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Logged On looks at mobile and smart phone technology through the lens of good government management. How will developing governments deliver goods and services that citizens care about? How will government in these countries leapfrog over traditional public management reforms to help reach out to and collaborate directly with the citizen? This book provides example after example where this has happened and how mobile technology has helped provide solutions to old problems. Our astounding revelat...

The 20th century witnessed two digital revolutions. Computing power has revolutionized every industry, from finance to agriculture to pharmaceuticals. We've got computers at work and at home, in our pockets and our bags, on our wrists, and even embedded in the architecture of our houses. At the same time a revolution in digital communication unfolded, which has forever altered our lives-work, social, and private-by enabling a world in which we're never impossible to reach and have nearly limitle...

Mining has been entangled with the development of communities in all continents since the beginning of large-scale resource extraction. It has brought great wealth and prosperity, as well as great misery and environmental destruction. Today, there is a greater awareness of the urgent need for engineers to meet the challenge of extracting declining mineral resources more efficiently, with positive and equitable social impact and minimal environmental impact. Many engineering disciplines-from soft...

Technological affordances mediate between the features of a technology and the outcomes of engagement with that technology. The concept of affordances, which migrated from psychology to design with Donald Norman's influential 1988 book, The Design of Everyday Things, offers a useful analytical tool in technology studies-but, Jenny Davis argues in How Artifacts Afford, it is in need of a conceptual update. Davis provides just such an update, introducing the mechanisms and conditions framework, wh...

Beatrice Bressan brings together a number of outstanding examples of successful cross-disciplinary technology transfer originating in fundamental physics research, which dramatically impacted scientific progress in areas which changed modern society. Many of them were developed at CERN, a hotbed of fundamental inventions in particle physics. This book deals with breakthrough developments being applied in the world of IT, consumer electronics, aviation, and material sciences. Additional sections...

This text concentrates on the interaction between society and technology in a comprehensive review and overview of contemporary thought and research and writing. Themes covered in Part 1 include feminism, envrironmental policy and public intellectuals, all examined in light of their relationship to technological advance. A section of the book is dedicated to the study of philosophy of technology at Twente University with chapters submitted by faculty members there. Also included is a review sect...

This book represents an important voice in the scientific discourse on what constitutes a sustainable information society, and provides a new comprehensive and forward-looking approach to such a development. This approach is based on the adoption of information and communication technologies (ICTs) by the main stakeholders of society, including individuals, enterprises, and public administration, who should use ICTs in order to build the welfare of present and future generations, ensure economic...

Soon, robots will leave the factories and make their way into living rooms, supermarkets, and care facilities. They will cooperate with humans in everyday life, taking on more than just practical tasks. How should they communicate with us? Do they need eyes, a screen, or arms? Should they resemble humans? Or may they enrich social situations precisely because they act so differently from humans? Meaningful Futures with Robots: Designing a New Coexistence provides insight into the opportunities...

Much has been written over the years about life in the coal mines of Appalachia. Not surprisingly, attention has focused mainly on the experiences of male miners. In Daughters of the Mountain, Suzanne Tallichet introduces us to a cohort of women miners at a large underground coal mine in southern West Virginia, where women entered the workforce in the late 1970s after mining jobs began opening up for women throughout the Appalachian coalfields. Tallichet's work goes beyond anecdotal evidence to...

A unique examination of the civic use, regulation, and politics of communication and data technologies City life has been reconfigured by our use—and our expectations—of communication, data, and sensing technologies. In this book Alison Powell examines the civic use, regulation, and politics of these technologies, looking at how governments, planners, citizens, and activists expect them to enhance life in the city. She argues that the de facto forms of citizenship that emerge in relation to th...

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Following the economic crisis of 2008, the website `bitcoin.org' was registered by a mysterious computer programmer called Satoshi Nakamoto. A new form of money was born: electronic cash. Does Bitcoin have the potential to change how the world transacts financially? Or is it just a passing fad, even a major scam? In Bitcoin: The Future of Money?, MoneyWeek's Dominic Frisby's explains this controversial new currency and how it came about, interviewing some of the key players in its development w...

Race on the Line is the first book to address the convergence of race, gender, and technology in the telephone industry. Venus Green-a former Bell System employee and current labor historian-presents a hundred year history of telephone operators and their work processes, from the invention of the telephone in 1876 to the period immediately before the break-up of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company in 1984. Green shows how, as technology changed from a manual process to a computerized on...

A century ago, discoveries in physics came together with engineering to produce an array of astonishing new technologies: radios, telephones, televisions, aircraft, radar, nuclear power, computers, the Internet and a host of still- evolving digital tools. These technologies so radically reshaped our world that we can no longer conceive of life without them. Today we are on the cusp of a new convergence, with discoveries in biology coming together with engineering to produce another array of almo...