Southern Surveyor

Southern Surveyor
Author: Michael Veitch
Publisher: CSIRO PUBLISHING
Total Pages: 294
Release: 2015-10-01
Genre: Science
ISBN: 1486302661

'The deepest trenches, highest mountains, biggest earthquakes, most explosive volcanoes are all associated with these places. We’re discovering things all the time.' For ten years, the RV Southern Surveyor represented the vanguard of Australian marine science. On over 100 voyages, this former North Sea fishing trawler with her distinctive blue and white livery carried scientists and technicians across the Southern, Pacific and Indian oceans as well as the waters off northern Australia. She conducted physical, chemical, geological and biological investigations and deployed state-of-the-art instruments to map vast unexplored tracts of the seafloor. Over the course of a year, prior to her final voyage, Michael Veitch interviewed the Southern Surveyor's former captains and crew, support staff and scientists. The result is a warm, engaging and sometimes dramatic account of their adventures — finding sunken WWII shipwrecks and swirling coastal vortexes, 'undiscovering' islands and watching pre-dawn fireworks from undersea volcanoes. But these are also stories of discovery which tell the legacy of scientific innovation and impact that Southern Surveyor left in her wake.

There Are No Facts

There Are No Facts
Author: Mark Shepard
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 293
Release: 2022-11-22
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0262047470

The entanglements of people and data, code and space, knowledge and power: how data and algorithms shape the world—and shape us within that world. With the emergence of a post-truth world, we have witnessed the dissolution of the common ground on which truth claims were negotiated, individual agency enacted, and public spheres shaped. What happens when, as Nietzsche claimed, there are no facts, but only interpretations? In this book, Mark Shepard examines the entanglements of people and data, code and space, knowledge and power that have produced an uncommon ground—a disaggregated public sphere where the extraction of behavioral data and their subsequent processing and sale have led to the emergence of micropublics of ever-finer granularity. Shepard explores how these new post-truth territories are propagated through machine learning systems and social networks, which shape the public and private spaces of everyday life. He traces the balkanization and proliferation of online news and the targeted distribution of carefully crafted information through social media. He examines post-truth practices, showing how truth claims are embedded in techniques by which the world is observed, recorded, documented, and measured. Finally, he shows how these practices play out, at scales from the translocality of the home to the planetary reach of the COVID-19 pandemic—with stops along the way at an urban minimarket, an upscale neighborhood for the one percent, a Toronto waterfront district, and a national election.

Seafloor Geomorphology as Benthic Habitat

Seafloor Geomorphology as Benthic Habitat
Author: Peter Harris
Publisher: Elsevier
Total Pages: 947
Release: 2011-11-28
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0123851408

Annotation This book provides a synthesis of seabed geomorphology and benthic habitats based on the most recent, up-to-date information. Case studies from around the world are presented.