Bits of Life PDF Download

Author: Anneke Smelik
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
This collection is constructed as an ongoing dialogue among a group of scholars. It engages key questions about new technologies of bio-engineering, reproduction, imaging, communication, and the redefinition of life. The contributors pursue a technophilic, yet critical, path while articulating appraised ethical standards.

Author: Christopher M. Kelty
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822342649
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 402

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Book Description
In Two Bits, Christopher M. Kelty investigates the history and cultural significance of Free Software, revealing the people and practices that have transformed not only software but also music, film, science, and education. Free Software is a set of practices devoted to the collaborative creation of software source code that is made openly and freely available through an unconventional use of copyright law. Kelty explains how these specific practices have reoriented the relations of power around the creation, dissemination, and authorization of all kinds of knowledge. He also makes an important contribution to discussions of public spheres and social imaginaries by demonstrating how Free Software is a “recursive public”—a public organized around the ability to build, modify, and maintain the very infrastructure that gives it life in the first place. Drawing on ethnographic research that took him from an Internet healthcare start-up company in Boston to media labs in Berlin to young entrepreneurs in Bangalore, Kelty describes the technologies and the moral vision that bind together hackers, geeks, lawyers, and other Free Software advocates. In each case, he shows how their practices and way of life include not only the sharing of software source code but also ways of conceptualizing openness, writing copyright licenses, coordinating collaboration, and proselytizing. By exploring in detail how these practices came together as the Free Software movement from the 1970s to the 1990s, Kelty also considers how it is possible to understand the new movements emerging from Free Software: projects such as Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization that creates copyright licenses, and Connexions, a project to create an online scholarly textbook commons.

Author: Caleb Scharf
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0593087259
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
“Full of fascinating insights drawn from an impressive range of disciplines, The Ascent of Information casts the familiar and the foreign in a dramatic new light.” —Brian Greene, author of The Elegant Universe Your information has a life of its own, and it’s using you to get what it wants. One of the most peculiar and possibly unique features of humans is the vast amount of information we carry outside our biological selves. But in our rush to build the infrastructure for the 20 quintillion bits we create every day, we’ve failed to ask exactly why we’re expending ever-increasing amounts of energy, resources, and human effort to maintain all this data. Drawing on deep ideas and frontier thinking in evolutionary biology, computer science, information theory, and astrobiology, Caleb Scharf argues that information is, in a very real sense, alive. All the data we create—all of our emails, tweets, selfies, A.I.-generated text and funny cat videos—amounts to an aggregate lifeform. It has goals and needs. It can control our behavior and influence our well-being. And it’s an organism that has evolved right alongside us. This symbiotic relationship with information offers a startling new lens for looking at the world. Data isn’t just something we produce; it’s the reason we exist. This powerful idea has the potential to upend the way we think about our technology, our role as humans, and the fundamental nature of life. The Ascent of Information offers a humbling vision of a universe built of and for information. Scharf explores how our relationship with data will affect our ongoing evolution as a species. Understanding this relationship will be crucial to preventing our data from becoming more of a burden than an asset, and to preserving the possibility of a human future.

Author: Harold Abelson
Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
ISBN: 0137135599
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 389

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Book Description
'Blown to Bits' is about how the digital explosion is changing everything. The text explains the technology, why it creates so many surprises and why things often don't work the way we expect them to. It is also about things the information explosion is destroying: old assumptions about who is really in control of our lives.

Author: Harper Bliss
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789887912378
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
Can a Christmas romance mend a life that's broken to pieces? Eileen Makenna is a Pulitzer Prize winning photographer who has traveled the world for over two decades, chasing the next big story. She returns home for the holidays shattered by a life-altering event and facing the terrifying prospect she'll never be able to work again. When Eileen meets Naomi Weaver, a small-town girl who dedicates her free time to helping those in need, Eileen is entranced by Naomi's zest for life. Can Eileen overcome her inner demons and troubled family relationships to let Naomi in? Best-selling lesbian romance authors Harper Bliss & T.B. Markinson have teamed up to bring this touching age-gap love story to life.

Author: Anneke M. Smelik
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295990333
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
Since World War II, the biological and technological have been fusing and merging in new ways, resulting in the loss of a clear distinction between the two. This entanglement of biology with technology isn't new, but the pervasiveness of that integration is staggering, as is the speed at which the two have been merging in recent decades. As this process permeates more of everyday life, the urgent necessity arises to rethink both biology and technology. Indeed, the human body can no longer be regarded either as a bounded entity or as a naturally given and distinct part of an unquestioned whole. Bits of Life assumes a posthuman definition of the body. It is grounded in questions about today's biocultures, which pertain neither to humanist bodily integrity nor to the anthropological assumption that human bodies are the only ones that matter. Editors Anneke Smelik and Nina Lykke aid in mapping changes and transformations and in striking a middle road between the metaphor and the material. In exploring current reconfigurations of bodies and embodied subjects, the contributors pursue a technophilic, yet critical, path while articulating new and thoroughly appraised ethical standards.

Author: George Osborne
Publisher: Xlibris Corporation
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 543

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Book Description
This book covers a 14-year period when the author progressed from being a boy sailor in the UK to become a chief Petty Officer in the Royal Navy. It offers a very interesting blend of life experiences of a growing young man through some frightening experiences and some happy times. Life as a boy sailor was exciting for him, but once the dark period of the WW2 emerged, things changed radically, and his knowledge and courage were tested in some dramatic experiences which are well described in his book. When he moved into the submarine service in late 1942, a very new experience awaited him and by then he was a married man entering fatherhood in the coming year and already wondering what to do when the war finally ended. The final chapter describes sadness and regrets as the author’s life radically changed with the pressures of finding a new profession and becoming a family member with three children and there was always a lingering regret at having taken the wrong pathway despite the emerging successes of his children.

Author: Andrew Thomas Elder
Publisher: Writers Republic LLC
ISBN: 1646200756
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages : 120

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Book Description
Other than a few poems in reference to veterans, the topics are basically my experiences in dealing with life as a double amputee. It is meant to inspire, motivate, and be inspirational! Baruch HaShem, Hebrew, meaning “Bless His Name.”

Author: Mathieu Capcarrere
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 354031816X
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 966

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Book Description
TheArti?cialLifetermappearedmorethan20yearsagoinasmallcornerofNew Mexico, USA. Since then the area has developed dramatically, many researchers joining enthusiastically and research groups sprouting everywhere. This frenetic activity led to the emergence of several strands that are now established ?elds in themselves. We are now reaching a stage that one may describe as maturer: with more rigour, more benchmarks, more results, more stringent acceptance criteria, more applications, in brief, more sound science. This, which is the n- ural path of all new areas, comes at a price, however. A certain enthusiasm, a certain adventurousness from the early years is fading and may have been lost on the way. The ?eld has become more reasonable. To counterbalance this and to encourage lively discussions, a conceptual track, where papers were judged on criteria like importance and/or novelty of the concepts proposed rather than the experimental/theoretical results, has been introduced this year. A conference on a theme as broad as Arti?cial Life is bound to be very - verse,but a few tendencies emerged. First, ?elds like ‘Robotics and Autonomous Agents’ or ‘Evolutionary Computation’ are still extremely active and keep on bringing a wealth of results to the A-Life community. Even there, however, new tendencies appear, like collective robotics, and more speci?cally self-assembling robotics, which represent now a large subsection. Second, new areas appear.

Author: Carole Christie Moore Adams
Publisher: AuthorHouse
ISBN: 1418444634
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 418

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Book Description
SNIPPETS (bits and pieces of love and life) by CAROLE, written in short chapters for picking up, reading a bit, and setting down, is one you will enjoy so much that you will be reluctant to set it down. The inspirational story of the love and life of Carole and John, her husband, who both view his Parkinson's Disease as just another facet of daily living, is told in vignettes of themselves and of their families, friends, homes, and animals. The witty, poignant sketches will cause you to laugh, cry, empathize, wonder, think, or feel the Snippet refers to you or someone you know. Her writing style scrambles together those of Erma Bombeck, Andy Rooney, and James Joyce. The book describes the couple's real life experience as their numerous "gray hairs," "wrinkles and bruises from stress, heartaches, headaches, accidents, diseases," and their "working, dancing, playing, and laughing" together will attest. Some of Carole's life before meeting John is revealed as she chats about a Perfect Family, Afraid, Running Away, A Single Stitch, Skates, Periwinkle Soup, Psychic, Kidnapping, Long Hair, Hurricanes, Bassoons, Blue Lips, and other topics. People of all ages will find these revelations by Carole Christie Moore Adams fascinating!