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The Disaster Experts
In the wake of 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, many are asking what, if anything, can be done to prevent large-scale disasters. How is it that we know more about the hazards of modern American life than ever before, yet the nation faces ever-increasing losses from such events? History shows that disasters are not simply random acts. Where is the logic in creating an elaborate set of fire codes for buildings, and then allowing structures like the Twin Towers—tall, impressive, and risky—to go up as design experiments? Why prepare for terrorist attacks above all else when floods, fires, and earthquakes pose far more consistent threats to American life and prosperity? The Disaster Experts takes ...
To the Digital Age
The metal-oxide-semiconductor (MOS) transistor is the fundamental element of digital electronics. The tens of millions of transistors in a typical home -- in personal computers, automobiles, appliances, and toys -- are almost all derive from MOS transistors. To the Digital Age examines for the first time the history of this remarkable device, which overthrew the previously dominant bipolar transistor and made digital electronics ubiquitous. Combining technological with corporate history, To the Digital Age examines the breakthroughs of individual innovators as well as the research and development power (and problems) of large companies such as IBM, Intel, and Fairchild. Bassett discusses how...
Disastrous Times
Across contemporary Asia, each day dawns with a new story about living in an era of profound environmental change. Rapid transformations in the landscape, society, and technology produce new conflicts that are experienced at nearly every scale of life in the region. Environmental change is marked in square kilometers or micrometers, in cities or in households, within national boundaries and beyond. These changes appear in the form of radical ruptures wrought both by spectacular catastrophes like massive floods or tsunamis and by slow tragedies like the widening epidemic of asthma or the grinding processes of land dispossession. Each of these scales and phenomena reveals what it is to live in...
In Thought and Action
One of the most gripping images from the 1960s captures the slight figure of Dr. S. I. Hayakawa scrambling onto a sound truck parked in front of San Francisco State College amid campus unrest. Hayakawa had hoped to use this soapbox to address the assembled demonstrators, but instead he ended up ripping out speaker wires and halting an illegal campus demonstration—or denying first-amendment rights to the crowd, depending on your perspective. Indeed, Hayakawa’s entire life defies simplistic labels, and his ability to be categorized largely depends on personal perspective. This intimate and detailed biography draws on interviews with friends and family members, as well as Hayakawa’s own p...
Urban Modernity
How Paris, London, Chicago, Berlin, and Tokyo created modernity through science and technology by means of urban planning, international expositions, and museums. At the close of the nineteenth century, industrialization and urbanization marked the end of the traditional understanding of society as rooted in agriculture. Urban Modernity examines the construction of an urban-centered, industrial-based culture—an entirely new social reality based on science and technology. The authors show that this invention of modernity was brought about through the efforts of urban elites—businessmen, industrialists, and officials—to establish new science- and technology-related institutions. Internat...
A Short History of Physics in the American Century
As the twentieth century drew to a close, computers, the Internet, and nanotechnology were central to modern American life. Yet the advances in physics underlying these applications are poorly understood and widely underappreciated by U.S. citizens today. In this concise overview, David C. Cassidy sharpens our perspective on modern physics by viewing this foundational science through the lens of America's engagement with the political events of a tumultuous century. American physics first stirred in the 1890s-around the time x-rays and radioactivity were discovered in Germany-with the founding of graduate schools on the German model. Yet American research lagged behind the great European lab...
Interdisciplinary Design Thinking in Architecture Education
This book explores the creative potential for architecture curricula to integrate solid interdisciplinary thinking in design studio education. Annotated case studies, both from academic institutions and from professional practices, provide examples of interdisciplinary engagement in creative design work, highlighting the challenges and opportunities of this approach. Cases are from a diverse selection of international collaborators, featuring projects from the United States, Australia, Mexico, Germany, and Italy, and cover a range of project types and scales. Chapters by invited experts offer speculations on current and future models, situating examples within the broader context, and encour...
The Challenge of Remaining Innovative
"The contributors explore two main themes: the challenge of remaining innovative and the necessity of managing institutional boundaries in doing so. The book is organized into four parts, which move outward from individual firms; to networks or clusters of firms; to consultants and other intermediaries in the private economy who operate outside of the firms themselves; and finally to government institutions and politics. "--Editor.
Critical Disaster Studies
This book announces the new, interdisciplinary field of critical disaster studies. Unlike most existing approaches to disaster, critical disaster studies begins with the idea that disasters are not objective facts, but rather are interpretive fictions—and they shape the way people see the world. By questioning the concept of disaster itself, critical disaster studies reveals the stakes of defining people or places as vulnerable, resilient, or at risk. As social constructs, disaster, vulnerability, resilience, and risk shape and are shaped by contests over power. Managers and technocrats often herald the goals of disaster response and recovery as objective, quantifiable, or self-evident. In...
Words Whispered in Water
“Anyone who is interested in Hurricane Katrina, and in America’s failing infrastructure, will want to read this book . . . a fast-paced narrative.” —Scott G. Knowles, Drexel University 2020 Nautilus Silver Winner In the aftermath of one of the worst disasters in US history, Words Whispered in Water tells the story of one woman’s fight, against all odds, to expose a mammoth federal agency—and win. In 2005, the entire world watched as a major US city was nearly wiped off the map. The levees ruptured and New Orleans drowned. But while newscasters attributed the New Orleans flood to “natural catastrophes” and other types of disasters, citizen investigator Sandy Rosenthal set out ...
