In Isaac Asimov’s story, Someday (1956a), two young boys, Nic-colo and Paul, describe a world both clearly past and future for us. On the one hand, their descriptions of technology show the story’s age. Personal computers are run by valves and updated by reels of magnetic tape; there is no internet, no wifi, or cell technology — all the silly and fundamental …
The five-hundredth anniversary of the Protestant Reformation (1517) pro-vides an opportunity to reflect in a new way on the relationship between the Protestants and the Society of Jesus, which was founded twenty-three years later (1540). Before we discuss the Jesuit–Protestant encounter in Africa, which resulted from the colonial expansion of the Catholic and Protestant Eur…
Luck is all around us.1 There is a certain school of cultural anthropology that is intent on tracking the structures, categories and beliefs that recur across all human societies, transcending the profound differences in history and culture that separate them. This school of ambitious universalists – which is by no mean uncontroversial, both within the field of anthropology…
Software is an essential part in various facets of our daily life. Mobility,production, energy supply, economics, and infrastructure, to name only afew examples, strongly depend on software. This software is not always ofhigh quality. Critical issues that arose from poor software quality are evenreported manifold publicly in the press. For example, Denver InternationalAirport opened, delayed, …
A company formed by the young, avowed British imperialist Cecil John Rhodes and his business partner Charles Dunell Rudd, with interests in the diamond mines of the Kimberley and gold mining in the Witwatersrand, became one of the foremost British mining-finance companies in the twentieth century. Emanating from South Africa, the company that Rhodes and Rudd founded, The …
This chapter lays the foundation by covering core concepts, including terminology, that are critical to have fresh in our minds as we learn how to accelerate C++ programs using data parallelism.Data parallelism in C++ enables access to parallel resources in a modern heterogeneous system. A single C++ application can use any combination of devices—including GPUs, CPUs, FPGAs, and AI Applicatio…
The “Psychology of Human Thought” is an “open access” collection of peer-reviewed chapters from all areas of higher cognitive processes. The book is intended to be used as a textbook in courses on higher process, complex cognition, human thought, and related courses. Chapters include concept acquisition, knowledge representation, inductive and deductive reasoning, problem solving, metac…
John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) is a central thinker of the twentieth century, not just an economic theorist and statesman, but also an important figure in economics, philosophy, politics, and culture. In this Very Short Introduction Lord Skidelsky, a renowned biographer of Keynes, explores his ethical and practical philosophy, his monetary thought, and provides an insight into his life and wor…
The massive disorder and economic ruin following the Second World War inevitably predetermined the scope and intensity of the Cold War. But why did it last so long? And what impact did it have on the United States, the Soviet Union, Europe, and the Third World? Finally, how did it affect the broader history of the second half of the twentieth century - what were the human and financial costs? T…
What is capitalism? Is capitalism the same everywhere? Is there an alternative? The word 'capitalism' is one that is heard and used frequently, but what is capitalism really all about, and what does it mean? The book begins by addressing basic issues such as 'what is capital?' before discussing the history and development of capitalism through three detailed and absorbing case studies rangin…