Showing titles in History & Culture

Technology is evolving faster than we are. As our BlackBerry devices, tablets, and digital capabilities become more and more complex we understand less and less about how they work. we no longer read the instruction manual before powering on, and we demand intuitive interfaces that get us up and running right away. But how many of us actually stop to think about potential threats to our privacy?Our passports broadcast our personal information and could allow terrorists to target us by nationality.

An illustrated history of American innovators—some well known, some unknown, and all fascinating—by the author of the bestselling The American Century. The real inventor of the steam engine. The creator of the bra. The man who invented modern banking. The creator of the computer operating...

James Lovelock, der Schöpfer der Gaia-Hypothese und berühmteste Ökodenker unserer Zeit, ist im vergangenen Juli 100 Jahre alt geworden - und hat ein neues Buch mit einer spektakulären These veröffentlicht. Darin prophezeit er gelassen das Ende des Anthropozäns und den Anbruch einer neuen Zeit: Mit unserer Gegenwart hat das "Novozän" begonnen, das Zeitalter der Hyperintelligenz. Schon sehr bald wird aus der künstlichen Intelligenz eine neue Art von Lebewesen hervorgehen: Cyborgs, die 10000 mal schneller sein werden als wir.

Award-winning author and journalist Benyamin Cohen has a bizarre side hustle as the manager of Einstein's official social media accounts, which have 20 million followers—more than most living celebrities. In The Einstein Effect, Cohen embarks on a global quest to unearth Einstein's ongoing relevance today. Along the way, he meets scientists and celebrities, speaks to dozens with the last name Einstein (including two rabbis), and even tracks down the brain of Einstein, stolen from his body during the autopsy

In The Unintended Consequences of Technology: Solutions, Breakthroughs and the Restart We Need, accomplished tech entrepreneur Chris Ategeka delivers an insightful and eye-opening exploration of the challenges and the opportunities at the intersection of technology, society, and our planet.  

Longlisted for the FT & McKinsey Business Book of the Year 2017 Tech experts Vivek Wadhwa and Alex Salkever describe dozens of astonishing technological advances in this fascinating and thought-provoking book, which asks what kind of future lies ahead - Star Trek or Mad Max.Breakthroughs such as...

Digital transformation of the business landscape is well underway, and businesses are being reshaped faster than ever before. Agility and adaptability are now critical components of these businesses' survival. But building these traits requires a holistic approach with an unrelenting focus on automation. How does one go about developing that focus? Vijay Tella, Scott Brinker, and Massimo Pezzini deliver a guide to implementing automation in the real world, avoiding jargon and vague bromides in favor of concrete examples.

Palo Alto is nice. The weather is temperate, the people are educated, rich, healthy, enterprising. Remnants of a hippie counterculture have synthesized with high technology and big finance to produce the spiritually and materially ambitious heart of Silicon Valley. It is also a haunted toxic waste dump built on stolen Indian burial grounds, and an integral part of the capitalist world system. In Palo Alto, the first comprehensive, global history of Silicon Valley, Malcolm Harris examines how and why Northern California evolved in the particular, consequential way it did.

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.

“It is possible to invent a single machine which can be used to compute any computable sequence,” twenty-four-year-old Alan Turing announced in 1936. In Turing’s Cathedral, George Dyson focuses on a small group of men and women, led by John von Neumann at the Institute for Advanced Study...

1998年にニフティサーブを運営するニフティ（株）の社長に就任し、富士通と日商岩井の共同出資会社から富士通100％子会社化へと変化する時期を経験された渡辺武経さんと、ニフティサーブのサービス開始当初からモータースポーツフォーラムのSysopを務めた漫画家のすがやみつるさんが、それぞれのFORUMに関わる経緯や、FORUMとニフティ（株）のかかわり合いや、FORUMに対する思いを熱く語り合って頂きました。

A pioneering neuroscientist shows how the long-sought merger of brains with machines is about to become a paradigm-shifting reality. Imagine living in a world where people use their computers, drive their cars, and communicate with one another simply by thinking. In this stunning and inspiring...

A field guide to the visionaries and the fans who are reinventing the art of storytelling. Not long ago we were spectators, passive consumers of mass media. Now, on YouTube and blogs and Facebook and Twitter, we are media. And while we watch more television than ever before, how we watch it is changing in ways we have barely slowed down to register. No longer content in our traditional role as couch potatoes, we approach media as experiences to immerse ourselves in at will.

Before smartphones, back even before the Internet and personal computer, a misfit group of technophiles, blind teenagers, hippies, and outlaws figured out how to hack the world’s largest machine: the telephone system. Starting with Alexander Graham Bell’s revolutionary "harmonic telegraph", by the middle of the 20th century the phone system had grown into something extraordinary, a web of cutting-edge switching machines and human operators that linked together millions of people like never before. But the network had a billion-dollar flaw, and once people discovered it, things would never be the same.

By utilising the latest thinking in health and behavioural economics, social psychology, neuroscience, management and social network analysis, Fully Connected will provide a blueprint for how to use social health to foster well-being and productivity. At every level, each person, department and organisation is struggling to find a way to navigate this challenging era; Fully Connected will be a blueprint for anyone looking to reclaim time, space and identity in our world.

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of Who Can You Trust? by Rachel Botsman, read by Caroline Baum. Nominated for the Business Book Awards 'Embracing Change' category If you can't trust those in charge, who can you trust? From government to business, banks to media, trust in institutions is...

Stephen Fry traces the evolution of the mobile phone, from hefty executive bricks that required a separate briefcase to carry the battery, to the smartphones available today. There are more mobile phones in the world than there are people on the planet: Stephen Fry talks to the backroom boys who...

Brought to you by Penguin. We are entering an empathy crisis. Most of our communication is conveyed through non-verbal cues - facial expressions, tone of voice, body language - nuances that are completely lost when we interact through our smartphones and other technology. The result is a digital...

Hailed by Ken Burns as one of the foremost “explainers” of technology and its effect throughout history, Tom Wheeler now turns his gaze to the public impact of entrepreneurial innovation. In Techlash, he connects the experiences of the late 19th century’s industrial Gilded Age with its echoes in the 21st century digital Gilded Age. In both cases, technology innovation and the great wealth that it created ran up against the public interest and the rights of others.

The Age of Prediction is about two powerful, and symbiotic, trends: the rapid development and use of artificial intelligence and big data to enhance prediction, as well as the often paradoxical effects of these better predictions on our understanding of risk and the ways we live. Beginning with dramatic advances in quantitative investing and precision medicine, this book explores how predictive technology is quietly reshaping our world in fundamental ways, from crime fighting and warfare to monitoring individual health and elections.