGI Global
ISBN: 1799835367
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 283

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Book Description
An exploration of Metamodernism, the philosophical framework based on the post-2000 historical and cultural moment, helps in understanding digital citizenship beyond postmodernism and into the future. Research on best practices for learning in digital culture at a time of rapid transition is critical to the future of education and civilization, and an awareness of the philosophical era in which we live provides a foundation for understanding best practices in formal education as well as in personal lives. Without an awareness of Metamodernism, the overwhelming information encountered daily is nearly impossible to tackle, organize, or archive individually or collectively. Metamodernism explored through the lens of changing literacy impacts the field of library and information science as well as media communications. Metamodernism and Changing Literacy: Emerging Research and Opportunities is a critical scholarly publication that advocates for new thinking about literacy for all age groups through an exploration of global digital participatory culture and Metamodernism. A thorough examination of both the advantages and disadvantages of new media, new technologies, and virtual environments, with emphasis on metaliteracy, arms educators and learners of all ages with critical skills and keen perspectives. Featuring a wide range of topics such as digital citizenship, information consumption, and philosophy, successful educators and learners will find this book valuable for navigating virtual landscapes and identifying best practices for learning and life in a digitally connected world. The target audience includes administrators, educators, librarians, students, artists, and lifelong learners.

GPS for Land Surveyors, Third Edition

GPS for Land Surveyors, Third Edition PDF Author: Jan Van Sickle
Publisher: CRC Press
ISBN: 9781575040752
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
The GPS Signal - Biases and Solutions - The Framework - Receivers and Methods - Coordinates - Planning a Survey - Observing - Postprocessing - RTK and DGPS.

Metallica

Metallica PDF Author: Joe Berlinger
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 1466866969
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 399

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Book Description
“Triumphs because of the commitment and fearlessness of Metallica . . . [and] shows that tenacious reporting can still produce great narratives.” —New York Times Metallica is one of the most successful hard-rock bands of all time, having sold more than ninety million albums worldwide. Receiving unfettered access, acclaimed filmmakers Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky followed Metallica over two and a half years as they faced personal and professional challenges that threatened to destroy the band just as they returned to the studio to record their first album in four years. While the documentary itself provides an insider’s view of Metallica, the two and a half years of production (and more than 1,600 hours of footage) garnered far more than can be expressed in a two-hour film. Berlinger’s book reveals the stories behind the film, capturing the uncertainty, and ultimate triumph of both the filming and Metallica’s bid for survival. It weaves the on-screen stories together with what happened off-screen, offering intimate details of the band’s struggle amidst personnel changes, addiction, and controversy. In part because Berlinger was one of the only witnesses to the intensive group-therapy sessions and numerous band meetings, his account is the most honest and deeply probing book about Metallica—or any rock band—ever written. “A fascinating look at the logistics of making an album and the dysfunctional family that bands can become.” —Chicago Tribune “This book should be required reading for aspiring filmmakers.” —Publishers Weekly “Berlinger takes us even deeper into the inner sanctum. . . . many events that were edited for the film, including a pivotal scene in which drummer Lars Ulrich laces into singer James Hetfield, are transcribed in full.” —USA Today