Showing results for "A World History" in Computers & Technology

The story of human civilization can be read most deeply in the materials we have found or created, used or abused. They have dictated how we build, eat, communicate, wage war, create art, travel, and worship. Some, such as stone, iron, and bronze, lend their names to the ages. Others, such as gold, silver, and diamond, contributed to the rise and fall of great empires.

Although we usually think of technology as something unique to modern times, our ancestors began to create the first technologies millions of years ago in the form of prehistoric tools and weapons. Over time, eight key technologies gradually freed us from the limitations of our animal origins.

Recoding History: The Audacious Women Who Shaped Our Digital World is an immersive look into the lives of some of computer history's most ingenious and audacious women. Pulling from the Computer History Museum’s archives and hosted by Reshma Saujani, the founder of Girls Who Code, listeners will learn and laugh along with these great minds as they recount their stories in their own words.

Most people think about technology as something we created to serve us, but we may well be getting to the point where we are the ones who're serving an ever more sophisticated technology. With pragmatism and optimism, Dr Tim Sharp, aka Dr Happy, outlines strategies and tools to build your confidence to positively cope with the modern world.

What is blockchain? What is Bitcoin? How can central banks be instrumental in guiding a nation's economy? What are the underlying causes of trade deficits? Do trade wars actually help the domestic economy? How has the behavior of millennials and Generation Z affected the global economy? Find out...

From gunpowder to generative AI, the forces of disruption are repeatedly rewriting the rules of business, society, and human possibility. But what drives these revolutionary changes? In Epic Disruptions, innovation expert Scott Anthony weaves together the stories behind history's most transformative disruptions.

Books preserve ideas, yes, but they also provoke new ones— they are true tools for thinking. In The Idea Machine, Joel J. Miller shows that books are one of the most important but overlooked factors in the making of our contemporary world.

Paul Kennedy, award-winning author of The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers and one of today’s most renowned historians, now provides a new and unique look at how World War II was won. Engineers of Victory is a fascinating nuts-and-bolts account of the strategic factors that led to Allied victory. Kennedy reveals how the leaders’ grand strategy was carried out by the ordinary soldiers, scientists, engineers, and businessmen responsible for realizing their commanders’ visions of success.

This riveting biography from the American Bar Association visits the spectacular life of Edwin Land, breakthrough inventor. At the time of his death, he stood third on the list of our most prolific inventors, behind only Thomas Edison and one of Edison's colleagues. Land's most famous achievement was the creation of a revolutionary film-and-camera system that could produce a photographic print moments after the picture was taken.

On a moonless night in January 1991, a dozen US aircraft appeared in the skies over Baghdad. To the Iraqi air defenses, the planes seemed to come from nowhere. Each aircraft was more than 60 feet in length and with a wingspan of 40 feet, yet its radar footprint was the size of a ball bearing. Here was the first extensive combat application of Stealth technology. And it was devastating.

In Future Histories, public interest lawyer and digital specialist Lizzie O'Shea argues that we need to stop looking forward and start looking backwards. Weaving together histories of computing and progressive social movements with modern theories of the mind, society, and self, O'Shea constructs a "usable past" that can help us determine our digital future. What, she asks, can the Paris Commune tell us about earlier experiments in sharing resources - like the internet - in common?

Few of us give much thought to computer code or how it comes to be. The very word “code” makes it sound immutable or even inevitable. “You Are Not Expected to Understand This” demonstrates that, far from being preordained, computer code is the result of very human decisions, ones we all live with when we use social media, take photos, drive our cars, and engage in a host of other activities.

In this provocative book, Ramesh Srinivasan describes the internet as both an enabler of frictionless efficiency and a dirty tangle of politics, economics, and other inefficient, inharmonious human activities. We may love the immediacy of Google search results, the convenience of Amazon, and the elegance of our Apple devices, but it’s a one-way, top-down process. We’re not asked for our input or our opinions - only for our data. The internet is brought to us by wealthy technologists in Silicon Valley and China. Srinivasan argues that we must think in terms beyond the Valley.

The definitive history of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Pentagon agency that has quietly shaped war and technology for nearly sixty years. Founded in 1958 in response to the launch of Sputnik, the agency’s original mission was to create “the unimagined weapons of the...

If you feel like you're losing your teen to technology, you're not alone. Screen time is rapidly replacing family time, and for teens especially, it is hardwiring the way they connect with their world. In Screens and Teens, Dr. Kathy helps you make sense of all this and empowers you to respond.

The Exciting World of Web 3.0 series is a captivating exploration into the most revolutionary technological shift of our time. This series demystifies the next evolution of the internet, where virtual reality, decentralised systems, and digital ownership redefine how we connect, create, and interact.

Spanning four decades of dramatic advances in astronomy and planetary science, this book tells the story of eleven iconic exploratory missions and how they have fundamentally transformed our scientific and cultural perspectives on the universe and our place in it

Brimming with enthralling details and personalities, Toby Lester's The Fourth Part of the World spotlights Martin Waldseemüller's 1507 world map and recounts the epic tale of the mariners and scholars who facilitated this watershed of Western history.

The dream of capturing and organizing knowledge is as old as history. From the archives of ancient Sumeria and the Library of Alexandria to the Library of Congress and Wikipedia, humanity has wrestled with the problem of harnessing its intellectual output. The timeless quest for wisdom has been as much about information storage and retrieval as creative genius. In Cataloging the World, Alex Wright introduces us to a figure who stands out in the long line of thinkers and idealists who devoted themselves to the task.

We may love books, but do we know what lies behind them? In The Book, Keith Houston reveals that the paper, ink, thread, glue, and board from which a book is made tell as rich a story as the words on its pages - of civilizations, empires, human ingenuity, and madness. In an invitingly tactile history of this 2,000-year-old medium, Houston follows the development of writing, printing, the art of illustrations, and binding to show how we have moved from cuneiform tablets and papyrus scrolls to the hardcovers and paperbacks of today.