Kategoria BISAC: Technology & Engineering >> Social Aspects

"Social Issues in Science and Technology" explores the controversies involving the impact of science and technology on human life. Each entry provides the basic scientific background needed to understand the issue involved and its social, political, and economic implications. The coverage presents an unbiased summary of differing views, possible social impacts, and government policy decisions.

Since the 2000 presidential election, the United States has been embroiled in debates about electronic voting. Critics say the new technologies invite tampering and fraud. Advocates say they enhance the accuracy of vote counts and make casting ballots easier--and ultimately foster greater political participation. Electronic Elections cuts through the media spin to assess the advantages and risks associated with different ways of casting ballots--and shows how e-voting can be the future of American democracy.

Elections by nature are fraught with risk. Michael Alvarez and...

With video game sales in the billions and anxious concerns about their long-term effects growing louder, Glued to Games: How Video Games Draw Us In and Hold Us Spellbound brings something new to the discussion. It is the first truly balanced research-based analysis on the games and gamers, addressing both the positive and negative aspects of habitual playing by drawing on significant recent studies and established motivational theory.

Filled with examples from popular games and the real experiences of gamers themselves, Glued to Games gets to the heart of...

This volume brings together a diverse set of new studies--archaeological, ethnohistoric, and ethnographic--that focus on agricultural intensification and hydraulic systems around the world. Fifteen chapters--written by many of the world's leading experts--combine extensive regional overviews of agricultural histories with in-depth case studies. In this volume are chapters on agriculture in the Middle East, South Asia, Europe, Oceania, Mesoamerica, and South America. A wide range of theoretical perspectives and approaches are used to provide a framework for agricultural land-use and water...

From the dawn of European civilization to the twentieth century, the automaton--better known today as the robot--has captured the Western imagination and provided a vital lens into the nature of humanity.

Historian Minsoo Kang argues that to properly understand the human-as-machine and the human-as-fundamentally-different-from-machine, we must trace the origins of these ideas and examine how they were transformed by intellectual, cultural, and artistic appearances of the automaton throughout the history of the West. Kang tracks the first appearance of the automaton in ancient...

Since the fall of the Ottoman Empire, Turkey has seen a complete re-imagining of its political, cultural and social landscape. Burce Celik argues that technology has been integral to this transformative process, showing how take-up of modern technologies, such as the cell or mobile phone, has been embraced particularly by those who most easily absorbed new ideals about Turkey and modern Turkishness. While many studies on the cultural significance of mobile technology focus on its rational uses and incentives, Celik draws on cultural theory, psychoanalysis and the philosophy of technology...

Our bodies are archives of sensory knowledge that shape how we understand the world. If our environment changes at an unsettling pace, how will we make sense of a world that is no longer familiar? One of Canada's premier historians tackles this question by exploring situations in the recent past where state-driven megaprojects and regulatory and technological changes forced ordinary people to cope with transformations that were so radical that they no longer recognized their home and workplaces or, by implication, who they were. In concert with a ground-breaking, creative, and analytical...

This theoretically informed research explores what the development and transformation of air travel has meant for societies and individuals.

• Brings together a number of interdisciplinary approaches towards the aeroplane and its relation to society
• Presents an original theory that our societies are aerial societies, or 'aerealities', and shows how we are both enabled and threatened by aerial mobility
• Features a series of detailed international case studies which map the history of...

This theoretically informed research explores what the development and transformation of air travel has meant for societies and individuals.

• Brings together a number of interdisciplinary approaches towards the aeroplane and its relation to society
• Presents an original theory that our societies are aerial societies, or 'aerealities', and shows how we are both enabled and threatened by aerial mobility
• Features a series of detailed international case studies which map the history of...