The transformative potential of genetic and cybernetic technologies to enhance human capabilities is most often either rejected on moral and prudential grounds or hailed as the future salvation of humanity. In this book, Nicholas Agar offers a more nuanced view, making a case for moderate human enhancement -- improvements to attributes and abilities that do not significantly exceed what is curr…
This volume offers a comprehensive overview of the latest neuroscientific approaches to the scientific study of creativity. In chapters that progress logically from neurobiological fundamentals to systems of neuroscience and neuro-imaging, leading scholars describe the latest theoretical, genetic, structural, clinical, functional, and applied research on the neural bases of creativity.OCLC-lice…
An argument that the uniquely human capacities of pretending and imagining develop in response to sociocultural and sociopolitical pressures in childhood.The human mind has the capacity to vault over the realm of current perception, motivation, emotion, and action, to leap--consciously and deliberately--to past or future, possible or impossible, abstract or concrete scenarios and situations. In…
"Almost anyone with a $40 mobile phone and a nearby cell tower can get online with an ease unimaginable just twenty years ago. An optimistic narrative has proclaimed the mobile phone as the device that will finally close the digital divide. Yet access and effective use are not the same thing, and the digital world does not run on mobile handsets alone. In After Access, Jonathan Donner examines …
"Our lives revolve around the acquisition of information. Sometimes the information we acquire--from other people, from books, or from the media--is wrong. Studies show that people rely on such misinformation, sometimes even when they are aware that the information is inaccurate or invalid. And yet investigations of learning and knowledge acquisition largely ignore encounters with this sort of …
"The future is not what it used to be because we can no longer rely on the comforting assumption that it will resemble the past. Past abundance of fuel, for example, does not imply unending abundance. Infinite growth on a finite planet is not possible. In this book, J?org Friedrichs argues that industrial society itself is transitory, and he examines the prospects for our civilization's coming …
Modern economics has largely ignored the issue of outright conflict as an alternative way of allocating goods, assuming instead the existence of well-defined property rights enforced by an undefined third party. And yet even in ostensibly peaceful market transactions, conflict exists as an outside option, sometimes constraining the outcomes reached through voluntary agreement. In this volume, e…
This volume explores alternative cultural encounters with and around information technologies, encounters that counter dominant, Western-oriented notions of media consumption. The contributors include media practices as forms of cultural resistance and subversion, 'DIY cultures', and other non-mainstream models of technology production and consumption. The contributors - leading thinkers in sci…
An examination of Mozilla's unique approach to software development considers how this model of participation might be applied to political and civic engagement. Firefox, a free Web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation, is used by an estimated 270 million people worldwide. To maintain and improve the Firefox browser, Mozilla depends not only on its team of professional programmers and…
"The emergence of open networked models made possible by digital technology has the potential to transform international development. Open network structures allow people to come together to share information, organize, and collaborate. Open development harnesses this power, to create new organizational forms and improve people's lives; it is not only an agenda for research and practice but als…