Computertechnik und Sterbekultur

Computertechnik und Sterbekultur PDF Author: Knud Böhle
Publisher: LIT Verlag Münster
ISBN: 3643110715
Category : Attitude to death
Languages : de
Pages : 261

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Book Description
Die Beiträge des Buches geben einen Einblick, wie das Sterben und das Weiterleben nach dem Tod - zumindest in der Erinnerung und in den Medien - fortschreitend und tiefgreifend durch den Einsatz von Techniken verändert werden. 0Die Vielfalt der dargebotenen Perspektiven aus Informatik, Philosophie, Kulturwissenschaft, Kunstgeschichte, Medienwissenschaft, Literaturwissenschaft, Religionswissenschaft, Soziologie, Technikfolgenabschätzung und Theologie macht die Produktivität einer interdisziplinären Thanatologie deutlich.

Computertechnik und Sterbekultur

Computertechnik und Sterbekultur PDF Author: Knud Böhle
Publisher: LIT Verlag Münster
ISBN: 3643110715
Category : Attitude to death
Languages : de
Pages : 261

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Book Description
Die Beiträge des Buches geben einen Einblick, wie das Sterben und das Weiterleben nach dem Tod - zumindest in der Erinnerung und in den Medien - fortschreitend und tiefgreifend durch den Einsatz von Techniken verändert werden. 0Die Vielfalt der dargebotenen Perspektiven aus Informatik, Philosophie, Kulturwissenschaft, Kunstgeschichte, Medienwissenschaft, Literaturwissenschaft, Religionswissenschaft, Soziologie, Technikfolgenabschätzung und Theologie macht die Produktivität einer interdisziplinären Thanatologie deutlich.

Virtual Immortality - God, Evolution, and the Singularity in Post- and Transhumanism

Virtual Immortality - God, Evolution, and the Singularity in Post- and Transhumanism PDF Author: Oliver Krüger
Publisher: transcript Verlag
ISBN: 3839450594
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 357

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Book Description
In recent years, ideas of post- and transhumanism have been popularized by novels, TV series, and Hollywood movies. According to this radical perspective, humankind and all biological life have become obsolete. Traditional forms of life are inefficient at processing information and inept at crossing the high frontier: outer space. While humankind can expect to be replaced by their own artificial progeny, posthumanists assume that they will become an immortal part of a transcendent superintelligence. Krüger's award-winning study examines the historical and philosophical context of these futuristic promises by Ray Kurzweil, Nick Bostrom, Frank Tipler, and other posthumanist thinkers.

Medicine, Ethics and Religion

Medicine, Ethics and Religion PDF Author: James F. Drane
Publisher: LIT Verlag Münster
ISBN: 3643910150
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 161

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Book Description
Medicine, Ethics, Religion addresses three topics that inevitably will be confronted at some level in every human life. Academic understanding of all three fields provides background for entering the field of medicine. Understanding of Bioethics is part of every contemporary student’s higher education. The discipline is presented as an important background understanding of contemporary culture for students. This textbook is required reading for an entry-level course in bioethics or for an introductory philosophy course with a focus on medicine. It may also help readers to understand their own lives, adding e religious dimension to the practice of medicine. The doctor-patient relationship, an analysis of contemporary culture, the impact of technology on human life and the interfaces between medical practice, bioethics, and religion are core themes of this volume.

Compressor Handbook: Principles and Practice

Compressor Handbook: Principles and Practice PDF Author: Tony Giampaolo
Publisher: CRC Press
ISBN: 1000966496
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 408

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Book Description
This book examines the full spectrum of compressor types, how they operate, how to control them, and how operating conditions can significantly impact their performance. Discussed in detail are the influence of pressure, temperature, molecular weight, specific heat ratio, compression ratio, speed, vane position, and volume bottles. The various methods of throughput control are also addressed, including discharge throttling, suction throttling, guide pain positioning, volume, bottles, suction valve unloaders, speed control, as well as how each of these control methods affects compressor life. Compressor surge is defined and discussed in detail, along with the types of instrumentation (controllers, valves, pressure, and temperature transmitters) available, and which of those are most suitable for controlling search. Case studies have been included to illustrate the principles covered in the text. This edition also includes detailed information on compressor seals. Various types of seals providing the best results for different applications are discussed, thereby giving the reader a basic understanding of seals serotypes and applications.

A Contemporary Western Book of the Dead

A Contemporary Western Book of the Dead PDF Author: Charlotte Rodgers
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781906958046
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
Within this book are rituals, stories, traditions and experiences of magicians' scholars and artists who work with death. Some of the contributors such as Nema, Mogg Morgan, Louis Martine and Nevill Drury (to name but a few) have helped define contemporary transformative spirituality. Others are less well known but just as learned. As there should be in such a collection there is comedy, anger, confrontation and practicality. This anthology is about who we are, and where we come from. It is also about how we change. A Contemporary Western Book of the Dead contains voices and visions that acknowledge our past, feed our present and guide the direction of our future. I was musing on Singapore in all its affluent glory still having shrines for the dead on every street corner during 'The Festival of the Hungry Ghosts'. Then I was musing on how the socially mobile of modern western society eschew death rites and grieving in the name of 'holding it together' and being progressive. I thought of which civilisations are falling and which are rising again, and wondered whether acknowledging death and the ancestors is a vital part of maintaining personal identity and our place in society.I remember how my grieving father mourned for all the information he had relied on his deceased wife remembering; information which was now lost. I recalled Michael Crichton's words 'If you don't know (your family's) history, then you don't know anything. You are a leaf that doesn't know it is part of a tree.' Then I thought maybe someone should write about the cults of the ancestors and death, perhaps an anthology, perhaps cross relate experiences of loss to personal spirituality and magick and history. I know that years of working with the dead in the name of art and spirituality, didn't prepare me for the death of my mother. What helped me was the advice of someone from a long tradition of working with the ancestors. I think that collecting the experiences of spiritual practitioners in their working with grief and death is part of a living and necessary tradition that will give respect to the dead and strength, identity and support to our own personal spirituality.'

Personality Capture and Emulation

Personality Capture and Emulation PDF Author: William Sims Bainbridge
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1447156048
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 213

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Book Description
Personality Capture and Emulation is the gateway to an amazing future that actually may be achieved, enabling the preservation and simulation of human personalities at progressively higher levels of fidelity. This challenge is no longer the province merely of uninhibited visionaries, but has become a solid field of research, drawing upon a wide range of information technologies in human-centered computing and cyber-human systems. Even at modest levels of accomplishment, research in this emerging area requires convergence of cognitive, social, and cultural sciences, in cooperation with information engineering and artificial intelligence, thus stimulating new multidisciplinary perspectives. Therefore this book will inspire many specific research and development projects that will produce their own valuable outcomes, even as the totality of the work moves us closer to a major revolution in human life. Will it ever really be possible to transfer a human personality at death to a technology that permits continued life? Or will people come to see themselves as elements in a larger socio-cultural system, for which a societal information system can provide collective immortality even after the demise of individuals? A large number and variety of pilot studies and programming projects are offered as prototypes for research that innovators in many fields may exploit for the achievement of their own goals. Together, they provide an empirical basis to strengthen the intellectual quality of several current debates at the frontiers of the human and information sciences.

Virtually Human

Virtually Human PDF Author: Martine Rothblatt, PhD
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
ISBN: 1466847042
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
Virtually Human explores what the not-too-distant future will look like when cyberconsciousness—simulation of the human brain via software and computer technology—becomes part of our daily lives. Meet Bina48, the world's most sentient robot, commissioned by Martine Rothblatt and created by Hanson Robotics. Bina48 is a nascent Mindclone of Martine's wife that can engage in conversation, answer questions, and even have spontaneous thoughts that are derived from multimedia data in a Mindfile created by the real Bina. If you're active on Twitter or Facebook, share photos through Instagram, or blogging regularly, you're already on your way to creating a Mindfile—a digital database of your thoughts, memories, feelings, and opinions that is essentially a back-up copy of your mind. Soon, this Mindfile can be made conscious with special software—Mindware—that mimics the way human brains organize information, create emotions and achieve self-awareness. This may sound like science-fiction A.I. (artificial intelligence), but the nascent technology already exists. Thousands of software engineers across the globe are working to create cyberconsciousness based on human consciousness and the Obama administration recently announced plans to invest in a decade-long Brain Activity Map project. Virtually Human is the only book to examine the ethical issues relating to cyberconsciousness and Rothblatt, with a Ph.D. in medical ethics, is uniquely qualified to lead the dialogue.

Dying, Death, and Grief in an Online Universe

Dying, Death, and Grief in an Online Universe PDF Author: Carla Sofka, PhD
Publisher: Springer Publishing Company
ISBN: 082610732X
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 283

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Book Description
Print+CourseSmart

Intelligent Virtual Agents

Intelligent Virtual Agents PDF Author: Thomas Rist
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 3540200037
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 378

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Book Description
This volume, containing the proceedings of IVA 2003, held at Kloster Irsee, in Germany, September 15–17, 2003, is testimony to the growing importance of IntelligentVirtualAgents(IVAs) asaresearch?eld.Wereceived67submissions, nearly twice as many as for IVA 2001, not only from European countries, but from China, Japan, and Korea, and both North and South America. As IVA research develops, a growing number of application areas and pl- forms are also being researched. Interface agents are used as part of larger - plications, often on the Web. Education applications draw on virtual actors and virtual drama, while the advent of 3D mobile computing and the convergence of telephones and PDAs produce geographically-aware guides and mobile - tertainment applications. A theme that will be apparent in a number of the papers in this volume is the impact of embodiment on IVA research – a char- teristic di?erentiating it to some extent from the larger ?eld of software agents.

The Singularity Is Near

The Singularity Is Near PDF Author: Ray Kurzweil
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101218886
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 672

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Book Description
“Startling in scope and bravado.” —Janet Maslin, The New York Times “Artfully envisions a breathtakingly better world.” —Los Angeles Times “Elaborate, smart and persuasive.” —The Boston Globe “A pleasure to read.” —The Wall Street Journal One of CBS News’s Best Fall Books of 2005 • Among St Louis Post-Dispatch’s Best Nonfiction Books of 2005 • One of Amazon.com’s Best Science Books of 2005 A radical and optimistic view of the future course of human development from the bestselling author of How to Create a Mind and The Singularity is Nearer who Bill Gates calls “the best person I know at predicting the future of artificial intelligence” For over three decades, Ray Kurzweil has been one of the most respected and provocative advocates of the role of technology in our future. In his classic The Age of Spiritual Machines, he argued that computers would soon rival the full range of human intelligence at its best. Now he examines the next step in this inexorable evolutionary process: the union of human and machine, in which the knowledge and skills embedded in our brains will be combined with the vastly greater capacity, speed, and knowledge-sharing ability of our creations.