Kategoria BISAC: Science >> History

Outstanding Academic Title, 1991, Choice Magazine

Although building a space station has been an extraordinary challenge for America's scientists and engineers, the securing and sustaining of presidential approval, congressional support, and long-term funding for the project was an enormous task for bureaucrats. The Space Station Decision examines the history of this controversial initiative and illustrates how bureaucracy shapes public policy. Using primary documents and interviews, Howard E. McCurdy describes the events that led up to the 1984 decision to build a...

Electronics provides a welcome, comprehensive history of one of the late twentieth century's greatest technologies: electronic devices. Some of them, the laser and the microchip for example, have become household words. Yet their origins and operation are largely unknown to the general public, remaining mysterious outside the field of engineering. Their advent brought about many of the most important historical developments in recent memory--the rise of television, the Cold War, the Space Race, the growth of Asian semiconductor manufacturers, and the emergence of the surveillance...

Science Research at the Federal Level in Canada is designed to provide much-needed information about the intertwined relationship between science research and politics at the federal level in Canada. Social, economic, and political imperatives drive the direction and scope of the scientific and technical research conducted by federal agencies, but little is known about the knowledge base of government publications and the literature of Canadian science and technology.

Covering the federal departments of Agriculture, Environment (including the Canadian Wildlife Service and the...

The Canadian Institute for Advanced Research originated at the University of Toronto in the early 1980s. Since that time, it has gone from a small, independent centre to an important and revered institution with a significant role in the study of sciences, social sciences, and humanities in Canada. A Generation of Excellence is a detailed history of the CIAR from its humble beginnings to its ascension as one of the most important research organizations in the country.

Beginning in the summer of 1982, with the CIAR merely a conception in the minds of senior scholars at the...

In 1918 the Spanish flu epidemic swept the world and killed an estimated 20 to 40 million people in just one year, more than the number that died during the four years of the First World War. To this day medical science has been at a loss to explain the Spanish flu's origin. Most virologists are convinced that sooner or later a similarly deadly flu virus will return with a vengeance; thus anything we can learn from the 1918 flu may save lives in a new epidemic.

Responding to sustained interest in this medical mystery, Hunting the 1918 Flu presents a detailed account of...

This collection of essays explores two traditions of interpreting and manipulating nature in the early-modern and nineteenth-century Iberian world: one instrumental and imperial, the other patriotic and national. Imperial representations laid the ground for the epistemological transformations of the so-called Scientific Revolutions. The patriotic narratives lie at the core of the first modern representations of the racialized body, Humboldtian theories of biodistribution, and views of the landscape as a historical text representing different layers of historical memory.

An insightful, revealing history of the magical mathematics that transformed our world.

At a summer tea party in Cambridge, England, a guest states that tea poured into milk tastes different from milk poured into tea. Her notion is shouted down by the scientific minds of the group. But one man, Ronald Fisher, proposes to scientifically test the hypothesis. There is no better person to conduct such an experiment, for Fisher is a pioneer in the field of statistics.

The Lady Tasting Tea spotlights not only Fisher's theories but also the revolutionary ideas of...

Bolles has scoured the literature of science to build a treasury that is accessible and riveting, and therefore appealing to readers unfamiliar with science, yet erudite enough for the scientifically initiated to enjoy.

Tornadoes, nature's most violent and unpredictable storms, descend from the clouds nearly one thousand times yearly and have claimed eighteen thousand American lives since 1880. However, the U.S. Weather Bureau--fearing public panic and believing tornadoes were too fleeting for meteorologists to predict--forbade the use of the word "tornado" in forecasts until 1938.

Scanning the Skies traces the history of today's tornado warning system, a unique program that integrates federal, state, and local governments, privately controlled broadcast media, and individuals. Bradford examines the...

Between 1633 and 1642, the French physician and philanthropist Theophraste Renaudot sponsored a series of public conferences in Paris. These conferences offered an open forum for wide-ranging discussions of a variety of topics, including science, medicine, gender, politics, and ethics. No matter the topic, participants consistently used scientific reasoning as a new standard of evidence. The conferences thus recast the rhetorical traditions of the Renaissance and prefigured the social sciences of the Enlightenment. They provide a candid snapshot of intellectual life at the dawn of the...