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An Engine Not A Camera
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Book Synopsis An Engine, Not a Camera by : Donald MacKenzie
Download or read book An Engine, Not a Camera written by Donald MacKenzie and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2008-08-29 with total page 782 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In An Engine, Not a Camera, Donald MacKenzie argues that the emergence of modern economic theories of finance affected financial markets in fundamental ways. These new, Nobel Prize-winning theories, based on elegant mathematical models of markets, were not simply external analyses but intrinsic parts of economic processes. Paraphrasing Milton Friedman, MacKenzie says that economic models are an engine of inquiry rather than a camera to reproduce empirical facts. More than that, the emergence of an authoritative theory of financial markets altered those markets fundamentally. For example, in 1970, there was almost no trading in financial derivatives such as "futures." By June of 2004, derivatives contracts totaling $273 trillion were outstanding worldwide. MacKenzie suggests that this growth could never have happened without the development of theories that gave derivatives legitimacy and explained their complexities. MacKenzie examines the role played by finance theory in the two most serious crises to hit the world's financial markets in recent years: the stock market crash of 1987 and the market turmoil that engulfed the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management in 1998. He also looks at finance theory that is somewhat beyond the mainstream—chaos theorist Benoit Mandelbrot's model of "wild" randomness. MacKenzie's pioneering work in the social studies of finance will interest anyone who wants to understand how America's financial markets have grown into their current form.
Book Synopsis Mechanizing Proof by : Donald MacKenzie
Download or read book Mechanizing Proof written by Donald MacKenzie and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2004-01-30 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most aspects of our private and social lives—our safety, the integrity of the financial system, the functioning of utilities and other services, and national security—now depend on computing. But how can we know that this computing is trustworthy? In Mechanizing Proof, Donald MacKenzie addresses this key issue by investigating the interrelations of computing, risk, and mathematical proof over the last half century from the perspectives of history and sociology. His discussion draws on the technical literature of computer science and artificial intelligence and on extensive interviews with participants. MacKenzie argues that our culture now contains two ideals of proof: proof as traditionally conducted by human mathematicians, and formal, mechanized proof. He describes the systems constructed by those committed to the latter ideal and the many questions those systems raise about the nature of proof. He looks at the primary social influence on the development of automated proof—the need to predict the behavior of the computer systems upon which human life and security depend—and explores the involvement of powerful organizations such as the National Security Agency. He concludes that in mechanizing proof, and in pursuing dependable computer systems, we do not obviate the need for trust in our collective human judgment.
Book Synopsis Plato's Camera by : Paul M. Churchland
Download or read book Plato's Camera written by Paul M. Churchland and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2012-01-20 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A noted philosopher draws on the empirical results and conceptual resources of cognitive neuroscience to address questions about the nature of knowledge. In Plato's Camera, eminent philosopher Paul Churchland offers a novel account of how the brain constructs a representation—or "takes a picture"—of the universe's timeless categorical and dynamical structure. This construction process, which begins at birth, yields the enduring background conceptual framework with which we will interpret our sensory experience for the rest of our lives. But, as even Plato knew, to make singular perceptual judgments requires that we possess an antecedent framework of abstract categories to which any perceived particular can be relevantly assimilated. How that background framework is assembled in the first place is the motivating mystery, and the primary target, of Churchland's book. Unexpectedly, this neurobiologically grounded account of human cognition also provides a systematic story of how such low-level epistemological activities are integrated within an enveloping framework of linguistic structures and regulatory mechanisms at the social level. As Churchland illustrates, this integration of cognitive mechanisms at several levels has launched the human race on an epistemological adventure denied to all other terrestrial creatures.
Book Synopsis Material Markets by : Donald MacKenzie
Download or read book Material Markets written by Donald MacKenzie and published by Oxford University Press on Demand. This book was released on 2009 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Financial markets, processes, and instruments are often difficult to fathom; and recent turbulence suggests they may be out of control in some respects. Donald Mackenzie is one of the most perceptive analysts of the workings of the financial world. In this book, MacKenzie argues that economic agents and markets need to be analyzed in their full materiality: their physicality, their corporeality, their technicality. Markets are populated not by disembodied, abstract agents, but by embodied human beings and technical systems. Concepts and systematic ways of thinking that simplify market processes and make them mentally tractable are essential to how markets function. In putting forward this material sociology of markets, the book synthesizes and contributes to the new field of social studies of finance: the application to financial markets not just of economics but of wider social-science disciplines, in particular science and technology studies. The topics covered include hedge funds (the book contains the first social-science study of a hedge fund based on direct observation); the development of financial derivatives exchanges (non-existent in 1970, but now trading products equivalent to $13,000 for every human being on earth); arbitrage; how corporate profit figures are constructed; and the crucial new markets in carbon emissions. The book will appeal to research students and academics across the social sciences, and the general reader will enjoy the book's explanations and analyses of some of the most important phenomena of today's turbulent markets.
Book Synopsis Engine of Inequality by : Karen Petrou
Download or read book Engine of Inequality written by Karen Petrou and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2021-03-03 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first book to reveal how the Federal Reserve holds the key to making us more economically equal, written by an author with unparalleled expertise in the real world of financial policy Following the 2008 financial crisis, the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy placed much greater focus on stabilizing the market than on helping struggling Americans. As a result, the richest Americans got a lot richer while the middle class shrank and economic and wealth inequality skyrocketed. In Engine of Inequality, Karen Petrou offers pragmatic solutions for creating more inclusive monetary policy and equality-enhancing financial regulation as quickly and painlessly as possible. Karen Petrou is a leading financial-policy analyst and consultant with unrivaled knowledge of what drives the decisions of federal officials and how big banks respond to financial policy in the real world. Instead of proposing legislation that would never pass Congress, the author provides an insider's look at politically plausible, high-impact financial policy fixes that will radically shift the equality balance. Offering an innovative, powerful, and highly practical solution for immediately turning around the enormous nationwide problem of economic inequality, this groundbreaking book: Presents practical ways America can and should tackle economic inequality with fast-acting results Provides revealing examples of exactly how bad economic inequality in America has become no matter how hard we all work Demonstrates that increasing inequality is disastrous for long-term economic growth, political action, and even personal happiness Explains why your bank's interest rates are still only a fraction of what they were even though the rich are getting richer than ever, faster than ever Reveals the dangers of FinTech and BigTech companies taking over banking Shows how Facebook wants to control even the dollars in your wallet Discusses who shares the blame for our economic inequality, including the Fed, regulators, Congress, and even economists Engine of Inequality: The Fed and the Future of Wealth in America should be required reading for leaders, policymakers, regulators, media professionals, and all Americans wanting to ensure that the nation’s financial policy will be a force for promoting economic equality.
Download or read book Science-Mart written by Philip Mirowski and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2011-04-29 with total page 463 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This trenchant study analyzes the rise and decline in the quality and format of science in America since World War II. Science-Mart attributes this decline to a powerful neoliberal ideology in the 1980s which saw the fruits of scientific investigation as commodities that could be monetized, rather than as a public good.
Book Synopsis Analog Photography by : Andrew Bellamy
Download or read book Analog Photography written by Andrew Bellamy and published by Chronicle Books. This book was released on 2019-04-09 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Attracted by the image quality, the tactile joy of a finely made camera, and the affordable prices of vintage equipment, photographers around the world are rediscovering the joys of manual photography. This comprehensive guide to shooting film photography covers all the bases, from setting up a camera through film processing. In a convenient format, filled with diagrams, examples, and illustrations, Analog Photography is a portable reference tool for neophytes and experienced photographers alike. With an irresistible package inspired by the aesthetics of vintage user manuals, this is "a great-looking publication and a fantastic place from which to start, or rekindle, a journey into film photography" (Creative Review).
Book Synopsis Search Engine Society by : Alexander Halavais
Download or read book Search Engine Society written by Alexander Halavais and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-04-25 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Search engines have become a key part of our everyday lives. Yet while much has been written about how to use search engines and how they can be improved, there has been comparatively little exploration of what the social and cultural effects might be. Like all technologies, search engines exist within a larger political, cultural, and economic environment. This volume aims to redress this balance and to address crucial questions such as: * How have search engines changed the way we organize our thoughts about the world, and how we work? * What are the ‘search engine wars', what do they portend for the future of search, and who wins or loses? * To what extent does political control of search engines, or the political influence of search engines, affect how they are used, misused, and regulated? * Does the search engine help shape our identities and interactions with others, and what implications does this have for privacy? Informed members of the information society must understand the social contexts in which search engines have been developed, what that development says about us as a society, and the role of the search engine in the global information environment. This book provides the perfect starting point.
Book Synopsis Inventing Accuracy by : Donald MacKenzie
Download or read book Inventing Accuracy written by Donald MacKenzie and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1993-01-29 with total page 484 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Mackenzie has achieved a masterful synthesis of engrossing narrative, imaginative concepts, historical perspective, and social concern." Donald MacKenzie follows one line of technology—strategic ballistic missile guidance through a succession of weapons systems to reveal the workings of a world that is neither awesome nor unstoppable. He uncovers the parameters, the pressures, and the politics that make up the complex social construction of an equally complex technology.
Book Synopsis Markets in the Making by : Michel Callon
Download or read book Markets in the Making written by Michel Callon and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-12-07 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Slicing through blunt theories of supply and demand, Callon presents a rigorously researched but counterintuitive model of how everyday market activity gets produced. If you’re convinced you know what a market is, think again. In his long-awaited study, French sociologist and engineer Michel Callon takes us to the heart of markets, to the unsung processes that allow innovations to become robust products and services. Markets in the Making begins with the observation that stable commercial transactions are more enigmatic, more elusive, and more involved than previously described by economic theory. Slicing through blunt theories of supply and demand, Callon presents a rigorously researched but counterintuitive model of market activity that emphasizes what people designing products or launching startups soon discover—the inherent difficulties of connecting individuals to things. Callon’s model is founded upon the notion of “singularization,” the premise that goods and services must adapt and be adapted to the local milieu of every individual whose life they enter. Person by person, thing by thing, Callon demonstrates that for ordinary economic transactions to emerge en masse, singular connections must be made. Pushing us to see markets as more than abstract interfaces where pools of anonymous buyers and sellers meet, Callon draws our attention to the exhaustively creative practices that market professionals continuously devise to entangle people and things. Markets in the Making exemplifies how prototypes, fragile curiosities that have only just been imagined, are gradually honed into predictable objects and practices. Once these are active enough to create a desired effect, yet passive enough to be transferred from one place to another without disruption, they will have successfully achieved the status of “goods” or “services.” The output of this more ample process of innovation, as redefined by Callon, is what we recognize as “the market”—commercial activity, at scale. The capstone of an influential research career at the forefront of science and technology studies, Markets in the Making coherently integrates the empirical perspective of product engineering with the values of the social sciences. After masterfully redescribing how markets are made, Callon culminates with a strong empirical argument for why markets can and should be harnessed to enact social change. His is a theory of markets that serves social critique.
Download or read book Thomas & Friends Camera Tour written by and published by . This book was released on 2002-01 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Book Synopsis Trading at the Speed of Light by : Donald MacKenzie
Download or read book Trading at the Speed of Light written by Donald MacKenzie and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2023-01-31 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A remarkable look at how the growth, technology, and politics of high-frequency trading have altered global financial markets In today’s financial markets, trading floors on which brokers buy and sell shares face-to-face have increasingly been replaced by lightning-fast electronic systems that use algorithms to execute astounding volumes of transactions. Trading at the Speed of Light tells the story of this epic transformation. Donald MacKenzie shows how in the 1990s, in what were then the disreputable margins of the US financial system, a new approach to trading—automated high-frequency trading or HFT—began and then spread throughout the world. HFT has brought new efficiency to global trading, but has also created an unrelenting race for speed, leading to a systematic, subterranean battle among HFT algorithms. In HFT, time is measured in nanoseconds (billionths of a second), and in a nanosecond the fastest possible signal—light in a vacuum—can travel only thirty centimeters, or roughly a foot. That makes HFT exquisitely sensitive to the length and transmission capacity of the cables connecting computer servers to the exchanges’ systems and to the location of the microwave towers that carry signals between computer datacenters. Drawing from more than 300 interviews with high-frequency traders, the people who supply them with technological and communication capabilities, exchange staff, regulators, and many others, MacKenzie reveals the extraordinary efforts expended to speed up every aspect of trading. He looks at how in some markets big banks have fought off the challenge from HFT firms, and how exchanges sometimes engineer technical systems to favor certain types of algorithms over others. Focusing on the material, political, and economic characteristics of high-frequency trading, Trading at the Speed of Light offers a unique glimpse into its influence on global finance and where it could lead us in the future.
Book Synopsis Primitive Photography by : Alan Greene
Download or read book Primitive Photography written by Alan Greene and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2013-04-11 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Primitive Photography considers the hand-made photographic process in its entirety, showing the reader how to make box-cameras, lenses, paper negatives and salt prints, using inexpensive tools and materials found in most hardware and art-supply stores. Step-by-step procedures are presented alongside theoretical explanations and historical background. Streamlined calotype procedures are demonstrated, featuring different paper negative processes and overlooked, developing-out printing methods. Primitive Photography combines the simplicity of pinhole photography, the handmade quality of alternative processes, and the precision of large-format. For those seeking alternatives to commercially prepared material as well as digital photography, it provides the instructions for creating the entire photographic process from the ground up. Given its scope and treatment of the photographic process as a whole, this may be the first book of its kind to appear in over a century.
Book Synopsis The Ascendancy of Finance by : Joseph Vogl
Download or read book The Ascendancy of Finance written by Joseph Vogl and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2017-06-15 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The global financial crisis of 2008 ushered in a system of informal decision-making in the grey zone between economics and politics. Legitimized by a rhetoric of emergency, ad hoc bodies have usurped democratically elected governments. In line with the neoliberal credo, the recent crisis has been used to realize the politically impossible and to re-align executive power with the interests of the finance industry. In this important book, Joseph Vogl offers a much longer perspective on these developments, showing how the dynamics of modern finance capitalism have always rested on a complex and constantly evolving relationship between private creditors and the state. Combining historical and theoretical analysis, Vogl argues that over the last three centuries, finance has become a "fourth estate," marked by the systematic interconnection of treasury and finance, of political and private economic interests. Against this historical background, Vogl explores the latest phase in the financialization of government, namely the dramatic transfer of power from states to markets in the latter half of the 20th century. From the liberalization of credit and capital markets to the privatization of social security, he shows how policy has actively enabled a restructuring of the economy around the financial sector. Political systems are "imprisoned" by the regime of finance, while the corporate model suffuses society, enclosing populations in the production of financial capital. The Ascendancy of Finance provides valuable and unsettling insight into the genesis of modern power and where it truly resides.
Book Synopsis Lights, Camera, Action Chugger! by : Ivy Silver
Download or read book Lights, Camera, Action Chugger! written by Ivy Silver and published by Scholastic Inc.. This book was released on 2012 with total page 35 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On his way to a movie set, Action Chugger crash-lands! Can Brewster save his hero?
Book Synopsis 3D Game Engine Design by : David Eberly
Download or read book 3D Game Engine Design written by David Eberly and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2006-11-03 with total page 1008 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first edition of 3D Game Engine Design was an international bestseller that sold over 17,000 copies and became an industry standard. In the six years since that book was published, graphics hardware has evolved enormously. Hardware can now be directly controlled through techniques such as shader programming, which requires an entirely new thought process of a programmer. In a way that no other book can do, this new edition shows step by step how to make a shader-based graphics engine and how to tame this new technology. Much new material has been added, including more than twice the coverage of the essential techniques of scene graph management, as well as new methods for managing memory usage in the new generation of game consoles and portable game players. There are expanded discussions of collision detection, collision avoidance, and physics—all challenging subjects for developers. The mathematics coverage is now focused towards the end of the book to separate it from the general discussion. As with the first edition, one of the most valuable features of this book is the inclusion of Wild Magic, a commercial quality game engine in source code that illustrates how to build a real-time rendering system from the lowest-level details all the way to a working game. Wild Magic Version 4 consists of over 300,000 lines of code that allows the results of programming experiments to be seen immediately. This new version of the engine is fully shader-based, runs on Windows XP, Mac OS X, and Linux, and is only available with the purchase of the book.
Book Synopsis The Book of the Leica R-series Cameras by : Brian Long
Download or read book The Book of the Leica R-series Cameras written by Brian Long and published by Earthworld. This book was released on 2019-09-17 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Researched and written with the full co-operation of the factory, here in definitive detail is the story of the SLRs that saved the Leica brand, along with the numerous lenses sold alongside them. All variations are covered, including official limited editions, allowing collectors to use the book for reference, or simply enjoy the stunning photography - mostly contemporary and original, some taken specially for the book - gathered from all over the world. Successful immediately, these SLR models ran alongside the legendary M-series to defend Leica's honour in the showrooms at a time when it looked like the Japanese had the camera market sewn up. Today, the R-series (1976-2009) is becoming more and more collectable, so this authoritative guide is timely.
