Tag
Technology
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Victor Frankenstein, ABD
What happens to a young scientist whose primary mentor is an artificial intelligence?
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Books On Books
You need a birthday present, let’s say for your cousin’s boyfriend. You’re bad at guessing shirt sizes, so it might as well be a book. You find a bookstore (if you’re lucky). You make for the section that nobody knows what to call: in front of the cash register, between the chocolate bars and fridge…
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Nuclear Graphics
One of the most challenging aspects of nuclear politics today is the simultaneous invisibility of nuclear things and their ever-presentness. Radiation, of course, is invisible to human senses, but nevertheless presents a constant challenge to health and safety at all nuclear sites. Similarly, while the atomic bomb is hidden behind elaborate systems of state secrecy,…
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Arts of Security
Being “against security” would be absurd in a place like Colombia, where my research is based. People from all over the country have suffered through decades of armed conflict only to now face new threats to their lives and livelihoods. Since the mid-1980s, the capital city of Bogotá has received close to a million internal…
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Jinn in the Machine
G. Willow Wilson’s Alif the Unseen is an unusual, exciting work of urban fantasy that broadens the usual meanings of “urban” and “fantasy.” What does it mean, the novel asks, for a person to turn to or away from faith? What kind of magic is needed to allow disenchanted, half-secularized young citizens of the Arab…
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Good Morning iPad: Technology in 21st-Century Picture Books
After teaching her class the “Star light, star bright” rhyme, my son’s preschool teacher invited each child to express a wish to be inscribed onto a paper star for them to decorate. Lousy with glitter, my son’s star read: “I wish I could play with electronics whenever I want.” From earliest toddlerhood, he had been…
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A Godlike Science
Is there something missing from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein? One would think that an author’s say over her work’s substance would be final. Yet the novel’s prolific adaptations seem obsessed with filling in the gory details that Shelley avoids. The latest such homage, Frankenstein, by Dave Morris and inkle Studios, reworks Shelley’s text as an interactive…
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Time to Occupy Silicon Valley? The New Tech Capitalists
Within 25 years, a life of “possibility,” including clean water, energy, education, information/communication, health, and freedom, will be attainable for all. So claims Abundance, a book that cites and has been glowingly reviewed by some of the most brilliant and successful science and technology entrepreneurs on the planet. And yet, in its rush to breathlessly…
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Can Objects Be Evil?
Addiction by Design is a nonfiction page-turner. A richly detailed account of the particulars of video gaming addiction, worth reading for the excellence of the ethnographic narrative alone, it is also an empirically rigorous examination of users, designers, and objects that deepens practical and philosophical questions about the capacities of players interacting with machines designed…
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Rhythms of Risk: The Rise, Fall, and Rise of Silicon Alley
Dubbed “Silicon Alley” in the mid 1990s, New York’s tech scene at the turn of the millennium was a nexus of youth, cool, and well-paid creative jobs for geeks, artists, and writers. When it contracted, in 2002 many 20-something workers faced not only their own lay-offs, but what felt like the demise of an entire…
