This book investigates standards as the recipes that shape not only the physical world, but human social interactions. The author outlines the history of formal standards and describes how modern science came to be associated with the moral-technical project of standardization of both people and things. The author also explores how standards are intimately connected to power, empowering some bu…
Literacy research has focused increasingly on the social, cultural, and material remaking of human communication. Such research has generated new knowledge about the diverse and interconnected modes and media through which people can and do make meaning and opened up definitions of literacy to include image, gaze, gesture, print, speech, and music. And yet, despite all of the attention to multi…
The physics of condensed matter, in contrast to quantum physics or cosmology, is not traditionally associated with deep philosophical questions. However, as science - largely thanks to more powerful computers - becomes capable of analysing and modelling ever more complex many-body systems, basic questions of philosophical relevance arise. Questions about the emergence of structure, the nature o…
An examination of how technological failures defined nature and national identity in Cold War Canada.OCLC-licensed vendor bibliographic record.
How to confront, embrace, and learn from the unavoidable failures of creative practice; with case studies that range from winemaking to animation. Failure is an inevitable part of any creative practice. As game designers, John Sharp and Colleen Macklin have grappled with crises of creativity, false starts, and bad outcomes. Their tool for coping with the many varieties of failure: iteration, th…
In the mid-1960s as a young high school student John Brumley visited Lookout Cave for the first time and knew immediately that the site was exceptional. The cave, located in north central Montana, was initially discovered in 1920 but it wasn’t until 1969 that a field crew from the University of Montana excavated a large portion of the remote site. The materials recovered in that excavation re…
"Costandi explains the neuroscience behind how we view our selves and our bodies, drawing from neurological studies on our sense of agency and free will, the neural correlates of mental representations, mirror neurons, and how the brain perceives timing and sensory consequences. He explores case studies of amputees with phantom limb syndrome, people with Body Integrity Identity Disorder (who ha…
The use of the internet in homes rivals the advent of the telephone, radio, or television in social significance. Daily use of the World Wide Web and e-mail is taken for granted in many families, and the computer-linked internet is becoming an integral part of the physical and audiovisual environment. The internet's features of personalization, interactivity, and information abundance raise pro…
How the shift toward "technical copy protection" in the battle over digital copyright depends on changing political and commercial alignments that are profoundly shaping the future of cultural expression in a digital age.While the public and the media have been distracted by the story of Napster, warnings about the evils of "piracy," and lawsuits by the recording and film industries, the enforc…