Showing results for "Lost" in Computers & Technology

We live under the comforting assumption that the digital world is permanent — that what we upload, store, and share online will remain accessible forever. Digital Memory & Identity challenges this illusion by exploring the fragility, decay, and impermanence of our modern digital archives. This book examines how our personal histories, cultural artifacts, creative works, and collective knowledge are increasingly stored on technological foundations that are far more vulnerable than traditional physical records.

When we avoid taking a decision, what happens to it? In The Unaccountability Machine, Dan Davies examines why markets, institutions and even governments systematically generate outcomes that everyone involved claims not to want. He casts new light on the writing of Stafford Beer, a legendary economist who argued in the 1950s that we should regard organisations as artificial intelligences, capable of taking decisions that are distinct from the intentions of their members.

When Pete Etchells was 13, his father died from motor neurone disease. In order to cope, he immersed himself in a virtual world - first as an escape, but later to try to understand what had happened. Etchells is now a researcher into the psychological effects of video games, and was co-author on a recent paper explaining why WHO plans to classify "game addiction" as a danger to public health are based on bad science and (he thinks) are a bad idea. In this, his first book, he journeys through the history and development of video games via scientific study....

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of Lost and Founder written and read by Rand Fishkin. Everyone knows how a startup story is supposed to go: a young, brilliant entrepreneur has an cool idea, drops out of college, defies the doubters, overcomes all odds, makes billions and becomes the envy...

What if the information that powers modern life were wiped out tomorrow? Across history, breakthroughs have appeared, flourished—and vanished. The Egyptians could remove cataracts 4,000 years ago; entire libraries of irreplaceable data have burned in a night. Today, our hyper-connected, fully digital world may be even more fragile than the empires that came before us.

In Programmed Inequality, Marie Hicks explores the story of labor feminization and gendered technocracy that undercut British efforts to computerize. Women were a hidden engine of growth in high technology from World War II to the 1960s. As computing experienced a gender flip, labor problems grew into structural ones, and gender discrimination caused the nation's largest computer user to make decisions that were disastrous for the British computer industry and the nation as a whole.

What shapes our sense of place, our sense of time, and our memory? How is technology changing the way we make sense of the world and of ourselves? Our screens offer us connection, especially now in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, but there are certain depths of connection our screens can’t...

Self-driving cars sound fantastical and futuristic, and yet they'll soon be on every street in America. Whether it's Tesla's Autopilot, Google's Waymo, Mercedes' Distronic, or Uber's modified Volvos, companies around the world are developing autonomous cars. But why? And what will they mean for the auto industry and humanity at large? In Robot, Take the Wheel, famed automotive expert Jason Torchinsky gives a colorful account of the development of autonomous vehicles and their likely implications.