Showing papers in "Technology and Culture in 1985"

A feeling for the organism : the life and work of Barbara McClintock

Abstract: A biography of the Nobel Prize-winning scientist explains her work in genetics and traces her long unheralded career as a research scientist.

The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918

Abstract: THIS EDITION HAS BEEN REPLACED BY A NEWER EDITION From about 1880 to World War I, sweeping changes in technology and culture created new modes of understanding and experiencing time and space. Stephen Kern writes about the onrush of technics that reshaped life concretely--telephone, electric lighting, steamship, skyscraper, bicycle, cinema, plane, x-ray, machine gun-and the cultural innovations that shattered older forms of art and thought--the stream-of-consciousness novel, psychoanalysis, Cubism, simultaneous poetry, relativity, and the introduction of world standard time. Kern interprets this generation's revolutionized sense of past, present, and future, and of form, distance, and direction. This overview includes such figures as Proust Joyce, Mann, Wells, Gertrude Stein, Strindberg, Freud, Husserl, Apollinaire, Conrad, Picasso, and Einstein, as well as diverse sources of popular culture drawn from journals, newspapers, and magazines. It also treats new developments in personal and social relations including scientific management, assembly lines, urbanism, imperialism, and trench warfare. While exploring transformed spatial-temporal dimensions, the book focuses on the way new sensibilities subverted traditional values. Kern identifies a broad leveling of cultural hierarchies such as the Cubist breakdown of the conventional distinction between the prominent subject and the framing background, and he argues that these levelings parallel the challenge to aristocratic society, the rise of democracy, and the death of God. This entire reworking of time and space is shown finally to have influenced the conduct of diplomacy during the crisis of July 1914 and to havestructured the Cubist war that followed.

Expert systems: artificial intelligence in business

Abstract: Case Study: MYCIN: Varieties of Problem Solving Strategies The Anatomy of a Knowledge Base Anatomy of An Inference Engine MYCIN Reconsidered Languages and Tools for Knowledge Systems A Sampler of Knowledge Systems and Their Architectures How Knowledge Systems are Developed Near Futures: Knowledge Engineering in the Next Five Years Large Scale Knowledge Systems Near Futures: Intelligent Job Aids Not So Near Futures: Research Topics Likely to Bear Fruit in 5 Years or More Not So Near Futures: Intelligent Tutoring Systems Not So Near Futures: Planning and Preparing for the Knowledge Systems Revolution Appendixes

The Wizards of Armageddon

Abstract: This is the untold story of the small group of men who have devised the plans and shaped the policies on how to use the Bomb. The book (first published in 1983) explores the secret world of these strategists of the nuclear age and brings to light a chapter in American political and military history never before revealed.

Stronger Than a Hundred Men: A History of the Vertical Water Wheel

Abstract: Like many apparently simple devices, the vertical water wheel has been around for so long that it is taken for granted. Yet this \"picturesque artifact\" was for centuries man's primary mechanical source of power and was the foundation upon which mills and other industries developed.Stronger than a Hundred Men explores the development of the vertical water wheel from its invention in ancient times through its eventual demise as a source of power during the Industrial Revolution. Spanning more than 2000 years, Terry Reynolds's account follows the progression of this labor-saving device from Asia to the Middle East, Europe, and America-covering the evolution of the water wheel itself, the development of dams and reservoirs, and the applications of water power.

Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World

Abstract: In memory of teachers and mentors:

Islamicate celestial globes : their history, construction, and use

Abstract: Islamicate celestial globes made as early as the eleventh century are found in museums and private collections today. There are also references in classical Greek and Roman literature to carlier globes that are no longer extant. These globes are of interest to the history of astronomy, of art, and of technology. The globe presently in the National Museum of American History of the Smithsonian Institution, which is a fine example of a seventeenth-century Mughal Indian globe, was selected for detailed analysis and serves as the focus for this monograph. The first part of the study compares this particular globe with other known Islamicate globes and places the development of such globes within the historical perspective of the earlier Greco-Roman world from which it drew many of its traditions. An historical survey is given of all references and artifacts from the Greco-Roman and Islamic world that can have bearing on our knowledge of the design, construction, and use of such globes. The nature and general characteristics of three basic types of Islamicate celestial globes, and their probable uses as well as methods of construction, are the subjects of the second chapter of the study. Photographs of selected Islamicate globes from the thirteenth to the nineteenth centuries, as well as line drawings based on written descriptions, accompany the historical and analytical discussion. The fourth chapter on iconography analyses the constellation figures on the Smithsonian globe from the perspective of an art historian. This chapter was contributed by Andrea P.A. Belloli.The second major part of the study presents a discussion of the star names engraved on the Mughal globe, tracing the origins of the terms in Greek mythology or early Bedouin constellation outlines. The discussion of each constellation is accompanied by a photograph of the constellation as depicted on the Smithsonian globe. An account of lunar mansions is included as background to early Bedouin asterisms, which greatly affected later Islamicate star names and eventually modern western star names.The sixth section presents an extensive descriptive catalogue of the 126 Islamicate celestial globes known to scholars prior to 1982. The references in the other sections to particular globes are keyed to the entry numbers in this catalog. Following the catalog are tables comparing the features of the globes and transcriptions of the signature inscriptions. Six entries (Nos. 127-132) were added to the catalog while the study was in press.

Tree Rings and Telescopes: The Scientific Career of A. E. Douglass

Abstract: As the subtitle indicates, this is a discussion of the scientific activities of Andrew Ellicott Douglass (1867-1962), not a biography in the fullest sense. We learn much about his work and professional careers in both astronomy and dendrochronology (a science Douglass helped found) but little about the personal side of the man. That his wife of fifty-six years is mentioned only on six of the 190 pages of text is one indication of the orientation of this book.

Masers and Lasers: An Historical Approach

Abstract: Foreword to the First Edition Foreword to the Second Edition Preface Author Introduction Principle of Operation The Devices Masers Lasers Applications Development Note Stimulated Emission: Could the Laser have been Built More than 80 Years Ago? Stimulated Emission Role of Stimulated Emission in the Theory of Light Dispersion Experimental Proofs of Negative Dispersion More on Negative Absorption Notes Intermezzo: Magnetic Resonance and Optical Pumping Introduction The Resonance Method with Molecular Beams Magnetic Relaxation Phenomena in Solids Magnetic Resonance: Bloch, Purcell, and Zavoisky Bloch Equations Experimental Proof of Population Inversion The Concept of Negative Temperature The Overhauser Effect Spin Echo Medical Application of Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) Electronic Paramagnetic Resonance Atomic Clocks Optical Pumping Notes The Maser Introduction Weber's Maser Townes and the First Ammonia Maser Basov and Prokhorov and the Soviet Approach to the Maser The Three-Level Solid-State Maser Optically Pumped Masers The Hydrogen Maser The Ancestor of the Free-Electron Laser The Electron Cyclotron Maser The Rydberg or Single-Photon Maser (Micromaser) Two-Photon Maser Maser Action in Nature Notes The Laser Introduction The Townes and Schawlow Proposal Townes' and Schawlow's Idea The Gordon Gould Story The Dicke Coherence-Brightened Laser Soviet Research Notes The First Lasers Introduction The Ruby Laser The Four-Level Laser The Neodymium Laser The Gas Laser The Cesium Laser Laser Cavities Further Progress in Gaseous Lasers Neutral Atom Lasers Ion Gas Lasers Molecular Lasers Excimer Lasers The Liquid Laser: Dye and Chelate Lasers The Chemical Laser The Semiconductor Laser Vertical-Cavity Surface-Emitting Laser Diodes (VCSELs) Quantum Cascade Lasers The Free-Electron Laser Does the Laser Exist in Nature? Notes Laser Properties and Progresses in Novel Lasers Introduction Q-Switching Modes in the He-Ne Laser Mode Locking Lamb's Theory Mode Selection and Frequency and Amplitude Stabilization Tunable Solid-State Lasers Distributed Feedback Lasers Optical Amplifiers Diode Pumped Solid-State Lasers Notes Nonlinear Optics Introduction The Prehistory of Nonlinear Optics The First Experiments Nonlinear Optics Physical Origin of Optical Nonlinearities Further Experiments in Nonlinear Optics Optical Rectification Optical Mixing Parametric Oscillation and Amplification Third-Order Effects Down-Conversion and Entanglement Nonlinearities in Optical Fibers High Harmonics Generation Multiphoton Ionization Ultrashort Laser Pulses Supercontinuum Generation Notes More Exotic Lasers Introduction Lasing Without Inversion Random Lasers Nanolasers Plasmon Lasers Spaser One- and Two-Photon Laser High-Power Lasers High-Power Fiber Lasers X- and Gamma-Ray Laser Notes The Statistical Properties of Light Introduction Introduction of the Concept of the Photon Fluctuations of Radiant Energy Bose and the Statistics of Radiation A Few More Remarks on Bose-Einstein Condensation Further Developments in the Theory of Fluctuations of Radiation Fields The Hanbury Brown and Twiss Experiment The Quantum Theory of Coherence The Discussion of the Need for Quantum Optics Experimental Studies of the Statistical Properties of Light Polarized Thermal Light Laser Light Nonclassical States of Light and Single-Photon Sources Notes Subject Index Author Index

Andrew A. Humphreys and the Development of Hydraulic Engineering: Politics and Technology in the Army Corps of Engineers, 1850-1950

Abstract: In 1861, Captain Andrew A. Humphreys of the United States Army Corps of Topographical Engineers and his young assistant, Lieutenant Henry L. Abbot, completed their Report upon the Physics and Hydraulics of the Mississippi River. The report was based on a thorough investigation of the lower Mississippi basin. Congress had authorized the survey in 1850, following two disastrous years of flooding and an appeal from the Louisiana legislature. It was far from being the first river survey, but it was the most extensive ever undertaken at that time. In it the authors challenged earlier hydraulic theories and introduced entirely new formulations to explain river flow.2 Although much of the theory introduced in the report was later disproved, the conclusions decidedly influenced the development of

Space-Age Europe: Gaullism, Euro-Gaullism, and the American Dilemma

Abstract: "It is a far cry from Cape Kennedy," wrote a correspondent for the New York Times. "There are no neon signs, no drive-ins-and no night clubs. There are only some scattered huts and towers, lost in a desolate flatland as big as New Jersey, its pebbly floor covered with a pale green haze after a spell of rain. In the huts, which are filled with electronic equipment, one can hear, almost any morning, a calm young voice on a loudspeaker saying 'dix, neuf, huit, sept ...' In the distance a needle with a tail of fire slowly rises above the desert and roars into the sky."' The site was Hammaguir, an adobe village where sheep, goats, and a few dromedaries nosed about in the brittle weeds. Colomb-Bechar, the nearest town, lay 80 miles to the north, itself 700 miles into the Sahara from Algiers. Nearby, the parallel lines of an abandoned railroad vanished into the dunes, perhaps to meet at infinity, an artifact of France's first stab at a colonial dream, the trans-Saharan railway. In 1965, the imperative of international competition had brought France's finest engineers back into a desolation that proved congenial to the most advanced technology even as it swallowed the remains of an earlier industrial revolution. For the Algerian civil war prepared the return of Charles de Gaulle, who forestalled a military threat to overthrow the Fourth Republic by overthrowing it himself and pledged to

Turing's Man: Western Culture in the Computer Age

Abstract: Part 1 Introduction: the measure of technological change the computer as a defining technology Turing's man. Part 2 Defining technologies in western culture: manual technology and the ancient world mechanical technology and western Europe dynamic technology and western Europe electronic technology from the clock to the computer the electronic brain. Part 3 Principles of operation: the Turing machine - states and symbols the von Neumann computer hardware and software. Part 4 Embodied symbol - mathematics by computer: binary representation and numerical analysis mathematics and culture embodied mathematics. Part 5 Embodied symbol - logic by computer: truth and the von Neumann machine the triumph of logic the embodiment of logical thought. Part 6 Electronic space: physical space logical space finite space infinite space the geometry of electronic space. Part 7 Time and progress in the computer age: electronic clocks time experienced and measured progress in circles the idea of progress. Part 8 Electronic language: natural and artificial language the hierarchy of computer language poetry and logic the ancient view the western European view silent structures. Part 9 Electronic memory: digital memory technology the art of memory information retrieval and electronic power. Part 10 Creator and creation: coherence and correspondence electronic limits creating by hand and by machine reason and necessity electronic play. Part 11 Artificial intelligence: Turing's game language, memory, and other games the technology of making man the electronic image of man artifact and artificer. Part 12 Conclusion: natural man from Socrates to Faust to Turing living with Turing's man invention and discovery the computer as a tool synthetic intelligence.

Accounting for Innovation: Technological Change and Business Practice in the Berkshire County Paper Industry

Abstract: Thomas Cochran has argued persuasively that historians of technology who seek cultural explanations for America's rapid early industrialization will find the examination of 19th-century business practices most rewarding. As befits a broad, synthetic essay, his Frontiers of Change mentions many of these practices, including accounting methods, only briefly.' My study of accounting procedures in a rapidly mechanizing 19th-century industry supports Cochran's thesis that business innovation fostered technological change and suggests as well that historians of technology can contribute to the understanding of business innovation. Whereas historians of business and accounting have focused on quantitative indicators that mechanized manufacturing grew more capital intensive and havejudged millowners to be poor managers because they did not depreciate machines, I find, through attention to qualitative changes in machines, that accounting was appropriate to and supportive of technological change. My research on mechanization and business practice in the 19th-century American paper industry supports four general conclusions: rapidly changing technology made depreciation accounting inappropriate, mercantile accounting solved problems posed by machines' increased output and