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This book explores the global technological transformations that have shaped development of society for eons, from the emergence of Homo sapiens to the modern day. Looking at a potential future for all of this century and the beginning of the next, the book explores how society is changing as a result of the two most powerful trends: technological advances and global aging. It studies the forthcoming technological wave – the Cybernetic Revolution, which will encompass AI, medical technology and biotechnology, robotics, cognitive, nanotechnology etc. In turn, it shows why and how global aging will become one of the most powerful factors, influencing the evolution of society and the World System as a whole. Lastly, the book demonstrates how technological innovations can change the way people live and the society of the future, assessing both the new opportunities and threats posed by uncontrolled technological progress. Accordingly, it will appeal to social scientists, political scientists, economists and historians who are interested in technological transformations and their social and economic impacts.

This unique book is a major contribution to the literature on persuasion in communication, and on doctor-patient communication, in particular. Written by a physician-scientist with deep experience on the topic, the book offers a comprehensive analysis of what makes an argument in medicine persuasive, outlining the characteristics of an argument that causes people to accept that the conclusion(s) of an argument are true. Although the book focuses on medical arguments in particular, the general approach offered by the author is appropriate for any informal argument. The central emphasis is that although sound logical construction and true premises are required to establish the logical truth of a conclusion, this is insufficient for persuasion to occur. Although formal logic can exist independent of human reception, real-world arguments must have both an arguer (the individual constructing the argument) and an audience (individuals listening and evaluating the argument).Whether the audience is capable of changing their world view is as important as the logical construction of the argument, maintains the author. To illustrate all points, a plethora of examples in medical research and in diagnosis and treatment decisions are presented. Medical Persuasion: Understanding the Impact on Medical Argumentation is a unique contribution to the clinical literature and will be of immense interest to medical practitioners, researchers, and philosophers as a way of gaining insights into constructing arguments for their peers and patients. In addition, medical trainees will gain important insights in the production of medical knowledge and medical practices, and even students in the social sciences and humanities will find the work valuable as a conduit to gaining insight into the reception of an argument.

This book discusses the legacy of the conference series The International Conferences of Women Engineers and Scientists (ICWES), which spans the second half of the Twentieth Century and the beginning of the twenty-first. The book first discusses how, at a time when there were few women engineers and scientists, a group of women organized a conference, in June 1964 in New York, which attracted 486 women. They presented their scientific achievements and discussed how to attract more women in STEM. This effort was carried out by volunteers, continuing the ICWES conferences over a period of 59 years. The authors discuss the organizers, the hosting societies, the scientific content, the changes in issues over time, and how the continuity has endured. The authors also discuss the importance of global involvement, shown through past conferences inlocations such as USA, UK, Italy, Poland, France, India, Ivory Coast, Hungary, Japan, Canada, and Korea. The authors also outline how the efforts were aided by the development of a not for profit Canadian corporation, the International Conference of Women in Sciences and engineering (INWES), which ensures the continuation of the conference series. Claire Deschênes and Monique Frize ensured that the conference database was digitalized and is now available at the Canadian Archive of Women in STEM, University of Ottawa Library, with the hope that researchers will continue to explore this rich database. As an important part of the Women in Science and Engineering book series, the work hopes to inspire women and men, girls and boys to study and work in STEM fields. This book is important historically because it documents a unique adventure created by women in STEM through vision and leadership. Their efforts established modes of networking and sharing their contributions in science, technology, and on gender issues.

This book is based on an institutional evolutionary theoretical view to the Göta kanal. Canals were the major transport infrastructure system besides roads and maritime transport until railroads were introduced. The canal studied is the Swedish Göta kanal project during the preparation and construction phase from 1800–1832. Thus, the Göta kanal, and the canal-era, is seen from a technological, an economic and a political perspective. Comparisons are made with two contemporary major canal-projects; the Erie Canal in the USA (1817–1825) and the Caledonian Canal in Britain (1804–1822). It is argued that the Göta kanal project, as Sweden's Mega Project of its time, represented an important development step in Sweden as regards learning and innovation and became a starting point for Swedish transport infrastructure projects in the time to come, primarily the railways.

In diesem Open-Access-Buch steht der akademische Group-Talk als Format der wissenschaftsinternen Wissenskommunikation im Fokus. Group-Talk ist die Feldbezeichnung für das wöchentliche Arbeitstreffen einer teilnehmend beobachteten Forschungsgruppe in der Computational Neuroscience (CNS). Dass (soziale) Wirklichkeit in Interaktionsprozessen erzeugt und institutionalisiert wird, ist eine aus der Wissenssoziologie bzw. dem Sozialkonstruktivismus bereits wohlbekannte Erkenntnis. Dass diese Erzeugung maßgeblich durch kommunikatives Handeln prozessiert wird, ist spätestens seit dem Kommunikativen Konstruktivismus bekannt. Zentral in vorliegender Analyse ist daher die spezifische Form des kommunikativen Handelns, das besondere Format, in dem die CNS, als relativ junger und interdisziplinärer Forschungskontext, von den disziplinär heterogenen Wissenschaftler/-innen im Feld, kommunikativ (re-)konstruiert wird. Die wissenssoziologische Gattungsanalyse dient dabei dazu, den reinen Situationalismus zu überschreiten und die soziologische Mikroanalyse (Handeln), vor dem Hintergrund einer fokussiert-ethnographischen Feldstudie, mit gesellschaftlichen Emergenzphänomenen auf Meso- und Makroebene zu verknüpfen. Erst diese systematische Verbindung des direkt beobachtbaren Wie der Kommunikation mit dem durch ethnographisches Wissen rekonstruierten Warum, überschreitet den Horizont reiner Beschreibung und führt in die Bereiche des soziologischen Verstehens und Erklärens.

This volume is a collection of essays of a philosophical nature on the subject of technology, introducing authors from the Portuguese-speaking community, namely from Portugal itself, Africa and Brazil. Their contributions detail a unique perspective on technology, placing this important topic within the historical, ideological and social contexts of their countries, all of which share a common language. The shared history of these countries and the cultural and economic specificities of each one have stimulated singular insights into these thinkers'reflections.The essays are thematically diverse. Among the topics covered are technogenic knowledge, visions of technology, risks and uncertainties, mediatization, digitalization, and datafication, engineering practice and ethics, alternative technoscientific strategies, ontotechnologies of the body, virtual and archive. The contributions also explore other themes that are more closely related to the semi-peripheral world, such as technological dependence and the incorporation of Western technology into the social structure of ancestral communities.This book appeals to students and researchers and provides a voice to authors whose work are not usually available in English-language publications. It serves as an ideal guide for all those who seek rigorous and geographically widespread knowledge regarding thinking on technology in several Portuguese-speaking countries.

Die mit der Ausbreitung digitaler Informations- und Kommunikationstechnologien verbundenen gesellschaftlichen Transformationen haben nicht nur Auswirkungen auf die Adressat•innen, Professionellen und Organisationen der Sozialen Arbeit, sondern gleichfalls auf die disziplinäre Soziale Arbeit, indem neue soziale Phänomene, Forschungsfragen und neue forschungsmethodische Ansätze entstehen. Darüber hinaus beschleunigt die Digitalisierung die Quantität an Publikationen und die wissenschaftliche Wissensproduktion in der Disziplin ist kaum noch zu überblicken. Zu welchen Themen in Deutschland geforscht oder publiziert wird und wie viel, ist kaum auszumachen. So ist eine Forschung über Forschung, die das Ausmaß und das Volumen der Themen in der Sozialen Arbeit zu bestimmen versucht, notwendig. Die vorliegende Studie zeigt auf, wie mit Hilfe von Methoden der Bibliometrie und Computerlinguistik stark frequentierte Themen der Sozialen Arbeit auf Grundlage von Abstracts und Rezensionen ermittelt werden können. Darüber hinaus wird auf der Sozialdimension der Disziplin das wissenschaftliche Kooperationsverhalten in Form von Co-Autor•innenschaften untersucht.

Get the Summary of Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition in 20 minutes. Please note: This is a summary & not the original book. Original book introduction: A work of striking originality, The Human Condition is in many respects more relevant now than when it first appeared in 1958. In her study of the state of modern humanity, Hannah Arendt considers humankind from the perspective of the actions of which it is capable. The problems Arendt identified then—diminishing human agency and political freedom, the paradox that as human powers increase through technological and humanistic inquiry, we are less equipped to control the consequences of our actions—continue to confront us today. This new edition, published to coincide with the sixtieth anniversary of its original publication, contains Margaret Canovan's 1998 introduction and a new foreword by Danielle Allen.

Das Theater der Moderne gründet sich auf ästhetische Energien. Seit den 1880er Jahren aber sind es elektrische Energien, aus fossilen Brennstoffen in Kraftwerken erzeugt, die im Theater zu zirkulieren beginnen. Installiert wird eine mysteriöse Entität, die noch als Lebenskraft gehandelt wird und schon für Fortschritt durch Technik steht. Mit der Elektrifizierung des Theaters wird Elektroindustrie respektabel und Bühnenkunst modernistisch. Entsorgt werden die Kulissen, die im Scheinwerferlicht nur noch verstaubt erscheinen, und aus der Bildermaschine wird Raumkunst. Doch wichtiger sind die institutionellen Transformationen, die sich in bislang unbeachteten Koalitionen, Kontinuitäten und Konkurrenzen von technischen und ästhetischen Dingen abspielen. Ingenieurswissen, Kontrolltechniken und Versorgungssysteme ändern, wie Theater und Gesellschaft verschaltet sind. Der Interaktionsraum (zwischen-)menschlicher Leiblichkeit des 20. Jahrhunderts entpuppt sich als eine technische Konstellation.

This book shows how many previously contingent social processes have gradually been re-organised and transformed into entangled processes of ‘discontinuance'and ‘continuance'through the implementation of digital logic. Together with the necessary co-evolution of our collective digital literacy, this persistent process of transformation throughout modernity is theorised here as one of ‘social digitalisation.'Social digitalisation highlights the ways in which material digital technology, like preceding material technologies, has been fitted into the longer term trajectory of digital transformation. This new social theory thus reverses prevailing accounts of the ‘digital revolution'that focus exclusively on changes allegedly caused by material digital technology in recent decades. The book also demonstrates the fruitfulness of applying the theory of social digitalisation as a holistic approach in researching the wide-ranging consequences of contemporary digitalisation, including its contrasting effects on different social groups. It will be useful to students and researchers of sociology, communications, media and history, but also for general readers interested in understanding the overall complexity of digitalisation and how digital transformation has come to dominate the ways we live today.

Die Studie über das Stuttgarter Hoftheater denkt Theater und Stadt zur Zeit der Elektrifizierung um 1900 zusammen. Welchen Einfluss hatte die Theatertechnik auf die werdende Großstadt? Wie wurde umgekehrt das Theater durch die Urbanisierung und Technisierung der Stadt geprägt? Die Studie untersucht anhand historischer Quellen diese Wechselbeziehung über die Analyse neuer räumlich-materieller Vernetzungen. Außerdem analysiert sie kollektive Großstadt-Imaginationen, die zwischen 1902 und 1912 bei der Planung eines Theaterneubaus in Stuttgart aufkamen und die insbesondere über die Architektur und Technik des Theaters verhandelt wurden. Zentral war dabei eine Aushandlung im Spannungsfeld von Tradition und Moderne. So zeigt die Studie, dass auch ein Hoftheater fern der Metropolen als Ort der Moderne erfahren werden konnte, und leistet somit am Schnittpunkt von Theater-, Technik-, Stadt- und Kulturgeschichte einen Beitrag zur Erforschung der Vielfalt des deutschen Theaters um 1900.

Celebrity and Mediated Social Connections is a critical examination of the multiple realities of the mediated culture we traverse, extending from our imaginary inner worlds to the imagined communities of digital media. Chapters explore the dialogic at work when we connect with celebrities and internalize aspects of their personas due to the various social roles they serve within our everyday lives. What might begin as strong identification and internalization within our imaginary worlds, in this digital age, sometimes seeps out as we connect to celebrities, their fans, friends and followers in ways that were not formerly possible. The book contains topics that range from the degradation of micro-celebrities, the role of celebrities in promoting prescription drugs and their role in contemporary social movements. The common thread that runs through the book presents a mediated world that paradoxically allows if not encourages people to daydream, engage in stream of consciousness thinking and fantasize about celebrities, all while concurrently compelling us to engage in a digitally based objective world. The possibility of interaction on and through digital media intensifies the emotional connection between celebrity and fan. The more personal details one gives up, the closer we feel we become—digital intimacy based on the excessive self. Digital media entice us to engage and remain tethered to technology, staying continuously connected so as not to miss the latest post or meme. To suggest we should build a proverbial wall between the two—imaginary and objective worlds—runs counter to the reality of an always on, always connected culture in which we presently live.

This book introduces recent global advances and innovations in industry integrated engineering and computing education to academics, program managers, department heads, and deans, and shares with readers a critical perspective on future potentials in industry integrated engineering education. It covers topics and issues such as integrated engineering and computing education, part-time engineering masters programs, secure BIM learning, ethics, and IT workforce development. The book concludes with detail information on summarizing and extracting different frameworks, cases, and models into a practitioner toolkit, along with pragmatic recommendations for engineering education academics to quickly utilize, adopt, and adapt the toolkits for their own curricular development activities.

Videogames were once made with a vast range of tools and technologies, but in recent years a small number of commercially available'game engines'have reached an unprecedented level of dominance in the global videogame industry. In particular, the Unity game engine has penetrated all scales of videogame development, from the large studio to the hobbyist bedroom, such that over half of all new videogames are reportedly being made with Unity. This book provides an urgently needed critical analysis of Unity as ‘cultural software'that facilitates particular production workflows, design methodologies, and software literacies. Building on long-standing methods in media and cultural studies, and drawing on interviews with a range of videogame developers, Benjamin Nicoll and Brendan Keogh argue that Unity deploys a discourse of democratization to draw users into its ‘circuits of cultural software'. For scholars of media production, software culture, and platform studies, this book provides a framework and language to better articulate the increasingly dominant role of software tools in cultural production. For videogame developers, educators, and students, it provides critical and historical grounding for a tool that is widely used yet rarely analysed from a cultural angle.

This book represents a major milestone in the endeavour to understand how communication is impacting on the fashion industry and on societal fashion-related practices and values in the digital age. It presents the proceedings of FACTUM 19, the first in a series of fashion communication conferences that highlights important theoretical and empirical work in the field. Beyond documenting the latest scientific insights, the book is intended to foster the sharing of methodological approaches, expand the dialogue between communications'studies and fashion-related disciplines, help establish an international and interdisciplinary network of scholars, and offer encouragement and fresh ideas to junior researchers. It is of high value to academics and students in the fields of fashion communication, fashion marketing, visual studies in fashion, digital transformation of the fashion industry, and the cultural heritage dimension of fashion. In addition, it is a key resource for professionals seeking sound research on fashion communication and marketing.

This volume introduces the reader to the wide range of methods that digital humanities employ, and offers a practical guide to the study, interpretation, and presentation of cultural material and practices. In this instance, the editors consider digital humanities to include both the use of computing to understand cultural material in new ways, and the application of theories and methods from the humanities to interpret new technologies. Each chapter provides a step-by-step guide to cutting-edge methodologies so that students can make informed decisions about the methods they use, consider ethical practices, follow practical procedures, and present their work effectively. Readers will develop practical and reflexive understandings of the software and digital devices that they study and use for research, and the book will help new researchers collaborate and contribute to their scholarly communities, and to public discourse. As contemporary humanities work becomes increasingly interdisciplinary, and increasingly permeated by and with digital technologies, this volume helps new researchers navigate an evolving academic environment. Humanities and social sciences students will find this textbook an invaluable resource for assessing and creating digital projects.

This book provides science and technology ethos to a literate person. It starts with a rather detailed treatment of basic concepts in human values, educational status and domains of education, development of science and technology and their contributions to the welfare of society. It describes ways and means of scientific progresses and technological advancements with their historical perspectives including scientific viewpoints of contributing scientists and technologists. The technical, social, and cultural dimensions are surveyed in relation to acquisition and application of science, and advantages and hindrances of technological developments. Science and Technology is currently taught as a college course in many universities with the intention to introduce topics from a global historical perspective so that the reader shall stretch his/her vision by mapping the past to the future. The book can also serve as a primary reference for such courses.

Hailed as “stunning” (New York Post), “authoritative” (Kirkus Reviews), and “comprehensively researched” (Shelf Awareness), a shocking exposé of the widespread abuses of our personal online data by a leading specialist on Web privacy. Social networks, the defining cultural movement of our time, offer many freedoms. But as we work and shop and date over the Web, we are opening ourselves up to intrusive privacy violations by employers, the police, and aggressive data collection companies that sell our information to any and all takers. Through groundbreaking research, Andrews reveals how routinely colleges reject applicants due to personal information searches, robbers use vacation postings to target homes for break-ins, and lawyers scour our social media for information to use against us in court. And the legal system isn't protecting us—in the thousands of privacy violations brought to trial, judges often rule against the victims. Providing expert advice and leading the charge to secure our rights, Andrews proposes a Social Network Constitution to protect us all. Now is the time to join her and take action—the very future of privacy is at stake. Log on to www.loriandrews.com to sign the Constitution for Web Privacy.

“Acceptable Risk” – On the Rationality (and Irrationality) of Emotional Evaluations of Risk What is “acceptable risk”? That question is appropriate in a number of different contexts, political, social, ethical, and scienti c. Thus the question might be whether the voting public will support a risky proposal or project, whether people will buy or accept a risky product, whether it is morally permissible to pursue this or that potentially harmful venture, or whether it is wise or prudent to test or try out some possibly dangerous hypothesis or product. But complicating all of these queries, the “sand in the machinery” of rational decision-making, are the emotions. It is often noted (but too rarely studied) that voters are swayed by their passions at least as much as they are convinced by rational arguments. And it is obvious to advertisers and retailers that people are seduced by all sorts of appeals to their vanities, their fears, their extravagant hopes, their insecurities. At least one major thread of ethical discourse, the one following Kant, minimizes the importance of the emotions (“the inclinations”) in favor of an emphatically rational decision-making process, and it is worth mulling over the fact that many of those who do not accept Kant's ethical views more or less applaud his rejection of the “moral sentiment theory” of the time, promoted by such luminary philosophers as David Hume and Adam Smith.

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Science, Technology and the Future is an analysis of the problems of and prospects for the development of science and technology and their role in society. Drawing on the perspectives of Soviet scientists, this book examines the relation between society and nature as well as the prospects for resolving ecological problems with the aid of science and technology. This book is comprised of 33 chapters and begins with a discussion on the role of science and technology in modern society and their place in the solution of global problems. The axiological and ethical aspects of the development of science and the mechanism of scientific and technical progress, economics, and social development are also considered. The next section deals with concrete questions pertaining to the development of natural and technical sciences and their significance for the future of mankind, with emphasis on the role of science in the development of productive forces; the state of and the prospects for resolving the energy problem; the most important achievements in the leading branches of physics, chemistry, and biology; opportunities for utilizing space research for man's daily needs; oceanology and geology in the year 2000; science and fertility of the soils; materials for the technology of the future; and prospects for the development of automation and man's place in future production. This monograph will be of interest to sociologists, environmentalists, and science policymakers.