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This book is a compendium of papers edited by Ahmed S. Khan, an educator and researcher at DeVry University in Addison, IL, U.S.A. DeVry University, whose presence now is mainly but not exclusively online, is a descendant of the former DeVry Technical Institute. The same kinds of technology that enable us to put billions of transistors on a single chip have led to the ability to make increasingly complex nanostructures for a wide variety of other uses, ranging from electronics to chemistry and medicine. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This book gives engineering educators a useful global perspective on the state of ethics education in their discipline. The principle strength of the book is the geographical diversity of the 17 contributors to this volume. Not only is India represented, but so is the U.S., U.K, Holland, Spain, Denmark, Finland, Malaysia, and Sudan. Obviously, Europe and Asia have a strong presence and there are multiple entries from the U.S., but there is alas nothing from South America or Australia. The book consists of a series of short essays by, for the most part, professors whose job it is to teach professional ethics to engineering students. Strange to say there is no one here from industry describing what ethical practices he/she might require in a newly hired engineer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reviews the book 'Cosmic Inventor,' by Reginald Aubrey Fessenden.

The book explores the relationship between appearance, conveyed through images and experiences, in contact with real things. For the purposes of analysis, the author discusses warfare and technology using the Civil War battle between the Union "Monitor" and Confederate "Merrimack" to emphasize and contrast issues of representation and reality. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article reviews the book "Understanding Me: Lectures and Interviews, Marshall McLuhan," edited by Stephanie McLuhan and David Staines.

This is an important and provocative book that effectively describes some major concerns of our era. Her target is electronic communications media that emerged in our time ? most notably the smartphone and handheld mobile devices like the iPad. Lest you think that the telephone?s ability to shape history and civilization are nothing compared to our newest communications gadets. The author believes in the power of conversation and see the new forms of electronic communication as eroding ways in which people communicate with one another. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article reviews the book "Power Struggles: Scientific Authority and the Creation of Practical Electricity Before Edison," by Michael Brian Schiffer.

There is a whole spectrum of books on Polaroid. One is the biography of its American-born founder Edwin Land (1909-1991). Land was a distinguished inventor even before he produced his famous camera — the first of the “instant” cameras. He was well known for inventing polarizing filters that form the basis of polarized sunglasses. The Polaroid Corporation existed before the camera. Not only a great inventor, with over 500 patents in his lifetime, he was a wonderful showman who had a flair for introducing his latest cameras at shareholders’ meetings. Other books focus on the technology of the camera as well as its influence on legal matters, patents, business, and technological developments. This book, The Camera Does the Rest, focuses on the social meaning of the Polaroid camera and explores how it changed the field of photography. The focus is on the social meaning of the Polaroid camera - how did it change photography and how are cameras being used from a social perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reviews the book "Networks, Crowds and Markets: Reasoning About a Highly Connected World," by David Easley and Jon Kleinberg.

The article reviews the book "Privacy in Context: Technology, Policy, and the Integral of Social Life," by Helen Nissenbaum.

In choosing to write about the history of an idea, the author has undertaken one of the most difficult of historical tasks, and it?s no wonder it took him the better part of fifteen years to complete the book. Biographies start and end with the subject?s life. Histories of a particular technology have similar well-defined limits. But the history of an idea, especially an idea as multifaceted and chameleon-like as cybernetics, can easily turn into a cat-herding expedition. Fortunately, the author is a masterful historian who knows his way around archives and among the ways of researchers, and he explores the many meanings and ramifications of the cybernetics concept from its birth to the 1980s, by which time most of the early participants had either died or returned to their respective traditional disciplines. Because cybernetics involved so wide a range of disciplines, researchers, and institutions, the author has trouble maintaining a clear story line through the book. It is not fair to say that the total is less than the sum of its parts, but the nature of his subject forces te author to run back and forth along the historical timeline as he takes up different aspects of his subject. Perhaps the book will be most valuable as historical background for the large number of disciplines that were involved in the cybernetics moment: computer science, communications engineering, information theory, and the social sciences of sociology and anthropology. While cybernetics as an independent discipline has largely vanished from the scene, many concepts and disciplines that are still with us today were born in, or at least influenced by, the chaotic and exciting times when the term held great promise and unlocked the coffers of research foundations of the 1950s. Even when research is funded as part of a fad, it can still do some good, and that may be the best lesson to be learned from The Cybernetics Moment. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article reviews the book "Human-Built World: How To Think About Technology and Culture," by Thomas P. Hughes.

The book describes the origins of computer programming and the competing interests that shaped its practice. It is about the growth of a practice ?of programming or of software engineering ? and about differing views of it as a craft, a profession, or a technology, and about the periodic crises that seemed to characterize the activity and its products. It is also about the masculinization of an activity in which women initially had a large role. One of the strengths of the book is its showing how what we may take as ?obvious,? such as the basic character of computer science as an academic discipline, emerges from multiple claims to define the field. Indeed, it was not obvious at the start that there should be such a field ? new technologies often don?t give rise to new disciplines. Academics who worked in computing wanted an intellectual foundation for programming, employers wanted educational standards, and computing workers wanted their activity to have professional standards. The major academic computing organization, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), also had non-academic members, but when it developed the first computer science curriculum standard, it was heavily theoretical and mathematical, and in the view of many in computing occupations, gave too little attention to practical data processing. The book is not primarily about academic computer science, though in its discussion of the ways in which women became excluded from the programming profession, it might have added something on university departments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reviews the book "Love and Sex With Robots," by David Levy.

The article reviews the book "The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed our Culture," by John Battelle.

The article reviews the book "Dark Hero of the Information Age: In Search of Norbert Wiener The Father of Cybernetics," by Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman.

Reviews the book "From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog: A History of the Software Industry," by Martin Campbell-Kelly.

Reviews the book "Between Human and Machine: Feedback, Control, and Computing Before Cybernetics," by David A. Mindell.

Reviews the book "Blue Sky Dreams: A Memoir of America's Fall from Grace," by David Beers.

This article focuses on a book named "Retooling: A Historian Confronts Technological Change," by Rosalind H. Williams. The author who is a highly qualified historian, has written a front-line report from her unique vantage point as a dean at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Although not all readers will agree with her diagnosis of engineering's present difficulties and her proposals for curing them, you have Williams to thank for a thoughtful, cogent, and historically well-informed analysis of the engineering profession, and more besides.

Reviews the book 'The Victorian Internet,' by Tom Standage.

Reviews the book `Social, Ethical, and Policy Implications of Engineering: Selected Readings,' by Joseph Herkert.

Reviews two books on technology. `Rocket Boys,' by Homer H. Hickam, Jr; `Extra Life: Coming of Age in Cyber Space,' by David S. Bennahum.

The article reviews the book "Residual Media," edited by Charles R. Acland.

The article reviews the book "Creating the Twentieth Century: Technical Innovations of 1867-1914 and Their Lasting Impact," by Vaclav Smil.

The article reviews the book "The Man Behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley," by Leslie Berlin.

The article reviews the book "God in the Machine: What Robots Teach Us About Humanity and God," by Anne Foerst.

Reviews the book "The Worldwide History of Telecommunications," by Anton A. Huurdeman.

Reviews the book "Technology and the Dream: Reflections on the Black Experience at MIT, 1941-1999," by Clarence G. Williams.

Reviews the book "The New Ruthless Economy: Work and Power in the Digital Age," by Simon Head.

The article reviews the book "Steve Jobs, Perfectionist," by Walter Isaacson.

The article reviews the books "How to Cool the Planet: Geoengineering and the Audacious Quest to Fix Earth's Climate," by Jeff Goodell, "Hack the Planet: Science's Best Hope -- or Worst Nightmare -- for Averting Climate Catastrophe," by Eli Kintisch and "Climate Wars: The Fight for Survival as the World Overheats," by Gwynne Dyer.