Clapperton Mavhunga's collection of essays about science, technology, and innovation (STI) from an African perspective opens with the idea, "Things do not (always) mean the same from everywhere; when we insist that only?our? meaning is the meaning, we silence other people?s meanings." Mavhunga and his contributors argue that our contemporary definitions of STI are those of countries and culture…
Short biographies of: Charles Babbage, Alan Turing, John von Neumann, Claude Shannon, Konrad Zuse, John V. Atanasoff, John V. Mauchly, J. Presper Eckert, Howard Aiken, Jay W. Forrester, Thomas J. Watson, Sr., William Norris, H. Ross Perot, William Shockley, Robert Noyce, Jack Kilby, Marcian E. (Ted) Hoff, Gene Amdahl, Seymour Cray, Gordon Bell, Grace Murray Hopper, John Backus, John Kemeny, Tho…
"I just want to say one word to you. Just one word. . . . Plastics." This line from the film The Graduate has come to symbolize the hubris, promise, and disappointment embodied in one of the world's most ubiquitous materials. At present, plastics are cheap, widely used, and durable. But that durability means that plastics persist in the environment for decades. Images of swaths of the ocean or …
"Looks at American independent inventors during the rise of corporate research and development"--OCLC-licensed vendor bibliographic record.
How can American manufacturing recapture its former dominance in the globalized industrial economy? In Worker Leadership, Fred Stahl proposes a strategy to boost enterprise productivity and restore America's industrial power. Stahl outlines a revolutionary transformation of industrial culture that offers workers real control of production operations and manufacturing processes (as well as a mon…
"America is the world leader in innovation, but many of the innovative ideas that are hatched in American start-ups, labs, and companies end up going abroad to reach commercial scale. Apple, the superstar of innovation, locates its production in China (yet still reaps most of its profits in the United States). When innovation does not find the capital, skills, and expertise it needs to come to …
This work explores how the rise of globalization over the past two centuries helps explain the income gap between rich and poor countries today.OCLC-licensed vendor bibliographic record.
Push a button and turn on the television; tap a button and get a ride; click a button and "like" something. The touch of a finger can set an appliance, a car, or a system in motion, even if the user doesn't understand the underlying mechanisms or algorithms. How did buttons become so ubiquitous? Why do people love them, loathe them, and fear them? In Power Button, Rachel Plotnick traces the ori…
Contemporary computing technologies have thoroughly embedded themselves in every aspect of modern life -- conducting commerce, maintaining and extending our networks of friends, and mobilizing political movements all occur through a growing collection of devices and services designed to keep and hold our attention. Yet what happens when our attention needs to be more local, collective, and focu…
Now that supply chain operations are facing new challenges due to the necessity of reducing costs and CO2 emissions, companies are increasingly leveraging cooperation from companies from other supply chains as a source of competitive advantage. Horizontal Collaboration has been proved an efficient tool for cutting logistic costs up to 49%. Zaragoza Logistics Center, member of the MIT-Scale N…