Showing titles in Science & Technology

In Antisocial Media, Siva Vaidhyanathan explains how Facebook devolved from an innocent social site hacked together by Harvard students into a force that, while it may make personal life just a little more pleasurable, makes democracy a lot more challenging.

The big media have spoken on the question of global warming, and the debate is officially over. "Be afraid, be very afraid", warns Time magazine. But have Al Gore and his environmentalist allies really proven their case? Not even close, says Christopher C. Horner.

In 1980, Ronald Reagan created one of the dumbest talking points of all time: "I'm not a scientist, but..." Since then, politicians have repeatedly committed egregious transgressions against scientific knowledge prefaced by this seemingly innocuous phrase. Yet, as science journalist Dave Levitan reveals, that line is just the tip of the melting iceberg when it comes to rhetorical tools wielded to attack scientific findings that don't cooperate with political agendas.

Government, industry, and academia need better tools to explore threats, opportunities, and human interactions in cyberspace. The interactive exercises called cyber wargames are a powerful way to solve complex problems in a digital environment that involves both cooperation and conflict.

Much has been written about the challenges tech presents to equality and democracy. But we can either criticize big data and automation or steer it to do better. Lobel makes a compelling argument that while we cannot stop technological development, we can direct its course according to our most fundamental values. With provocative insights in every chapter, Lobel masterfully shows that digital technology frequently has a comparative advantage over humans.

Science is in trouble. Real questions in desperate need of answers—especially those surrounding ethnicity, gender, climate change, and almost anything related to “health and safety”—are swiftly buckling to the fiery societal demands of what ought to be rather than what is. Can true, fact-based discovery be redeemed? In Science in an Age of Unreason, legendary professor of psychology and biology, John Staddon, unveils the identity crisis afflicting today’s scientific community, and provides an actionable path to recovery.

The latest and most bitterly contested battle in the culture war is the controversy over Darwin and intelligent design. But much of what you've heard about it is wrong. Jonathan Wells, a battle-hardened veteran with doctorates in biology and theology, sets the record straight.

The greatest threat to privacy today is not the NSA, but good-old American companies. Internet giants, leading retailers, and other firms are voraciously gathering data with little oversight from anyone. In Las Vegas, no company knows the value of data better than Caesars Entertainment. Many thousands of enthusiastic clients pour through the ever-open doors of their casinos. The secret to the company’s success lies in their one unrivaled asset: they know their clients intimately by tracking the activities of the overwhelming majority of gamblers.

From drone warfare in the Middle East to digital spying by the National Security Agency, the US government has harnessed the power of cutting-edge technology to awesome effect. But what happens when ordinary people have the same tools at their fingertips? Advances in cybertechnology, biotechnology, and robotics mean that more people than ever before have access to potentially dangerous technologies that could be used to attack states and private citizens alike.

A Ph.D. biochemist and immunologist goes through the data on one of the greatest public policy disasters in human history—the lockdown response to COVID. How deadly was COVID originally and after it had evolved for a year or two? How many COVID deaths were prevented by the lockdowns? How many people did the lockdowns throw into depression? How many people did the lockdowns kill by deaths of despair? But the good news from the lockdowns is it shows citizens are willing to make enormous sacrifices for their society and that we can transform society on a dime.

While traditional drugs mostly help us manage the effects of disease, cell therapies promise genuine cures for a broad range of intractable ailments, from Alzheimer’s to heart damage to cancer. They could even reverse the effects of aging. For the first time in history, on an unprecedented scale, we possess the power to modify the biology that gives rise to disease, ultimately restoring individuals to a state of normalcy and reversing debilitating ailments. Former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb traces the scientific achievements that propelled progress in cell therapies.

As is often observed, Trump is a symptom of a virus that has been incubating for at least 50 years. But not often observed is where the virus is imbedded: in the psychic core of our identity. In American Manifesto: Saving Democracy from Villains, Vandals, and Ourselves, Bob Garfield examines the tragic confluence of the American preoccupation with identity and the catastrophic disintegration of the mass media.

America is at war, but most of its citizens don't know it. Covert information warfare is being waged by world powers, rogue states - such as Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea - and even terrorist groups like ISIS. This conflict has been designed to defeat and ultimately destroy the United States. This new type of warfare is part of the Information Age that has come to dominate our lives.

In this provocative book, Ramesh Srinivasan describes the internet as both an enabler of frictionless efficiency and a dirty tangle of politics, economics, and other inefficient, inharmonious human activities. We may love the immediacy of Google search results, the convenience of Amazon, and the elegance of our Apple devices, but it’s a one-way, top-down process. We’re not asked for our input or our opinions - only for our data. The internet is brought to us by wealthy technologists in Silicon Valley and China. Srinivasan argues that we must think in terms beyond the Valley.

"Uma mentira pode dar a volta ao mundo no mesmo tempo que a verdade leva para calçar seus sapatos." Mark Twain. Aos olhos dos seus eleitores, as deficiências dos líderes populistas se transformam em qualidades, sua inexperiência demonstra que não pertencem ao círculo da "velha política", e sua incompetência é uma garantia da sua autenticidade. As tensões que causam em nível internacional são vistas como mostras de sua independência, e as fake News, marca inequívoca de sua propaganda, evidenciam sua liberdade de pensamento.

Hackers have a bad reputation, as shady deployers of bots and destroyers of infrastructure. In Coding Democracy, Maureen Webb offers another view. Hackers, she argues, can be vital disruptors. Hacking is becoming a practice, an ethos, and a metaphor for a new wave of activism in which ordinary citizens are inventing new forms of distributed, decentralized democracy for a digital era. Confronted with concentrations of power, mass surveillance, and authoritarianism enabled by new technology, the hacking movement is trying to "build out" democracy into cyberspace.

Over the last 20 years, our economy and our society, from how we shop and pay our bills to how we communicate, have been completely revolutionized by technology. As Aneesh Chopra shows in Innovative State, once it became clear how much this would change America, a movement arose around the idea that these same technologies could reshape and improve government. But the idea languished, and while the private sector innovated, our government stalled, trapped in a model designed for the America of the 1930s and 1960s.

You are probably not aware, because of their hidden nature, but artificial intelligence systems are all around you affecting some of the biggest areas of your life - jobs, loans, kids, mental health, relationships, freedoms, and even healthcare decisions that can determine if you live or die.

Silicon Valley is imperializing the planet. With nearly bottomless supplies of cash and ambition, a small group of companies have been gradually seizing symbolic and practical civic leadership in America and worldwide. But Silicon Valley does not answer to the electorate; nor have they been voted into office. And the perils of their influence are only now making themselves known.

The emergence of genomic science in the last quarter century has revolutionized medicine, the justice system, and our understanding of who we are. We use genomics to determine guilt and exonerate the falsely convicted; devise new medicines; test embryos; and discover our ethnic and national roots. One might think that, given these advances, most would favor the availability of genomic tools. Yet as Jennifer Hochschild explains in Genomic Politics, the uses of genomic science are both politically charged and hotly contested.