Showing titles in Science & Technology

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.

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.

April 28, 2015, West Baltimore, Maryland: ground zero in America's Opiate Wars. In this crime-plagued section of the city, the death of Freddie Gray has triggered the worst domestic rioting since the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and created a terrifying new breed of criminal entrepreneur.

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.

In Longshot, investigative journalist David Heath takes listeners inside the small group of scientists whose groundbreaking work was once largely dismissed but whose feat will now eclipse the importance of Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine in medical history. With never-before-reported details, Heath reveals how these scientists overcame countless obstacles to give the world an unprecedented head start when we needed a COVID-19 vaccine.

Not so long ago, we embraced social media as a life-changing opportunity to connect with friends and family all across the globe. Today, the pendulum of public opinion is swinging in the opposite direction as Facebook, Twitter, Google, YouTube, and similar sites are being accused of corrupting our democracy, spreading disinformation, and fanning the flames of hatred. Here, with insightful analysis and in-depth research, Robby Soave explores some of the biggest issues animating both the right and the left: bias, censorship, disinformation, privacy, screen addiction, crime, and more.

What is the impact of surveillance capitalism on our right to free speech? The internet once promised to be a place of extraordinary freedom beyond the control of money or politics, but today corporations and platforms exercise more control over our ability to access information and share knowledge to a greater extent than any state. In Silicon Values, leading campaigner Jillian York looks at how our rights have become increasingly undermined by the major corporations' desire to harvest our personal data and turn it into profit.

COVID-19 has killed more people than any war or public health crisis in American history, but the scale and grim human toll of the pandemic were not inevitable. Pandemic Politics examines how Donald Trump politicized COVID-19, shedding new light on how his administration tied the pandemic to the president’s political fate in an election year and chose partisanship over public health. This book draws on a wealth of new data on public opinion to show how pandemic politics has touched all aspects of our lives, and puts America’s COVID-19 response in global perspective.

In 1997, scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory found a small leak of radioactive water near their research reactor. Brookhaven was—and is—a world-class lab, and its reactor was the cornerstone of US materials science. But its discovery triggered a media and political firestorm that resulted in the reactor's shutdown, and even attempts to close the entire laboratory. A quarter century later, the episode reveals the dynamics of today's controversies in which fears and the dismissal of science disrupt serious discussion and research of vital issues.

This audiobook narrated by Teri Schnaubelt explains how to put democracy at the heart of AI governance.

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.

The second edition of this book appears two years after the first. I deliberately left the body of the book unchanged other than add a new introduction. if only to underscore the point: there were plenty of warnings! The significance of the timing of the first edition book is obvious to anyone who has lived through our strange times: September 2020. That was six months following the lockdown of most of the world during which places where people might “congregate” were shut by governments. The reason was to avoid, mitigate, eliminate maybe, or otherwise diminish the disease impact of the...

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. 

In this bracing book, Michael Chertoff makes clear that our laws and policies surrounding the protection of personal information, written for an earlier time, need to be completely overhauled in the Internet era. In offering his compelling call for action, Chertoff argues that what is at stake is not so much the simple loss of privacy, which is almost impossible to protect, but of individual autonomy - the ability to make personal choices free of manipulation or coercion.

When the Founding Fathers drafted our Constitution, they had no idea there would be a “Big Tech”–nor any concept of the immense power these companies would wield over our people. But the Fathers did provide mechanisms—a system of check and balances—for the people to stop dangerous monopolies like Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon from suffocating our business and political life. Few know more about these mechanisms than Rep. Ken Buck, who has been a leader in Congress fighting against the unchecked power of Big Tech.

When businesses distort and restrain markets, government policy is not enough to fight back. If the problems come from individual behavior, so should the solutions. Ennis shows that individual users of the internet all have a role to play in determining the future nature of our digital economies. Building on his provocative diagnosis, he suggests 15 ways we can take back control and, in so doing, transform the internet into a fairer and healthier place that can deliver freedom of choice.

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.

For more than a century, the interplay between private, investor-owned electric utilities and government regulators has shaped the electric power industry in the United States. Provision of an essential service to largely dependent consumers invited government oversight and ever more sophisticated market intervention. The industry has sought to manage, coopt, and profit from government regulation. In The Power Brokers, Jeremiah Lambert maps this complex interaction from the late 19th century to the present day.

By shedding new light on grooming practices, this book provides a key resource for discourse analysis, forensic linguistics, communication, and media studies, as well as for practitioners aiming to counter online grooming through policy changes, detection software, and prevention-focused training to promote digital civility and safety.