Government Technology

In the absence of motorized boats and gondolas, Venice’s waters have returned to a sparkling blue color. Deer have been spotted roaming cities in Italy, and mountain goats recently took over a small seaside town in Wales. Taking advantage of the decreased boat traffic, whales have returned to roaming Vancouver’s harbours. The absence of “regular” human activities has dramatically affected our environment. In this book, Bob McDonald turns his focus to global energy sources, and shows how the global shutdowns may have been exactly what we needed to show us that a greener future is achievable.

The American Dream is close to being replaced by a living nightmare. Key commodities that are essential to our daily lives and that are widely believed to be abundant are running critically short. Even worse, the Chinese are doing what they can to monopolize the world's dwindling resources. The U.S. is now largely dependent on our greatest economic rival for rare earth elements as well as a host of other minerals - all of which are absolutely essential to the development of alternative energies....

Desde mediados de la década de 2000, la inteligencia artificial (IA) se ha expandido a gran velocidad a nivel mundial, como campo académico y como industria. De manera crítica, advierte cómo la IA altera la forma en que el mundo es visto y entendido, e impulsa un cambio hacia gobiernos antidemocráticos, una mayor desigualdad y enormes daños medioambientales. De hecho, la creación de los sistemas de IA contemporáneos dependen de la explotación de los recursos energéticos y minerales del planeta, de la mano de obra barata y de los datos a gran escala.

Ever since the earliest days of the Cold War, American intelligence agencies have launched spies in the sky, implanted spies in the ether, burrowed spies underground, sunk spies in the ocean, and even tried to control spies' minds by chemical means. But these weren't human spies. Instead, the United States expanded its reach around the globe through techno-spies. Nothing Is Beyond Our Reach investigates how America's technophiles inadvertently created a global espionage empire: one based on technology, not land.

From severe flooding in Louisiana to wildfires in the Pacific Northwest to melting permafrost in Alaska, catastrophic climate events are occurring more frequently—and severely—than ever. And these events are having a direct impact on the lives (and futures) of young people and their families.

The summer of 1969 saw astronauts land on the moon for the first time and hippie hordes descend on Woodstock for a legendary music festival. For Neil M. Maher, the conjunction of these two era-defining events is not entirely coincidental. With its lavishly funded mandate to send a man to the moon, Apollo became a litmus test in the 1960s culture wars.

The history of the American gun is intricately entwined with the history of America itself, and the potential future developments in gun technology could change the world. However, the radical anti-gun lobby stands between innovation and the American people. Bestselling author Frank Miniter describes amazing breakthroughs waiting to happen in gun technology - and how gun grabbers threaten to stop progress in its tracks.

For better or for worse, Google and social media - “Big Tech”, collectively - have become the new public square. Unfortunately, this public square has a watchful referee standing behind them, ready and waiting to blow the whistle if they veer too far from the preferred narrative. Americans have given these companies enormous power to select the information they read, share and discuss with their neighbors and friends.

No single invention of the last half century has changed the way we live now as much as the Internet. Alexander Klimburg was a member of the generation for whom it was a utopian ideal turned reality: a place where ideas, information, and knowledge could be shared and new freedoms found and enjoyed. Two decades later, the future isn't so bright any more: increasingly, the Internet is used as a weapon and a means of domination by states eager to exploit or curtail global connectivity.

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.

Alla fine del 2017 un algoritmo di intelligenza artificiale ha collezionato una serie di vittorie schiaccianti a scacchi scegliendo mosse che la mente umana non è nemmeno in grado di assimilare o utilizzare. Qualche anno più tardi, i ricercatori del Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) hanno annunciato la scoperta di un nuovo antibiotico ottenuto grazie all'aiuto dell'intelligenza artificiale, che era riuscita a individuare proprietà molecolari sfuggite alla concettualizzazione e alla classificazione degli scienziati.

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.

New technologies have provided both incredible convenience and new threats. The same kinds of digital networks that allow you to hail a ride using your smartphone let power grid operators control a country's electricity - and these personal, corporate, and government systems are all vulnerable. In Ukraine, unknown hackers shut off electricity to nearly 230,000 people for six hours. North Korean hackers destroyed networks at Sony Pictures in retaliation for a film that mocked Kim Jong-un.

This is the first biography in English of Nikolai Ivanovich Kibalchich, who was hanged as the explosives technician of the "People's Will" party of terrorists who assassinated Russian Tsar Alexander II with a thrown grenade on March 1, 1881. While in prison awaiting execution, Kibalchich conceived and drew the design of the first rocket-powered human-piloted flying device, thus qualifying him in history as a "terrorist rocket pioneer".

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.

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.

Federal agencies with a lead role to assist and protect one or more of the nation’s 16 critical infrastructures are referred to as sector risk management agencies (SRMAs). The SRMAs for three of the 16 have determined the extent of their sector’s adoption of the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s (NIST) Framework for Improving Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity (framework). In doing so, lead agencies took actions such as developing sector surveys and conducting technical assessments mapped to framework elements.

Today's militaries are increasingly reliant on highly networked autonomous systems, artificial intelligence, and advanced weapons that were previously the domain of sci-fi writers. In such a world, what can we do to decrease the chances of war? In Future Peace, Robert H. Latiff questions our overreliance on technology and examines the pressure-cooker scenario created by the growing animosity between the US and its adversaries, our thinly stretched global military, the capacity for technology to catalyze violence, and the American public's lack of familiarity with these topics.

With the rise of cyberbullying and hate speech online, issues around climate change and technology, and the "move fast and break things" mentality of tech culture, Which Side of History? will urge listeners to draw the line. This book will help shape the conversations we have around technology in our society and our future for years to come.

The never-before-told true account of the design and development of the first desktop computer by the world's most famous high-styled typewriter company, more than a decade before the arrival of the Osborne 1, the Apple 1, the first Intel microprocessor, and IBM's PC5150.