Building a Web Site with Ajax Visual Quickproject Guide Series or The Coming Convergence

Building a Web Site with Ajax [Visual Quickproject Guide Series]

Author: Larry Ullman

Ajax is at the heart of the Web 2.0 revolution. It isn't a technology but, rather, is a technique that leverages other technologies and techniques, such as CSS, XML, DHTML, and XHTML. Many Web designers and programmers would like to incorporate Ajax in their projects because of the amazing functionality it can add to a Web site, but they can't because of the steep learning curve. That's where this book steps in. It makes learning Ajax fun and easy -- a great place to start! Visual QuickProject Guides focus on a single project. In this case the project is creating a business employee directory, like an address book. What's being created is a better, new kind of Web site.

Look this: On Call in Hell or Handbook of International Migration

The Coming Convergence: The Surprising Ways Diverse Technologies Interact to Shape Our World and Change the Future

Author: Stanley Schmidt

Imagine direct communication links between the human brain and machines, or tailored materials capable of adapting by themselves to changing environmental conditions, or computer chips and environmental sensors embedded into everyday clothing, or medical technologies that eliminate currently untreatable conditions such as blindness and paralysis. Now imagine all of these developments occurring at the same time. The stuff of science fiction?
Not So. These are actually the reasonable predictions of scientists attempting to forecast a few decades into the future based on the rapid pace of innovation.
• Author Stanley Schmidt-a physicist, a writer, and the editor of Analog: Science Fiction and Fact-explores these and many more amazing yet probable scenarios in this fascinating guide to the near future. He shows how past convergences have led to today's world, then considers tomorrow's main currents in biotechnology, cognitive science, information technology, and nanotechnology. Looking even further downstream he foresees both exciting and potentially dangerous developments:

• Longer, healthier lives
• Cheap, generally available food, energy, and technology
• Reduced pollution and environmental stress
• Economic disruption during transitional periods
• Excessive power in too few hands
• Increased vulnerability from overdependence on technology.

Schmidt notes that even a routine technology such as the CAT scan is the result of three wholly separate innovations started many decades ago which recently converged: the X-ray, the computer, and advances in medicine. On a more ominous note, he also observes that the9/11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center was made possible by the malicious convergence of two separate trends in modern engineering and technology: the concentration of people in high rises within cities and the success of the passenger airline industry.
The message is clear: the choices we make now will converge to create a near and distant future that will be almost unbelievably wonderful or unimaginably catastrophic, or both. This knowledgeable, fascinating glimpse into the future is a must read for everyone interested in technology, upcoming innovations in business, science fiction, and the future.

Publishers Weekly

It's far easier to describe the past than to predict the future: this principle is unwittingly demonstrated by Schmidt, a physicist and longtime science fiction editor (Analog: Science Fiction and Fact). His book is best when discussing how past technologies have come together, usually in unforeseen ways, to enable social change. Joseph-Marie Jacquard's late-18th-century work on automatic looms controlled by punch cards, for example, can be traced forward to the development of early computers. Schmidt is glib but far less informative when projecting where the confluence of current technologies is likely to take us. He touches on nanotechnology and improvements in computing power, among other fields, and offers projections about how medicine, communication and interpersonal relationships are apt to change, but he largely does so superficially and perhaps overly optimistically: "In the kind of world we can aspire to, everybody will have enough and nobody will have to work very hard to get it." Though he acknowledges that some convergences can be harmful, he dismisses this downside with equal ease, concluding simply that we need to be vigilant about the choices we make. Illus. (Apr.)

Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information

Table of Contents:

Foreword     9
Acknowledgments     13
Introduction: Converging Currents: Then, Now, and Tomorrow     15
From Fabric Looms to the Internet: The Story of Computing     31
Aviation and Big Buildings     49
New Arts and Sciences     69
Looking Inside: New Technologies and Medicine     87
Computers and Genes     101
New Directions in Biotechnology     115
Cognitive Science: How Do We Know?     129
The Explosion in Information Technology     147
Nanotechnology     173
Metaconvergences: When Big Streams Make Still Bigger Streams     185
Potentials and Promises     215
Pitfalls and Perils     223
Getting There from Here: Challenges and Strategies     235
Notes     247
Index     263