History Computer Technology

Designers & Dragons: The ‘00s is a comprehensive picture of the new resurgence of the RPG industry. This 2nd edition expands the original single book into a series of four–beginning with the ’70s and ending with the ’00s–and we’ve added over tens of thousands of new words to this final and most updated volume. Take an inside look at d20 companies, watch the growth of new titans like Paizo Publishing, and learn about the growth of indie presses like Evil Hat Productions. Regardless of your gaming background, Shannon Appelcline’s meticulously researched history won’t disappoint.

Authors Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell tap their experiences with the MyLifeBits project at Microsoft Research for this extraordinary book. What if you could remember everything? With today’s technology, that notion becomes more realistic each day. Bell and Gemmell explain what it could all mean.

For decades, technology encouraged people to squander their time and intellect as passive consumers. Today, technology has finally caught up with human potential. In Cognitive Surplus, Internet guru Clay Shirky forecasts the thrilling changes we will all enjoy as new digital technology puts our untapped resources of talent and goodwill to use at last.

Creating superior intelligence would be the biggest event in human history. Unfortunately, according to the world's pre-eminent AI expert, it could also be the last. In this groundbreaking book on the biggest question facing humanity, Stuart Russell explains why he has come to consider his own discipline an existential threat to his own species, and lays out how we can change course before it's too late. There is no one better placed to assess the promise and perils of the dominant technology of the future than Russell, who has spent decades at the forefront of AI research.

From the simple to the intricate and the audacious to the absurd, Adam Kucharski reveals the long and tangled history between betting and science and explains why gambling continues to generate insights into luck and decision making today. Covering exploits and ideas from across the globe, he meets the teams behind hedge funds that capitalize on inaccurate sports betting odds and explains how PhD-level pundits are using methods originally developed for the US nuclear program to predict sports results.

People of the Screen traces the history of Bible software development, showing the unique and powerful role evangelical entrepreneurs and coders have played in shaping its functionality and how their choices in turn shape the reading habits of millions of people around the world.

In Out of Touch, Professor of Psychology Michelle Drouin investigates what she calls our intimacy famine, exploring love, belongingness, and fulfillment and considering why relationships carried out on technological platforms may leave us starving for physical connection. Drouin puts it this way: when most of our interactions are through social media, we are taking tiny hits of dopamine rather than the huge shots of oxytocin that an intimate in-person relationship would provide.

When we make decisions, our thinking is informed by societal norms, “guardrails” guiding our decisions, like the laws and rules that govern us. But what are good guardrails in today’s world of overwhelming information flows and increasingly powerful technologies, such as artificial intelligence? Based on the latest insights from the cognitive sciences, economics, and public policy, Guardrails offers a novel approach to shaping decisions by embracing human agency in its social context.

From the Industrial Revolution to the age of artificial intelligence, The Technology Trap takes a sweeping look at the history of technological progress and how it has radically shifted the distribution of economic and political power among society’s members.

As Audrey Kurth Cronin explains in Power to the People, what we are seeing now is an exacerbation of an age-old trend. Over the centuries, the most surprising developments in warfare have occurred because of advances in technologies combined with changes in who can use them. Indeed, accessible innovations in destructive force have long driven new patterns of political violence. When Nobel invented dynamite and Kalashnikov designed the AK-47, each inadvertently spurred terrorist and insurgent movements that killed millions and upended the international system.

We are living in a new urban age and its most tangible expression is the "supertall": megastructures that are dramatically bigger, higher, and more ambitious than any in history. In Supertall, TED Resident Stefan Al—himself an experienced architect who has worked on some of the largest buildings in the world—reveals the advancements in engineering, design, and data science that have led to this worldwide boom.

In this book, you'll learn how: data science, driven by artificial intelligence and machine learning, is yielding unprecedented business insights; blockchain has the potential to restructure the economy; drones and driverless vehicles are becoming essential tools; 3-D printing is making new business models possible; augmented reality is transforming retail and manufacturing; smart speakers are redefining the rules of marketing; and humans and machines are working together to reach new levels of productivity.

In Rust journalist Jonathan Waldman travels from Key West, Florida, to Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, to meet the colorful and often reclusive people concerned with corrosion. He sneaks into an abandoned steelworks with a brave artist and nearly gets kicked out of Can School. Across the Arctic he follows a massive high-tech robot, hunting for rust in the Alaska pipeline.

In The Glass Cage, bestselling author Nicholas Carr digs behind the headlines about factory robots and self-driving cars, wearable computers and digitized medicine, as he explores the hidden costs of granting software dominion over our work and our leisure. Even as they bring ease to our lives, these programs are stealing something essential from us.

In Millennium, best-selling historian Ian Mortimer takes the listener on a whirlwind tour of the last 10 centuries of Western history. It is a journey into a past vividly brought to life and bursting with ideas, that pits one century against another in his quest to measure which century saw the greatest change. We journey from a time when there was a fair chance of your village being burned to the ground by invaders - and dried human dung was a recommended cure for cancer - to a world in which explorers sailed into the unknown and civilizations came into conflict.

Desde su invención en los años cincuenta del pasado siglo, los videojuegos se han convertido progresivamente y de manera imparable en uno de los mayores fenómenos culturales, artísticos y sociales contemporáneos.

A web API is an efficient way to communicate with an application or service. However, this convenience opens your systems to new security risks. API Security in Action gives you the skills to build strong, safe APIs you can confidently expose to the world.

Are you drowning in endless tasks? Stuck using outdated tools that make your workday drag on forever? Does the mere mention of AI make you feel like you're lost in a sci-fi thriller you don't understand? Take a deep breath. You don't have to be a tech guru to harness the game-changing powers of AI and ChatGPT. You're just one listen away from demolishing the barriers that prevent you from unlocking a wealth of new skills and opportunities.

Across the world, people watch more than a billion hours of video on YouTube every day. Every minute, more than five hundred additional hours of footage are uploaded to the site, a technical feat unmatched in the history of computing. YouTube invented the attention economy we all live in today, forever changing how people are entertained, informed, and paid online. Everyone knows YouTube. And yet virtually no one knows how it works.

Web3 Marketing: A Handbook for the Next Internet Revolution is the essential book for anyone looking to understand the next era of the internet and start building. Beyond the sensational hype and headlines around crypto and NFTs, a real revolution is taking place: new technologies for owning, moving, and organizing value spell the overdue end of an internet where a few huge companies hoard data and power, and open a new frontier for products, services, and applications in which ownership and control belongs to creators, builders, and users.