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"Technology Social aspects Fiction."
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Future Tense fiction : stories of tomorrow
\"A collection of electrifying original stories from a veritable who's-who of authors working in speculative literature and science fiction today.\"
Book
Shaky Foundations
Numerous popular and scholarly accounts have exposed the deep impact of patrons on the production of scientific knowledge and its applications.Shaky Foundationsprovides the first extensive examination of a new patronage system for the social sciences that emerged in the early Cold War years and took more definite shape during the 1950s and early 1960s, a period of enormous expansion in American social science.
By focusing on the military, the Ford Foundation, and the National Science Foundation, Mark Solovey shows how this patronage system presented social scientists and other interested parties, including natural scientists and politicians, with new opportunities to work out the scientific identity, social implications, and public policy uses of academic social research. Solovey also examines significant criticisms of the new patronage system, which contributed to widespread efforts to rethink and reshape the politics-patronage-social science nexus starting in the mid-1960s.
Based on extensive archival research,Shaky Foundationsaddresses fundamental questions about the intellectual foundations of the social sciences, their relationships with the natural sciences and the humanities, and the political and ideological import of academic social inquiry.
eBook
The terrible privacy of Maxwell Sim
Maxwell Sim feels he has no meaningful connection to anyone in his life. Trying to get out of this rut, Max quits his job as a customer service employee at a local department store. He accepts a job to drive a Prius full of toothbrushes to he remote Shetland Islands as part of a misguided promotional campaign for a dental hygiene company with the slogan, \"We reach furthest.\" Things don't go as planned and Max makes some impromptu stops to a few of the important people in his life. These are cruelly and intensely awkward. Max eventually finds himself falling in love with the soothing voice of the GPS system (\"Emma\"). Max begins to wonder if he lacks the ability to establish actual relationships.
Book
The Ethnography of Rhythm: Orality and Its Technologies
Who speaks? The author as producer, the contingency of the text, intertextuality, the \"device\"-core ideas of modern literary theory-were all pioneered in the shadow of oral literature. Authorless, loosely dated, and variable, oral texts have always posed a challenge to critical interpretation. When it began to be thought that culturally significant texts-starting with Homer and the Bible-had emerged from an oral tradition, assumptions on how to read these texts were greatly perturbed. Through readings that range from ancient Greece, Rome, and China to the Cold War imaginary, The Ethnography of Rhythm situates the study of oral traditions in the contentious space of nineteenth- and twentieth-century thinking about language, mind, and culture. It also demonstrates the role of technologies in framing this category of poetic creation. By making possible a new understanding of Maussian \"techniques of the body\" as belonging to the domain of Derridean \"arche-writing,\" Haun Saussy shows how oral tradition is a means of inscription in its own right, rather than an antecedent made obsolete by the written word or other media and data-storage devices.
eBook
The amateurs
Allow us to introduce you to the newest product from PINA, the world's largest tech company. \"Port\" is a curiously irresistible device that offers the impossible: space-time travel mysteriously powered by nostalgia and longing. Step inside a Port and find yourself transported to wherever and whenever your heart desires: a bygone youth, a dreamed-of future, the fabled past.
Book
The Use of “Literary Fiction” to Promote Mentalizing Ability
Empathy is a multidimensional process that incorporates both mentalizing and emotional sharing dimensions. Empathic competencies are important for creating interpersonal relationships with other people and developing adequate social behaviour. The lack of these social components also leads to isolation and exclusion in healthy populations. However, few studies have investigated how to improve these social skills. In a recent study, Kidd and Castano (2013) found that reading literary fiction increases mentalizing ability and may change how people think about other people's emotions and mental states. The aim of our study was to evaluate the effects of reading literary fiction, compared to nonfiction and science fiction, on empathic abilities. Compared to previous studies, we used a larger variety of empathy measures and utilized a pre and post-test design. In all, 214 healthy participants were randomly assigned to read a book representative of one of three literary genres (literary fiction, nonfiction, science fiction). Participants were assessed before and after the reading phase using mentalizing and emotional sharing tests, according to Zaki and Ochsner' s (2012) model. Comparisons of sociodemographic, mentalizing, and emotional sharing variables across conditions were conducted using ANOVA. Our results showed that after the reading phase, the literary fiction group showed improvement in mentalizing abilities, but there was no discernible effect on emotional sharing abilities. Our study showed that the reading processes can promote mentalizing abilities. These results may set important goals for future low-cost rehabilitation protocols for several disorders in which the mentalizing deficit is considered central to the disease, such as Autism Spectrum Disorders and Schizophrenia.
Journal Article
Five studies evaluating the impact on mental health and mood of recalling, reading, and discussing fiction
Does reading fiction improve mental health and well-being? We present the results of five studies that evaluated the impact of five forms of exposure to fiction. These included the effects of recalling reading fiction, of being prescribed fiction, of discussing fiction relative to non-fiction, and of discussing literary fiction relative to best-seller fiction. The first three studies directly recruited participants; the final two relied on scraped social media data from Reddit and Twitter. Results show that fiction can have a positive impact on measures of mood and emotion, but that a process of mnemonic or cognitive consolidation is required first: exposure to fiction does not, on its own, have an immediate impact on well-being.
Journal Article
Build the future : 18 exciting tales from the metaverse
This text features 18 stories of women on the cutting-edge of virtual reality and technology: women who are building the metaverse. It showcases some of the exciting ways girls can engage with this new world of tech, from game design and 3D art to data science and software engineering.
BOOK
Beyond beauty: Does visual art facilitate social cognitive skills?
Engaging with art can move individuals through a myriad of emotions, provoke reflective thoughts, and lead to new ideas. Could art also influence interpersonal outcomes pertaining to the ways we interact with others and navigate the social world, that is, our suite of social cognitive skills? Here, we focus on visual art to explore the effect of art engagement on personal aesthetic experience and social cognitive skills. Across two studies, using veridical paintings and matched non-art photos, we examined the effect of art engagement on emotional (e.g., awe, being moved) and eudaimonic experiences (e.g., reflective thoughts), as well as social cognitive skills pertaining to Theory of Mind (ToM) and recognition of other’s emotions. Further, we varied the depth with which participants engaged with the experiences of the characters in the artworks, to assess whether deep social information processing could boost the effect of art engagement on social cognitive skills. Our findings showed that art engagement altered personal aesthetic experience through changes in emotional and eudaimonic outcomes. However, we did not find any support for the effect of art engagement on social cognitive skills: Neither engaging with art, nor art in combination with deep social information processing, influenced performance on social cognitive skills of ToM and emotion recognition. The effect of art engagement on personal aesthetic experience and the absence of effect on social cognitive skills highlight the nuanced nature of individuals’ interactions with art. We discuss these results considering the varied ways of engagement with different artforms and in relation to different operationalizations of social cognitive skills.
Journal Article