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The article reviews two books including "On Paper: The Everything of Its 2000-Year History" by Nicholas A. Basbanes, and "Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols and Other Typographical Marks" by Keith Houston.

This paper addresses the gap between familiar popular narratives describing Artificial Intelligence (AI), such as the trope of the killer robot, and the realistic near-future implications of machine intelligence and automation for technology policy and society. The authors conducted a series of interviews with technologists, science fiction writers, and other experts, as well as a workshop, to identify a set of key themes relevant to the near future of AI. In parallel, they led the analysis of almost 100 recent works of science fiction stories with AI themes to develop a preliminary taxonomy of AI in science fiction. These activities informed the commissioning of six original works of science fiction and non-fiction response essays on the themes of "intelligence" and "justice" that were published as part of the Slate Future Tense Fiction series in 2019 and 2020. Our findings indicate that artificial intelligence remains deeply ambiguous both in the policy and cultural contexts: we struggle to define the boundaries and the agency of machine intelligence, and consequently find it difficult to govern or interact with such systems. However, our findings also suggest more productive avenues of inquiry and framing that could foster both better policy and better narratives around AI. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper treats the articles as represented in A.E. Housman: Classical Scholar. Since Housman wrote on a wide variety of ancient authors, the numerous areas of expertise in which he engaged are noted and examined by a cadre of scholars who are marked by eminence. Each of these papers is summarily critiqued in the following review-essay. Moreover notation of two distinct pathways toward original studies of Housman's rigorous scholarship are then supplied. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Provides an overview of the book "Data, Expert Knowledge, and Decisions," the subtitle of the "Annals of Operations Research," as well as the subject of the conference held at SchloΒ Reisensburg in 1991.

A recent and growing discussion in philosophy addresses the construction of models and their use in scientific reasoning by comparison with fiction. This comparison helps to explore the problem of mediated observation and, hence, the lack of an unambiguous reference of representations. Examining the usefulness of the concept of fiction for a comparison with non-denoting elements in science, the aim of this paper is to present reasonable grounds for drawing a distinction between these two kinds of representation. In particular, my account will suggest a demarcation between fictional and non-fictional discourse as involving two different ways of interpreting representations. This demarcation, leading me to distinguish between fictional and non-fictional forms of enquiry, will provide a useful tool to explore to what extent the descriptions given by a model can be justified as making claims about the world and to what degree they are a consequence of the model's particular construction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a review essay of three books representing new research into the relationship between Cold War mobilization and postwar American political development: Michael Hogan, A Cross of Iron: Harry S. Truman and the Origins of the National Security State, 1945–1954 (Cambridge University Press, 1998); Guy Oakes, The Imaginary War: Civil Defense and American Cold War Culture (Oxford University Press, 1994); and Peter Trubowitz, Defining the National Interest: Conflict and Change in American Foreign Policy (University of Chicago Press, 1998). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

University–industry interaction has many supporters and some detractors in the scholarly literature. Science, Technology and Innovation (STI) policy frameworks emphasise interactions between universities and stakeholders other than industry, and the contribution made by these interactions to a range of goals such as environmental sustainability. Given the significance of discourse to shape public opinion, it is important that academic and policy actors convey positive views of university interaction. We investigate whether this is happening by examining representations of university interactions in popular culture. Since public opinion can shape science, our investigation could also suggest new research questions. Our sample includes science fiction novels that won prestigious awards (Hugo, Nebula and Locus) for the genre, from the 1970s to the 2010s. The use of an objective corpus of the literature increases external validity, a methodological novelty in representations of science studies. We show how science fiction, predominantly, is critical of university interactions, reflecting a lack of convincing institutional narratives on their benefits. The apprehensions expressed about interactions with industry or other stakeholders are equivalent. We offer some recommendations for research on STI policy frameworks to incorporate critical views of university–society interaction, including threats to sustainability, and new research questions related to defence of non-disclosure of information for political reasons and conflicts of equity due to the lack of career progression for 'disengaged' academics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Oxford University Press; 2011; XXIV+478 pages; US$79.95; ISBN 978-0-19-956877-2 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reviews the book "Littlewood's Miscellany" by Béla Bollobás.

The article reviews the book "Nature's Oracle: The Life and Work of W.D. Hamilton" by Ullica Segerstrale.

The article reviews the book "Einstein and the Quantum: The Quest of the Valiant Swabian" by A. Douglas Stone.

The article reviews the book "Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking" by Douglas Hofstadter and Emmanuel Sander.

Design of practically realizable unipolar HgCdTe nBn photodetectors has been studied in detail by numerical analysis. The simulations reported herein reveal that, by optimization of barrier doping, dark current levels can be reduced and collection efficiency substantially improved. It is shown that p-type doping of the barrier layer can significantly reduce the effective potential barrier arising from the valence band offset between the absorber and barrier regions, thus enabling HgCdTe nBn detector operation under near zero-bias conditions. However, relatively high electric fields in the space charge regions near the barrier/absorber interface result in enhanced trap-assisted Shockley-Read-Hall thermal generation. Our calculations indicate that nBn HgCdTe detectors with barriers engineered by use of HgTe/HgCdTe superlattices have, potentially, substantially better valence band alignment without the need for p-type doping. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reviews several books including "Junkyard Planet: Travels in the Billion-Dollar Trash Trade" by Adam Minter, "Shores of Knowledge: New World Discoveries and the Scientific Imagination" by Joyce Appleby, and "To the Letter: A Journey Through a Vanishing World" by Simon Garfield.

The article reviews several books including "The Future: Six Drivers of Global Change" by Al Gore, "The Secrets of Alchemy" by Lawrence Principe, and "The Universe Within: The Deep History of the Human Body" by Neil Shubin.

The article reviews the book "Perplexities of Consciousness" by Eric Schwitzgebel.

The article reviews the book "Nature's Oracle: A Life of W.D. Hamilton," by Ullica Segerstrale.

The article reviews several books including "The Social Conquest of Earth" by Edward O. Wilson, "Darwin's Ghosts: In Search of the First Evolutionists" by Rebecca Stott and "The Spark of Life: Electricity in the Human Body" by Frances Ashcroft.

I critically examine some recent work on the philosophy of scientific fictions, focusing on the work of Winsberg. By considering two case studies in fracture mechanics, the strip yield model and the imaginary crack method, I argue that his reliance upon the social norms associated with an element of a model forces him to remain silent whenever those norms fail to clearly match the characteristic of fictions or non-fictions. In its place, I propose a normative epistemology of fictions which clarifies a model's ontological commitments when the community of scientists lack any clear, shared norms of use. Specifically, I will introduce a variational account of fictions as an extension of Laymon's monotonic improvability account of idealizations. I will conclude by connecting this variational account of fictions to didactic fictions in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reading comprehension is a challenge for K-12 learners and adults. Nonfiction texts, such as expository texts that inform and explain, are particularly challenging and vital for students' understanding because of their frequent use in formal schooling (e.g., textbooks) as well as everyday life (e.g., newspapers, magazines, and medical information). The structure strategy is explicit instruction about how to strategically use knowledge about text structures for encoding and retrieval of information from nonfiction and has consistently shown significant improvements in reading comprehension. We present the delivery of the structure strategy using a web-based intelligent tutoring system (ITSS) that has the potential to offer consistent modeling, practice tasks, assessment, and feedback to the learner. Finally, we report on statistically significant findings from a large scale randomized controlled efficacy trial with rural and suburban 4th-grade students using ITSS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A review essay of Bonaventura Vulcanius, Works and Networks, edited by Hélène Cazes. The essay sketches Vulcanius' place in the historiography of scholarship, and discusses the contributions to our understanding of him made in the volume under review, before asking to what extent Vulcanius is, in Geoffrey Elton's formulation, 'biographable,' and what a narrative life of him might achieve. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bloomsbury Press, New York, USA; 2009; 288 pages; ISBN 978-1608190553 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a review of the book "Teaching Every Student in the Digital Age: Universal Design for Learning," by David H. Rose and Anne Meyer.

The article reviews the book "Sound Science, Junk Policy: Environmental Health Science and the Decision-Making Process" by Michele Morrone and Timoothy W. Lohner.