"This book investigates how we should form ourselves in a world saturated with technologies that are profoundly intruding in the very fabric of our selfhood. New and emerging technologies, such as ...smart technological environments, imaging technologies and smart drugs, are increasingly shaping who and what we are and influencing who we ought to be. How should we adequately understand, evaluate and appreciate this development? Tackling this question requires going beyond the persistent and stubborn inside-outside dualism and recognizing that what we consider our ""inside"" self is to a great extent shaped by our ""outside"" world. Inspired by various philosophers – especially Nietzsche, Peirce and Lacan –this book shows how the values, goals and ideals that humans encounter in their environments not only shape their identities but also enable them to critically relate to their present state. The author argues against understanding technological self-formation in terms of making ourselves better, stronger and smarter. Rather, we should conceive it in terms of technological sublimation, which redefines the very notion of human enhancement. In this respect the author introduces an alternative, more suitable theory, namely Technological Sublimation Theory (TST). Extimate Technology will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in philosophy of technology, philosophy of the self, phenomenology, pragmatism, and history of philosophy."
Nanotechnology Shatkin, Jo Anne
2012, 2017-12-19, 2012-11-12
eBook
Should you adopt nanotechnology? If you have already adopted it, what do you need to know? What are the risks? Nanomaterials and nanotechnologies are revolutionizing the ways we treat disease, ...produce energy, manufacture products, and attend to our daily wants and needs. To continue to capture the promise of these transformative products, however, we need to ask critical questions about the broader impacts of nanotechnology on society and the environment. Exploring these questions, the second edition of Nanotechnology: Health and Environmental Risks gives you the latest tools to understand the risks of nanotechnology and make better decisions about using it.
Examining the state of the science, the book discusses what is known, and what still needs to be understood, about nanotechnology risk. It looks at the uses of nanotechnology for energy, industry, medicine, technology, and consumer applications and explains how to determine whether there is risk-even when there is little reliable evidence-and how to manage it. Contributors cover a wide range of topics, including:
Current concerns, among them perceived risks and the challenges of evaluating emerging technology
A historical perspective on product safety and chemicals policy
The importance of being proactive about identifying and managing health and environmental risks during product development
How the concepts of sustainability and life cycle assessment can guide nanotechnology product development
Methods for evaluating nanotechnology risks, including screening approaches and research
How to manage risk when working with nanoscale materials at the research stage and in occupational environments
What international organizations are doing to address risk issues
How risk assessment can inform environmental decision making
Written in easy-to-understand language, without sacrificing complexity or scientific accuracy, this book offers a wide-angle view of nanotechnology and risk. Supplying cutting-edge approaches and insight, it explains what types of risks could exist and what you can do to address them.
What's New in This Edition
Updates throughout, reflecting advances in the field, new literature, and policy developments
A new chapter on nanotechnology risk communication, including insights into risk perceptions and the mental models people use to evaluate technological risks
An emphasis on developing nanotechnology products that are sustainable in the long term
Advances in the understanding of nanomaterials toxicity
Cutting-edge research on occupational exposure to nanoparticles
Changes in the international landscape of organizations working on the environmental, health, and safety aspects of nanotechnologies
This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. It is funded by Trinity College Dublin, DARIAH-EU and the European ...Commission. This book explores the challenges society faces with big data, through the lens of culture rather than social, political or economic trends, as demonstrated in the words we use, the values that underpin our interactions, and the biases and assumptions that drive us. Focusing on areas such as data and language, data and sensemaking, data and power, data and invisibility, and big data aggregation, it demonstrates that humanities research, focussing on cultural rather than social, political or economic frames of reference for viewing technology, resists mass datafication for a reason, and that those very reasons can be instructive for the critical observation of big data research and innovation.
Nonvolatile memory technologies in Si-based electronics date back to the 1990s. Ferroelectric field-effect transistor (FeFET) was one of the most promising devices replacing the conventional Flash ...memory facing physical scaling limitations at those times. A variant of charge storage memory referred to as Flash memory is widely used in consumer electronic products such as cell phones and music players while NAND Flash-based solid-state disks (SSDs) are increasingly displacing hard disk drives as the primary storage device in laptops, desktops, and even data centers. The integration limit of Flash memories is approaching, and many new types of memory to replace conventional Flash memories have been proposed. Emerging memory technologies promise new memories to store more data at less cost than the expensive-to-build silicon chips used by popular consumer gadgets including digital cameras, cell phones and portable music players. They are being investigated and lead to the future as potential alternatives to existing memories in future computing systems. Emerging nonvolatile memory technologies such as magnetic random-access memory (MRAM), spin-transfer torque random-access memory (STT-RAM), ferroelectric random-access memory (FeRAM), phase-change memory (PCM), and resistive random-access memory (RRAM) combine the speed of static random-access memory (SRAM), the density of dynamic random-access memory (DRAM), and the nonvolatility of Flash memory and so become very attractive as another possibility for future memory hierarchies. Many other new classes of emerging memory technologies such as transparent and plastic, three-dimensional (3-D), and quantum dot memory technologies have also gained tremendous popularity in recent years. Subsequently, not an exaggeration to say that computer memory could soon earn the ultimate commercial validation for commercial scale-up and production the cheap plastic knockoff. Therefore, this review is devoted to the rapidly developing new class of memory technologies and scaling of scientific procedures based on an investigation of recent progress in advanced Flash memory devices.
This book is open access. This book undertakes a multifaceted and integrated examination of biometric identification, including the current state of the technology, how it is being used, the key ...ethical issues, and the implications for law and regulation. The five chapters examine the main forms of contemporary biometrics–fingerprint recognition, facial recognition and DNA identification– as well the integration of biometric data with other forms of personal data, analyses key ethical concepts in play, including privacy, individual autonomy, collective responsibility, and joint ownership rights, and proposes a raft of principles to guide the regulation of biometrics in liberal democracies. Biometric identification technology is developing rapidly and being implemented more widely, along with other forms of information technology. As products, services and communication moves online, digital identity and security is becoming more important. Biometric identification facilitates this transition. Citizens now use biometrics to access a smartphone or obtain a passport; law enforcement agencies use biometrics in association with CCTV to identify a terrorist in a crowd, or identify a suspect via their fingerprints or DNA; and companies use biometrics to identify their customers and employees. In some cases the use of biometrics is governed by law, in others the technology has developed and been implemented so quickly that, perhaps because it has been viewed as a valuable security enhancement, laws regulating its use have often not been updated to reflect new applications. However, the technology associated with biometrics raises significant ethical problems, including in relation to individual privacy, ownership of biometric data, dual use and, more generally, as is illustrated by the increasing use of biometrics in authoritarian states such as China, the potential for unregulated biometrics to undermine fundamental principles of liberal democracy. Resolving these ethical problems is a vital step towards more effective regulation.
This book presents applicable knowledge of technology, equipment and applications, and the core economic issues of micromanufacturing for anyone with a basic understanding of manufacturing, material, ...or product engineering. It explains micro-engineering issues (design, systems, materials, market and industrial development), technologies, facilities, organization, competitiveness, and innovation with an analysis of future potential. The machining, forming, and joining of miniature/micro-products are all covered in depth, including: grinding/milling, laser applications, and photo chemical etching; embossing (hot & UV), injection molding and forming (bulk, sheet, hydro, laser); mechanical assembly, laser joining, soldering, and packaging. The book presents case studies, material and design considerations, working principles, process configurations, and information on tools, equipment, parameters and control. It explains the many facets of recently emerging additive/hybrid technologies and systems; outlines system engineering issues pertaining to handling, metrology, testing, integration and software; explains widely used micro parts in bio/medical industry, information technology and automotive engineering; and covers technologies in high demand.
Data Science for Wind Energy provides an in-depth discussion on how data science methods can improve decision making for wind energy applications, near-ground wind field analysis and forecast, ...turbine power curve fitting and performance analysis, turbine reliability assessment, and maintenance optimization for wind turbines and wind farms. A broad set of data science methods covered, including time series models, spatio-temporal analysis, kernel regression, decision trees, kNN, splines, Bayesian inference, and importance sampling. More importantly, the data science methods are described in the context of wind energy applications, with specific wind energy examples and case studies. Please also visit the author’s book site at https://aml.engr.tamu.edu/book-dswe. Features Provides an integral treatment of data science methods and wind energy applications Includes specific demonstration of particular data science methods and their use in the context of addressing wind energy needs Presents real data, case studies and computer codes from wind energy research and industrial practice Covers material based on the author's ten plus years of academic research and insights
Today we are witnessing dramatic changes in the way scientific and scholarly knowledge is created, codified, and communicated. This transformation is connected to the use of digital technologies and ...the virtualization of knowledge. In this book, scholars from a range of disciplines consider just what, if anything, is new when knowledge is produced in new ways. Does knowledge itself change when the tools of knowledge acquisition, representation, and distribution become digital? Issues of knowledge creation and dissemination go beyond the development and use of new computational tools. The book, which draws on work from the Virtual Knowledge Studio, brings together research on scientific practice, infrastructure, and technology. Focusing on issues of digital scholarship in the humanities and social sciences, the contributors discuss who can be considered legitimate knowledge creators, the value of "invisible" labor, the role of data visualization in policy making, the visualization of uncertainty, the conceptualization of openness in scholarly communication, data floods in the social sciences, and how expectations about future research shape research practices. The contributors combine an appreciation of the transformative power of the virtual with a commitment to the empirical study of practice and use.
Window functions—otherwise known as weighting functions, tapering functions, or apodization functions—are mathematical functions that are zero-valued outside the chosen interval. They are well ...established as a vital part of digital signal processing. Window Functions and their Applications in Signal Processing presents an exhaustive and detailed account of window functions and their applications in signal processing, focusing on the areas of digital spectral analysis, design of FIR filters, pulse compression radar, and speech signal processing. Comprehensively reviewing previous research and recent developments, this book: Provides suggestions on how to choose a window function for particular applications Discusses Fourier analysis techniques and pitfalls in the computation of the DFT Introduces window functions in the continuous-time and discrete-time domains Considers two implementation strategies of window functions in the time- and frequency domain Explores well-known applications of window functions in the fields of radar, sonar, biomedical signal analysis, audio processing, and synthetic aperture radar
Highlights
This article mainly summarizes the challenges and the latest research progress of highly reversible zinc anodes in mild aqueous zinc-ion batteries and proposes corresponding ...recommendations.
The rapid advance of mild aqueous zinc-ion batteries (ZIBs) is driving the development of the energy storage system market. But the thorny issues of Zn anodes, mainly including dendrite growth, hydrogen evolution, and corrosion, severely reduce the performance of ZIBs. To commercialize ZIBs, researchers must overcome formidable challenges. Research about mild aqueous ZIBs is still developing. Various technical and scientific obstacles to designing Zn anodes with high stripping efficiency and long cycling life have not been resolved. Moreover, the performance of Zn anodes is a complex scientific issue determined by various parameters, most of which are often ignored, failing to achieve the maximum performance of the cell. This review proposes a comprehensive overview of existing Zn anode issues and the corresponding strategies, frontiers, and development trends to deeply comprehend the essence and inner connection of degradation mechanism and performance. First, the formation mechanism of dendrite growth, hydrogen evolution, corrosion, and their influence on the anode are analyzed. Furthermore, various strategies for constructing stable Zn anodes are summarized and discussed in detail from multiple perspectives. These strategies are mainly divided into interface modification, structural anode, alloying anode, intercalation anode, liquid electrolyte, non-liquid electrolyte, separator design, and other strategies. Finally, research directions and prospects are put forward for Zn anodes. This contribution highlights the latest developments and provides new insights into the advanced Zn anode for future research.
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