...This chapter briefly discusses the empires that succumbed to Western expansion in the early modern period, including China and Central America. In order to strengthen their system, Mongols developed interlinking exchange circuits of information, technologies, and ideas with other societies. Long...

...This chapter shows how accurate description became the linchpin of the development of knowledge in medicine and natural history. For both description and analysis, investigators also adopted information acquired from the latest technologies of production. These methods sometimes also had unexpected...

...This chapter outlines the best energy policy for balancing the often-competing goals of cheap, clean, and secure energy, and which would use the price system to fundamentally alter consumer behavior, business behavior, and the incentives to develop alternative-energy technologies. With the pressing...

... access to reproductive technologies. Global and national changes that, in some instances, are seemingly unrelated to ART will usher in an era of greater availability and access to reproductive assistance. assisted reproductive technologies ART Edwards Robert eugenics in vitro fertilization IVF...

... the development of new technologies. Examples of these technologies include hardware, such as charge-coupled devices in place of vidicons, and software, such as computer programs that provided autonomy for Voyager. Two technologies in this period exemplify the ingenuity and effort of JPL engineers: synthetic...

... MSNBC.com had expanded substantially. The Newsvine technology now powers all of the blogs and nearly all of the user-community features on MSNBC.com, as well as on the extended MSNBC Digital Network. This chapter describes several phases in the evolution of MSNBC's collection of blogs and interactive...

.... If, in anticipation of the coming decades of increasing water scarcity, humankind is able to develop appropriate governance and institutions for water management, instigate market and policy reforms, and address global management issues, then improved innovation and investments in new water technologies and better...

...This chapter argues that product liability law does not result in safer products. Because new products pose novel risks, the court's task of assessing innovative products entails more problematic judgments than with assessments of existing technologies. There is no evidence that higher liability...

...This chapter discusses how the world of assisted reproductive technologies (ART) offers those who cannot reproduce the old-fashioned way various medical techniques aimed at achieving pregnancy by means other than sexual intercourse. By disaggregating sex from reproduction, ART is the story of both...

... Southwest Asia, whereas Russia hopes to export more of its energy exploration technologies and natural resources farther afield. Along with geoeconomic interests, the region's sea lanes of communication are also rising in importance. In addition, the Indian Ocean region is experiencing rising navalism...

...This chapter introduces the digitally augmented city as a major focus of current design research and practice. It critically examines the impact that the entanglement of networked information technologies with the urban realm has produced and discusses this in reference to extant literature...

... Americans have a constitutionally protected liberty to bear or beget biologically related offspring and whether this liberty includes only the right to have children by sexual intercourse. This chapter examines the use of artificial reproductive technologies (ARTs), asexual ARTs such as cloning...

... services provided to long distance carriers, when combined with the strategies of three dominant, long-distance carriers, resulted in a pattern of corporate behavior that rendered the local exchange carriers unwilling to invest in broadband technologies for rapid access to the Internet. The FCC was totally...

...This chapter explains that new technologies are required and that hence, R&D has to be a major element of climate change strategy. The new and emerging technologies may enable us to address the climate change problem, provided that coal has not wreaked too much damage in the meantime. Technical...

...This chapter is dedicated to models of human-machine interaction (HCI) that have been influential for the design domain and that form the basis of how we think about designing human-machine interactions today. Digital networked technologies have become increasingly pervasive in today's urban...

... over the past two decades strikingly recalls the early days of the twentieth century. What then was the idealized new and modern has become the smart of today. The development of technology has long pursued the superlatives of faster, higher, bigger, cleaner, stronger, better, and safer...

...This chapter examines four emerging areas of technological innovation in which digital technologies are becoming embedded into the physical world. The digitization of everyday objects includes consumer Internet of things and connected objects in smart cities. The Internet of self encompasses...

... generation of urban water supply systems that can improve efficiency and sustainable use. Water use in agriculture, too, can benefit from a range of innovations in irrigation technologies and delivery systems. The chapter then considers the key policies and other initiatives that are necessary for prompting...

...The 1990s brought surprising industrial development in emerging economies around the globe: firms in countries not previously known for their high-technology industries moved to the forefront in new Information Technologies (IT) by using different business models and carving out unique positions...

... carbon and security taxes, alternative energy forms will be able to compete on a more even playing field against fossil fuels, which will unleash advances in alternative energy and conservation technologies, enabling the marketplace and consumers to find the right balance among energy sources...