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Author: Steven Vogel Publisher: Princeton University Press ISBN: 0691209499 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 380
Book Description
This entertaining and informative book describes how living things bump up against non-biological reality. "My immodest aim," says the author, "is to change how you view your immediate surroundings." He asks us to wonder about the design of plants and animals around us: why a fish swims more rapidly than a duck can paddle, why healthy trees more commonly uproot than break, how a shark manages with such a flimsy skeleton, or how a mouse can easily survive a fall onto any surface from any height. The book will not only fascinate the general reader but will also serve as an introductory survey of biomechanics. On one hand, organisms cannot alter the earth's gravity, the properties of water, the compressibility of air, or the behavior of diffusing molecules. On the other, such physical factors form both constraints with which the evolutionary process must contend and opportunities upon which it might capitalize. Life's Devices includes examples from every major group of animals and plants, with references to recent work, with illustrative problems, and with suggestions of experiments that need only common household materials.
Author: Steven Vogel Publisher: Princeton University Press ISBN: 0691209499 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 380
Book Description
This entertaining and informative book describes how living things bump up against non-biological reality. "My immodest aim," says the author, "is to change how you view your immediate surroundings." He asks us to wonder about the design of plants and animals around us: why a fish swims more rapidly than a duck can paddle, why healthy trees more commonly uproot than break, how a shark manages with such a flimsy skeleton, or how a mouse can easily survive a fall onto any surface from any height. The book will not only fascinate the general reader but will also serve as an introductory survey of biomechanics. On one hand, organisms cannot alter the earth's gravity, the properties of water, the compressibility of air, or the behavior of diffusing molecules. On the other, such physical factors form both constraints with which the evolutionary process must contend and opportunities upon which it might capitalize. Life's Devices includes examples from every major group of animals and plants, with references to recent work, with illustrative problems, and with suggestions of experiments that need only common household materials.
Author: John Long Publisher: Basic Books ISBN: 0465029280 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 289
Book Description
What happens when we let robots play the game of life?br Darwin's Devices, Long tells the story of these evolving biorobots -- how they came to be, and what they can teach us about the biology of living and extinct species. Evolving biorobots can replicate creatures that disappeared from the earth long ago, showing us in real time what happens in the face of unexpected environmental challenges. Biomechanically correct models of backbones functioning as part of an autonomous robot, for example, can help us understand why the first vertebrates evolved them.But the most impressive feature of these robots, as Long shows, is their ability to illustrate the power of evolution to solve difficult technological challenges autonomously -- without human input regarding what a workable solution might be. Even a simple robot can create complex behavior, often learning or evolving greater intelligence than humans could possibly program. This remarkable idea could forever alter the face of engineering, design, and even warfare. An amazing tour through the workings of a fertile mind, Darwin's Devices will make you rethink everything you thought you knew about evolution, robot intelligence, and life itself.
Author: Amy Crouch Publisher: Baker Books ISBN: 1493426834 Category : Young Adult Nonfiction Languages : en Pages : 187
Book Description
It's time to take our power back We can barely imagine our lives without technology. Tech gives us tools to connect with our friends, listen to our music, document our lives, share our opinions, and keep up with what's going on in the world. Yet it also tempts us to procrastinate, avoid honest conversations, compare ourselves with others, and filter our reality. Sometimes, it feels like our devices have a lot more control over us than we have over them. But it doesn't have to be that way. In fact, we deserve so much more than what technology offers us. And when we're wise about how we use our devices, we can get more--more joy, more connection, more out of life. Tech shouldn't get in the way of a life worth living. Let's get tech-wise.
Author: Narayanaswamy Balakrishnan Publisher: John Wiley & Sons ISBN: 1119664004 Category : Mathematics Languages : en Pages : 240
Book Description
Provides authoritative guidance on statistical analysis techniques and inferential methods for one-shot device life-testing Estimating the reliability of one-shot devices—electro-expolsive devices, fire extinguishers, automobile airbags, and other units that perform their function only once—poses unique analytical challenges to conventional approaches. Due to how one-shot devices are censored, their precise failure times cannot be obtained from testing. The condition of a one-shot device can only be recorded at a specific inspection time, resulting in a lack of lifetime data collected in life-tests. Accelerated Life Testing of One-shot Devices: Data Collection and Analysis addresses the fundamental issues of statistical modeling based on data collected from accelerated life-tests of one-shot devices. The authors provide inferential methods and procedures for planning accelerated life-tests, and describe advanced statistical techniques to help reliability practitioners overcome estimation problems in the real world. Topics covered include likelihood inference, competing-risks models, one-shot devices with dependent components, model selection, and more. Enabling readers to apply the techniques to their own lifetime data and arrive at the most accurate inference possible, this practical resource: Provides expert guidance on comprehensive data analysis of one-shot devices under accelerated life-tests Discusses how to design experiments for data collection from efficient accelerated life-tests while conforming to budget constraints Helps readers develops optimal designs for constant-stress and step-stress accelerated life-tests, mainstream life-tests commonly used in reliability practice Includes R code in each chapter for readers to use in their own analyses of one-shot device testing data Features numerous case studies and practical examples throughout Highlights important issues, problems, and future research directions in reliability theory and practice Accelerated Life Testing of One-shot Devices: Data Collection and Analysis is essential reading for graduate students, researchers, and engineers working on accelerated life testing data analysis.
Author: Margaret E. Morris Publisher: MIT Press ISBN: 0262039133 Category : Technology & Engineering Languages : en Pages : 187
Book Description
Unexpected ways that individuals adapt technology to reclaim what matters to them, from working through conflict with smart lights to celebrating gender transition with selfies. We have been warned about the psychological perils of technology: distraction, difficulty empathizing, and loss of the ability (or desire) to carry on a conversation. But our devices and data are woven into our lives. We can't simply reject them. Instead, Margaret Morris argues, we need to adapt technology creatively to our needs and values. In Left to Our Own Devices, Morris offers examples of individuals applying technologies in unexpected ways—uses that go beyond those intended by developers and designers. Morris examines these kinds of personalized life hacks, chronicling the ways that people have adapted technology to strengthen social connection, enhance well-being, and affirm identity. Morris, a clinical psychologist and app creator, shows how people really use technology, drawing on interviews she has conducted as well as computer science and psychology research. She describes how a couple used smart lights to work through conflict; how a woman persuaded herself to eat healthier foods when her photographs of salads garnered “likes” on social media; how a trans woman celebrated her transition with selfies; and how, through augmented reality, a woman changed the way she saw her cancer and herself. These and the many other “off-label” adaptations described by Morris cast technology not just as a temptation that we struggle to resist but as a potential ally as we try to take care of ourselves and others. The stories Morris tells invite us to be more intentional and creative when left to our own devices.
Author: Marvi Sri Harwoko Publisher: Smithers Rapra ISBN: 1847354416 Category : Medical Languages : en Pages : 124
Book Description
With the emergence of new therapies for diseases which affect vital organs either partially or as a whole, the complexity of the parameter interaction and the variety of new discoveries opens many possibilities to implement these proposals into clinical use. Unfortunately, this diversity can also handicap an efficient design process.Therefore, a practical tool has to be developed, which in the early development stages, systematically supports the product and process optimization by preparing and providing information and knowledge.This book details such a methodology for systematizing the product design process, which uses a knowledge-based design process, a customer-oriented engineering process, and a business supporting life cycle model.This book describes how this methodology can be used as a product design guidance tool for supporting the development of a new implant. The methodology resolves the development complexity by using a series of logical steps and provides researchers with the means to assess these steps as soon as possible for anticipating and removing subsequent useless steps.
Author: Louise Amoore Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1317527372 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 211
Book Description
This book critically explores forms and techniques of calculation that emerge with digital computation, and their implications. The contributors demonstrate that digital calculative devices matter beyond their specific functions as they progressively shape, transform and govern all areas of our life. In particular, it addresses such questions as: How does the drive to make sense of, and productively use, large amounts of diverse data, inform the development of new calculative devices, logics and techniques? How do these devices, logics and techniques affect our capacity to decide and to act? How do mundane elements of our physical and virtual existence become data to be analysed and rearranged in complex ensembles of people and things? In what ways are conventional notions of public and private, individual and population, certainty and probability, rule and exception transformed and what are the consequences? How does the search for ‘hidden’ connections and patterns change our understanding of social relations and associative life? Do contemporary modes of calculation produce new thresholds of calculability and computability, allowing for the improbable or the merely possible to be embraced and acted upon? As contemporary approaches to governing uncertain futures seek to anticipate future events, how are calculation and decision engaged anew? Drawing together different strands of cutting-edge research that is both theoretically sophisticated and empirically rich, this book makes an important contribution to several areas of scholarship, including the emerging social science field of software studies, and will be a vital resource for students and scholars alike.
Author: Bruno Latour Publisher: Princeton University Press ISBN: 1400820413 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 295
Book Description
This highly original work presents laboratory science in a deliberately skeptical way: as an anthropological approach to the culture of the scientist. Drawing on recent work in literary criticism, the authors study how the social world of the laboratory produces papers and other "texts,"' and how the scientific vision of reality becomes that set of statements considered, for the time being, too expensive to change. The book is based on field work done by Bruno Latour in Roger Guillemin's laboratory at the Salk Institute and provides an important link between the sociology of modern sciences and laboratory studies in the history of science.
Author: Steven Vogel
Author: Steven Vogel
Author: Steven Vogel
Author: John Long
Author: Amy Crouch
Author: 
Author: Narayanaswamy Balakrishnan
Author: Margaret E. Morris
Author: Marvi Sri Harwoko
Author: Louise Amoore
Author: Bruno Latour