CARTOGRAPHIA offers a stunning array of 200 of the most beautiful, important, and fascinating maps in existence, from the world's largest cartographic collection, at the Library of Congress. These maps show how our idea of the world has shifted and grown over time, and each map tells its own unique story about nations, politics, and ambitions. The chosen images, with their accompanying stories, introduce the reader to an exciting new way of "reading" maps as travelogues---living history from the earliest of man's imaginings about planet earth to our current attempts at charting cyberspace.Among the rare gems included in the book are the Waldseemuller Map of the World from 1507, the first to include the designation "America"; pages from the Ortelius's Theatrum Orbis Terrarum of 1570, considered the first modern atlas; rare maps from Africa, Asia, and Oceania that challenge traditional Western perspectives; William Faulkner's hand-drawn 1936 map of the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi; and even a map of the Human Genome. In an oversized format, with gorgeous four-color reproductions throughout, Catrographia will appeal to collectors, historians, and anyone looking for a perfect gift.

See also, I am legend, an interview with the author, Vincent Virga, in the latest issue of Time Out New York.

Cartographia: Mapping Civilizations

From Publishers Weekly:

Environmental journalist Peter Thomson, founding producer and senior editor of National Public Radio's Living on Earth, combines introspection with objective reporting in this engaging account of his six-month pilgrimage to Siberia's Lake Baikal, the deepest, oldest and supposedly purest body of fresh water on earth. Thomson includes everything from thoughts about his failed marriage and his relationship with his brother and fellow traveler James to colorful impressions of the people he meets as he documents his quest, shattering the myth of the lake's reputed capacity to cleanse itself. Researchers tell him that the air and water are full of thousands of tons of pollutants and contaminants from Baikal's paper mill and nearby farms, industry and power plants. Tiny filter-feeding shrimp do cleanse the water, but in the process they move the contaminants into the food chain and concentrate them, so the fish eaten by the people living around Lake Baikal now pose a serious health threat. Nevertheless, many Russians continue to believe that the waters of the Sacred Sea are pristine. Thomson's book is a lucid and sobering reminder of the destructive effects human activity has on the planet.

Sacred Sea: A Journey to Lake Baikal

300 stunning before-and-after photographs that show the staggering transformation of our world.

Earth Then and Now records the dramatic way our planet has changed over the past century. On one page is a specific part of the world as it was 5, 20, 50 or even 100 years ago. On the facing page is the same place as it looks today. Each stark visual comparison tells a compelling story -- a melting glacier, an expanding desert, an encroaching cityscape, a natural disaster.

Earth Then and Now reminds us that nothing is without a cost. Highly topical and thought provoking chapters in this book include:

* Environmental change: Bearing witness to the effects of global warming
* Industrialization: Revealing the hidden costs of "progress"
* Urbanization: Showing the effects of our spreading cities
* Natural disasters: Reminding us of the power of nature
* War: Using comparisons to show the impact of armed conflict
* Travel and tourism: Illustrating the predatory nature of development.

Concise captions explain the facts and then allow the reader to draw personal conclusions. Anyone concerned about the environment will enjoy and appreciate Earth Then and Now.

Earth Then and Now: Amazing Images of Our Changing World

"American Ruins" is the first photography book to document historic ruins throughout the United States. It presents a stunning visual record of ruins ranging from ancient Native American dwellings in the Southwest to the remains of Gilded Age mansions on the East Coast and a king's summer home in Hawaii. Luminous infrared photographs expose crumbled walls, weathered facades and overgrown flora, and are accompanied by brief essays detailing the historical, geographical and architectural significance of each site. This landmark publication raises awareness of and appreciation for overlooked ruins that remain unknown even to most Americans. It captures the visual poetry of each place and offers a new way of seeing the landscape, the past and the collective identity of America. This work is a unique, awe-inspiring photographic record of American history. This is the first photographic record of historic ruins throughout the United States. It will appeal to anyone interested in architecture, photography, history, archaeology and Americana.

See also Arthur Drooker Photography.

American Ruins

I mentioned this book in August; now it's available.

Teeming with chatrooms, online discussion groups, and blogs, the Internet offers previously unimagined opportunities for personal expression and communication. But there’s a dark side to the story. A trail of information fragments about us is forever preserved on the Internet, instantly available in a Google search. A permanent chronicle of our private lives—often of dubious reliability and sometimes totally false—will follow us wherever we go, accessible to friends, strangers, dates, employers, neighbors, relatives, and anyone else who cares to look. This engrossing book, brimming with amazing examples of gossip, slander, and rumor on the Internet, explores the profound implications of the online collision between free speech and privacy.

Praise:

"A timely, vivid, and illuminating book that will change the way you think about privacy, reputation, and speech on the Internet. Daniel Solove tells a series of fascinating and frightening stories about how blogs, social network sites, and other websites are spreading gossip and rumors about people's private lives. He offers a fresh and thought-provoking analysis of a series of wide-ranging new problems and develops useful suggestions about what we can do about these challenges."
—Paul M. Schwartz, professor of law, UC Berkeley School of Law

"No one has thought more about the effects of the information age on privacy than Daniel Solove."
—Bruce Schneier

"As the Internet is erasing the distinction between spoken and written gossip, the future of personal reputation is one of our most vexing social challenges. In this illuminating book, filled with memorable cautionary tales, Daniel Solove incisively analyzes the technological and legal challenges and offers moderate, sensible solutions for navigating the shoals of the blogosphere."
—Jeffrey Rosen, author of The Unwanted Gaze and The Naked Crowd

About the author:

Solove, an authority on information privacy law, offers a fascinating account of how the Internet is transforming gossip, the way we shame others, and our ability to protect our own reputations. Focusing on blogs, Internet communities, cybermobs, and other current trends, he shows that, ironically, the unconstrained flow of information on the Internet may impede opportunities for self-development and freedom. Long-standing notions of privacy need review, the author contends: unless we establish a balance between privacy and free speech, we may discover that the freedom of the Internet makes us less free.

Previously on Solove:

Cell Phone Number Research

"This is a person's associations ... It's a real wealth of data to find out the people that a person interacts with."

'I've Got Nothing to Hide' and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy

In this essay, Solove critiques the nothing to hide argument and exposes its faulty underpinnings.

We know everything about you

... we are almost entirely powerless against these vast bureaucracies ...

The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet

This is the first history of public health surveillance in the United States to span more than a century of conflict and controversy. The practice of reporting the names of those with disease to health authorities inevitably poses questions about the interplay between the imperative to control threats to the public's health and legal and ethical concerns about privacy. Authors Amy L. Fairchild, Ronald Bayer, and James Colgrove situate the tension inherent in public health surveillance in a broad social and political context and show how the changing meaning and significance of privacy have marked the politics and practice of surveillance since the end of the nineteenth century.

Searching Eyes: Privacy, the State, and Disease Surveillance in America

How do we understand the world? While some look to the heavens for intelligent design, others argue that it is determined by information encoded in DNA. Science serves as an important activity for uncovering the processes and operations of nature, but it is also immersed in a social context where ideology influences the questions we ask and how we approach the material world. Biology Under the Influence: Dialectical Essays on the Coevolution of Nature and Society breaks from the confirms of determinism, offering a dialectical analysis for comprehending a dynamic social and natural world.

In Biology Under the Influence, Richard Lewontin and Richard Levins provide a devastating critique of genetic determinism and reductionism within science while exploring a broad range of issues including the nature of science, biology, evolution, the environment, pubic health, and dialectics, They dismantle the ideology that attempts to naturalize social inequalities, unveil the alienation of science and nature, and illustrate how a dialectical position serves as a basis for grappling with historical developments and a world characterized by change. Biology Under the Influence brings together the illuminating essays of two prominent scientists who work to demystify and empower the public's understanding of science and nature.

For many years, Lewontin has written for the New York Review of Books. In 1990, he responded to a review of Roger Penrose's "The Emperor's New Mind", in which he asks, ARE WE ROBOTS?

Maynard Smith again juxtaposes a "fact" about people with an assumption of motivation. "The people who are going to like this book best, however, will probably be those who don't understand it. As an evolutionary biologist, I have learned over the years that most people do not want to see themselves as lumbering robots programmed to ensure the survival of their genes."

Unless he has been carrying out a stratified sampling poll of Great Britain, John surely means "most literate and educated people, professors, students and people who write letters to the editors", since those are the people that he, and I, mostly know and hear from. But if what he says about them is true, then they are extraordinary masochists as well. They have made a best-seller out of The Selfish Gene in which the robot metaphor first appeared, and a popular intellectual figure and modest academic success out of its previously undistinguished author, Richard Dawkins.

With enemies like these, people have no need of friends. Of all the vulgar errors about biology presently circulating, the notion that we are "lumbering robots blindly programmed" by our genes which "control us body and mind" (Dawkins' original dictum) is surely the most popular by a long shot.

Biology Under the Influence: Dialectical Essays on Ecology, Agriculture, and Health

From best-selling author Donald A. Norman, the long-awaited sequel to The Design of Everyday Things: a critical look at the new dawn of "smart" technology, from smooth-talking GPS units to cantankerous refrigerators.

Donald A. Norman, a popular design consultant to car manufacturers, computer companies, and other industrial and design outfits, has seen the future and is worried. In this long-awaited follow-up to The Design of Everyday Things, he points out what's going wrong with the wave of products just coming on the market and some that are on drawing boards everywhere -- from "smart" cars and homes that seek to anticipate a user's every need, to the latest automatic navigational systems. Norman builds on this critique to offer a consumer-oriented theory of natural human-machine interaction that can be put into practice by the engineers and industrial designers of tomorrow's thinking machines. This is a consumer-oriented look at the perils and promise of the smart objects of the future, and a cautionary tale for designers of these objects--many of which are already in use or development.

The Design of Future Things

From Maja J Matarić:

The Robotics Primer offers a broadly accessible introduction to robotics for students at pre-university and university levels, robot hobbyists, and anyone interested in this burgeoning field. The text takes the reader from the most basic concepts (including perception and movement) to the most novel and sophisticated applications and topics (humanoids, shape-shifting robots, space robotics), with an emphasis on what it takes to create autonomous intelligent robot behavior. The core concepts of robotics are carried through from fundamental definitions to more complex explanations, all presented in an engaging, conversational style that will appeal to readers of different backgrounds.

The Robotics Primer covers such topics as the definition of robotics, the history of robotics ("Where do Robots Come From?"), robot components, locomotion, manipulation, sensors, control, control architectures, representation, behavior ("Making Your Robot Behave"), navigation, group robotics, learning, and the future of robotics (and its ethical implications). To encourage further engagement, experimentation, and course and lesson design, The Robotics Primer is accompanied by a free robot programming exercise workbook.

The Robotics Primer is unique as a principled, pedagogical treatment of the topic that is accessible to a broad audience; the only prerequisites are curiosity and attention. It can be used effectively in an educational setting or more informally for self-instruction. The Robotics Primer is a springboard for readers of all backgrounds--including students taking robotics as an elective outside the major, graduate students preparing to specialize in robotics, and K-12 teachers who bring robotics into their classrooms.

Praise for the book:

"As with electronics and then computers, the world is about to be transformed yet again by the age of robotics. Every age needs its technology to be adopted by smart kids and dedicated hobbyists to provide the tide of people who will carry out the transformation. The Robotics Primer is a bridge between academia and everyperson, and its readers will become the crucibles of the new age."
--Rodney Brooks, Director, MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab

"Dr. Mataric has made a complex subject accessible to students of all ages. Students can learn in conjunction with hands-on experience using the robot workbook available online. This primer and workbook will give the student a first glimpse at the incredible possibilities of robotics."
--Helen Greiner, Chairman and Co-founder of iRobot

"This book is a very enthusiastic introduction to robotics. It is an excellent textbook for anyone designing or taking an undergraduate introductory course, and great reading for those interested in learning about robots."
--Daniela Rus, Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science, MIT

The Robotics Primer (Intelligent Robotics and Autonomous Agents)

In follow-up to a recent thread about the author:

Love, marriage, and sex with robots? Not in a million years? Maybe a whole lot sooner. From a leading expert in artificial intelligence comes an eye-opening, superbly argued book that explores a new level of human intimacy and relationships—with robots.

From Pygmalion falling for his chiseled Galatea to Dr. Frankenstein marveling at his "modern Prometheus" to the man-meets-machine fiction of Philip K. Dick and Michael Crichton, humans have been enthralled by the possibilities of emotional relationships with their technological creations. Synthesizing cutting-edge research in robotics with the cultural history and psychology of artificial intelligence, Love and Sex with Robots explores this fascination and its far-reaching implications.

Using examples drawn from around the world, David Levy shows how automata have evolved from the mechanical marvels of centuries past to the electronic androids of the modern age, and how human interactions with technology have changed over the years. Along the way, Levy explores many aspects of human relationships—the reasons we fall in love, why we form emotional attachments to animals and to virtual pets such as the Tamagotchi, and why these same attachments could extend to love for robots. He also examines the needs we seek to fulfill through sexual relationships, tracking the development of life-sized dolls, machines, and other sexual devices, and demonstrating how society's ideas about what constitutes normal sex have changed—and will continue to change—as sexual technology becomes increasingly sophisticated.

Shocking but utterly convincing, Love and Sex with Robots provides insights that are surprisingly relevant to our everyday interactions with technology. This is science brought to life, and Levy makes a compelling and titillating case that the entities we once deemed cold and mechanical will soon become the objects of real companionship and human desire. Anyone reading the book with an open mind will find a wealth of fascinating material on this important new direction of intimate relationships, a direction that, before long, will be regarded as perfectly normal.

Author David Levy is President of the International Computer Games Association.

Love and Sex with Robots: The Evolution of Human-Robot Relationships