Other books that might interest you

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  The Ecology of Everyday Things

  Mark Everard

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  For many people, ecosystems may be a remote concept, yet we eat, drink, breathe and interface with them in every moment of our lives. In this engaging textbook, ecosystems scientist Dr. Mark Everard considers a diversity of "everyday things", including fascinating facts about their ecological origins: from the tea we drink, to the things we wear, read and enjoy, to the ecology of communities and space flight, and the important roles played by germs and "unappealing creatures" such as slugs and wasps.In today's society, we are so umbilically connected to ecosystems that we fail to notice them, and this oversight blinds us to the unsustainability of everyday life and the industries and policy environment that supports it. The Ecology of Everyday Things takes the listener on an enlightening, fascinating voyage of discovery, all the while soundly rooted in robust science. It will stimulate awareness about how connected we all are to the natural world and its processes, and how important it is to learn to better treat our environment. Ideal for use in undergraduate—and school-level teaching, it will also interest, educate, engage and enthuse a wide range of less technical audiences.

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  Typewriters - Iconic Machines...

  Anthony Casillo

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  “Typewriter expert and collector Anthony Casillo presents a visual homage to the device that revolutionized correspondence” (The Florida Times-Union). 
   
  From the creation of the QWERTY keyboard to the world’s first portable typing machine, this handsome collection is a visual homage to the golden age of the typewriter. From the world’s first commercially successful typewriter—the Sholes & Glidden Type Writer of 1874—to the iconic electric models of the 1960s, eighty vintage devices are profiled in elegant photographs and fascinating text that highlights the design modifications, intricate details, and peculiar quirks that make each typewriter unique. From functional advances like noiseless machines to luxurious details such as mahogany covers and inlaid mother-of-pearl, a century of design innovation and experimentation is charted in these pages. Packed with visuals and rich with history, Typewriters is the essential story of a writing invention that changed the world. 
   
  Includes a foreword by Tom Hanks 
   
  Praise for Typewriters 
   
  “A Love Letter to Vintage Typewriters.” —Wall Street Journal 
   
  “This is sure to delight typewriter lovers and those interested in machine or design history.” —Library Journal

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  New Money - How Payment Became...

  Lana Swartz

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  A new vision of money as a communication technology that creates and sustains invisible—often exclusive-communities 
  One of the basic structures of everyday life, money is at its core a communication media. Payment systems-cash, card, app, or Bitcoin—are informational and symbolic tools that integrate us into, or exclude us from, the society that surrounds us. Examining the social politics of financial technologies, Lana Swartz reveals what's at stake when we pay. 
  This accessible and insightful analysis comes at a moment of disruption: from "fin-tech" startups to cryptocurrency schemes, a variety of technologies are poised to unseat traditional financial infrastructures. Swartz explains these changes, traces their longer histories, and demonstrates their consequences. Getting paid and paying determines whether or not you can put food on the table. She shows just how important these invisible systems are. The data that payment produces is uniquely revelatory—and newly valuable. New forms of money create new forms of identity, new forms of community, and new forms of power.

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  Benny the Blue Whale - A Descent...

  Andy Stanton

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  A bestselling author and AI team up to write a novel. Chaos ensues.AI is changing the world at frightening speed. A bestselling author decides to find out more…Is ChatGPT the end of creative industries as we know them? An ethical quagmire from which there is no return? A threat to all our jobs, as we keep hearing on the news?Bestselling children's author Andy Stanton has made a career out of writing differently – from the unconventional ‘hero' of his bestselling Mr Gum series to his penchant for absurdist plots, his children's books are anything but formulaic.When a friend introduces him to ChatGPT, the new large language chatbot, Andy is as sceptical as he is curious. Can this jumble of algorithms really mimic the spontaneity of human thought? Could it one day replace human authors like him for good? And are we soon to be ruled over by despotic robot overlords.He decides there's only one thing for it – he must test this bot's capabilities. Eventually, he settles on a prompt that will push the algorithm to its creative limits: ‘tell me a story about a blue whale with a tiny penis.'Chaos ensues.What follows is a surprising and illuminating battle between Andy and ChatGPT that maybe, just maybe, might help us all understand AI a little bit better. Join Andy and his beleaguered AI lackey on a rollicking metafictional journey through the art of storytelling. Presenting his prompts and the AI-generated narrative alongside extensive commentary, Stanton provides a startling paean to the art of a good story and boundless human creativity. Hopeful and hilarious, Benny the Blue Whale provides a joyfully anarchic meditation on AI, literature and why we write.

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  Solomon's Code

  Olaf Groth, Mark Nitzberg

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  As thinking machines make more decisions on our behalf, they can enrich, enable, and influence our lives. Whether in medicine, money, or love, technologies powered by forms of artificial intelligence are playing an increasingly prominent role in our lives. How do we ensure they make the most beneficial choices for us? And if one person benefits at another's expense, who gets to decide what's best? The increasing use of AI raises critical questions about our values, cultures, economies, and power relationships. And the answers may depend upon your race, gender, age, behavior, and nationality. In clear and accessible prose, Olaf Groth and Mark Nitzberg explore the history of intelligent technology, revealing how close we are to designing machines that have some sort of consciousness—and that we must now decide how to give those machines a conscience. Simultaneously thrilling and provocative, Solomon’s Code raises difficult questions that need to be considered given the speed of technological development.

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  This Week In Voice Presents:...

  Bradley Metrock

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  As voice technology (more properly referred to as voice-first technology) advances as the most important emerging technology of our time, This Week In Voice has chronicled it all. Amazon's Alexa, Google's Assistant, Apple's Siri, Microsoft's Cortana, Samsung's Bixby, and many other voice assistants now crowd the landscape and have ushered in a new era of computing which uses the human voice as its preferred method of input. 
   
  The rise of voice-first technology has brought along a new set of issues related to gender. If this is our new method of computing, and we're speaking with all manner of voice assistants and intelligent agents now, does it matter if they are gendered? Are there best practices or learnings that have emerged from Amazon's use of a female-gendered assistant (Alexa) relative to Google's own genderless Assistant? 
   
  How do the behaviors of end users, and their willingness to push boundaries and try everything a voice assistant will allow, factor in to the process of creating voice assistants and voice experiences? And we know children are embracing this technology, leading Katie McMahon of SoundHound to dub this new generation of children "Generation V." How does this technology's impact on our children change our views on the gender we assign to these assistants, and the interaction models we try to facilitate? 
   
  These questions, and more, are explored in This Week In Voice Presents: Perspectives On Gender In VoiceFirst Technology.

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