[PDF] Computing Across America eBook

Author : Joy Lisi Rankin
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 337 pages
File Size : 10,70 MB
Release : 2018-10-08
Category : Computers
ISBN : 0674970977

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Silicon Valley gets all the credit for digital creativity, but this account of the pre-PC world, when computing meant more than using mature consumer technology, challenges that triumphalism. The invention of the personal computer liberated users from corporate mainframes and brought computing into homes. But throughout the 1960s and 1970s a diverse group of teachers and students working together on academic computing systems conducted many of the activities we now recognize as personal and social computing. Their networks were centered in New Hampshire, Minnesota, and Illinois, but they connected far-flung users. Joy Rankin draws on detailed records to explore how users exchanged messages, programmed music and poems, fostered communities, and developed computer games like The Oregon Trail. These unsung pioneers helped shape our digital world, just as much as the inventors, garage hobbyists, and eccentric billionaires of Palo Alto. By imagining computing as an interactive commons, the early denizens of the digital realm seeded today’s debate about whether the internet should be a public utility and laid the groundwork for the concept of net neutrality. Rankin offers a radical precedent for a more democratic digital culture, and new models for the next generation of activists, educators, coders, and makers.

Author : Scott Aaronson
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 403 pages
File Size : 13,52 MB
Release : 2013-03-14
Category : Computers
ISBN : 0521199565

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Takes students and researchers on a tour through some of the deepest ideas of maths, computer science and physics.

Author : George Dyson
Publisher : Pantheon
Page : 466 pages
File Size : 47,91 MB
Release : 2012
Category : Science
ISBN : 0375422773

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Documents the innovations of a group of eccentric geniuses who developed computer code in the mid-20th century as part of mathematician Alan Turin's theoretical universal machine idea, exploring how their ideas led to such developments as digital television, modern genetics and the hydrogen bomb.

Author : Clifford Stoll
Publisher : Anchor
Page : 242 pages
File Size : 43,59 MB
Release : 2000-09-12
Category : Education
ISBN : 0385489765

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The cry for and against computers in the classroom is a topic of concern to parents, educators, and communities everywhere. Now, from a Silicon Valley hero and bestselling technology writer comes a pointed critique of the hype surrounding computers and their real benefits, especially in education. In High-Tech Heretic, Clifford Stoll questions the relentless drumbeat for "computer literacy" by educators and the computer industry, particularly since most people just use computers for word processing and games--and computers become outmoded or obsolete much sooner than new textbooks or a good teacher. As one who loves computers as much as he disdains the inflated promises made on their behalf, Stoll offers a commonsense look at how we can make a technological world better suited for people, instead of making people better suited to using machines.

Author : Larry CUBAN
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 258 pages
File Size : 41,18 MB
Release : 2009-06-30
Category : Education
ISBN : 0674030109

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Impelled by a demand for increasing American strength in the new global economy, many educators, public officials, business leaders, and parents argue that school computers and Internet access will improve academic learning and prepare students for an information-based workplace. But just how valid is this argument? In Oversold and Underused, one of the most respected voices in American education argues that when teachers are not given a say in how the technology might reshape schools, computers are merely souped-up typewriters and classrooms continue to run much as they did a generation ago. In his studies of early childhood, high school, and university classrooms in Silicon Valley, Larry Cuban found that students and teachers use the new technologies far less in the classroom than they do at home, and that teachers who use computers for instruction do so infrequently and unimaginatively. Cuban points out that historical and organizational economic contexts influence how teachers use technical innovations. Computers can be useful when teachers sufficiently understand the technology themselves, believe it will enhance learning, and have the power to shape their own curricula. But these conditions can't be met without a broader and deeper commitment to public education beyond preparing workers. More attention, Cuban says, needs to be paid to the civic and social goals of schooling, goals that make the question of how many computers are in classrooms trivial.

Author : Donald Leka
Publisher : Happy About
Page : 123 pages
File Size : 12,36 MB
Release : 2013
Category : Computers
ISBN : 1600052436

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Cross platform technology could be "The Next Big Thing." Glide is a pioneering and award winning cloud-computing service leading the emergence of the cross platform space. If you use any combination of Microsoft Windows, Google Android and Apple iOS/OS X devices and various cloud services like Dropbox, Google Docs and Facebook in your home or business, this book is a must read. Cloud Computing: The Glide OS Story provides a detailed primer on the challenges and opportunities faced by start up companies and how they all relate to major changes in the technology industry and the global financial environment. Experience how Founder and CEO, Donald Leka steers Glide through the ultra competitive technology industry and the Global Financial Crisis. Go behind the scenes and learn what really happened in key meetings, interviews, backstage at major international trade shows and the strategy behind major product releases. The thrills and spills described make this book an educational gem for budding tech entrepreneurs and the seed and venture capital investors who fund them and entertaining reading for the rest of us.

Author : Charlton D. McIlwain
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 272 pages
File Size : 17,4 MB
Release : 2019-10-01
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 0190863854

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Activists, pundits, politicians, and the press frequently proclaim today's digitally mediated racial justice activism the new civil rights movement. As Charlton D. McIlwain shows in this book, the story of racial justice movement organizing online is much longer and varied than most people know. In fact, it spans nearly five decades and involves a varied group of engineers, entrepreneurs, hobbyists, journalists, and activists. But this is a history that is virtually unknown even in our current age of Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Black Lives Matter. Beginning with the simultaneous rise of civil rights and computer revolutions in the 1960s, McIlwain, for the first time, chronicles the long relationship between African Americans, computing technology, and the Internet. In turn, he argues that the forgotten figures who worked to make black politics central to the Internet's birth and evolution paved the way for today's explosion of racial justice activism. From the 1960s to present, the book examines how computing technology has been used to neutralize the threat that black people pose to the existing racial order, but also how black people seized these new computing tools to build community, wealth, and wage a war for racial justice.Through archival sources and the voices of many of those who lived and made this history, Black Software centralizes African Americans' role in the Internet's creation and evolution, illuminating both the limits and possibilities for using digital technology to push for racial justice in the United States and across the globe.

Author : Brian J.S. Chee
Publisher : CRC Press
Page : 151 pages
File Size : 23,34 MB
Release : 2010-04-07
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 1040065481

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Modern computing is no longer about devices but is all about providing services, a natural progression that both consumers and enterprises are eager to embrace. As it can deliver those services, efficiently and with quality, at compelling price levels, cloud computing is with us to stay. Ubiquitously and quite definitively, cloud computing is

Author : Ed Finn
Publisher : MIT Press
Page : 267 pages
File Size : 35,82 MB
Release : 2017-03-10
Category : Computers
ISBN : 0262035928

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The gap between theoretical ideas and messy reality, as seen in Neal Stephenson, Adam Smith, and Star Trek. We depend on—we believe in—algorithms to help us get a ride, choose which book to buy, execute a mathematical proof. It's as if we think of code as a magic spell, an incantation to reveal what we need to know and even what we want. Humans have always believed that certain invocations—the marriage vow, the shaman's curse—do not merely describe the world but make it. Computation casts a cultural shadow that is shaped by this long tradition of magical thinking. In this book, Ed Finn considers how the algorithm—in practical terms, “a method for solving a problem”—has its roots not only in mathematical logic but also in cybernetics, philosophy, and magical thinking. Finn argues that the algorithm deploys concepts from the idealized space of computation in a messy reality, with unpredictable and sometimes fascinating results. Drawing on sources that range from Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash to Diderot's Encyclopédie, from Adam Smith to the Star Trek computer, Finn explores the gap between theoretical ideas and pragmatic instructions. He examines the development of intelligent assistants like Siri, the rise of algorithmic aesthetics at Netflix, Ian Bogost's satiric Facebook game Cow Clicker, and the revolutionary economics of Bitcoin. He describes Google's goal of anticipating our questions, Uber's cartoon maps and black box accounting, and what Facebook tells us about programmable value, among other things. If we want to understand the gap between abstraction and messy reality, Finn argues, we need to build a model of “algorithmic reading” and scholarship that attends to process, spearheading a new experimental humanities.