The Man In The Machine

The Man in the Machine consists of lively, iconoclastic assessments of major writers and critics by Marvin Mudrick, about whom the critic Roger Sale wrote: "T. S. Eliot was not so good a reviewer as Marvin Mudrick." The book takes its title from Mudrick’s introduction, in which he writes about Edgar Allan Poe’s pervasive influence on modern literature: "[Poe] had the effrontery to palm off on us the silliest, least interesting, and most influential of twentieth-century critical dogmas: that books are machines with nobody inside." Writing about such masters as Kafka, D. H. Lawrence, Jane Austen, Trollope, Saint-Simon, Conrad, Chekhov, and Solzhenitsyn, Mudrick shows us the pyrotechnics that can occur when a towering intellect meets characters from the past with all dogma and theories of literature tossed to the wind.

Scientist Charles Neumann loses a leg in an industrial accident. It's not a tragedy. It's an opportunity. Charlie always thought his body could be better. He begins to explore a few ideas. To build parts. Better parts. Prosthetist Lola Shanks loves a good artificial limb. In Charlie, she sees a man on his way to becoming artificial everything. But others see a madman. Or a product. Or a weapon. A story for the age of pervasive technology, Machine Man is a gruesomely funny unraveling of one man's quest for ultimate self-improvement.

The first modern translation of the complete texts of La Mettrie's pioneering L'Homme machine and L'Homme plante, first published in 1747 and 1748, respectively, this volume also includes translations of the advertisement and dedication to L'Homme machine. Justin Leiber's introduction illuminates the radical thinking and advocacy of the passionate La Mettrie and provides cogent analysis of La Mettrie's relationship to such important philosophical figures as Descartes, Malebranche, and Locke, and of his lasting influence on the development of materialism, cognitive studies, linguistics, and other areas of intellectual inquiry.

Ferrari means red. It means racing. Excellence, luxury, and performance. Less well-known is the man behind the brand. For nearly seventy years, Enzo Ferrari dominated a motor-sports empire that defined the world of high-performance cars. Next to the Pope, Ferrari was the most revered man in Italy. But was he the benign padrone portrayed by an adoring world press at the time, or was he a ruthless despot, who drove his staff to the edge of madness, and his racing drivers even further? Brock Yates's definitive biography penetrated Ferrari's elaborately constructed veneer and uncovered the truth behind Ferrari's bizarre relationships, his work with Mussolini's fascists, and his fanatical obsession with speed. "A fascinating and provocative book" The Observer.

“This gonzo-journalistic exploration of the Silicon Valley techno-utopians’ pursuit of escaping mortality is a breezy romp full of colorful characters.” —New York Times Book Review (Editor's Choice) Transhumanism is a movement pushing the limits of our bodies—our capabilities, intelligence, and lifespans—in the hopes that, through technology, we can become something better than ourselves. It has found support among Silicon Valley billionaires and some of the world’s biggest businesses. In To Be a Machine, journalist Mark O'Connell explores the staggering possibilities and moral quandaries that present themselves when you of think of your body as a device. He visits the world's foremost cryonics facility to witness how some have chosen to forestall death. He discovers an underground collective of biohackers, implanting electronics under their skin to enhance their senses. He meets a team of scientists urgently investigating how to protect mankind from artificial superintelligence. Where is our obsession with technology leading us? What does the rise of AI mean not just for our offices and homes, but for our humanity? Could the technologies we create to help us eventually bring us to harm? Addressing these questions, O'Connell presents a profound, provocative, often laugh-out-loud-funny look at an influential movement. In investigating what it means to be a machine, he offers a surprising meditation on what it means to be human.

MACHINE OF DEATH tells thirty-four different stories about people who know how they will die. Prepare to have your tears jerked, your spine tingled, your funny bone tickled, your mind blown, your pulse quickened, or your heart warmed. Or better yet, simply prepare to be surprised. Because even when people do have perfect knowledge of the future, there's no telling exactly how things will turn out.

Winner of the 2014 Minotaur Books/Mystery Writers of America First Crime Novel CompetitionA Theo Bogart MysteryWhen former party girl and society photographer Theophania Bogart flees to San Francisco to escape a high-profile family tragedy, a series of murders drags her unwillingly out of hiding. A charming debut with wacky, colorful characters and a delightfully twisted mystery.

Alan Turing has long proved a subject of fascination, but following the centenary of his birth in 2012, the code-breaker, computer pioneer, mathematician (and much more) has become even more celebrated with much media coverage, and several meetings, conferences and books raising public awareness of Turing's life and work. This volume will bring together contributions from some of the leading experts on Alan Turing to create a comprehensive guide to Turing that will serve as a useful resource for researchers in the area as well as the increasingly interested general reader. The book will cover aspects of Turing's life and the wide range of his intellectual activities, including mathematics, code-breaking, computer science, logic, artificial intelligence and mathematical biology, as well as his subsequent influence.

Man-machine interaction is the interdisciplinary field, focused on a human and a machine in conjunction. It is the intersection of computer science, behavioural sciences, social psychology, ergonomics, security. It encompasses study, design, implementation, and evaluation of small- and large-scale, interacting, computing, hardware and software systems dedicated for human use. Man-machine interaction builds on supportive knowledge from both sides, the machine side providing techniques, methods and technologies relevant for computer graphics, visualisation, programming environments, the human side bringing elements of communication theory, linguistics, social sciences, models of behaviour. The discipline aims to improve ways in which machines and their users interact, making hardware and software systems better adapted to user's needs, more usable, more receptive, and optimised for desired properties. This monograph is the second edition in the series, providing the reader with a selection of high-quality papers dedicated to current progress, new developments and research trends in man-machine interactions area. In particular, the topical subdivisions of this volume include human-computer interfaces, robot control and navigation systems, bio-data analysis and mining, pattern recognition for medical applications, sound, text and image processing, design and decision support, rough and fuzzy systems, crisp and fuzzy clustering, prediction and regression, algorithms and optimisation, and data management systems.

An examination of the human impulse towards self-destruction suggests that in the course of human evolution, a pathological split between emotion and reason developed