Author: Manuel Delanda File Type: pdf In this groundbreaking book, Manuel DeLanda analyzes different genres of simulation, from cellular automata and generic algorithms to neural nets and multi-agent systems, as a means to conceptualize the space of possibilitiesassociated with casual and other capacities. This remarkably clear philosophical discussion of a rapidly growing field, from a thinker at the forefront of research at the interface of science and the humanities, is a must-read for anyone interested in the philosophies of technology, emergence and science at all levels.Review The topic of this clearly written and well-documented text is the philosophical concept of emergence... Imaginative defences of philosophical realism are certainly to be applauded, and given the critical role that mathematical modelling occupies in both scientific and technical practices today, questioning computer simulation is undoubtedly important. Philosophy and Simulation does an interesting job of the former via the latter. -bThe Guardianb The thirst for knowledge ... is competently soothed by Bloomsbury with the volume Philosophy and Simulation The Emergence of Synthetic Reason , which provides useful material against the celebration of ignorance. -bJournal of Artificial Societies and Social Stimulationb

Author: Jean M. Twenge File Type: epub In this provocative and newly revised book, headline-making psychologist Dr. Jean Twenge explores why the young people she calls Generation Me are tolerant, confident, open-minded, and ambitious but also disengaged, narcissistic, distrustful, and anxious. Born in the 80s, and 90s and called The Entitlement Generation or Millennials, they are reshaping schools, colleges, and businesses all over the country. The children of the Baby Boomers are not only feeling the effects of the recession and the changing job marketthey are affecting change the world over. Now, in this new edition of Generation Me, Dr. Twenge incorporates the latest research, data, and statistics, as well as new stories and cultural references, to show how Gen Me-ers have shifted the American character, redefining what it means to be an individual in todays society. Dr. Twenge uses data from 11 million respondents to reveal shocking truths about this generation, including dramatic differences in sexual behavior and religious practice, and controversial predictions about what the future holds for them and society as a whole. Her often humorous, eyebrow-raising stories about real people vividly bring to life the hopes, disappointments, and challenges of Generation Me. Engaging, controversial, prescriptive, and funny, Generation Me gives Boomers and GenXers new and fascinating insights into their offspring, and helps those in their teens, twenties, and thirties find their road to happiness.**From Publishers WeeklyIn their 2000 book, Millennials Rising, Neil Howe and William Straus argued that children born after 1982 will grow up to become Americas next Greatest Generationfilled with a sense of optimism and civic dutybut according to San Diego State psychology professor Twenge, such predictions are wishful thinking. Lumping together Gen-X and Y under the moniker GenMe, Twenge argues that those born after 1970 are more self-centered, more disrespectful of authority and more depressed than ever before. When the United States started the war in Iraq, she points out, military enlistments went down, not up. (Born in 1971, Twenge herself is at the edge of the Me Generation.) Her book is livened with analysis of films, magazines and TV shows, and with anecdotal stories from her life and others. The real basis of her argument, however, lies in her 14 years of research comparing the results of personality tests given to boomers when they were under 30 and those given to GenMe-ers today. Though Twenges opinionated asides may occasionally set Gen-X and -Yers teeth on edge, many of her findings are fascinating. And her call to ditch the self-esteem movement in favor of education programs that encourage empathy and real accomplishment could spare some Me-ers from the depression that often occurs when they hit the realities of todays increasingly competitive workplace. (Apr.) Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. From Booklist A new book tackles the 18-to-35-year-old generations problems--those they face and those they create.Twenges book is comprehensive and scholarly, filled with statistics and thoughtful observations about the group shes dubbed Generation Me. These young people were raised with the idea of self-esteem being more important than achievement, which has caused them to place the self above all else. Such beliefs also have created a generation of young people who believe every dream is attainable but who arent prepared to deal with discovering it isnt so. Twenge notes that todays young parents are especially lenient with their children and reluctant to discipline them, suggesting that perhaps the next generation will be even worse off. Twenge believes Generation Me would benefit from a heavy dose of realism. Accessible and a must-read for the generation they address. Kristine Huntley American Library Association. lt The Associated Press calls them The Entitlement Generation, and they are storming into schools, colleges, and businesses all over the country. They are todays young people, a new generation with sky-high expectations and a need for constant praise and fulfillment. In this provocative new book, headline-making psychologist and social commentator Dr. Jean Twenge documents the self-focus of what she calls Generation Me — people born in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. Herself a member of Generation Me, Dr. Twenge explores why her generation is tolerant, confident, open-minded, and ambitious but also cynical, depressed, lonely, and anxious.br br Using findings from the largest intergenerational study ever conducted — with data from 1.3 million respondents spanning six decades — Dr. Twenge reveals how profoundly different todays young adults are — and makes controversial predictions about what the future holds for them and society as a whole. But Dr....

Author: Gersh File Type: pdf This volume deals with the relation between Derrida and Neoplatonism (ancient, patristic, medieval), presenting that relation in the form not only of the actual reading of Neoplatonism by Derrida but also of a hypothetical reading of Derrida by Neoplatonism.**

Author: Richard Powers File Type: epub A dazzling new novel by the author of Galatea 2.2 and GainIn a digital laboratory on the shores of Puget Sound, a band of virtual-reality researchers races to complete the Cavern, an empty white room that can become a jungle, a painting, or a vast Byzantine cathedral. In a war-torn Mediterranean city, an American is held hostage, chained to a radiator in another empty white room. What can possibly join these two remote places? Only the shared imagination, a room that these people unwittingly build in common, where they are all about to meet.Adie Klarpol, a skilled but disillusioned artist, comes back to life, revived by the thrill of working with cutting-edge technology. Against the collapse of Cold War empires and the fall of the Berlin Wall, she retreats dangerously into the cyber-realities she has been hired to create. On the other side of the globe, Taimur Martin, an English teacher recovering from a failed love affair, is picked up off the streets in Beirut by Islamic fundamentalists and held in solitary captivity.A mesmerizing fiction that explores the imaginations power to both destroy and save, Plowing the Dark recasts the rules of the novel and stands as Richard Powerss most daring work to date.**Amazon.com ReviewNo one who enjoyed Richard Powerss remarkable breakthrough novel, Galatea 2.2, will be surprised that he has returned to the richly promising realm of cyber-invention, one of our ages few remaining frontiers and a siren call to restless intellects. In Plowing the Dark, an old friend recruits a disillusioned New York artist named Adie Klarpol to work on the Cavern. TeraSys, a Seattle-based company, is building this virtual environment at great expense in the hope that it will lower its enormous tax liability as well as, in the long run, provide the template for all such virtual playrooms. Millions of dollars of funding, Adies friend Steve tells her when she arrives on the job, and nobody around this dump can draw worth squat. Suitably impressed by the Caverns programming, and slowly absorbing its dazzling capacity to project vivid and convincing illusions, she sets herself the task of creating a faithful 3-D version of Rousseaus Dream. Her painstaking efforts in the Realization Lab are aided by a host of supporting characters, one of whom, Spider Lim, proves so sensitive that he gets a bruise from bumping into one of Adies virtual tree branches. And when the central female figure appears among the foliage, Lim is irresistibly drawn in, marveling that blockquote their first successful leaf, twirling in the Cavern darkness, had led to this--this pale, lentil body turning in his minds dark. This scapular profile, these tow-line braids. Her hips fell somewhere on the Limacon of Pascal. The squares of her breasts abscissas and ordinates summed to an integer. This was the math of women, a field hed given up studying, female equations whose complexities had long ago surpassed his ability to differentiate. blockquotePowerss lush language corresponds to Adies vision of Rousseaus jungle, and in turn to Rousseaus own ecstatic vision. Yet there is also something elegiac in the authors lavish descriptions of the Caverns miracles, as if he were offering a late, last flowering of words before the cultural ascendancy of the image. Great, quotable chunks weight every page. Even readers fond of extravagant prose may find Powerss verbal persistence wearying, though it argues that there are still contradictions and subtleties of mind that no image can track. --Regina MarlerFrom Publishers Weekly A groundbreaking literary novelist and MacArthur genius grant winner, Powers (Galatea 2.2 Gain The Gold Bug Variations) takes on virtual reality, global migration, prolonged heartbreak, the end of the Cold War and the nature and purpose of art in his ambitious and dazzling seventh book. Like most of Powerss previous works, this novel weaves together two sets of characters. One comprises artists and programmers at the Cavern, a pioneering virtual-reality project sponsored by a Microsoftesque company. As college students in the early 1970s, painter Adie Klarpol, writer Steve Spiegel and composer Ted Zimmerman shared a house, an art scene, a complex erotic entanglement and a sense of limitless potential. When the novel opens, its the mid-80s, and Steve is a programmer he convinces Adie to flee New York City and commercial art for Washington State and the Cavern. We follow Adie as she learns about new media and about her new, multiethnic colleagues, each with his or her own emotional problems. As Adie and Steve rediscover high art and each other, both must return to the charismatic Ted and his painful fate. Powerss other plot concerns Taimur Martin, an American teacher taken hostage in Beirut. Taimur spends most of the novel in captivity, thrown back on memory and imagination his harrowing second-person narration transforms outward monotony into inward drama, building up to some of Powerss best writing to date. Powerss fans love his gorgeous, allusive (if sometimes florid) prose, and his digressions into the sciences both features, largely missing from Gain, re-emerge here to spectacular effect. Taimurs life and Adies link up only thematically--they never meet instead, Powerss dramatic prose and his intellectual reach makes their symbolic connection more than enough to propel the novel toward its moving close. (June) 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.