Programmable Planet
Programmable Planet

Author: Ted Anton

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2023-07-25

Total Pages: 446

ISBN-13: 0231555849

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Honorable Mention, 2024 Richard Frisbie Award for Adult Nonfiction, Society of Midland Authors A new science is reengineering the fabric of life. Synthetic biology offers bold new ways of manufacturing medicines, clothing, foods, fragrances, and fuels, often using microbe fermentation, much like brewing beer. The technology can help confront climate change, break down industrial pollutants, and fight novel viruses. Today, researchers are manipulating life forms and automating evolution to create vegetarian “meat,” renewable construction materials, and cancer treatments. In the process, they are changing our concept of what life science can achieve. Is this a new industrial and information revolution—or dangerous tinkering that could unleash unintended consequences? Programmable Planet is a grand tour through the world of synthetic biology, telling the stories of the colorful visionaries whose ideas are shaping discoveries. Ted Anton explores the field from its beginning in fighting malaria in Africa to the COVID vaccines and beyond. Covering medical and agricultural triumphs and blunders, he examines successes in energy production, plant gene editing, and chemical manufacturing, as well as the most controversial attempts at human gene enhancement. This book reports from the front lines of research, showing policy makers’ struggle to stay abreast of the technologies they aim to regulate. Even-handed, lively, and informative, Programmable Planet gives a glimpse of the promise and problems of a new biology-based industry.

Professor Bridges and the Programmable Planet
Professor Bridges and the Programmable Planet

Author: Chris Hackett

Publisher: Tall Tales Press

Published: 2023-01-27

Total Pages: 290

ISBN-13:

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In this irreverent, nostalgic, and light-hearted take on the typical space opera, the down-on-his-luck alcoholic Nick Bridges is abducted by aliens to save the galaxy - whether he wants to or not. "...if you enjoyed [Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Men in Black], I believe you will enjoy this as well." -Laura, Netgalley ARC Review "Something they never tell you about being a hero - it's really just about being at the wrong place at the wrong time and living to tell the tale." Stuck in a dead-end job as an adjunct Professor of Psychology focused on paranormal sightings and claims of alien abduction, the alcoholic Nick Bridges is divorced, disinterested and defeated. Stumbling home from a late-night bender, Nick is himself abducted by aliens - a secret police force that keeps the galaxy from falling into chaos. They tell him that only he - out of everyone in the universe - is being called by a cybernetic armor that is key to their mission. A mission they now expect him to help complete. Now, to get home, he has to be the hero he never envisioned himself to be and save the galaxy, and maybe even himself - as long as his demons don't derail him along the way. Join Nick Bridges as he discovers that we aren't alone - and neither is he - in this first installment of the epic and hysterical PROFESSOR BRIDGES SAGA.

The Uncertain Image
The Uncertain Image

Author: Ulrik Ekman

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-04-28

Total Pages: 195

ISBN-13: 0429787979

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Citizens of networked societies are almost incessantly accompanied by ecologies of images. These ecologies of still and moving images present a paradox of uncertainties emerging along with certainties. Images appear more certain as the technical capacities that render them visible increase. At the same time, images are touched by more uncertainty as their numbers, manipulabilities, and contingencies multiply. With the emergence of big data, the image is becoming a dominant vehicle for the construction and presentation of the truth of data. Images present themselves as so many promises of the certainty, predictability, and intelligibility offered by data. The focus of this book is twofold. It analyses the kinds of images appearing today, showing how they are marked by a return to modern photographic emphases on high resolution, clarity, and realistic representation. Secondly, it discusses the ways in which the uncertainty of images is increasingly underscored within such reiterated emphases on allegedly certain visual truths. This often involves renewed encounters with noise, grain, glitch, blur, vagueness, and indistinctness. This book provides the reader with an intriguing transdisciplinary investigation of the uncertainly certain relation between the cultural imagination and the techno-aesthetic regime of big data and ubiquitous computing. This book was originally published as a special issue of Digital Creativity.

Program Earth
Program Earth

Author: Jennifer Gabrys

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published: 2016-04-13

Total Pages: 445

ISBN-13: 1452950172

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Sensors are everywhere. Small, flexible, economical, and computationally powerful, they operate ubiquitously in environments. They compile massive amounts of data, including information about air, water, and climate. Never before has such a volume of environmental data been so broadly collected or so widely available. Grappling with the consequences of wiring our world, Program Earth examines how sensor technologies are programming our environments. As Jennifer Gabrys points out, sensors do not merely record information about an environment. Rather, they generate new environments and environmental relations. At the same time, they give a voice to the entities they monitor: to animals, plants, people, and inanimate objects. This book looks at the ways in which sensors converge with environments to map ecological processes, to track the migration of animals, to check pollutants, to facilitate citizen participation, and to program infrastructure. Through discussing particular instances where sensors are deployed for environmental study and citizen engagement across three areas of environmental sensing, from wild sensing to pollution sensing and urban sensing, Program Earth asks how sensor technologies specifically contribute to new environmental conditions. What are the implications for wiring up environments? How do sensor applications not only program environments, but also program the sorts of citizens and collectives we might become? Program Earth suggests that the sensor-based monitoring of Earth offers the prospect of making new environments not simply as an extension of the human but rather as new “technogeographies” that connect technology, nature, and people.

Living Surfaces
Living Surfaces

Author: Abelardo Gil-Fournier

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2024-06-25

Total Pages: 325

ISBN-13: 0262547953

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An investigation of aesthetics and visualizations of planetary surfaces from an experimental media theory perspective. What if every vista, every island—indeed, every geographical feature on Earth—could be viewed as an art object? In Living Surfaces, Abelardo Gil-Fournier and Jussi Parikka explore how the surface of the Earth has, over the last two centuries, become known and perceived as an environment of images. Living Surfaces features a range of case studies from eighteenth-century experiments with and observations of vegetal matter, photosynthesis, and plant physiology to twenty-first-century machine vision and AI techniques of calculating agricultural and other landscape surfaces. Mapping these different scales of vegetal images, Gil-Fournier and Parikka help us understand core questions that pertain to the artistic and architectural reference points for the Anthropocene. With 42 black-and-white and full-color illustrations, Living Surfaces is an engaging and unique take on environmental surfaces as they come to occupy a central place in our understanding of planetary change.

The Cambridge History of the American Essay
The Cambridge History of the American Essay

Author: Christy Wampole

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2023-12-14

Total Pages: 836

ISBN-13: 1009080415

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From the country's beginning, essayists in the United States have used their prose to articulate the many ways their individuality has been shaped by the politics, social life, and culture of this place. The Cambridge History of the American Essay offers the fullest account to date of this diverse and complex history. From Puritan writings to essays by Indigenous authors, from Transcendentalist and Pragmatist texts to Harlem Renaissance essays, from New Criticism to New Journalism: The story of the American essay is told here, beginning in the early eighteenth century and ending with the vibrant, heterogeneous scene of contemporary essayistic writing. The essay in the US has taken many forms: nature writing, travel writing, the genteel tradition, literary criticism, hybrid genres such as the essay film and the photo essay. Across genres and identities, this volume offers a stirring account of American essayism into the twenty-first century.

Earth To God - The New Stewardship
Earth To God - The New Stewardship

Author: David Bastian Marshall

Publisher: Writers Republic LLC

Published: 2023-03-27

Total Pages: 436

ISBN-13:

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The conflict between Religion and Science escalates to the Eco-world. Evidence of climate issues accumulates, yet political forces continue to ignore Earth’s warning signs. How can Climate Specialists and other scientists convince the inhabitants of this world that we each must take deliberate action to heal our planet and its environment? We cannot rely on government participation and funding - especially from the countries where their economy is tightly coupled with fossil fuel production and consumption. Johann covertly attends a climate summit in France and he quickly attracts the attention of several of the attendees who are intrigued by his point of view of Earth. However, unexpected circumstances detain him in Paris; Johann’s quest to become a climate specialist is delayed and redirected. Meanwhile, his security business begins to flourish back home in mid-state New York. His intellectual team begins to make progress with their New Stewardship concept. Though Johann was detained in France for two years, he and his team are making substantial progress with their quest to influence people to heal Earth.

Ecomedia
Ecomedia

Author: Stephen Rust

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-09-07

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13: 1317670574

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Ecomedia: Key Issues is a comprehensive textbook introducing the burgeoning field of ecomedia studies to provide an overview of the interface between environmental issues and the media globally. Linking the world of media production, distribution, and consumption to environmental understandings, the book addresses ecological meanings encoded in media texts, the environmental impacts of media production, and the relationships between media and cultural perceptions of the environment. Each chapter introduces a distinct type of media, addressing it in a theoretical overview before engaging with specific case studies. In this way, the book provides an accessible introduction to each form of media as well as a sophisticated analysis of relevant cases. The book includes contributions from a combination of new voices and well-established media scholars from across the globe who examine the basic concepts and key issues of ecomedia studies. The concepts of "frames," "flow", and "convergence" structure a dynamic collection divided into three parts. The first part addresses traditional visual texts, such as comics, photography, and film. The second part of the book addresses traditional broadcast media, such as radio, and television, and the third part looks at new media, such as advertising, video games, the internet, and digital renderings of scientific data. In its breadth and scope, Ecomedia: Key Issues presents a unique survey of rich scholarship at the confluence of Media Studies and Environmental Studies. The book is written in an engaging and accessible style, with each chapter including case studies, discussion questions and suggestions for further reading.