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Author: Scott Huler
Publisher: Rodale
Published: 2010-05-11
Total Pages: 258
ISBN-13: 1605296473
DOWNLOAD EBOOKInvestigates the systems of infrastructure that sustain the world and the cultures of historical periods, following various elements, from electricity and pavement to water and waste disposal, back to their origins and people who operate them.
Author: Gretchen Bakke
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Published: 2017-07-11
Total Pages: 385
ISBN-13: 1632865688
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA revelatory look at our national power grid--how it developed, its current flaws, and how it must be completely reimagined for our fast-approaching energy future. America's electrical grid, an engineering triumph of the twentieth century, is turning out to be a poor fit for the present. It's not just that the grid has grown old and is now in dire need of basic repair. Today, as we invest great hope in new energy sources--solar, wind, and other alternatives--the grid is what stands most firmly in the way of a brighter energy future. If we hope to realize this future, we need to reimagine the grid according to twenty-first-century values. It's a project which forces visionaries to work with bureaucrats, legislators with storm-flattened communities, moneymen with hippies, and the left with the right. And though it might not yet be obvious, this revolution is already well under way. Cultural anthropologist Gretchen Bakke unveils the many facets of America's energy infrastructure, its most dynamic moments and its most stable ones, and its essential role in personal and national life. The grid, she argues, is an essentially American artifact, one which developed with us: a product of bold expansion, the occasional foolhardy vision, some genius technologies, and constant improvisation. Most of all, her focus is on how Americans are changing the grid right now, sometimes with gumption and big dreams and sometimes with legislation or the brandishing of guns. The Grid tells--entertainingly, perceptively--the story of what has been called "the largest machine in the world": its fascinating history, its problematic present, and its potential role in a brighter, cleaner future.
Author: Hannah B Higgins
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2009-01-23
Total Pages: 311
ISBN-13: 0262512408
DOWNLOAD EBOOKTen grids that changed the world: the emergence and evolution of the most prominent visual structure in Western culture. Emblematic of modernity, the grid is the underlying form of everything from skyscrapers and office cubicles to paintings by Mondrian and a piece of computer code. And yet, as Hannah Higgins makes clear in this engaging and evocative book, the grid has a history that long predates modernity; it is the most prominent visual structure in Western culture. In The Grid Book, Higgins examines the history of ten grids that changed the world: the brick, the tablet, the gridiron city plan, the map, musical notation, the ledger, the screen, moveable type, the manufactured box, and the net. Charting the evolution of each grid, from the Paleolithic brick of ancient Mesopotamia through the virtual connections of the Internet, Higgins demonstrates that once a grid is invented, it may bend, crumble, or shatter, but its organizing principle never disappears. The appearance of each grid was a watershed event. Brick, tablet, and city gridiron made possible sturdy housing, the standardization of language, and urban development. Maps, musical notation, financial ledgers, and moveable type promoted the organization of space, music, and time, international trade, and mass literacy. The screen of perspective painting heralded the science of the modern period, classical mechanics, and the screen arts, while the standardization of space made possible by the manufactured box suggested the purified box forms of industrial architecture and visual art. The net, the most ancient grid, made its first appearance in Stone Age Finland; today, the loose but clearly articulated networks of the World Wide Web suggest that we are in the middle of an emergent grid that is reshaping the world, as grids do, in its image.
Author: Phillip F. Schewe
Publisher: National Academies Press
Published: 2007-02-20
Total Pages: 319
ISBN-13: 030910260X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe electrical grid goes everywhere-it's the largest and most complex machine ever made. Yet the system is built in such a way that the bigger it gets, the more inevitable its collapse. Named the greatest engineering achievement of the 20th century by the National Academy of Engineering, the electrical grid is the largest industrial investment in the history of humankind. It reaches into your home, snakes its way to your bedroom, and climbs right up into the lamp next to your pillow. At times, it almost seems alive, like some enormous circulatory system that pumps life to big cities and the most remote rural areas. Constructed of intricately interdependent components, the grid operates on a rapidly shrinking margin for error. Things can-and do-go wrong in this system, no matter how many preventive steps we take. Just look at the colossal 2003 blackout, when 50 million Americans lost power due to a simple error at a power plant in Ohio; or the one a month later, which blacked out 57 million Italians. And these two combined don't even compare to the 2001 outage in India, which affected 226 million people. The Grid is the first history of the electrical grid intended for general readers, and it comes at a time when we badly need such a guide. As we get more and more dependent on electricity to perform even the most mundane daily tasks, the grid's inevitable shortcomings will take a toll on populations around the globe. At a moment when energy issues loom large on the nation's agenda and our hunger for electricity grows, The Grid is as timely as it is compelling.
Author: Allen Hurlburt
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Published: 1982-12-15
Total Pages: 104
ISBN-13: 9780471289234
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAuthor: Ian Foster
Publisher: Morgan Kaufmann
Published: 2004
Total Pages: 778
ISBN-13: 1558609334
DOWNLOAD EBOOK"The Grid" is an emerging infrastructure that will fundamentally change the way people think about and use computing. The editors reveal the revolutionary impact of large-scale resource sharing and virtualization within science and industry, and the intimate relationships between organization and resource sharing structures.
Author: Phillip Thurtle
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Published: 2018-10-19
Total Pages: 308
ISBN-13: 1452957797
DOWNLOAD EBOOKHow grids paved the way for our biological understanding of organisms As one of the most visual sciences, biology has an aesthetic dimension that lends force and persuasion to scientific arguments: how things are arranged on a page, how texts are interspersed with images, and how images are composed reflect deep-seated beliefs about how life exists on Earth. Biology in the Grid traces how our current understanding of life and genetics emerged from the pervasive nineteenth- and twentieth-century graphic form of the grid, which allowed disparate pieces of information to form what media theorist Vilém Flusser called “technical images.” Phillip Thurtle explains how the grid came to dominate biology in the twentieth century, transforming biologists’ beliefs about how organisms were constructed. He demonstrates how this shift in our understanding of biological grids enabled new philosophies in endeavors such as advertising, entertainment, and even political theory. The implications of the arguments in Biology in the Grid are profound, touching on matters as fundamental as desire, our understanding of our bodies, and our view of how society is composed. Moreover, Thurtle’s beautifully written, tightly focused arguments allow readers to apply his claims to new disciplines and systems. Bristling with insight and potential, Biology in the Grid ultimately suggests that such a grid-organized understanding of natural life inevitably has social and political dimensions, with society recognized as being made of interchangeable, regulated parts rather than as an organic whole.
Author: Liora Bigon
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Published: 2021-10-04
Total Pages: 254
ISBN-13: 3110733226
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis is the first collection of interdisciplinary scholarship to expand on gridded modalities, with a strong affinity to the arts. It seeks to inspire new avenues of research by exploring a horizon of gridded relationships among humans, between humans and the environment, and between human and non-human actors. By bringing together philosophical themes and applied practices, the volume traces a genealogy of the "grid" as an exercise in grasping its inherent complexity and incomplete quality. A collective effort by a group of researchers, practitioners, and designers, it promotes an understanding of gridded modalities as complex networks that interact with other networks, generating new meanings and reflecting changes in thought.
Author: Andrew Haslam
Publisher: Laurence King Publishing
Published: 2006
Total Pages: 264
ISBN-13: 9781856694735
DOWNLOAD EBOOK'Book Design' takes the reader through every aspect of the subject, from the components that make up a book, to understanding how books are commissioned and created, to the intricacies of grid construction and choosing a typeface.
Author: Fran Berman
Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
Published: 2003-04-18
Total Pages: 1076
ISBN-13: 9780470853191
DOWNLOAD EBOOKUnter "Grid Computing" versteht man die gleichzeitige Nutzung vieler Computer in einem Netzwerk für die Lösung eines einzelnen Problems. Grundsätzliche Aspekte und anwendungsbezogene Details zu diesem Gebiet finden Sie in diesem Band. - Grid Computing ist ein viel versprechender Trend, denn man kann damit (1) vorhandene Computer-Ressourcen kosteneffizient nutzen, (2) Probleme lösen, für die enorme Rechenleistungen erforderlich sind, und (3) Synergieeffekte erzielen, auch im globalen Maßstab - Ansatz ist in Forschung und Industrie (IBM, Sun, HP und andere) zunehmend populär (aktuelles Beispiel: Genomforschung) - Buch deckt Motivationen zur Einführung von Grids ebenso ab wie technologische Grundlagen und ausgewählte Beispiele für moderne Anwendungen
