bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Ways of thinking 3D geometry: exploratory case study in junior high school students
Authors: Sudirman Sudirman , Andrés Rodríguez-Nieto Camilo , Bongani Dhlamini Zwelithini , Singh Chauhan Alok , Baltaeva Umida , Abubakar Abdulhalim , O. Dejarlo Jenisus , Andriani Mela
Published: June 2023

Each student has their own characteristics and way of doing 3D geometric thinking. The way of thinking that students do influences the resulting understanding of the concept of 3D geometry. Therefore, this study aims to investigate students' geometric thinking based on the level of achievement of students in completing the 3D geometric thinking ability test (3D GTA). This study uses an exploratory case study design. The participants who voluntarily participated were 33 junior high school students (14 boys, 19 girls) in one of the schools in Indramayu Regency, Indonesia. Data obtained from the process of observation, tests, interviews, and documentation were analyzed qualitatively using Atlas. ti 8 software. The findings revealed that students with low 3D GTA achievements experienced difficulties in representing and calculating the surface area and volume of 3D shapes. In addition, students with moderate 3D GTA achievements experienced difficulties in representing 3D shapes but were able to translate 2D shapes from 3D shapes. Furthermore, students with high 3D GTA achievements experienced difficulties in calculating the surface area and volume of 3D shapes, but were able to use appropriate formulas and were able to interpret the comparisons of 3D geometric shapes well. The results of this study have implications for helping teachers identify student characteristics in understanding the concept of 3D geometry and connections with 2D geometry.
Pressure Fluctuations in Railway Tunnels
Authors:   Principia, Rodríguez Javier , Lacoma Luis , Martí Joaquín
Published: June 2023

When high-speed trains enter and exit tunnels, major pressure transients are produced, which travel in the form of waves along the tunnel and are reflected at the portals. Guidelines and regulations limit the pressure changes felt inside the cars to ensure the health and aural comfort of the passengers. The authors developed a one-dimensional program, based on the method of characteristics, to carry out the necessary calculations. After validating the program against results from other codes, including full 3-D CFD calculations, they used it to confirm the design of a tunnel for high-speed rail traffic.
Rebuilding the Symbolic Boundaries between the East and West: Occidentalism in 'The Battle at Lake Changjin'
Authors: Nicieja Stankomir
Published: June 2023

The article explores the concept of Occidentalism and its portrayal in the recent Chinese blockbuster film, The Battle at Lake Changjin. The author contends that the movie represents a resurgence of Occidentalism in Chinese popular cinema, reinforcing the East-West binary and promoting a narrative of Chinese superiority. The discussion begins by contextualizing the historical origins of the East-West binary and its role in shaping Western identities and justifying practices like colonialism. The article also highlights the intricate complexities and contradictions within the film, as well as its implications for China’s cultural and political landscape, specifically the shift in China’s attitude towards the West during President Xi Jinping’s tenure. The article emphasizes the growing closure of the Chinese mindset, exemplified by the adoption of “wolf-warrior diplomacy” and the portrayal of the West as an adversary in the media. This shift is also discernible in Chinese popular cinema, exemplified by films like Wolf Warrior 2, which depict Chinese protagonists triumphing over villainous Western characters. The author underscores the essentialist portrayal of the Chinese in The Battle at Lake Changjin as morally and spiritually superior to their Western counterparts. By creating a stark binary opposition between the East and West, the movie accentuates cultural differences and constructs them as insurmountable. Additionally, the article explores the film’s narrative structure, its influences from Western and Chinese cinema, and the depiction of key characters, including General Douglas MacArthur and Mao Zedong.
Migration aspirations: fallible impact of structural factors and incongruence of aspirations claimed by Ukrainian students at the Czech Republic
Authors: Jirka Luděk
Published: June 2023

Traditional approaches in migration studies are push and pull factors, neoclassical theory of migration and historical-structural approaches, however these approaches are not human-centered because self-identification, self-realization, aspirations or desires of migrants is not adopted. This article, based on qualitative research in the Czech Republic and Ukraine from 2014 until 2022, is aimed at young Ukrainian participants who throughout eight years migrated in their 15-16-years-old as students at High school in Uni?ov, Czech Republic, while their parents stayed in Ukraine. This article shows that aspirations, instead of objective structural factors, are more decisive for participants and it indicates that migration aspirations are strongly ambiguous and heavily affected by strong inclination to subjective goals which asses the incongruence between participants and their parents in this research.
Measurement of scattering intensity distribution of single microparticles/nanoclusters based on laser levitation
Authors: Huang Xue-Feng , Chen Chu , Li Jia-Xin , Zhang Min-Qi , Li Sheng-Ji ,   Department of Physics, Hangzhou Dianzi University, Hangzhou 310018, China,   College of Materials and Environmental Engineering, Hangzhou Dianzi University, Hangzhou 310018, China
Published: June 2023

The scattering measurement of particulates in gaseous medium is helpful in understanding light transmission, laser detection, combustion radiation and atmospheric environment. In order to explore the scattering characteristics of micron-/nano-sized particles, this paper proposes a method of accurately measuring the scattering intensity distribution of a single micron-sized particles/nanoclusters by combining laser levitation and scattering measurement. An experimental apparatus is first built based on the counter-propagated bi-Bessel beams levitation system and scattering test system. The microparticles/nanoclusters of various matters and sizes are then levitated and their stabilities are evaluated. Finally, the scattering intensity distribution of levitated particles within 2π scattering angle is accurately measured with an angular resolution of 9.2″. The forces acting on particles under laser irradiation and the scattering intensity distribution of different particle parameters are simulated and calculated, and compared with experimental results. The influence of noise on the uncertainty of the scattering measurement system is analyzed in depth, including background light, laser beam, and reflected light from the walls. The results show that the signal-to-noise ratio of scattering measurement for metallic magnesium and aluminum, whether single particles or clusters, are both greater than 20 dB and their maximum values are both 94.6 dB in a range of 2π angle. For graphite nanoclusters, the signal-to-noise ratio in the backscattering direction is relatively poor. The influence of levitation instability on the scattering measurement results is estimated in detail, verifying that the influence of levitation instability in the test system on the scattering measurement is ignorable. Metallic magnesium, aluminum, and graphite particles can be stably levitated by the counter-propagated bi-Bessel beams, with a relative instability of less than 0.15. During the levitation, the photophoretic force plays a dominant role. The scattering intensity distribution of a single micron-sized particles and nanoclusters both conform to the scattering characteristics of Mie particles. Microparticles with large refractive index imaginary parts have stronger forward scattering characteristics. The larger the particle size parameter, the stronger the forward scattering effect becomes. The accurate measurement of the scattering intensity distribution of a single microparticles confirms the versatility and reliability of the levitation scattering test system, providing a new research method for in-depth understanding of the scattering characteristics of substances.
Effects of long-range inter-particle interactions and isolated defect on quantum walks of two hard-core bosons in one-dimensional lattices
Authors: Li Yan ,   College of Physics and Telecommunication, Nanchang Normal University, Nanchang 330032, China
Published: June 2023

The quantum walk of two hard-core bosons in one-dimensional lattice under the effect of long-range inter-particle interaction is studied in detail. We also simulate the influence of an isolated defect that may exist in the lattice on the quantum walk of two particles by adding an additional potential energy to a certain lattice site. Using exact diagonalization method, the continuous-time quantum walk is directly simulated. The numerical simulations show that the range of interaction (long-range or short-range), the strength of the inter-particle interaction, the initial state of the two particles and the presence of the isolated defect have great influences on the quantum walk. Under the effect of strong long-range interaction, the particles initially located on the non-adjacent lattice sites have a co-walking behavior, while under the short-range interactions (nearest-neighbor interactions) only two particles initially located on the neighboring lattice sites can exhibit co-walking. After introducing the isolated defect into the system with strong interaction, two particles residing on the same side of the isolated defect keep co-walking, while two particles located on either sides of the isolated defect or one particle located on the isolated defect and the other particle staying on the side of the isolated defect, the two particles keep stationary or co-walking near the defect, displaying the characteristics of localization. By using the second-order perturbation theory of degenerate quantum system, a comprehensive theoretical analysis of the above numerical results is given. The theoretical analysis reveals the underlying physical law of quantum walks of two particles in one-dimensional lattice under the effects of strong long-range interaction and isolated defect in the lattice.
Mechanism of avalanche charge domain transport for nonlinear mode of GaAs photoconductive semiconductor switches
Authors: Tian Li-Qiang , Pan Cong , Shi Wei , Pan Yi-Ke , Ran En-Ze , Li Cun-Xia ,   School of Science, Xi’an University of Technology, Xi’an 710048, China
Published: June 2023

Photoconductive semiconductor switch is of significance in the fields of ultafast electronics, high-repetition rate and high-power pulse power system, and THz radiation. The mechanism of the nonlinear mode of the switch is an important area of study. In this work, stable nonlinear wave forms are obtained by a semi-insulating GaAs photoconductive semiconductor switch triggered by a 5-ns laser pulse with pulsed energy of 1 mJ at a wavelength of 1064 nm under a bias of 2750 V. Based on two-photon absorption model, the photogenerated carrier concentration is calculated. The theory analysis and calculation result show that the photogenerated carrier can compensate for the lack of intrinsic carrier, and lead to the nucleation of photo-activated charge domain. According to transferred-electron effect principium, the electric field inside and outside the domain are calculated, indicating that the electric field within the domain can reach the electric field which is much larger than intrinsic breakdown electric field of GaAs material, and results in strong impact avalanche ionization in the bulk of the GaAs switch. According to the avalanche space charge domain, the typical experimental phenomena of nonlinear mode for GaAs switch are analyzed and calculated, the analysis and calculations are in excellent agreement with the experimental results. Based on drift-diffusion model and negative differential conductivity effect, the transient electric field in the bulk of the switch is simulated numerically under the optical triggering condition. The simulation results show that there are moving multiple charge domains with a peak electric filed as high as the intrinsic breakdown electric field of GaAs within the switch. This work provides the experimental evidence and theoretical support for studying the generation mechanism of the nonlinear photoconductive semiconductor switch and the improvement of the photo-activated charge domain theory.
Diversity Dividend
Authors: Cecchi-Dimeglio Paola
Published: June 2023

From entry-level to the boardroom, what works to create large-scale change in organizations looking to accelerate their diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts andreap financial benefits.

Every leader endeavors to invest in and manage their key asset—talent—to be as high-performing as possible. Like a winning stock, successful diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) actions pay back over time. That dividend is paid both to the company—through not only higher performance but also talent acquisition, training, and other savings—and to society in general. In Diversity Dividend,Paola Cecchi-Dimeglio offers a fresh, detailed look at how to realize gender and racial equity along the company-employee pathway—from attracting and interviewing applicants to onboarding, promoting, and sustaining hires—and how to remove systemic barriers at the organizational level that prevent women and underrepresented groups from advancing.

While other books have delved into DEI and the challenges inherent in sustaining successful efforts, no book has done so in concert with the depth and scope of data, basis in science, and application in the real world. In Diversity Dividend, Cecchi-Dimeglio artfully combines accessible anecdotal cases—where success was achieved or where, despite best intentions and efforts, things did not go as expected—with scientifically rigorous solutions as well as applications of data and big data.

As empowering as it is comprehensive, Diversity Dividend helps remove the guesswork and near-superstition that naturally arise when some methods work and others fail, thereby giving leaders the tools and insight to make informed choices at the right moments to create lasting change.
Dark Star
Authors: Hersch Matthew H.
Published: June 2023

A captivating history of NASA's Space Transportation System—the space shuttle—chronicling the inevitable failures of a doomed design.

In Dark Star, Matthew Hersch challenges the existing narrative of the most significant human space program of the last 50 years, NASA's space shuttle. He begins with the origins of the space shuttle: a century-long effort to develop a low-cost, reusable, rocket-powered airplane to militarize and commercialize space travel, which Hersch explains was built the wrong way, at the wrong time, and for all the wrong reasons. Describing the unique circumstances that led to the space shuttle's creation by President Richard Nixon's administration in 1972 and its subsequent flights from 1981 through 2011, Hersch illustrates how the space shuttle was doomed from the start.

While most historians have accepted the view that the space shuttle's fatal accidents—including the 1986 Challenger explosion—resulted from deficiencies in NASA's management culture that lulled engineers into a false confidence in the craft, Dark Star reveals the widespread understanding that the shuttle was predestined for failure as a technology demonstrator. The vehicle was intended only to give the United States the appearance of a viable human spaceflight program until funds became available to eliminate its obvious flaws. Hersch's work seeks to answer the perilous questions of technological choice that confront every generation, and it is a critical read for anyone interested in how we can create a better world through the things we build.
Distant Viewing
Authors: Arnold Taylor , Tilton Lauren
Published: June 2023

A new theory and methodology for the application of computer vision methods to the computational analysis of collected, digitized visual materials, called “distant viewing.”

Distant Viewing: Computational Exploration of Digital Images presents a new theory and methodology for the computational analysis of digital images, offering a lively, constructive critique of computer vision that you can actually use. What does it mean to say that computer vision “understands” visual inputs? Annotations never capture a whole image. The way digital images convey information requires what researchers Taylor Arnold and Lauren Tilton call “distant viewing”—a play on the well-known term “distant reading” from computational literary analysis.

Recognizing computer vision's limitations, Arnold and Tilton's spirited examination makes the technical exciting by applying distant viewing to the sitcoms Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie, movie posters and other popular forms of advertising, and Dorothea Lange's photography. In the tradition of visual culture studies and computer vision, Distant Viewing's interdisciplinary perspective encompasses film and media studies, visual semiotics, and the sciences to create a playful, accessible guide for an international audience working in digital humanities, data science, media studies, and visual culture studies.
Picture-Work
Authors: Kamin Diana
Published: June 2023

How the image collection, organized and made available for public consumption, came to define a key feature of contemporary visual culture.

The origins of today's kaleidoscopic digital visual culture are many. In this book, Diana Kamin traces the sharing of photographs to an image economy developed throughout the twentieth century by major institutions. Picture-Work examines how three of these institutions—the New York Public Library, the Museum of Modern Art, and the stock agency H. Armstrong Roberts Inc.—defined the public's understanding of what the photographic image is, while building vast collections with universalizing ambitions. Highlighting underexplored figures, such as the first rights and reproduction manager at MoMA Pearl Moeller and visionary NYPL librarian Romana Javitz, and underexplored professional practices, Diana Kamin demonstrates how bureaucratic work communicates ideas about images to the public.

Kamin artfully shows how the public interfaces with these image collections through systems of classification and protocols of search and retrieval. These interactions, in turn, shape contemporary image culture, including concepts of authorship, art, property, and value, as well as logics of indexing, tagging, and hyperlinking. Together, these interactions have forged a concept of the image as alienable content, which has intensified with the advent of digital techniques for managing image collections. To survey the complicated process of digitization in the nineties and early aughts, Kamin also includes interviews with photographers, digital asset management system designers, librarians, and artists on their working practices.
How to Research Like a Dog
Authors: Schuster Aaron
Published: June 2023

A provocative book that proposes a new and surprising inspiration for philosophy today—the canine thinker from Kafka's story “Investigations of a Dog.”

Written toward the end of Kafka's life, “Investigations of a Dog” (Forschungen eines Hundes, 1922) is one of the lesser-known and most enigmatic works in the author's oeuvre. Kafka's tale of philosophical adventure is that of a lone, maladjusted dog who challenges the dogmatism of established science and pioneers an original research program in pursuit of the mysteries of his self and his world. In How to Research Like a Dog, Aaron Schuster uses the canine as a guide dog to rediscover Kafka's fictional universe, while taking up the cause of this ingenious, possessed, melancholy, comical, and revolutionary thinker.

Neither an exercise in literary criticism nor a traditional philosophical commentary, this charming and idiosyncratic book aligns itself with the research program of Kafka's dog. It constructs an “impossible” system based on the fourfold division of nourishment, music, incantation, and freedom—or, stated a bit differently: enjoyment, art, institutions, and freedom. From Plato to Flaubert, Lispector, and Lacan, Schuster puts the dog in dialogue with psychoanalytic theory, the history of philosophy, and modern literature. Imagining the “Unknown University” that Kafka's new science calls for, the book enlists new comrades in the dog's struggle.
R.U.R. and the Vision of Artificial Life
Authors: Čapek Karel
Published: June 2023

A new translation of Karel Čapek's play R.U.R.—which famously coined the term “robot”—and a collection of essays reflecting on the play's legacy from scientists and scholars who work in artificial life and robotics.

R.U.R. and the Vision of Artificial Life offers a new, highly faithful translation by Štěpán Šimek of Czech novelist, playwright, and critic Karel Čapek's play R.U.R.: Rossum's Universal Robots, as well as twenty essays from contemporary writers on the 1920 play. R.U.R. is perhaps best known for first coining the term “robot” (in Czech, robota means serfdom or arduous drudgery). The twenty essays in this new English edition, beautifully edited by Jitka Čejková, are selected from Robot 100, an edited collection in Czech with perspectives from 100 contemporary voices that was published in 2020 to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the play.

Čapek's robots were autonomous beings, but biological, not mechanical, made of chemically synthesized soft matter resembling living tissue, like the synthetic humans in Blade Runner, Westworld, or Ex Machina. The contributors to the collection—scientists and other scholars—explore the legacy of the play and its connections to the current state of research in artificial life, or ALife. Throughout the book, it is impossible to ignore Čapek's prescience, as his century-old science fiction play raises contemporary questions with respect to robotics, synthetic biology, technology, artificial life, and artificial intelligence, anticipating many of the formidable challenges we face today.

This publication has been supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic.

Contributors Jitka Čejková, Miguel Aguilera, Iñigo R. Arandia, Josh Bongard, Julyan Cartwright, Seth Bullock, Dominique Chen, Gusz Eiben, Tom Froese, Carlos Gershenson, Inman Harvey, Jana Horáková, Takashi Ikegami, Sina Khajehabdollahi, George Musser, Geoff Nitschke, Julie Nováková, Antoine Pasquali, Hemma Philamore, Lana Sinapayen, Hiroki Sayama, Nathaniel Virgo, Olaf Witkowski
The Sensorium of the Drone and Communities
Authors: Maurer Kathrin
Published: June 2023

A comprehensive overview of how civilian drones sense the world and how they build the aesthetic imaginaries of our communities.

Drone technology has garnered critical attention across many fields, from engineering to the humanities. While the first wave of drone scholarship was key in initiating the debate on drones, it also privileged the idea of the “scopic regime”—a militarized regime of hypervisuality—in its analyses of the connection between vision and power. The Sensorium of the Drone and Communities broadens the drone's spectrum of perception by acknowledging its creative, life-affirming possibility with the notion of the sensorium. The sensorium of the drone is a multimedia, synesthetic sensing assemblage in which the human agent is enmeshed with the drone. Drone sensoria can sense in many more ways than the scopic regime—with sound, touch, smell, temperature, and movement.

In The Sensorium of the Drone and Communities, Kathrin Maurer shows how drone sensoria can change our understanding of human communities by constructing imaginaries of social communities based on decentralized and fluid sensing processes. Maurer takes an aesthetic approach to technology, working with two understandings of aesthetics. One understanding refers to aesthetics as a way of experiencing, and it explores how the drone-human assemblage perceives the world. The other refers to aesthetic mimetic representation, and focuses on how aesthetic drone imaginaries in literature, popular culture, visual arts, and films negotiate the sensorial technology of the drone. Bringing together key ideas in technology studies, studies of aerial views, visual and aesthetic studies, posthuman sensing, machine–human interaction, and communities, The Sensorium of the Drone and Communities sheds a welcome and necessary light on this technology's creative potential as well as its dangers and risks.
The Abuse of Property
Authors: Loick Daniel
Published: June 2023

A fundamental critique of the current property regime, calling for radical social and political change.

In The Abuse of Property, Daniel Loick offers a multifaceted philosophical critique of the concept of property, broadly understood. He argues that property should not be the dominant framework in which human beings regulate the use of things, that property is not the same as use. Property rights, in his view, are not conditions of freedom or justice, but deficient, dysfunctional, and harmful ways of interacting with other people and the natural environment. He dissects not only the classic justifications of property (from John Locke's justification of property as a natural right based on individual freedom to Hegel's justification of property as a form of mutual recognition) but also the classic critiques of property, from Proudhon and Marx up to Adorno and Agamben.

Through an innovative critical approach to legal studies, Loick demonstrates how the concept of property, historically applied to things and people and still a linchpin of our distorted relation with the world, forms a direct line from the Occupy movement to Black Lives Matter and beyond.

Untimely Meditations series
The Perception Machine
Authors: Zylinska Joanna
Published: June 2023

A provocative investigation of the future of photography and human perception in the age of AI.

We are constantly photographing and being photographed while feeding machine learning databases with our data, which in turn is used to generate new images. Analyzing the transformation of photography by computation—and the transformation of human perception by algorithmically driven images, from CGI to AI—The Perception Machine investigates what it means for us to live surrounded by image flows and machine eyes. In an astute and engaging argument, Joanna Zylinska brings together media theory and neuroscience in a Vilém Flusser–Paul Virilio remix. Her “perception machine” names a technical universe of images and their infrastructures. But it also refers to a sociopolitical condition resulting from today's automation of vision, imaging—and imagination.

Written by a theorist-practitioner, the book incorporates Zylinska's own art projects, some of which have been co-created with AI. The photographs, collages, films, and installations available as part of the book (and its companion website) provide a different mode of thinking about our technological futures, at a local as well as a planetary level. Offering provocative concepts such as eco-eco-punk, AUTO-FOTO-KINO, planetary micro-vision, loser images, and sensography, the book outlines an existential philosophy of messy media for a time when our practices of imaging and self-imaging are being radically redesigned. Importantly, it also offers a new vision of our future.
Families on the Edge
Authors: Carpenter-Song Elizabeth
Published: June 2023

An intimate account of rural New England families living on the edge of homelessness, as well as the practices and policies of care that fail them.

Families on the Edge is an ethnographic portrait of families in rural and small-town New England who are often undercut by the very systems that are set up to help them. In this book, author and medical anthropologist Elizabeth Carpenter-Song draws on a decade of ethnographic research to chart the struggles of a cohort of families she met in a Vermont family shelter in 2009, as they contend with housing insecurity, mental illness, and substance use. Few other works have attempted to take such a long-term view of how vulnerability to homelessness unfolds over time or to engage so fully with existing scholarship in the fields of anthropology and health services.

Research on homelessness in the United States has been overwhelmingly conducted in urban settings, so much less is known about its trajectory in rural areas and small towns. Carpenter-Song's book identifies how specific aspects of rural New England—including scarce affordable housing stock, extremely limited transportation, and cultural expectations of self-reliance—come together to thwart opportunities for families despite their continual striving to “make it” in this environment. Carpenter-Song shines a light on the many high-stakes consequences that occur when systems of care fail and offers a way forward for clinicians, health researchers, and policymakers seeking practical solutions.
A Place for Science and Technology Studies
Authors: Calvert Jane
Published: June 2023

An exploration of science and technology studies in eight different places, and the possibilities that arise for observation, intervention, and collaboration.

Where does science and technology studies (STS) belong? In A Place for Science and Technology Studies, Jane Calvert takes readers through eight different rooms—the laboratory, the conference room, the classroom, the coffee room, the art studio, the bioethics building, the policy room, and the ivory tower—investigating the possibilities and limitations of each for STS research.

Drawing from over a decade of work in synthetic biology, Calvert explores three different orientations for STS—observation, intervention, and collaboration—to ask whether there is a place for STS, which, as an undisciplined field, often finds itself on the periphery of traditional institutions or dependent on more generously funded STEM disciplines.Using examples of failures and successes and tackling enduring concerns about the relations between social scientific researchers and their fields of study, Calvert argues for an approach to STS that is collaborative yet allows for autonomy.
From ASCII Art to Comic Sans
Authors: Wagner Karin
Published: June 2023

A fresh and provocative take on typography, computing, and popular culture, viewed through four idiosyncratic typographical phenomena from the digital age.

From ASCII Art to Comic Sans offers an original vision of the history of typography and computing in the digital age, viewed through the lens of offbeat typography. We often regard text as pure information and typography as a transparent art form without meaning of its own. In this richly illustrated book, however, Karin Wagner offers a fresh perspective that shows how text is always an image that conveys meaning, and how typography, far from being meaningless, has in fact shaped modern visual and material culture in significant ways.

By juxtaposing four odd typographical phenomena—the pedantic practice of ASCII art, the curious-looking machine-readable typefaces, the blurry letters of dot matrix printers, and the much-maligned font Comic Sans—Wagner paints a vivid picture of how functional technologies influence popular culture when used in ways their original creators never intended.

Design practitioners, as well as fans of media, graphic design, type history, and computer technology, will enjoy this breezily sophisticated perspective on visual and digital culture. Spanning the material and visual aspects of typography from the 1960s to the present, From ASCII Art to Comic Sans is a unique contribution to the study of popular and material culture that fills a gap in the history of typography and computing.
Molecular Mechanisms in Materials
Authors: Yip Sidney
Published: June 2023

A student-oriented introduction to understanding mechanisms at the atomistic level controlling macroscopic materials phenomena through molecular dynamics simulations.

Machine-learning-based computation in materials innovation, performance optimization, and sustainability offers exciting opportunities at the mesoscale research frontier. Molecular Mechanisms in Materials presents research findings and insights about material behavior at the molecular level and its impact on macroscopic properties. The book's fifteen essays represent author Sidney Yip's work in atomistic modeling and materials simulation over more than five decades. The phenomena are grouped into five basic types: fluctuations in simple fluids, crystal melting, plasticity and fracture, glassy relaxations, and amorphous rheology, all focused on molecular mechanisms in base materials.

The organizing principle of Molecular Mechanisms in Materials is multiscale modeling and simulation, where conceptual models and simulation techniques are linked across the micro-to-macro length and time scales to control the outcome of specific materials processes. Each essay addresses a specific standalone topic of materials phenomena while also recognizing the larger context of materials science and technology. Individual case studies serve both as standalone essays and companion pieces to each other. Indeed, the global transformation of science and technology is well underway: in his epilogue, Yip discusses the potential of artificial intelligence and machine learning to enhance future materials for societal benefits in the face of global challenges such as climate change, energy sustainability, infrastructure renewal, and nuclear arms control.
Autographic Design
Authors: Offenhuber Dietmar
Published: June 2023

An ambitious vision for design based on the premise that data is material, not abstract.

Data analysis and visualization are crucial tools in today's society, and digital representations have steadily become the default. Yet, more and more often, we find that citizen scientists, environmental activists, and forensic amateurs are using analog methods to present evidence of pollution, climate change, and the spread of disinformation. In this illuminating book, Dietmar Offenhuber presents a model for these practices, a model to make data generation accountable: autographic design.

Autographic refers to the notion that every event inscribes itself in countless ways. Think of a sundial, for example—a perfectly autographic device that displays information on itself. Inspired by such post-digital practices of visualization and evidence construction, Offenhuber describes an approach to visualization based on the premise that data is a material entity rather than an abstract representation. Emerson wrote, “Every act of the man inscribes itself in the memories of his fellows, and in his own manners and face.” In Autographic Design, Offenhuber introduces a model for design that emphasizes traces, imprints, and self-inscriptions, turning them into sensory displays.

In an age where misinformation is harder and harder to identify, Autographic Design makes an urgent and persuasive case for a different approach that calls attention to the production of data and its connection to the material world.
Code to Joy
Authors: Littman Michael L.
Published: June 2023

How we can get more joy from our machines by telling them what our hearts desire.

In this informative, accessible, and very funny book, Michael L. Littman inspires readers to learn how to tell machines what to do for us. Rather than give in to the fear that computers will steal our jobs, spy on us and control what we buy and whom we vote for, we can improve our relationship with them just by learning basic programming skills. Our devices will help us, Littman writes, if we can say what we want in a way they can understand.

Each chapter of the book focuses on a particular element of what can be said, providing examples of how we use similar communication in our daily interactions with people. Littman offers ways readers can experiment with these ideas right away, using publicly available systems that might also make us more productive as a welcome side effect. Each chapter also reflects on how the use of these programming components can be expedited by machine learning. With humor and teacherly guidance, Code to Joy brings into view a future where programming is like reading—something everyone can learn.
Dare to Invent the Future
Authors: Mavhunga Clapperton Chakanetsa
Published: June 2023

A rallying manifesto for the innovative problem-solving we need to build a better, more verdant, and sustainable planetary existence.

Academics are letting Africa down. With all that we know, what do we have to show for it? Whose lives have been changed for the better by it? What have we done for and with our communities lately? In this provocative book—the first in a trilogy—Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga argues that our critical thinkers must become actual thinker-doers. Taking its title from one of Thomas Sankara's most inspirational speeches, Dare to Invent the Future looks for moments in Africa's story where precedents of critical thought and knowledge in service of problem-solving are evident to inspire readers to dare to invent such a knowledge system.

Mavhunga revisits insights from Edward Wilmot Blyden, Booker T. Washington, Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Amílcar Cabral, Julius Nyerere, and Thomas Sankara to illustrate how the academic disciplines have been, and could be, deployed in the service of and through problem-solving, building on what people are doing and know. At its core, he writes, knowledge in the service of and through problem-solving derives from reading the past for new questions, doing due diligence in the present, and contriving an anticipatory approach toward the future.

Questioning the fundamental premises of Western and white knowledge production, especially regarding science and technology, Mavhunga proposes in this book refreshingly new approaches to thinking-doing that stem from African realities, in the hopes of inspiring a generation that will run toward, not away from, problems to solve them.
Sharing Our Science
Authors: Brown Brandon R.
Published: June 2023

A personal, practical, and inspirational guide to written and oral STEM communications for scientists and technical professionals.

In Sharing Our Science, scientist-turned-writing teacher Brandon Brown offers an eminently useful guidebook for STEM practitioners looking to communicate their technical work to either a technical or a broader audience. Professionals are increasingly required to communicate their work through blogs, podcasts, and newsletters and to submit to traditional media. After seeing his colleagues struggle to find a writing guide that tackled the unique challenges of writing and speaking about scientific topics, Brown set out to write the definitive handbook to assist STEM students, scientists, engineers, and tech workers alike.

In this practical and relevant book, Brown uses his experience as a proven science communicator to cover three levels of writing: fundamental craft considerations, such as narrative tension, structure, sentences, and audience; unique scientific considerations, such as conveying numbers and utilizing metaphors; and finally, social considerations, such as public speaking and writing inside and outside of silos. In place of a reference manual, Brown's engaging narrative guide clarifies the fundamental principles that impact all scientific communication tasks, from white papers and slide decks to Zoom meetings and emails. Sharing Our Science represents the culmination of a lifetime of writing, research, and teaching that will enrich scientists' careers and illuminate the ways in which science is done and conveyed to the world.
The Infrastructural South
Authors: Silver Jonathan
Published: June 2023

An in-depth look at the infrastructural landscape of Africa amid the third wave of urbanization, drawing on case studies from Africa and extending further afield.

The Infrastructural South represents a major theoretical contribution to the study of infrastructure's role in the third wave of urbanization centered on Africa. Based on over a decade of empirical research, Silver's sweeping examination probes many of contemporary urbanism's most exciting and pressing issues through the lens of the Global South. Focusing on Uganda, Ghana, and South Africa, Silver's conceptually innovative chapters explore the way access to energy, water, sanitation, transit, and information technologies shapes everyday life as they map the dynamic relations between cities, technology, and the environment.

Pushing readers to look at the wider worlds that suffuse urban systems, this theoretical and geographical perspective treats Africa's rapidly transforming towns and cities as complex sites of disruption, emancipation, and contradiction. In doing so, it shows how the proliferating urbanisms and contested techno-environments arise from shifting priorities in infrastructure planning, politics, and financing gaps.

As urban issues become a key twenty-first-century challenge for Africa, Silver offers a comprehensive reworking of our understanding of urbanization. The Infrastructural South rethinks how global scholarship approaches infrastructure, laying pathways for future research at the intersection of technology, environmental urbanism, and urban politics.
Open Minded
Authors: Newell Ben R. , Shanks David R.
Published: June 2023

A provocative look at the unconscious mind that challenges contemporary perceptions and exposes the indefensible science that fostered them.

How much of a role does the unconscious play in our decision making? In Open Minded: Searching for Truth about the Unconscious Mind, authors Ben R. Newell and David R. Shanks would argue: not very much. Behavioral science and public discourse have placed an outsized emphasis on the unconscious mind when it comes to understanding human behavior. Pursuing trails of fraud, intrigue, and claims about the power of unconscious thought, Newell and Shanks scrutinize the science that has contributed to our conventional wisdom and offer an important counterpoint to the ever-stronger traction that the unconscious mind has gained in public debate, such as the now ubiquitous claim that unconscious bias plays a large role in people's decisions and behavior.

Open Minded is divided into two sections: the first examines the modern understanding of the conscious mind, and the second shifts the focus to how to reform current research. Focusing on the core processes of decision making, Newell and Shanks cut through many questionable claims about unconscious behavior. Then, they delve into the nuts-and-bolts of methodology, challenging not only psychology and the behavioral sciences but also medicine and science more broadly. In this against-the-grain approach, Newell and Shanks chart new possibilities for how we may be more open to understanding how our minds actually work.
Recycling Class
Authors: Anantharaman Manisha
Published: June 2023

An ethnographic and community-engaged study of the class, caste, and gender politics of environmental mobilizations around Bengaluru, India's discards.

In Recycling Class, Manisha Anantharaman examines the ideas, flows, and relationships around unmanaged discards in Bengaluru, India, itself a massive environmental problem of planetary proportions, to help us understand what types of coalitions deliver social justice within sustainability initiatives. Recycling Class links middle-class, sustainable consumption with the environmental labor of the working poor to offer a relational analysis of urban sustainability politics and practice. Through ethnographic, community-based research, Anantharaman shows how diverse social groups adopt, contest, and modify neoliberal sustainability's emphasis on market-based solutions, behavior change, and the aesthetic conflation of “clean” with “green.”

Tracing garbage politics in Bengaluru for over a decade, Anantharaman argues that middle-class “communal sustainability” efforts create new avenues for waste picker organizations to make claims for infrastructural inclusion. Coproduced “DIY infrastructures” serve as sites of citizenship and political negotiation, challenging the technocratic and growth-based logics of dominant sustainability policies. Yet, these configurations reproduce class, caste, and gender-based divisions of labor, demonstrating that inclusion without social reform can reproduce unjust distributions of risk and responsibility. Revealing the win-win fallacy of sustainability and foregrounding the agency of communities excluded from environmental policy, Recycling Class will appeal to scholars and activists alike who want to create a future with more transformative sustainability.
Person, Thing, Robot
Authors: Gunkel David J.
Published: June 2023

Why robots defy our existing moral and legal categories and how to revolutionize the way we think about them.

Robots are a curious sort of thing. On the one hand, they are technological artifacts—and thus, things. On the other hand, they seem to have social presence, because they talk and interact with us, and simulate the capabilities commonly associated with personhood. In Person, Thing, Robot, David J. Gunkel sets out to answer the vexing question: What exactly is a robot? Rather than try to fit robots into the existing categories by way of arguing for either their reification or personification, however, Gunkel argues for a revolutionary reformulation of the entire system, developing a new moral and legal ontology for the twenty-first century and beyond.

In this book, Gunkel investigates how and why efforts to use existing categories to classify robots fail, argues that “robot” designates an irreducible anomaly in the existing ontology, and formulates an alternative that restructures the ontological order in both moral philosophy and law. Person, Thing, Robot not only addresses the issues that are relevant to students, teachers, and researchers working in the fields of moral philosophy, philosophy of technology, science and technology studies (STS), and AI/robot law and policy but it also speaks to controversies that are important to AI researchers, robotics engineers, and computer scientists concerned with the social consequences of their work.
Evolutionary Intelligence
Authors: Neuman W. Russell
Published: June 2023

A surprising vision of how human intelligence will coevolve with digital technology and revolutionize how we think and behave.

It is natural for us to fear artificial intelligence. But does Siri really want to kill us? Perhaps we are falling into the trap of projecting human traits onto the machines we might build. In Evolutionary Intelligence,Neuman offers a surprisingly positive vision in which computational intelligence compensates for the well-recognized limits of human judgment, improves decision making, and actually increases our agency. In artful, accessible, and adventurous prose, Neuman takes the reader on an exciting, fast-paced ride, all the while making a convincing case about a revolution in computationally augmented human intelligence.

Neuman argues that, just as the wheel made us mobile and machines made us stronger, the migration of artificial intelligence from room-sized computers to laptops to our watches, smart glasses, and even smart contact lenses will transform day-to-day human decision making. If intelligence is the capacity to match means with ends, then augmented intelligence can offer the ability to adapt to changing environments as we face the ultimate challenge of long-term survival.

Tapping into a global interest in technology's potential impacts on society, economics, and culture, Evolutionary Intelligence demonstrates that our future depends on our ability to computationally compensate for the limitations of a human cognitive system that has only recently graduated from hunting and gathering.