Algorithms and the Assault on Critical Thought

Algorithms and the Assault on Critical Thought
Author: Nancy Ettlinger
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 133
Release: 2022-12-30
Genre: Science
ISBN: 1000824098

This book examines the digitalization of longstanding problems of technological advance that produce inequalities and automated governance, which relieves subjects of agency and critical thought, and prompts a need to weaponize thoughtfulness against technocratic designs. The book situates digital-era problems relative to those of previous sociotechnical milieux and argues that technical advance perennially embeds corrosive effects on social relations and relations of production, recognizing variation across contexts and relative to entrenched societal hierarchies of race and other axes of difference and their intersections. Societal tolerance, despite abundant evidence for harmful effects of digital technologies, requires attention. The book explains blindness to social injustice by technocratic thinking delivered through education as well as truths embraced in the data sciences coupled with governance in universities and the private sector that protect these truths from critique. Institutional inertia suggests benefits of communitarianism, which strives for change emanating from civil society. Scaling postcapitalist communitarian values through communitybased peer production presents opportunities. However, enduring problems require critical reflection, continual revision of strategies, and active participation among diverse community citizens. This book is written with critical geographic sensibilities for an interdisciplinary audience of scholars and graduate and undergraduate students in the social sciences, humanities, and data sciences.

Ethics and Sustainability in Digital Cultures

Ethics and Sustainability in Digital Cultures
Author: Thomas Taro Lennerfors
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 293
Release: 2023-10-09
Genre: Science
ISBN: 1000987728

Digital technologies, now ubiquitous around the world, can promote positive values, as well as support those that are less socially acceptable. To better understand such technologies’ impact on ethics and sustainability, this book situates digital technologies within a cultural context, arguing that the technology is received differently in different cultural contexts. The book contains chapters on state-of-the-art digital technologies such as artificial intelligence from various countries including Japan and Sweden to highlight the multifarious ways in how ethical and sustainability issues are being manifested in certain cultural contexts. The book contributes to furthering understandings on the similarities and differences between digital technology implementations in different cultures, promoting a cross-cultural dialogue on desired values and how they are promoted or downplayed by such technologies. The book is divided into two parts: the former focuses on how individuals relate to new digital technologies, and the latter focuses on those who develop digital technologies. The book targets scholars, businesspeople and policymakers interested in the interconnection between digital technologies, ethics and sustainability from various cultural viewpoints. It provides new case studies on a range of digital technologies and discussions about digital technology implementations in cultural contexts.

Thinking Ahead

Thinking Ahead
Author: Paul A. Wagner
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 168
Release: 2018-02-09
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1475841027

This book addresses a very important aspect of teacher training, as well as the training of educational administrators, school counselors and other educational allied professionals, an aspect that is too often overlooked. That aspect is role modeling a deliberative mind. A deliberative mind is one filled with wonderment and eagerness to learn. We introduce educational professionals to systematic pondering and large-scale wonderment.

Methods for Facilitating Adult Learning

Methods for Facilitating Adult Learning
Author: Joellen E. Coryell
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 343
Release: 2024-04-12
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1040010423

This book equips instructors with fresh, practical teaching and training methods to support adult learning in both formal and continuing educational environments. An extensive, how-to guide, Methods for Facilitating Adult Learning covers adult teaching and learning fundamentals, collaborative teaching methods, methods for facilitating autonomous learning, community-based teaching methods, and technology-enhanced teaching and learning approaches. Readers will emerge with an in-depth understanding of each method, made comprehensive by the inclusion of definitions, philosophical and/or theoretical underpinnings, advantages and limitations, practical guidelines for application, and ample real-world examples. Ideal for any educator working with adult learners, this book offers a toolbox of approaches designed to enhance reader understanding and practice of adult instruction.

Distrust

Distrust
Author:
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2023-03-23
Genre:
ISBN: 0192868454

There is no doubt science is currently suffering from a credibility crisis. This thought-provoking book argues that, ironically, science's credibility is being undermined by tools created by scientists themselves. Scientific disinformation and damaging conspiracy theories are rife because of the internet that science created, the scientific demand for empirical evidence and statistical significance leads to data torturing and confirmation bias, and data mining is fuelled by the technological advances in Big Data and the development of ever-increasingly powerful computers. Using a wide range of entertaining examples, this fascinating book examines the impacts of society's growing distrust of science, and ultimately provides constructive suggestions for restoring the credibility of the scientific community.

Paulo Freire's Intellectual Roots

Paulo Freire's Intellectual Roots
Author: Robert Lake
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 397
Release: 2013-04-11
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1441154426

Paulo Freire's critical pedagogy has had a profound influence on contemporary progressive educators around the globe as they endeavor to rethink education for liberation and the creation of more humane global society. For Freire, maintaining a sense of historicity, that is, the origins from which our thinking and practice emerges, is essential to understanding and practicing education as a means for liberation. Too often, however, critical pedagogy is presented as a monolithic philosophy, and the historical and intellectual roots of critical pedagogy are submerged. Through a compilation of essays written by leading and emerging scholars of critical pedagogy, this text brings history into the present and keeps Paulo's intellectual roots alive in all of us as we develop our praxis today.

Algorithms

Algorithms
Author: Sushil C. Dimri
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 231
Release: 2024-06-17
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 3111229637

Algorithms are ubiquitous in the contemporary technological world, and they ultimately consist of finite sequences of instructions used to accomplish tasks with necessary input values. This book analyses the top performing algorithms in areas as diverse as Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, Optimization Techniques and Cloud & Cyber Security Systems in order to explore their power and limitations.

Expert Humans

Expert Humans
Author: Michael Jenkins
Publisher: Emerald Group Publishing
Total Pages: 220
Release: 2021-03-09
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 180071260X

Expert Humans: Critical Leadership Skills for a Disrupted World examines the critical leadership concepts of Altruism, Compassion and Empathy (ACE) and their application to the great disruptors of today.

Comedy and Critical Thought

Comedy and Critical Thought
Author: Iain MacKenzie
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 246
Release: 2018-03-13
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1786604086

Throughout history, comedians and clowns have enjoyed a certain freedom to speak frankly often denied to others in hegemonic systems. More recently, professional comedians have developed platforms of comic license from which to critique the traditional political establishment and have managed to play an important role in interrogating and mediating the processes of politics in contemporary society. This collection will examine the questions that arise when of comedy and critique intersect by bringing together both critical theorists and comedy scholars with a view to exploring the nature of comedy, its potential role in critical theory and the forms it can take as a practice of resistance.

The Assault on Intelligence

The Assault on Intelligence
Author: Michael V. Hayden
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 306
Release: 2019-05-07
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0525558608

A blistering critique of the forces threatening the American intelligence community, beginning with the President of the United States himself, in a time when that community's work has never been harder or more important In the face of a President who lobs accusations without facts, evidence, or logic, truth tellers are under attack. Meanwhile, the world order teeters on the brink. Experience and expertise, devotion to facts, humility in the face of complexity, and respect for ideas seem more important, and more endangered, than they've ever been. American Intelligence--the ultimate truth teller--has a responsibility in a post-truth world beyond merely warning of external dangers, and in The Assault on Intelligence, General Michael Hayden, former CIA director, takes up that urgent work with profound passion, insight and authority. It is a sobering vision. The American intelligence community is more at risk than commonly understood. Our democracy's core structures are under great stress. Many of the premises on which we have based our understanding of governance are now challenged, eroded, or simply gone. And in the face of overwhelming evidence from the intelligence community that the Russians are, by all acceptable standards of cyber conflict, in a state of outright war against us, we have a President in office who chooses not to lead a strong response, but instead to shoot the messenger. There are fundamental changes afoot in the world and in this country. The Assault on Intelligence shows us what they are, reveals how crippled we've become in our capacity to address them, and points toward a series of effective responses. Because when we lose our intelligence, literally and figuratively, democracy dies.