Before Palm Pilots and iPods, PCs and laptops, the term "computer" referred to the people who did scientific calculations by hand. These workers were neither calculating geniuses nor idiot savants but knowledgeable people who, in other circumstances, might have become scientists in their own right. When Computers Were Human represents the first in-depth account of this little-known, 200-year epoch in the history of science and technology. Beginning with the story of his own grandmother, who was trained as a human computer, David Alan Grier provides a poignant introduction to the wider world of women and men who did the hard computational labor of science. His grandmother's casual remark, "I wish I'd used my calculus," hinted at a career deferred and an education forgotten, a secret life unappreciated; like many highly educated women of her generation, she studied to become a human computer because nothing else would offer her a place in the scientific world. The book begins with the return of Halley's comet in 1758 and the effort of three French astronomers to compute its orbit. It ends four cycles later, with a UNIVAC electronic computer projecting the 1986 orbit. In between, Grier tells us about the surveyors of the French Revolution, describes the calculating machines of Charles Babbage, and guides the reader through the Great Depression to marvel at the giant computing room of the Works Progress Administration. When Computers Were Human is the sad but lyrical story of workers who gladly did the hard labor of research calculation in the hope that they might be part of the scientific community. In the end, they were rewarded by a new electronic machine that took the place and the name of those who were, once, the computers.
Increasingly, high profile criminal and civil legal actions around the world highlight the interactions between medicine and the law. Forensic and legal medicine describes the body of knowledge that encompasses this interaction. The terms generally embrace forensic pathology and clinical forensic medicine. However, the nature of forensic and legal medicine is broad and may extend beyond medical and legal issues, into scientific and technical areas, and include specialist roles such as anthropology, toxicology, odontology and psychiatry.
Spaceships travel through time at lightspeed, piloted by human clones and talking animals. Serious injuries are healed with the wave of a medical gizmo. The media makes it all look easy. Can scientists hope to accomplish such amazing feats in the real world, or are they merely flights of fancy? This book is a fun look at what can, and can't, be achieved with current technology in today's laboratory experiments. Fans of the Jetsons, Star Trek, and Star Wars will learn the facts behind the fiction through entires that describe the scientific inventions and procedures on the screen, and how they differ from the reality. Van Riper shows us who innovators like Charles Darwin, Benjamin Franklin, and Isaac Newton really were before they were mythologized. He discusses how animals such as chimpanzees, dolphins, and elephants are portrayed in books and films, and what we really know about animal intelligence. This book lifts the curtain on science fiction, revealing how and where scientific laws have been discarded for the sake of a good plot.
Added by: Maria | Karma: 3098.81 | Coursebooks | 12 September 2008
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Many professional people in science and technology have an excellent command of their scientific subject, but have difficulty in expressing their knowledge in simple, accurate English. Good Style explains the tactics that can be used to express scientific information in a coherent, readable style. The book discusses in detail possible choices of vocabulary, phrasing and sentence structure. Many examples of writing from a variety of scientific and technical contexts.
(Scientific American Special Edition Volume 14, Number 4)
In this special edition from Scientific American, we invite you to forget about everyday life to spend some time with the stars. In the pages that follow, you’ll find the latest gossip on the glitterati, written by the astronomer shutterbugs themselves. Although the stars have revealed more than ever, they’ve been careful not to tell all, lest we grow bored with their antics. As authors Chryssa Kouveliotou, Robert C. Duncan and Christopher Thompson so aptly put it in “Magnetars”: “What other phenomena, so rare and fleeting that we have not recognized them, lurk out there?” We can hardly wait to find out.
