Play Among Books

How does coding change the way we think about architecture? Miro Roman and his AI Alice_ch3n81 develop a playful scenario in which they propose coding as the new literacy of information. They convey knowledge in the form of a project model that links the fields of architecture and information through two interwoven narrative strands in an “infinite flow” of real books

Science's First Mistake

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. The purpose of the book is to deconstruct the process of knowledge discovery and theory construction. Grounded in the tradition of second-order cybernetics, the concept of self-reference is used in the context of systems theory in order to examine the mode in which observation, paradox and delusion become 'structurally coupled' with cognition. To put this simply, physical scientists take it as a given that all the universe is explainable once we've discovered the underlying rules. Whereas social scientists and philosophers are more sensitive to the issues around how the observer actually impacts that which is being observed. The authors work in the fields of Information Studies, which is within the technical or physical realm, and Management Studies, which is about human behaviour. Their argument is that all scientists (physical and social) rely too much on the absolutism and certainty of the methods of traditional physical science and that we should acknowledge the limitations of how we know what we know. Rooted in information systems analysis this fresh and audacious examination of knowledge discovery and theory construction makes an important contribution to the understanding of how we employ scientific method

Science's First Mistake

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. The purpose of the book is to deconstruct the process of knowledge discovery and theory construction. Grounded in the tradition of second-order cybernetics, the concept of self-reference is used in the context of systems theory in order to examine the mode in which observation, paradox and delusion become 'structurally coupled' with cognition. To put this simply, physical scientists take it as a given that all the universe is explainable once we've discovered the underlying rules. Whereas social scientists and philosophers are more sensitive to the issues around how the observer actually impacts that which is being observed. The authors work in the fields of Information Studies, which is within the technical or physical realm, and Management Studies, which is about human behaviour. Their argument is that all scientists (physical and social) rely too much on the absolutism and certainty of the methods of traditional physical science and that we should acknowledge the limitations of how we know what we know. Rooted in information systems analysis this fresh and audacious examination of knowledge discovery and theory construction makes an important contribution to the understanding of how we employ scientific method

A God in the Mechanism: German Language Theater and the Atomic Bomb, 1945-65

This dissertation compiles and analyzes postwar theatrical representations of the nuclear threat to show how German-language theater strove to establish an aesthetic and political program adequate to a post-fascist, Cold War age. Drawing on more than 25 atomic plays written between 1945 and 1965, the dissertation demonstrates that competing aesthetic paradigms—the aesthetically conservative director-dominated theater (Intendantentheater), burlesques and grotesques, socialist realism, and the documentary drama—incorporated the threat of technological destruction, manifested in the Cold War arms race, to articulate conflicting positions on the viability of a completely secular society. Skirting obvious geopolitical issues, the atomic plays treated the atomic bomb as the symbol of a new technological unfreedom in a society stripped of religious authority and comprised a discourse on the prospect of re-establishing human agency. The dissertation examines eight works in depth: Max Frisch’s Die Chinesische Mauer, Curt Langenbeck’s Der Phantast, Carl Zuckmayer’s Das kalte Licht, Alfred Gong’s Zetdam: Ein Satyr-Spiel, Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s Der Erfinder and Die Physiker, Rolf Schneider’s Prozess Richard Waverly and Heinar Kipphardt’s In der Sache J. Robert Oppenheimer. Analyzed across the 20 years of their relative prominence, the atomic plays evince a loose developmental trajectory. Experimental attempts to render the atomic bomb stageable in the 1940s gave way to a tendency toward classical dramatic principles in the 1950s via the inclusion of the physicist as a protagonist. At the end of the 1950s and into the 1960s, these so-called physicist dramas were in decline. Their dominant theme, a binary setting religion and agency against technology and determinism, were undermined in tragi-comic works. In the 1960s, the documentary drama reframed the question of agency and the atomic bomb as an institutional, rather than primarily moral issue. Viewed collectively, the atomic plays evince the evolving cultural and political expectations of the postwar and the unique formal problems the atomic bomb posed to the theater.Doctor of Philosoph