"The impact of technology on society is clear and unmistakeable. The influence of society on technology is more subtle. The 13 essays in this book have been written by a diverse group of scholars united by a common interest in creating a new field - the sociology of technology. They draw on a wide array of case studies - from cooking stoves to missile systems, from 15th-century Portugal to today's Al labs - to outline an original research program based on a synthesis of ideas from the social studies of science and the history of technology. Together they affirm the need for a study of technology that gives equal weight to technical, social, economic, and political questions"--Back cover.

A unique practice-oriented survey of how the new surgical, analytical, and biomedical advances are being applied to pediatric urology. Here the practicing urologist will find informative, easy-to-read reviews of the modern evaluation of prenatal hydronephrosis, the standard treatment of reflux vs the newer injectable techniques, and the spectrum of hypospadias treatment along with new developments in bladder exstrophy. Additional updated topics include what's new in undescended testis, the evaluation of difficult duplication anomalies, voiding dysfunction and neurogenic bladders, pediatric stone disease, and the developmental problems associated with genitourinary defects.

As this book took form, its contents furnished the material for a graduate course at the University of Rhode Island. Toward the end of that course, the class reviewed the literature on display characteristics and design. The universal criticism voiced in those reviews was that there was lots of hardware information but no criteria upon which one could base a sound design. Though one could learn all about the size and brightness of various displays, one could not form any judgment about how ef fectively the display transferred information to an observer. As I reviewed our nearly completed text, an announcement crossed my desk stating that one of the professional societies in a seminar was to consider if one should not attempt to formulate a theory concerning information transfer from displays to an observer. That was the first title chosen for our book, before our publisher told us that "that was a paragraph, not a title. " The group of contributors to this book have labored long in the conviction that there was a real need to develop and present a consolidated theory based upon the work of a number of pioneers, including Barnes and Czerny, de Vries, Rose, Coltman and Anderson, Schade, Johnson, van Meeteren, and others, who established the various parts of a substantial theoretical and experimental back ground that seemed ripe for consolidation.

We are living through a time when old identities - nation, culture and gender are melting down. Spaces of Identity examines the ways in which collective cultural identities are being reshaped under conditions of a post-modern geography and a communications environment of cable and satellite broadcasting. To address current problems of identity, the authors look at contemporary politics between Europe and its most significant others: America; Islam and the Orient. They show that it's against these places that Europe's own identity has been and is now being defined. A stimulating account of the complex and contradictory nature of contemporary cultural identities.