Websites and apps are places where critical parts of our lives happen. We shop, bank, learn, gossip, and select our leaders there. But many of these places weren’t intended to support these activities. Instead, they're designed to capture your attention and sell it to the highest bidder. Living in Information draws upon architecture as a way to design information environments that serve our humanity.

Jer Thorp’s analysis of the word “data” in 10,325 New York Times stories written between 1984 and 2018 shows a distinct trend: among the words most closely associated with “data,” we find not only its classic companions “information” and “digital,” but also a variety of new neighbors—from “scandal” and “misinformation” to “ethics,” “friends,” and “play.” To live in data in the twenty-first century is to be incessantly extracted from, classified and categorized, statisti-fied, sold, and surveilled. Data—our data—is mined and processed for profit, power, and political gain. In Living in Data, Thorp asks a crucial question of our time: How do we stop passively inhabiting data, and instead become active citizens of it? Threading a data story through hippo attacks, glaciers, and school gymnasiums, around colossal rice piles, and over active minefields, Living in Data reminds us that the future of data is still wide open, that there are ways to transcend facts and figures and to find more visceral ways to engage with data, that there are always new stories to be told about how data can be used. Punctuated with Thorp's original and informative illustrations, Living in Data not only redefines what data is, but reimagines who gets to speak its language and how to use its power to create a more just and democratic future. Timely and inspiring, Living in Data gives us a much-needed path forward.

The informational nature of biological organization, at levels from the genetic and epigenetic to the cognitive and linguistic. Information shapes biological organization in fundamental ways and at every organizational level. Because organisms use information--including DNA codes, gene expression, and chemical signaling--to construct, maintain, repair, and replicate themselves, it would seem only natural to use information-related ideas in our attempts to understand the general nature of living systems, the causality by which they operate, the difference between living and inanimate matter, and the emergence, in some biological species, of cognition, emotion, and language. And yet philosophers and scientists have been slow to do so. This volume fills that gap. Information and Living Systems offers a collection of original chapters in which scientists and philosophers discuss the informational nature of biological organization at levels ranging from the genetic to the cognitive and linguistic. The chapters examine not only familiar information-related ideas intrinsic to the biological sciences but also broader information-theoretic perspectives used to interpret their significance. The contributors represent a range of disciplines, including anthropology, biology, chemistry, cognitive science, information theory, philosophy, psychology, and systems theory, thus demonstrating the deeply interdisciplinary nature of the volume's bioinformational theme.

Understand the impact of new technologies on the media landscape with LIVING IN THE INFORMATION AGE with InfoTrac®! Examining the conceptual and practical aspects of life in an information society, this communication text encourages you to consider how the media industries are being transformed through digital convergence and corporate concentration. Each reading is prefaced by a short introduction and three questions for critical thinking and discussion to help you master the material. Each article is followed by suggestions for taking research online using InfoTrac College Edition so that you can enhance your understanding of the material.

Rural homesteaders and urban apartment-dwellers alike will find a mother lode of practical information packed into this completely revised and updated edition of the ultimate how-to handbook for all generations. A selective compendium of public-domain documents, it brings together in one volume a wealth of knowledge and useful instruction on just about every imaginable aspect of self-sufficiency—from building a dwelling and growing food to raising children, using tools of all kinds, and, yes, getting more mileage out of your car. Readers will learn how to: build a greenhouse; administer first aid; stock an emergency shelter; survive in the wilderness, at sea, and in the city; plant, buy farmland; grow plants indoors and out; read architect’s drawings; care for household pets; repair clothing; hunt, trap, and fish; repair a screen or leaking faucet; butcher and store big-game kill; relieve allergy symptoms; control insects; stay safe during storms and floods; can and freeze fruits and vegetables; take your own blood pressure; and much, much more! Praise for a previous edition: “How we have survived this long without [this book], I don’t know. The concept is brilliant and simple. . . . If we had lived in a rural community a century ago, much of the knowledge gathered here would have been in our bones.” —Harper’s

By offering an understanding of Geographic Information Systems within the social, economic, legal, political and ethical contexts within which they exist, the author shows that there are substantial limits to their ability to represent the very objects and relationships, people and places, that many believe to be most important. Focusing on the ramifications of GIS usage, Digital Places shows that they are associated with far-reaching changes in the institutions in which they exist, and in the lives of those they touch. In the end they call for a complete rethinking of basic ideas, like privacy and intellectual property and the nature of scientific practice, that have underpinned public life for the last one hundred years.

In this nuanced and groundbreaking history, Donna Murch argues that the Black Panther Party (BPP) started with a study group. Drawing on oral history and untapped archival sources, she explains how a relatively small city with a recent history of African