Information Ages

Information Ages PDF Author: Michael E. Hobart
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9780801864124
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
A grand intellectual history from clay tablets to Bill Gates. Selected by Choice Magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title The late twentieth century is trumpeted as the Information Age by pundits and politicians alike, and on the face of it, the claim requires no justification. But in Information Ages, Michael E. Hobart and Zachary S. Schiffman challenge this widespread assumption. In a sweeping and captivating history of information technology from the ancient Sumerians to the world of Alan Turing and John von Neumann, the authors show how revolutions in the technology of information storage—from the invention of writing approximately 5,000 years ago to the mathematical models for describing physical reality in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to the introduction of computers—profoundly transformed ways of thinking.

Information Ages

Information Ages PDF Author: Michael E. Hobart
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9780801864124
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
A grand intellectual history from clay tablets to Bill Gates. Selected by Choice Magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title The late twentieth century is trumpeted as the Information Age by pundits and politicians alike, and on the face of it, the claim requires no justification. But in Information Ages, Michael E. Hobart and Zachary S. Schiffman challenge this widespread assumption. In a sweeping and captivating history of information technology from the ancient Sumerians to the world of Alan Turing and John von Neumann, the authors show how revolutions in the technology of information storage—from the invention of writing approximately 5,000 years ago to the mathematical models for describing physical reality in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to the introduction of computers—profoundly transformed ways of thinking.

The Electric Information Age Book

The Electric Information Age Book PDF Author: Jeffrey Schnapp
Publisher: Princeton Architectural Press
ISBN: 9781616890346
Category : Design
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The Electric Information Age Book explores the nine-year window of mass-market publishing in the sixties and seventies when formerly backstage players-designers, graphic artists, editors-stepped into the spotlight to produce a series of exceptional books. Aimed squarely at the young media-savvy consumers of the "Electronic Information Age," these small, inexpensive paperbacks aimed to bring the ideas of contemporary thinkers like Marshall McLuhan, R. Buckminster Fuller, Herman Kahn, and Carl Sagan to the masses. Graphic designers such as Quentin Fiore (The Medium Is the Massage, 1967) employed a variety of radical techniques-verbal visual collages and other typographic pyrotechnics-that were as important to the content as the text. The Electric Information Age Book is the first book-length history of this brief yet highly influential publishing phenomenon.

Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age

Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age PDF Author: Kurt W. Beyer
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262517264
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 405

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Book Description
The career of computer visionary Grace Murray Hopper, whose innovative work in programming laid the foundations for the user-friendliness of today's personal computers that sparked the information age. A Hollywood biopic about the life of computer pioneer Grace Murray Hopper (1906–1992) would go like this: a young professor abandons the ivy-covered walls of academia to serve her country in the Navy after Pearl Harbor and finds herself on the front lines of the computer revolution. She works hard to succeed in the all-male computer industry, is almost brought down by personal problems but survives them, and ends her career as a celebrated elder stateswoman of computing, a heroine to thousands, hailed as the inventor of computer programming. Throughout Hopper's later years, the popular media told this simplified version of her life story. In Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age, Kurt Beyer reveals a more authentic Hopper, a vibrant and complex woman whose career paralleled the meteoric trajectory of the postwar computer industry. Both rebellious and collaborative, Hopper was influential in male-dominated military and business organizations at a time when women were encouraged to devote themselves to housework and childbearing. Hopper's greatest technical achievement was to create the tools that would allow humans to communicate with computers in terms other than ones and zeroes. This advance influenced all future programming and software design and laid the foundation for the development of user-friendly personal computers.

Structuring the Information Age

Structuring the Information Age PDF Author: JoAnne Yates
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9780801880865
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 380

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Book Description
Structuring the Information Age provides insight into the largely unexplored evolution of information processing in the commercial sector and the underrated influence of corporate users in shaping the history of modern technology. JoAnne Yates examines how life insurance firms—where good record-keeping and repeated use of massive amounts of data were crucial—adopted and shaped information processing technology through most of the twentieth century. The book analyzes this process beginning with tabulating technology, the most immediate predecessor of the computer, and continuing through the 1970s with early computers. Yates elaborates two major themes: the reciprocal influence of information technology and its use, and the influence of past practices on the adoption and use of new technologies. In the 1950s, insurance industry leaders recognized that computers would enable them to integrate processes previously handled separately, but they also understood that they would have to change their ways of working profoundly to achieve this integration. When it came to choosing equipment and applications, most companies ultimately preferred a gradual, incremental migration to an immediate and radical transformation. In tracing this process, Yates shows that IBM's successful transition from tabulators to computers in part reflected that vendor's ability to provide large customers such as insurance companies with the necessary products to allow gradual change. In addition, this detailed industry case study helps explain information technology's so-called productivity paradox, showing that firms took roughly two decades to achieve the initial computerization and process integration that the industry set as objectives in the 1950s.

John Trevisa's Information Age

John Trevisa's Information Age PDF Author: Emily Steiner
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192896903
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
What would medieval English literature look like if we viewed it through the lens of the compendium? In that case, John Trevisa might come into focus as the major author of the fourteenth century. Trevisa (d. 1402) made a career of translating big informational texts from Latin into English prose. These included Ranulph Higden's Polychronicon, an enormous universal history, Bartholomaeus Anglicus's well-known natural encyclopedia De proprietatibus rerum, and Giles of Rome's advice-for-princes manual, De regimine principum. These were shrewd choices, accessible and on trend: De proprietatibus rerum and De regimine principum had already been translated into French and copied in deluxe manuscripts for the French and English nobility, and the Polychronicon had been circulating England for several decades. This book argues that John Trevisa's translations of compendious informational texts disclose an alternative literary history by way of information culture. Bold and lively experiments, these translations were a gamble that the future of literature in England was informational prose. This book argues that Trevisa's oeuvre reveals an alternative literary history more culturally expansive and more generically diverse than that which we typically construct for his contemporaries, Geoffrey Chaucer and William Langland. Thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century European writers compiled massive reference books which would shape knowledge well into the Renaissance. This study maintains that they had a major impact on English poetry and prose. In fact, what we now recognize to be literary properties emerged in part from translations of medieval compendia with their inventive ways of handling vast quantities of information.

Privacy in the Information Age

Privacy in the Information Age PDF Author: Fred H. Cate
Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
ISBN: 0815791348
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 261

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Book Description
Electronic information networks offer extraordinary advantages to business, government, and individuals in terms of power, capacity, speed, accessibility, and cost. But these same capabilities present substantial privacy issues. With an unprecedented amount of data available in digital format--which is easier and less expensive to access, manipulate, and store--others know more about you than ever before. Consider this: data routinely collected about you includes your health, credit, marital, educational, and employment histories; the times and telephone numbers of every call you make and receive; the magazines you subscribe to and the books your borrow from the library; your cash withdrawals; your purchases by credit card or check; your electronic mail and telephone messages; where you go on the World Wide Web. The ramifications of such a readily accessible storehouse of information are astonishing. Governments have responded to these new challenges to personal privacy in a wide variety of ways. At one extreme, the European Union in 1995 enacted sweeping regulation to protect personal information; at the other extreme, privacy law in the United States and many other countries is fragmented, inconsistent, and offers little protection for privacy on the internet and other electronic networks. For all the passion that surrounds discussions about privacy, and the recent attention devoted to electronic privacy, surprisingly little consensus exists about what privacy means, what values are served--or compromised--by extending further legal protection to privacy, what values are affected by existing and proposed measures designed to protect privacy, and what principles should undergird a sensitive balancing of those values. In this book, Fred Cate addresses these critical issues in the context of computerized information. He provides an overview of the technologies that are provoking the current privacy debate and discusses the range of legal issues that these technologies raise. He examines the central elements that make up the definition of privacy and the values served, and liabilities incurred, by each of those components. Separate chapters address the regulation of privacy in Europe and the United States. The final chapter identifies four sets of principles for protecting information privacy. The principles recognize the significance of individual and collective nongovernmental action, the limited role for privacy laws and government enforcement of those laws, and the ultimate goal of establishing multinational principles for protecting information privacy. Privacy in the Information Age involves questions that cut across the fields of business, communications, economics, and law. Cate examines the debate in provocative, jargon-free, detail.

After the Information Age

After the Information Age PDF Author: James W. Marcum
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9780820462288
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
Textbook

Power and Security in the Information Age

Power and Security in the Information Age PDF Author: Myriam Dunn Cavelty
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317076958
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 189

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Book Description
The marriage of computers and telecommunications, the global integration of these technologies and their availability at low cost is bringing about a fundamental transformation in the way humans communicate and interact. But however much consensus there may be on the growing importance of information technology today, agreement is far more elusive when it comes to pinning down the impact of this development on security issues. Written by scholars in international relations, this volume focuses on the role of the state in defending against cyber threats and in securing the information age. The manuscript is captivating with the significance and actuality of the issues discussed and the logical, knowledgeable and engaged presentation of the issues. The essays intrigue and provoke with a number of 'fresh' hypotheses, observations and suggestions, and they contribute to mapping the diverse layers, actors, approaches and policies of the cyber security realm.

Global Political Economy in the Information Age

Global Political Economy in the Information Age PDF Author: Gillian Youngs
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113417490X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 205

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Book Description
Introduction: 20th-21st century imaginings and realities Section 1: Time/Space Frameworks 1. States and Markets: understanding geospatial time 2. Virtual Realities: exploring sociospatiality 3. The Political Economy of Time: historical time, speed and mobility Section 2: Borders and Inequality 4. Transcendence and Communication 5. Inequality as Driver 6. Embedding Patriarchy: feminism and inequality in the Internet era Section 3: Technofutures and Power 7. Complex Hegemony in the 21st Century: power and inequality Conclusion

Public Administration in an Information Age

Public Administration in an Information Age PDF Author: I. Th. M. Snellen
Publisher: IOS Press
ISBN: 9789051993950
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 606

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Book Description
This book is a joint effort of researchers who have been involved in research-projects and programmes that have been trying to chart and reflect upon the implications of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) for Public Administration (Tilburg/Rotterdam, Kassel, Irvine, Nottingham/Glasgow). Since the fifties, computers had largely facilitated and the transformation of the minimal 'Night-Watch-state' into the modern 'Welfare-state', through their contribution to their effectivity, productivity and efficiency. In most Handbooks of Public Administration, computers are seen as neutral instruments and, most of the time, the role of computer technologies in the transformation of public administration is completely neglected. This 'deafening silence' is a great contrast with the way ICT's are actually changing public administration. The faster the developments in a field of study are, the more difficult it is to let the theories, related to that field of study, mature. In such circumstances, most statements will remain provisial and context-dependent. 25 years of research in Irvine (California) and Kassel (Germany) and more than 10 years of research in Tilburg/Rotterdam (The Netherlands) and about seven years of research in Glasgow/Nottingham (the United Kingdom) nonetheless enables the presentation of a modest image of public administration as it is entering the information age. Researchers in each of these groups have, nevertheless, not stopped trying to phrase theories about the implications of informatization for public administration with a more or less larges scope, that are robust in different contexts and over longer periods of time. These results and theories, covering a broad set of elements of the body of knowledge of public administration, are presented in this volume. As the authors try to demonstrate in this book, informatization developments in public administration do not only challenge the existing body of knowledge of the public administration discipline, but they are also opening up new perspectives and paradigms for the study of public administration.