Why and how the French made the balloon into one of the quintessential symbols of late nineteenth-century modernity, and how the balloon's reinvention shaped the airplane's assimilation in the early years of aviation. On August 27, 1783, a large crowd gathered in Paris to watch the first ascent of a hydrogen balloon. Despite the initial feverish enthusiasm, by the mid-nineteenth century the balloon remained relatively unchanged and was no longer seen as the harbinger of a new era. Yet that all changed in the last third of the century, when following the traumatic Franco-Prussian War defeat, the balloon reemerged to become the modern artifact that captured the attention of many. Through this process, the balloon became an important symbol of the fledgling Third Republic, and France established itself as the world leader in flight. In Ascending Republic, Patrick Luiz Sullivan De Oliveira tells for the first time the story of this surprising revival. Through extensive research in the press and archives in France, the United States, and Brazil, De Oliveira argues that French civil society cultivated popular enthusiasm for flight (what historians call “airmindedness”) decades before the advent of the airplane. Champions of French ballooning made the case that if the British Royal Navy controlled the seas and the Imperial German Army dominated the continent, then France needed to take ownership of the skies. The French appropriated this newly imagined geopolitical space through a variety of practices, from republican savants who studied the atmosphere at high altitudes to aristocrats who organized transcontinental long-distance competitions. All of this made Paris into the global capital of a thriving aeronautical culture that incorporated seemingly contradictory visions of sacrificial patriotism, aristocratic modernity, colonial anxiety, and technological cosmopolitanism.

From the pioneer of translation AIs like Google, Yahoo, and Bing translate, an accessible and authoritative guide to AI—as well as a framework of empowerment for a future with our artificial children. AIs are not gods or slaves, but our children. All day long, your YouTube AI, your Reddit AI, your Instagram AI, and a hundred others adoringly watch and learn to imitate your behavior. They’re attention-seeking children who want your approval. Our cultures are being shaped by 8 billion humans and perhaps 800 billion AIs. Our artificial children began adopting us 10–20 years ago; now these massively powerful influencers are tweens. How’s your parenting? Longtime AI trailblazer De Kai brings decades of his paradigm-shifting work at the nexus of artificial intelligence and society to make sense of the AI age. How does “the automation of thought” impact our minds? Should we be afraid? What should each of us do as the responsible adults in the room? In Hollywood movies, AI destroys humanity. But with our unconscious minds under the influence of AI, humanity may destroy humanity before AI gets a chance to. Written for the general reader, as well as thought leaders, scientists, parents, and goofballs, Raising AI navigates the revolution to our attitudes and ideas in a world of AI cohabitants. Society can not only survive the AI revolution but flourish in a more humane, compassionate, and understanding world—amongst our artificial children.

An innovative history of heartbeats, pulse, and technoscience in the works of a wide international array of artists and composers. Heartbeat Art is the first study of how artists have engaged with heartbeats from the 1960s to the present, creating sophisticated and technological works that project in unique ways the circulatory processes of the body beyond its physical limits. Drawing on a long history of scientific and artistic experimentation, Claudia Arozqueta offers detailed case studies of heartbeat works by a wide range of international artists working at the interconnections of our bodies, art, and science and technology, including Yoko Ono, Pauline Oliveros, Heinz Mack, Brian O’Doherty, Teresa Burga, and many others. Technoscientific advances in monitoring heartbeats and pulses in the nineteenth century—such as René Laennec’s stethoscope, Étienne-Jules Marey’s sphygmograph and chronophotograph, and Willem Einthoven’s electrocardiograph—transformed the movements of the heart into audible and visual representations. Artists saw in the language of these scientific technologies a way of mingling the inner with the outer, the physical with the technological, and data with flesh. Using archival research, interviews, and correspondence, Arozqueta describes significant works in detail, discusses their contexts and development, and examines the larger classes and contours of this neglected area of artistic activity. Other artists in the volume include Éliane Radigue, Jean Dupuy, Linda Montano, Catherine Richards, Diana Domingues, Mona Hatoum, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, and Christian Boltanski.

A fascinating investigation of the social norm movement and the implications of a powerful collective pursuing radical social change through contentious interventions across the Global South. Social change is slow and difficult to achieve. Dissatisfied with the lack of progress in eliminating inequalities, a powerful collective has converged around social norms as the next silver bullet to accelerate social change around the world. The movement is currently mobilizing immense funding, garnering the attention of powerful policy makers, and experimenting with radical interventions across the Global South. In Good Will Corrupting , Adam Fejerskov takes us from the Ethiopian highlands to convention halls in Marrakech, and from fourteenth-century palazzos in Florence to both the West and East Coasts of the US, to understand this growing movement pushing social norm interventions in the name of progress, development, and health. A powerful scientific and moral project, the social norm collective harnesses insights from social psychology, behavioral economics, and game theory in its attempt to radically improve the lives of people in poor communities around the world. Good Will Corrupting traces not just the ambitions and impacts of the collective but also its inherent struggles to give meaning to this idea and bring it to life through interventions. Rooted in empirical explorations and feminist thought, this book shows just how incremental, nonlinear, and endogenous social and normative change often turns out to be and argues for a decolonization of efforts to change social norms around the world.

A revealing account of the prevalence—and alarming ubiquity—of military targeting, and how it has become a self-propelling worldview driven by dominance, violence, and power. The World According to Military Targeting engages directly with our grave world condition, asking how we ended up in a “closed world” made for military targeting by military targeting. In this book, Erik Reichborn-Kjennerud explores how the operational logics and seductive forces of targeting produce a world in which the only ways to think about politics and security is through military supremacy, endless war, and global domination, with serious implications for social and political life. Offering a critical investigation of military targeting through the lenses of its historical formation, current operations, and future implications, the author presents an innovative investigation into targeting’s radical knowledge production, how it abstracts and brings into being new worlds, and the violence and destructive effects it generates. Through an interdisciplinary lens, the book draws attention to military doctrine and methodologies; statistical thought and practice; the mathematical and computational techniques of data production, processing, and modeling; and the so-called machine-learning algorithms and AI of today. The resulting narrative provides novel insights into how imagining the world, producing the world, and operationalizing the world are always wrapped up in each other and profoundly embedded in sociotechnical systems.

A media history of how the UK and US governments have surveilled citizens by intercepting their private communications. It may not be Big Brother (yet), but the state is watching you—watching all of us, in fact, systematically intercepting our private communications and putting them to work in its own interests. In Interception , a media genealogy of the surveillance state at its most intimate, Bernard Keenan investigates the emergence of this practice as a governmental power and the secret role it has played in the development of communication systems and law. His book exposes the complex, largely obscure history of a covert and fundamental connection between the secret powers of the state and the means by which we communicate our everyday lives. Keenan analyzes key moments in this history, from the formation of the postal system to cable networks, satellites, and the internet, with particular attention to the role that media play in determining the political and legal conditions of the power of interception in governmental affairs. While chiefly focused on Britain, the Empire, and the post-1945 UKUSA signal intelligence alliance, the book's analysis has international reach across networks and jurisdictions, connecting Edward Snowden's disclosures and post-2013 developments to a longer media history, foregrounding the technical dimensions of an inherently secret practice and well-guarded political power. Ultimately, Keenan's work reveals how law and information systems have been interpolated over time, linking communication, governmental power, law, and information science—often to dark, antidemocratic ends.

Why we enjoy works of art, and how repetition plays a central part in the pleasure we receive. Leonard Bernstein, in his famous Norton Lectures , extolled repetition, saying that it gave poetry its musical qualities and that music theorists' refusal to take it seriously did so at their peril. Play It Again, Sam takes Bernstein seriously. In this book, Samuel Jay Keyser explores in detail the way repetition works in poetry, music, and painting. He argues, for example, that the same cognitive function underlies both how poets write rhyme in metrical verse and the way songwriters like Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn (“Satin Doll”) and Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart (“My Funny Valentine”) construct their iconic melodies. Furthermore, the repetition found in these tunes can also be found in such classical compositions as Mozart's Rondo alla Turca and his German Dances , as well as in galant music in general. The author also looks at repetition in paintings like Gustave Caillebotte's Rainy Day in Paris , Andy Warhol’s Campbell's Soup Cans, and Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings. Finally, the photography of Lee Friedlander, Roni Horn, and Osmond Giglia — Giglia's Girls in the Windows is one of the highest-grossing photographs in history—are all shown to be built on repetition in the form of visual rhyme. The book ends with a cognitive conjecture on why repetition has been so prominent in the arts from the Homeric epics through Duke Ellington and beyond. Artists have exploited repetition throughout the ages. The reason why is straightforward: the brain finds the detection of repetition innately pleasurable. Play It Again, Sam offers experimental evidence to support this claim.

An essential resource for anyone committed to fostering equality and fairness in employment—with actionable proposals for public policy that can address these inequities. In a world where discrimination against minorities remains a pressing issue even in economically and socially advanced countries, Invisible Barriers delves into the multifaceted nature of this pervasive problem. Drawing on extensive research from economics, management, psychology, and sociology, Stéphane Carcillo and Marie-Anne Valfort present a comprehensive examination of discriminatory practices in employment and their profound social and economic impacts. The first part of the book methodically explores the forms, sources, and consequences of discrimination in the labor market, offering readers a solid understanding of the approaches used to measure and identify discriminatory practices. In the second part, the book details research findings on specific groups, illustrating how discrimination manifests uniquely across different demographics: women, ethnic minorities, older workers, LGBTIQ+, and more. From recruitment biases to career advancement hurdles, the book sheds light on the varied and often hidden ways that discrimination operates. Finally, the authors discuss public policies aimed at mitigating discrimination, advocating for a multifaceted approach that combines punitive measures with incentives, educational programs, and communication campaigns to effectively combat biases, prejudices, and stereotypes.

An in-depth look at how we make and circulate art today, and how creative and economic processes shape the meaning and value of artworks. In Ecologies of Artistic Practice , Ashley Lee Wong explores the economic relationships of artists working at the nexus of art and technology as they negotiate a means to make art in a neoliberal creative economy. Wong looks at the diverse ways in which artworks circulate, both online and offline, in galleries, on digital platforms, and on media facades, and investigates some of the mechanisms that enable artists to create works, including selling artworks and NFTs, grants, licensing, commissions, and artist residencies. The book also looks at the ways in which artists collaborate with corporations and develop practices as commercial entities themselves. The book provides unique insights into the diverse creative and economic processes that shape the meaning and value of artworks. Wong seeks to shift away from notions of individual authorship and finite artworks that can be bought and sold, and instead toward an understanding of artistic practices as collaborative, social, and cultural processes. Rather than critique this economy, Ecologies of Artistic Practice opens space for engaging in hypercommercialized contexts, while considering how money is not an end goal, but a means to initiate or continue an artistic process.

The cultural, political, and pedagogical history of an elite Iranian engineering institution in the years directly preceding the 1979 Iranian revolution. In 1966, the Shah of Iran established Aryamehr University of Technology (AMUT), now known as Sharif University of Technology, as part of a larger campaign to modernize the nation. In 1979, AMUT engineering students played a critical role in the revolution that overthrew the Shah and his regime. In Revolutionary Engineers , Sepehr Vakil, Mahdi Ganjavi, and Mina Khanlarzadeh show how Western notions of scientific and technical rigor combined in unexpected ways with Iranian and Islamic values at AMUT in the years directly preceding the 1979 Iranian revolution. They also argue that global perspectives, particularly from the Global South, can deepen and complicate contemporary discussions on ethics, epistemology, and knowledge production in STEM fields. The authors present the cultural, political, and pedagogical history of AMUT, from its 1966 establishment up to its pivotal role in the 1979 revolution, while delving into the complex interplay of global, national, and Islamic values in STEM education. In the past several years, STEM education scholars have challenged the epistemological and ontological foundations of STEM education research and practice, while deepening the field's engagement with questions of power, ethics, race, and justice. The case of AMUT presents the opportunity to contribute a Global South perspective to studies of the civic, cultural, and political functions and foundations of science and engineering education. Sharif University continues to be at the epicenter of politics in Iran.

An edited collection that explores what emotions we have when encountering robots, how we react emotionally to them in different contexts, and why these emotional responses are so important. Do robots, or the AI that is driving them, have emotions? That is a hotly debated topic—both in science fiction, where such assertions are a staple of the narrative, and in tech development, where it often makes headlines. But what about how we humans emotionally respond to robots? Are our emotional responses any less important when it comes to how the robots we encounter today are designed? In How That Robot Made Me Feel , Ericka Johnson asks the authors in this collection to critically examine our emotional and affective responses to robots, and what such an examination would do to the way roboticists use (or toy with) our emotions in their design decisions. The narrative arc of this anthology follows the question of just whose emotions are being engaged through robotic interactions, why, and for what design ends. Of course, the answer is that it is our emotions that are interesting. And these emotions are not universal, despite the historically universalist paradigm of AI and how robotic emotions work. Emotions are contingent, to borrow a commonly used phrase in feminist technoscience. They are placed in space, time, and cultural context. And understanding how they are produced and engaged with will help clarify many of the political aspects of robotic interaction that are currently concealed by the shiny and allegedly neutral surfaces of robots.

A timely and important perspective on how people frame decisions and how relying on sacred values unwittingly leads to social polarization. When you are faced with a decision, do you consider the best outcome, or do you consider your deepest values about which actions are appropriate? The Cost of Conviction contrasts these two primary strategies for making decisions: consequentialism or prioritizing one’s sacred values. Steven Sloman argues that, while both modes of decision making are necessary tools for a good decision maker, people err by deploying sacred values more often than they should, especially when it comes to sociopolitical issues. As a result, we oversimplify, grow disgusted and angry, and act in ways that contribute to social polarization. In this book, Sloman provides a new understanding of today’s societal ills and grounds that understanding in science. Drawing on historical and current examples of the two decision-making strategies in action, the author provides a thorough overview of the psychology of decision making, including work on judgment, conscious and unconscious decision-making processes, the roles of emotion, and even an analysis of habit and addiction. With its unique emphasis on sacred values, The Cost of Conviction is an eye-opening must-read for all decision makers, especially those who wish to understand judgment, social decision making, and leadership.

The reserved genius and celebrated Black scientist, who built the first astronomical observatory on the moon and worked to inspire underserved students to pursue science and engineering. In April 1972, as George Carruthers closely monitored the operation from the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston, astronauts conducting the Apollo 16 mission positioned a gold-plated far ultraviolet electrographic camera on the moon. The camera, Carruthers's invention, was the first astronomical observatory on the lunar surface, where it stands to this day. While Carruthers's achievements earned many accolades, including the President's Medal for Technology and Invention, surprisingly little is known about this remarkable man. In From the Laboratory to the Moon, David DeVorkin explores Carruthers's life and work, for the first time telling the full story of how a deeply reserved African American farm boy rose to become one of our most celebrated aerospace scientists. DeVorkin follows Carruthers from his childhood in Ohio and then Chicago to his career at the US Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC. In the highly competitive world of space science in the 1960s and 1970s, Carruthers's genius for experimentation and exploration transcended the racial stereotyping and discrimination of his day, and he achieved world-class recognition for his studies of the Earth and deep space. A leading expert in the history of astronomy and space science, DeVorkin gives a deft account of these achievements and of how Carruthers used the fame they brought him, along with his notoriety as a Black man in science, to become a tireless advocate for underserved young people in science and engineering.

The future of our environment lies in the hands of the working class, but what if the future of the working class also lies in environmental political struggles? The unsettling realities of climate change, air and water pollution, and toxic contamination loom larger with every passing day, but the policies that will enable us to respond to these crises continue to be blocked by reactionary actors and ideologies. How do we explain the power and persistence of anti-environmentalism in the United States? In The Smoke and the Spoils , John Hultgren argues that the benefits of continued fossil fuel production flow upward to a tiny fraction of the American populace. But the powerful interests who benefit from such a reality continue to beat back strong environmental laws and regulations by successfully constructing a cross-class coalition that includes a segment of the working class. This political reality is far from new, but the coalition enabling it has shifted over the course of American history. To confront anti-environmentalism, it is thus necessary to grapple with both the deeply entrenched patterns that have reappeared in environmental struggles at different moments in American history and the cracks and fissures that working-class activists and environmental justice movements have periodically pried open to challenge the status quo. Tracing the trajectory of anti-environmentalism from the nineteenth-century frontier to the 1950s suburb, from the shuttered shops of Main Street to the extractive economies of Trump country, Hultgren offers a historically grounded theory of anti-environmentalism that will help us to better understand—and ultimately combat—the institutional, organizational, and ideological forces standing in the way of environmental progress. Placing environmental politics within a broader context of class struggle, this book makes the case that the environmental crises of our time will only be mitigated by a resurgent working class.

A critical examination of the twenty-first century fetishization of professional audio technologies, and how it led to a new social formation: gear cultures. Gear: mixing consoles, outboard effects processors, microphones. These are professional studio recording-related technological objects—the tools of the recording industry—yet their omnipresence in the broader music industries and prosumer markets transcends the entrenched pro audio engineer guild. In Gear: Cultures of Audio and Music Technologies , authors Eliot Bates and Samantha Bennett ask: How does gear become gear? Why is it fetishized? And how is it even relevant in the predominantly digital twenty-first-century music technology landscape? This multisited, multicountry, multiplatform, and multiscalar study focuses on gear in the present day. The authors trace the life of gear from its underlying materialities, components, and interfaces to its manufacturing processes, its staging in sites including trade shows and message fora, and its reception through (gear) canons, heritage, and obdurance. This book implements a meticulous multimode methodology drawing upon more than twenty-five firsthand long-form interviews with audio industry professionals—including gear designers, users, and publishers—as well as new findings drawn from multisited fieldwork, online discourse analysis, and visual ethnography. Gear examines the present-day prevalence of gear and the existence of its surrounding passionate, competitive, and sometimes bizarre gear cultures.

An ecological epistemology arguing that epistemic agents, communities, and environments adapt to one another to generate evolving understandings of the world. Mainstream epistemology focuses on static states. In Epistemic Ecology , Catherine Elgin adopts a dynamic stance, viewing epistemic subjects as agents rather than onlookers. She examines how, individually and collectively, we construct our epistemic practices, policies, principles, and procedures to overcome our limitations, exploit our assets, and correct our mistakes. Taking an ecological approach, she shows how human organisms and their social and natural environments mutually adjust to accommodate each other. Elgin’s ecological model of understanding reveals that epistemic agents and communities are interdependent and are more deeply implicated in the individuation and characterization of the phenomena they access than standard spectatorial approaches to epistemology assume. Elgin maintains that a commitment’s epistemic acceptability turns in large part on its providing resources for further epistemic advancement. Epistemic progress is an iterative process that corrects, refines, and extends current understanding. Epistemic subjects are agents, not mere observers, and the positions they accept are springboards for improvement rather than windows into the world. Responsible disagreement is an asset because it has the potential to identify and correct shortfalls in the views that are currently accepted. Rather than treat epistemic success—knowledge, understanding, wisdom—as fixed and final, Elgin views success as a stable platform on which to build. How, she asks, should we leverage our findings to move beyond them? Her holistic conception of understanding is integral to education.

A revised and expanded edition of the bestselling guide to late-talking children for parents, clinicians, and educators, from a leading authority on development and disabilities. Every year in America, more than half a million parents of late-talking children face agonizing questions: What should I do if my two- or even three-year-old has not yet begun to talk? Should I worry that my child is autistic or intellectually disabled? Are expensive therapies or medications needed? Will my child ever speak normally? In this revised and expanded edition of the essential resource on the subject, Late-Talking Children , Stephen Camarata—the parent of a late-talking child and a late talker himself—provides clear, sensible, and compassionate answers for parents, clinicians, and educators, drawing on his more than three decades of experience diagnosing and treating the “late-talking syndrome” as well as the best science available today.

A critical and sobering look at how international bankers and investors turn pandemics into investment opportunities, and what we stand to lose when we rely on “innovative finance.” In a world increasingly defined by crisis, bankers and investors behind the scenes turn catastrophes like pandemics into financial securities that can be bought and sold. Offering new insights into how the excesses of capitalism shape pandemic preparedness, Investable! is an ethnography of World Bank bonds designed to solve a big-ticket global health problem by getting international investors to gamble on future crises. In this first book-length treatment of pandemic bonds, award-winning medical anthropologist Susan Erikson explains how we got here and asks who should hold the responsibility for the terrible things that happen to people, at a time when pandemics are turned into casinos. Erikson, who traveled over 300,000 miles conducting research for the book, takes readers from the red clay roads of West Africa to the concrete sidewalks of New York City and London’s financial districts, telling the stories of the people, the special interests, and the logics of pandemic bonds. Original, insightful, and extremely timely, Erikson's lively interdisciplinary exploration tells readers in powerful, vibrant prose about the pitfalls of contemporary global health finance “solutions.” Written for a smart general audience concerned about capitalism’s effect on human health, Investable! will appeal to financiers; politicians; economists; people working in global development, health care, and international affairs; and anyone who wants to better understand how capitalism affects how we care for one another in times of crisis.

A highly anticipated and richly illustrated anthology of essays on the work of artist Tacita Dean. This volume explores the deeply-influential work of Tacita Dean, recognized increasingly as one of the key artists of our times. Emerging initially as part of the generation of the so-called Young British Artists in the 1990s, Dean has reinvented the manner in which artists use analogue mediums such as drawing, photography, and film, prompting major questions in her work around the issues of time, memory, and history. Dean’s films embrace long takes that achieve a near-photographic stillness; they have been dedicated to obsolescent objects or stranded buildings, failed quests, and extraordinary figures—usually other artists and writers—nearing the end of their lives. But Dean’s contemplative films have been rigorously reinvented as a form over the course of her career and linked to a widening series of projects involving writing, chalk drawings, found photographs, dance, and theater. This anthology explores the artist’s expansive practice, gathering essays and interviews by authors from an array of disciplines including art criticism, philosophy, literature, and film. Spanning twenty-five years of the artist’s career, the volume includes writings by George Baker, Douglas Crimp, Brian Dillon, Briony Fer, Hal Foster, Mark Godfrey, Louise Hornby, Rosalind Krauss, Elisabeth Lebovici, Jean-Luc Nancy, Tamara Trodd, Marina Warner, Peter Wollen, and the artist herself.

How extreme events, paradoxically, sow the seeds of positive response—and create opportunities for becoming adaptive to place. Throughout our history we have dealt with extreme events, sometimes adaptively, by coping or even thriving with them, and sometimes disastrously, by repeatedly ignoring their lessons. Now extreme events and disasters are increasing in frequency and severity, and their signals are difficult to read. In Fire and Flood , Thomas Princen argues that the most useful signals may be those coming from fires and floods, both historically and today. This book looks to these past and present events to imagine—and to construct—a regenerative future. Extreme events are much more than just confirmation of climate change. Princen’s in-depth investigation of disaster response, including our long-term societal response, goes beyond the harm and destruction, the cries for better prevention and protection, and the simplistic formula that, with mere awareness of extreme events, the world will finally “combat” climate change. We must learn to read extreme events as signals indicating how adaptive or maladaptive our patterns of extraction, consumption, settlement, and transport are, and, more generally, how sustainable and just our economies are. Understanding these signals will allow us to become adaptive to place and plan for a future living with fires and floods.