Genesis Redux
Genesis Redux

Author: Jessica Riskin

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2010-02-15

Total Pages: 408

ISBN-13: 0226720837

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Since antiquity, philosophers and engineers have tried to take life’s measure by reproducing it. Aiming to reenact Creation, at least in part, these experimenters have hoped to understand the links between body and spirit, matter and mind, mechanism and consciousness. Genesis Redux examines moments from this centuries-long experimental tradition: efforts to simulate life in machinery, to synthesize life out of material parts, and to understand living beings by comparison with inanimate mechanisms. Jessica Riskin collects seventeen essays from distinguished scholars in several fields. These studies offer an unexpected and far-reaching result: attempts to create artificial life have rarely been driven by an impulse to reduce life and mind to machinery. On the contrary, designers of synthetic creatures have generally assumed a role for something nonmechanical. The history of artificial life is thus also a history of theories of soul and intellect. Taking a historical approach to a modern quandary, Genesis Redux is essential reading for historians and philosophers of science and technology, scientists and engineers working in artificial life and intelligence, and anyone engaged in evaluating these world-changing projects.

Genesis Redux
Genesis Redux

Author: Ed Rietman

Publisher: McGraw-Hill Companies

Published: 1994

Total Pages: 378

ISBN-13:

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Genesis Redux makes cutting-edge research into biotechnology, neural networks, artificial intelligence, robotics, ecosystems, and cellular biology accessible. Contains artificial life simulation for BASIC, C, and Pascal programmers. Interactive programs on disk allow programmers to create complex, dynamic organisms on their PCs.

Genesis Redux: When Ya Gotta Go, Ya Gotta Go
Genesis Redux: When Ya Gotta Go, Ya Gotta Go

Author: R. Alan Elder

Publisher: Fulton Books, Inc.

Published: 2016-07-05

Total Pages: 283

ISBN-13: 1633381404

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Catastrophic events leave Earth uninhabitable. Two former astronauts lead a group of couples on an adventure to reenact the book of Genesis on Mars. The adventure begins when Earth receives a mysterious message from space warning of the impending entry of an unwanted influence into Earth's solar system. "Genesis Redux" is an opportunity to start the processes of populating a world all over again. Let's hope they get it right this time.

Modernity Reimagined: An Analytic Guide
Modernity Reimagined: An Analytic Guide

Author: Chandra Mukerji

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-12-19

Total Pages: 282

ISBN-13: 131757883X

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Winner of the American Sociological Association’s Distinguished Book Award in 2012, Chandra Mukerji offers with this remarkable new book an explanation of the birth and subsequent proliferation of the many strands in the braid of modernity. The journey she takes us on is dedicated to teasing those strands apart, using forms of cultural analysis from the social sciences to approach history with fresh eyes. Faced with the problem of trying to understand what is hardest to see: the familiar, she gains analytic distance and clarity by juxtaposing cultural analysis with history, asking how modernity began and how people conjured into existence the world we now recognize as modern. Part I describes the genesis of key modern social forms: the modern self, communities of strangers, the modern state, and the industrial world economy. Part II focuses on modern social types: races, genders, and childhood. Part III focuses on some of the cultural artifacts and activities of the contemporary world that people have invented and used to cope with the burdens of self-making and to react against the broken promises of modern discourse and the silent injuries of material modernism. Beautifully illustrated with over 100 color photographs in its 10 chapters, MODERNITY REIMAGINED is not just an explanation, an analysis of how modern life came to be, it is also a model for how to do cultural thinking about today’s world.

Before the Law
Before the Law

Author: Cary Wolfe

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 153

ISBN-13: 0226922405

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Animal studies and biopolitics are two of the most dynamic areas of interdisciplinary scholarship, but until now, they have had little to say to each other. Bringing these two emergent areas of thought into direct conversation in Before the Law, Cary Wolfe fosters a new discussion about the status of nonhuman animals and the shared plight of humans and animals under biopolitics. Wolfe argues that the human-animal distinction must be supplemented with the central distinction of biopolitics: the difference between those animals that are members of a community and those that are deemed killable but not murderable. From this understanding, we can begin to make sense of the fact that this distinction prevails within both the human and animal domains and address such difficult issues as why we afford some animals unprecedented levels of care and recognition while subjecting others to unparalleled forms of brutality and exploitation. Engaging with many major figures in biopolitical thought—from Heidegger, Arendt, and Foucault to Agamben, Esposito, and Derrida—Wolfe explores how biopolitics can help us understand both the ethical and political dimensions of the current questions surrounding the rights of animals.

The Irregular School
The Irregular School

Author: Roger Slee

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2011-04-19

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 1136830200

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Should disabled students be in regular classrooms all of the time or some of the time? Is the regular school or the special school or both the solution for educating students with a wide range of differences? Inclusive education has been incorporated in government education policy around the world. Key international organisations such as UNESCO and OECD declare their commitment to Education for All and the principles and practice of inclusive education. There is no doubt that despite this respectability inclusive education is hotly contested and generates intense debate amongst teachers, parents, researchers and policy-makers. People continue to argue over the nature and extent of inclusion. The Irregular School explores the foundations of the current controversies and argues that continuing to think in terms of the regular school or the special school obstructs progress towards inclusive education. The book contends that we need to build a better understanding of exclusion, of the foundations of the division between special and regular education, and of school reform as a precondition for more inclusive schooling in the future. Schooling ought to be an apprenticeship in democracy and inclusion is a prerequisite of a democratic education. The Irregular School builds on existing research and literature to argue for a comprehensive understanding of exclusion, a more innovative and aggressive conception of inclusive education and a genuine commitment to school reform that steps aside from the troubled and troubling notions of regular schools and special schools. It will be of interest to all those working and researching in the field of inclusive education.

The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment
The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment

Author: Valerie Traub

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2016-09-08

Total Pages: 969

ISBN-13: 0191019720

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The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment brings together 40 of the most important scholars and intellectuals writing on the subject today. Extending the purview of feminist criticism, it offers an intersectional paradigm for considering representations of gender in the context of race, ethnicity, sexuality, disability, and religion. In addition to sophisticated textual analysis drawing on the methods of historicism, psychoanalysis, queer theory, and posthumanism, a team of international experts discuss Shakespeare's life, contemporary editing practices, and performance of his plays on stage, on screen, and in the classroom. This theoretically sophisticated yet elegantly written Handbook includes an editor's Introduction that provides a comprehensive overview of current debates.

Leadership Varieties
Leadership Varieties

Author: Alexander Styhre

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-03-10

Total Pages: 190

ISBN-13: 1317377990

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In all periods of time, there is a perceived shortage of qualified, credible, and robust leadership skills. At the same time, what is regarded as skilled leadership is contingent on economic, political, institutional, and cultural conditions specific for a period of time or a local setting. Leadership in the era of managerial capitalism was focused on planning and administration, and was seated in large-scale, divisionalized corporations. In the 1970s, this economic model started to wane and leadership was advanced as the solution to a series of economic and social concerns, now being a matter of meaning-making in the face of uncertainty and ambiguity. With the expansion of the finance industry and the deregulation of finance markets in the 1990s and in the new millennium, yet another leadership model increasingly prioritized economic value creation. In parallel to the economic, political and institutional changes, the idea of leadership has been strongly informed by new ideas about individualism and masculinity, adding to the understanding of leadership as what is anchored in widespread social beliefs about for example healthy life styles, the virtues of physical exercise, and novel gender relations. Aimed at scholars, researchers, students and policy makers in the fields of Leadership, Management History and Organizational Theory; Leadership Varieties examines predominant ideas about the qualities and virtues of leadership in a historical and cultural perspective.

Bedeviled
Bedeviled

Author: Jimena Canales

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2022-08-09

Total Pages: 416

ISBN-13: 0691241686

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How scientists through the ages have conducted thought experiments using imaginary entities—demons—to test the laws of nature and push the frontiers of what is possible Science may be known for banishing the demons of superstition from the modern world. Yet just as the demon-haunted world was being exorcized by the enlightening power of reason, a new kind of demon mischievously materialized in the scientific imagination itself. Scientists began to employ hypothetical beings to perform certain roles in thought experiments—experiments that can only be done in the imagination—and these impish assistants helped scientists achieve major breakthroughs that pushed forward the frontiers of science and technology. Spanning four centuries of discovery—from René Descartes, whose demon could hijack sensorial reality, to James Clerk Maxwell, whose molecular-sized demon deftly broke the second law of thermodynamics, to Darwin, Einstein, Feynman, and beyond—Jimena Canales tells a shadow history of science and the demons that bedevil it. She reveals how the greatest scientific thinkers used demons to explore problems, test the limits of what is possible, and better understand nature. Their imaginary familiars helped unlock the secrets of entropy, heredity, relativity, quantum mechanics, and other scientific wonders—and continue to inspire breakthroughs in the realms of computer science, artificial intelligence, and economics today. The world may no longer be haunted as it once was, but the demons of the scientific imagination are alive and well, continuing to play a vital role in scientists' efforts to explore the unknown and make the impossible real.

The Orchestral Revolution
The Orchestral Revolution

Author: Emily I. Dolan

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2013-01-17

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 1107028256

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This book explores the relationship between the history of orchestration and the development of modern musical aesthetics in the Enlightenment. Using Haydn as a focal point, it examines how the consolidation of the modern orchestra radically altered how people listened to and thought about the expressive capacity of instruments.