The Future Is Not What It Used to Be PDF Download

Author: Jörg Friedrichs
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262019248
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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Book Description
"In this book, Jörg Friedrichs argues that industrial society itself is transitory, and he examines the prospects for our civilization's coming to terms with its two most imminent choke points: climate change and energy scarcity. He offers a thorough and accessible account of these two challenges as well as the linkages between them. Friedrichs contends that industrial civilization cannot outlast our ability to burn fossil fuels and that the demise of industrial society would entail cataclysmic change, including population decreases."--Publisher's description.

Author: Yogi Berra
Publisher: Workman Publishing Company
ISBN: 0761162046
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 177

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Book Description
Celebrate one of the greatest and most beloved baseball players who ever lived—and certainly the most quoted. The Yogi Book is the New York Times bestseller filled with Yogi Berra’s immortal sayings, plus photographs, a career timeline, and appreciations by some of his greatest fans, including Billy Crystal and Tim McCarver. Yogi Berra's gift for saying the smartest things in the funniest, most memorable ways has made him a legend. The Yogi Book brings all of his famous quotes together in one place—and even better, gives the story behind them. "It ain't over till it's over."—that’s Yogi's answer to a reporter when he was managing the Mets in July 1973, and they were nine games out of first place (not only quotable, but prophetic—they won the pennant). "Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded."—Yogi's comment to Stan Musial and Joe Garagiola about Ruggeri's restaurant in St. Louis in 1959. "It gets late early out there."—Yogi describing how shadows crept across Yankee Stadium's left field during late autumn afternoons.

Author: Alvin Toffler
Publisher: Ballantine Books
ISBN: 0593159470
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 625

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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The classic work that predicted the anxieties of a world upended by rapidly emerging technologies—and now provides a road map to solving many of our most pressing crises. “Explosive . . . brilliantly formulated.” —The Wall Street Journal Future Shock is the classic that changed our view of tomorrow. Its startling insights into accelerating change led a president to ask his advisers for a special report, inspired composers to write symphonies and rock music, gave a powerful new concept to social science, and added a phrase to our language. Published in over fifty countries, Future Shock is the most important study of change and adaptation in our time. In many ways, Future Shock is about the present. It is about what is happening today to people and groups who are overwhelmed by change. Change affects our products, communities, organizations—even our patterns of friendship and love. But Future Shock also illuminates the world of tomorrow by exploding countless clichés about today. It vividly describes the emerging global civilization: the rise of new businesses, subcultures, lifestyles, and human relationships—all of them temporary. Future Shock will intrigue, provoke, frighten, encourage, and, above all, change everyone who reads it.

Author: Harry R. Lewis
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 026236221X
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 518

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Book Description
Classic papers by thinkers ranging from from Aristotle and Leibniz to Norbert Wiener and Gordon Moore that chart the evolution of computer science. Ideas That Created the Future collects forty-six classic papers in computer science that map the evolution of the field. It covers all aspects of computer science: theory and practice, architectures and algorithms, and logic and software systems, with an emphasis on the period of 1936-1980 but also including important early work. Offering papers by thinkers ranging from Aristotle and Leibniz to Alan Turing and Nobert Wiener, the book documents the discoveries and inventions that created today's digital world. Each paper is accompanied by a brief essay by Harry Lewis, the volume's editor, offering historical and intellectual context.

Author: Nick Montfort
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262344769
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
How the future has been imagined and made, through the work of writers, artists, inventors, and designers. The future is like an unwritten book. It is not something we see in a crystal ball, or can only hope to predict, like the weather. In this volume of the MIT Press's Essential Knowledge series, Nick Montfort argues that the future is something to be made, not predicted. Montfort offers what he considers essential knowledge about the future, as seen in the work of writers, artists, inventors, and designers (mainly in Western culture) who developed and described the core components of the futures they envisioned. Montfort's approach is not that of futurology or scenario planning; instead, he reports on the work of making the future—the thinkers who devoted themselves to writing pages in the unwritten book. Douglas Engelbart, Alan Kay, and Ted Nelson didn't predict the future of computing, for instance. They were three of the people who made it. Montfort focuses on how the development of technologies—with an emphasis on digital technologies—has been bound up with ideas about the future. Readers learn about kitchens of the future and the vision behind them; literary utopias, from Plato's Republic to Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland; the Futurama exhibit at the 1939 New York World's Fair; and what led up to Tim Berners-Lee's invention of the World Wide Web. Montfort describes the notebook computer as a human-centered alterative to the idea of the computer as a room-sized “giant brain”; speculative practice in design and science fiction; and, throughout, the best ways to imagine and build the future.

Author: Gary Westfahl
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786484764
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
Science fiction has always challenged readers with depictions of the future. Can the genre actually provide glimpses of the world of tomorrow? This collection of fifteen international and interdisciplinary essays examines the genre's predictions and breaks new ground by considering the prophetic functions of science fiction films as well as SF literature. Among the texts and topics examined are classic stories by Murray Leinster, C. L. Moore, and Cordwainer Smith; 2001: A Space Odyssey and its sequels, Japanese anime and Hong Kong cinema; and electronic fiction.

Author: William Cheung
Publisher: Elsevier
ISBN: 0128179465
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 584

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Book Description
Predicting Future Oceans: Sustainability of Ocean and Human Systems Amidst Global Environmental Change provides a synthesis of our knowledge of the future state of the oceans. The editors undertake the challenge of integrating diverse perspectives—from oceanography to anthropology—to exhibit the changes in ecological conditions and their socioeconomic implications. Each contributing author provides a novel perspective, with the book as a whole collating scholarly understandings of future oceans and coastal communities across the world. The diverse perspectives, syntheses and state-of-the-art natural and social sciences contributions are led by past and current research fellows and principal investigators of the Nereus Program network. This includes members at 17 leading research institutes, addressing themes such as oceanography, biodiversity, fisheries, mariculture production, economics, pollution, public health and marine policy. This book is a comprehensive resource for senior undergraduate and postgraduate readers studying social and natural science, as well as practitioners working in the field of natural resources management and marine conservation. - Provides a synthesis of our knowledge on the future state of the oceans - Includes recommendations on how to move forwards - Highlights key social aspects linked to ocean ecosystems, including health, equity and sovereignty

Author: Michael Batty
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262349906
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 301

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Book Description
How we can invent—but not predict—the future of cities. We cannot predict future cities, but we can invent them. Cities are largely unpredictable because they are complex systems that are more like organisms than machines. Neither the laws of economics nor the laws of mechanics apply; cities are the product of countless individual and collective decisions that do not conform to any grand plan. They are the product of our inventions; they evolve. In Inventing Future Cities, Michael Batty explores what we need to understand about cities in order to invent their future. Batty outlines certain themes—principles—that apply to all cities. He investigates not the invention of artifacts but inventive processes. Today form is becoming ever more divorced from function; information networks now shape the traditional functions of cities as places of exchange and innovation. By the end of this century, most of the world's population will live in cities, large or small, sometimes contiguous, and always connected; in an urbanized world, it will be increasingly difficult to define a city by its physical boundaries. Batty discusses the coming great transition from a world with few cities to a world of all cities; argues that future cities will be defined as clusters in a hierarchy; describes the future “high-frequency,” real-time streaming city; considers urban sprawl and urban renewal; and maps the waves of technological change, which grow ever more intense and lead to continuous innovation—an unending process of creative destruction out of which future cities will emerge.

Author: Chris Impey
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393246647
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 399

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“Expansive and enlightening. . . . Impey packs his prose with wonderful anecdotes and weird factoids.”—New York Times Book Review Human exploration has been an unceasing engine of technological progress, from the first homo sapiens to leave our African cradle to a future in which mankind promises to settle another world. Beyond tells the epic story of humanity leaving home—and how humans will soon thrive in the vast universe beyond the earth. A dazzling and propulsive voyage through space and time, Beyond reveals how centuries of space explorers—from the earliest stargazers to today’s cutting-edge researchers—all draw inspiration from an innate human emotion: wanderlust. This urge to explore led us to multiply around the globe, and it can be traced in our DNA. Today, the urge to discover manifests itself in jaw-dropping ways: plans for space elevators poised to replace rockets at a fraction of the cost; experiments in suspending and reanimating life for ultra-long-distance travel; prototypes for solar sails that coast through space on the momentum of microwaves released from the Earth. With these ventures, private companies and entrepreneurs have the potential to outpace NASA as the leaders in a new space race. Combining expert knowledge of astronomy and avant-garde technology, Chris Impey guides us through the heady possibilities for the next century of exploration. In twenty years, a vibrant commercial space industry will be operating. In thirty years, there will be small but viable colonies on the Moon and Mars. In fifty years, mining technology will have advanced enough to harvest resources from asteroids. In a hundred years, a cohort of humans born off-Earth will come of age without ever visiting humanity’s home planet. This is not the stuff of science fiction but rather the logical extension of already available technologies. Beyond shows that space exploration is not just the domain of technocrats, but the birthright of everyone and the destiny of generations to come. To continue exploration is to ensure our survival. Outer space, a limitless unknown, awaits us.

Author: Michael J. Oyster
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319998552
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
Following the Great Financial Crisis, the S&P 500 advanced more than 17 percent annualized from February 2009 through June 2018. At this pace, a buy-and-hold investor in the stock market would see their money double in 5 years and more than triple in 7 years. This performance has lulled many investors into thinking that such above-average returns will be with us into perpetuity. Unfortunately, this may not be the case. Far more likely, the return an investor may receive from the stock market will be slightly better than half the long-term average, about 5% to 7%. Most investment portfolios hold a greater allocation to stocks than any other class of investment asset. Massive amounts of wealth were created from the bull market since early 2009 providing institutions and individuals with a rising tide that lifted their portfolios above their goals without much effort. The environment of the future stands to be far less accommodating, so finding suitable investments (other than U.S. stocks) that can achieve the necessary returns (or make up the shortfall) will be a critical component of achieving goals in years to come. This book will explore those solutions.