Topics dealt with: Bioscience and biotechnology; Industry and technology; Safety and environmental protection; Geo- and space sciences; Scientific aspects of collecting and distributing data; Legal and social aspects of data dissemination; Innovations in data handling.
Physics at the beginning of the twenty-first century has reached new levels of accomplishment and impact in a society and nation that are changing rapidly. Accomplishments have led us into the information age and fueled broad technological and economic development. The pace of discovery is quickening and stronger links with other fields such as the biological sciences are being developed. The intellectual reach has never been greater, and the questions being asked are more ambitious than ever before. Physics in a New Era is the final report of the NRC's six-volume decadal physics survey. The book reviews the frontiers of physics research, examines the role of physics in our society, and makes recommendations designed to strengthen physics and its ability to serve important needs such as national security, the economy, information technology, and education.
"Reinventing Discovery argues that we are in the early days of the most dramatic change in how science is done in more than 300 years. This change is being driven by new online tools, which are transforming and radically accelerating scientific discovery"--
Recent advancements in technology have led to significant improvements and developments within learning environments. When utilized properly, these innovations can serve as a valuable resource for educators and students. Exploring the New Era of Technology-Infused Education is a pivotal reference source for the latest scholarly research on the implementation of emerging technologies in contemporary classroom settings. Highlighting theoretical foundations, empirical case studies, and curriculum development strategies, this book is ideally designed for researchers, practitioners, educators, and academics actively involved in teaching and learning environments.
The transition from serial to parallel computing in which many operations are performed simultaneously and at tremendous speed, marks a new era in computation. These original essays explore the emerging modalities and potential impact of this technological revolution. Daniel Hillis, inventor of the superfast Connection Machine®, provides a clear explanation of massively parallel computing. The essays that follow investigate the rich possibilities, as well as the constraints, that parallel computation holds for the future. These possibilities include its tremendous potential for simulating currently intractable physical processes and for solving "monster" scientific problems (involving new algorithms and ways of thinking about problem solving that will change the way we think about the world), and its use in the neural sciences (where the biological model for parallel computation is the brain). Essays also address the gap between the promise of this new technology and our current educational system and look at America's technological agenda for the 1990s. Daniel Hillis is Chief Scientist and James Bailey is Director of Marketing, both at Thinking Machines Corporation. Selected Essays:Preface,Stephen R. Graubard. What is Massively Parallel Computing, and Why Is It Important?W. Daniel Hillis. Complex Adaptive Systems, John H. Holland. Perspectives on Parallel Computing, Yuefan Deng, James Glimm, David H. Sharp. Parallel Billiards and Monster Systems, Brosl Hasslacher. First We Reshape Our Computers, Then Our Computers Reshape Us: The Broader Intellectual Impact of Parallelism, James Bailey. Parallelism in Conscious Experience. Robert Sokolowski. Of Time, Intelligence, and Institutions, Felix E. Browder. Parallel Computing and Education,Geoffrey C. Fox. The Age of Computing: A Personal Memoir, N. Metropolis. What Should the Public Know about Mathematics? Philip J. Davis. America's Economic-Technological Agenda for the 1990s,Jacob T. Schwartz. A Daedalus special issue
Established by Congress in 1901, the National Bureau of Standards (NBS), now the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), has a long and distinguished history as the custodian and disseminator of the United States' standards of physical measurement. Having reached its centennial anniversary, the NBS/NIST reflects on and celebrates its first century with this book describing some of its seminal contributions to science and technology. Within these pages are 102 vignettes that describe some of the Institute's classic publications. Each vignette relates the context in which the publication appeared, its impact on science, technology, and the general public, and brief details about the lives and work of the authors. The groundbreaking works depicted include: A breakthrough paper on laser-cooling of atoms below the Doppler limit, which led to the award of the 1997 Nobel Prize for Physics to William D. Phillips The official report on the development of the radio proximity fuse, one of the most important new weapons of World War II The 1932 paper reporting the discovery of deuterium in experiments that led to Harold Urey's1934 Nobel Prize for Chemistry A review of the development of the SEAC, the first digital computer to employ stored programs and the first to process images in digital form The first paper demonstrating that parity is not conserved in nuclear physics, a result that shattered a fundamental concept of theoretical physics and led to a Nobel Prize for T. D. Lee and C. Y. Yang "Observation of Bose-Einstein Condensation in a Dilute Atomic Vapor," a 1995 paper that has already opened vast new areas of research A landmark contribution to the field of protein crystallography by Wlodawer and coworkers on the use of joint x-ray and neutron diffraction to determine the structure of proteins