Books on the topic 'Entanglement generation'

Invisible Digital helps us makes sense of something we cannot see by presenting an innovative approach to digital images and digital culture. At its heart is a novel method for exploring software used in the creation of moving images as markers of converging cultural, organizational and technological influences. The three main case studies of Invisible Digital are the animated feature Moana (2016) and the computer games No Man’s Sky (2016) and Everything (2017). All three were created using procedural techniques: simulation software for Moana, and procedural content generation for No Man’s Sky and Everything. Production culture disclosures associated with procedural techniques often emphasize the influences of automated systems and their algorithms, making them ideal for a study that interrogates digital processes. The approach of Invisible Digital is informed by relational theories and the concept of entanglement based on materialist perspectives, combined with insights from work that more explicitly interrogates algorithms and algorithmic culture. Aylish Wood employs the notion of assemblages to introduce the concept of material-cultural narratives. Using this conceptual framework, she draws out material-cultural narratives for each case study to demonstrate what they reveal about software and digital culture. These analyses of software provide a widely applicable method through which moving image studies can contribute more fully to the wider and growing debates about algorithmic culture.

This is the first book-length study of the relationship between science fiction, the techno-scientific policies of independent India, and the global non-aligned movement that emerged as a response to Cold War and decolonization. Today, science-fiction writers are often used as government advisors on techno-scientific and defence policies. Such relationships between literature, policy and geo-politics have a long and complex history. Glimpses of this history can be seen in the case of the first generation of post-colonial Indian science fiction writers and their critical entanglements with both techno-scientific policies and the strategy of international non-alignment pursued by India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. This investigation reveals the surprisingly long and relatively unknown life of Indian science fiction, as well as the genre’s capacity to imagine alternative pathways to techno-scientific and geo-political developments that dominate our lives today.

This book shows how Seneca’s prose works offer both an illustration of and an invitation to philosophy as a way of life. In Seneca’s hands, the specificity of the philosopher’s social and historical location becomes generative of that way of life rather than an obstacle to be transcended. The social character of Senecan philosophical practice is brought to light through detailed examination of the ideas of solitude and independence in Seneca’s writing. Later chapters explore the relationship in Seneca’s works between the Socratic ideal of the examined life, on the one hand, and, on the other, some characteristically Roman social and political institutions: slavery, the philosophical school, and the commonwealth. Seneca emerges as a keen observer of philosophy’s social entanglements.

This book provides a succinct and accessible interpretation of the major event and ideas that have shaped U.S. foreign relations since the American Revolution—historical factors that now affect our current debates and commitments in the Middle East as well as Europe and Asia. American Foreign Relations since Independence explores the relationship of American policies to national interest and the limits of the nation's power, reinterpreting the nature and history of American foreign relations. The book brings together the collective knowledge of three generations of diplomatic historians to create a readily accessible introduction to the subject. The authors explicitly challenge and reject the perennial debates about isolationism versus internationalism, instead asserting that American foreign relations have been characterized by the permanent tension inherent in America's desire to engage with the world and its equally powerful determination to avoid "entanglement" in the world's troubles. This work is ideally suited as a resource for students of politics, international affairs, and history, and it will provide compelling insights for informed general readers.

This chapter draws attention to the ways in which a commitment to radical vulnerability can enable and enrich politically engaged alliance work, and the particular ways in which affect and trust empower translations across borders. It presents excerpts of letters, conversations, poems, and narratives from contexts that might seem disjointed and disparate on the surface but that tell stories—of encounters, events, and relationships—that have enabled the arguments made in the rest of this book. These fragments also point to the intense entanglements between autobiography and politics, and seek to initiate a discussion on feminist praxis that commits itself to learning and unlearning by inserting one's body—individually and collectively—into the process of knowledge making and the generative challenges that such insertion poses for imagining storytelling and engagement across socioeconomic, geographical, and institutional borders.

This volume surveys the burst of political imagination that created multiple Enlightenment cultures in an era widely understood as an age of democratic revolutions. Enlightenment as precursor to liberal democratic modernity was once secular catechism for generations of readers. Yet democracy did not elicit much enthusiasm among contemporaries, while democracy as a political system remained virtually nonexistent through much of the period. If seventeenthand eighteenth-century ideas did underwrite the democracies of succeeding centuries, they were often inheritances from monarchical governments that had encouraged plural structures of power competition. But in revolutions across France, Britain, and North America, the republican integration of constitutional principle and popular will established rational hope for public happiness. Nevertheless, the tragic clashes of principle and will in fraught revolutionary projects were also democratic legacies. Each chapter focuses on a distinct theme: sovereignty; liberty and the rule of law; the “common good”; economic and social democracy; religion and the principles of political obligation; citizenship and gender; ethnicity, race, and nationalism; democratic crises, revolutions, and civil resistance; international relations; and the transformations of sovereignty—a synoptic survey of the cultural entanglements of “enlightenment” and “democracy.”

Although we have more literary manuscripts from the Romantic period than for any previous period, these manuscripts have been consulted chiefly for the textual evidence they provide. This book begins the work of unearthing the alternative histories manuscripts tell us about British Romantic literary culture: describing the practices by which they were written, shared, altered and preserved; exploring the functions they served as instruments of expression and sociability; and explicating the migration of texts between the copying technologies of script and print. Deploying a range of methodologies, including quantitative approaches, it considers both literary manuscripts of texts that went unprinted during the lifetimes of their creators as well as those that were printed, presenting a capacious account of how handwritten literary documents were shared, copied, read, and valued. It describes the material processes that brought these manuscripts to audiences small and large, and preserved them for future generations. This book situates manuscript practices within an expanding print marketplace, arguing that the realms of script and print interacted to nurture and transform the period’s literary culture. Providing a comprehensive analysis of the values ascribed to literary manuscripts and the practices involved in their creation and use, this study illuminates the complex entanglements between various media. It concludes with an examination of the ongoing transformations of Romantic literary manuscripts, by textual scholars and digital humanists.

For a physicist, all the world is information. The Universe and its workings are the ebb and flow of information. We are all transient patterns of information, passing on the recipe for our basic forms to future generations using a four-letter digital code called DNA. In this engaging and mind-stretching account, Vlatko Vedral considers some of the deepest questions about the Universe and considers the implications of interpreting it in terms of information. He explains the nature of information, the idea of entropy, and the roots of this thinking in thermodynamics. He describes the bizarre effects of quantum behaviour -- effects such as 'entanglement', which Einstein called 'spooky action at a distance', and explores cutting edge work on harnessing quantum effects in hyperfast quantum computers, and how recent evidence suggests that the weirdness of the quantum world, once thought limited to the tiniest scales, may reach into the macro world. Vedral finishes by considering the answer to the ultimate question: where did all of the information in the Universe come from? The answers he considers are exhilarating, drawing upon the work of distinguished physicist John Wheeler. The ideas challenge our concept of the nature of particles, of time, of determinism, and of reality itself. This edition includes a new foreword from the author, reflecting on changes in the world of quantum information since first publication. Oxford Landmark Science books are 'must-read' classics of modern science writing which have crystallized big ideas, and shaped the way we think.

Social media users fracture into tribes, but social media ecosystems are globally interconnected technically, socially, culturally, and economically. At the crossroads, Huatong Sun, author of Cross-Cultural Technology Design, presents theory, method, and case studies to uncover the global interconnectedness of social media design and reorient universal design standards. Centering on the dynamics between structure and agency, Sun draws on practices theories and transnational fieldwork and articulates a critical design approach. The culturally localized user engagement and empowerment (CLUE², or CLUE-squared) framework extends from situated activity to social practice and connects macro institutions with micro interactions to redress asymmetrical relations in everyday life. Why were Japanese users not crazed about Facebook? Would Twitter have been more successful than its copycat Weibo in China if not banned? How did mobilities and value propositions play out in the competition of WhatsApp, WeChat, LINE, and KakaoTalk for global growth? Illustrating the cultural entanglement with a relational view of design, Sun provides three provocative accounts of cross-cultural social media design and use. Concepts such as affordance, genre, and uptake are demonstrated as design tools to bind the material with the discursive and leap from the critical to the generative for culturally sustaining design. Sun calls to reshape the crossroads into a design square where differences are nourished as design resources, where diverse discourses interact for innovation, and where alternative design epistemes thrive from the local. This timely book will appeal to researchers, students, and practitioners who design across disciplines, paradigms, and boundaries to bridge differences in this increasingly globalized world.

Despite John Lennon's immense popularity, little attention has been paid to his work apart from the Beatles. Yet his solo artistry not only illuminates what he gave to the Beatles, but also constitutes a significant contribution to popular music in general. Lennon was able to fuse experiments in technology, instrumentation, lyrics, and musical form into recordings that were both artistically and commercially successful. Few singer-songwriters have been his equal. In this long overdue investigation, authors Ben Urish and Ken Bielen give Lennon's artistry the opportunity to speak for itself. After a brief biographical introduction, chronologically arranged chapters discuss his incredible body of work album-by-album and single-by-single. A discography and annotated bibliography conclude the book. Despite John Lennon's immense popularity, little attention has been paid to the overall efforts of his work apart from the Beatles. Yet his solo artistry not only illuminates what he gave to the Beatles (and what the Beatles experience gave to him), but also constitutes a significant contribution to popular music in general. Lennon was able to fuse experiments in technology, instrumentation, lyrics, and musical form into recordings that were both artistically and commercially successful. Whether expressing emotions, explaining philosophies, protesting social situations, or ruminating on the joys and pains of personal entanglements, few singer-songwriters have been his equal. In this long overdue investigation, authors Ben Urish and Ken Bielen give Lennon's artistry the opportunity to speak for itself. After a brief biographical introduction, chronologically arranged chapters discuss his incredible body of work album-by-album and single-by-single. A discography and annotated bibliography conclude the book. Although he is often lauded as a spokesperson for his generation, this praise, however intended, is far too limiting. Lennon was able to transform the intensely personal into the deeply universal (as well as the reverse), often with humor and pointed insight. At their core, his songs are simultaneously humanistic and transcendent. And as such, they-and he-continue to be relevant, and will certainly remain a valuable part of our cultural heritage for a long time to come.