Michael Swaine

A profile of the 44th President of the United States--his childhood in Hawaii, his college years at Columbia University and Harvard Law School, his career as a civil rights attorney and professor, all the way to the White House were he served two terms. This is the first available post-presidency biography of Barack Obama. Illustrations, index, glossary, further reading, quotes, and timeline included in all series titles.

Three nails for J. Robert Oppenheimer, more than half a century after the Manhattan Project.For Want of a Nail takes as its starting point a series of curious memoranda sent from J. Robert Oppenheimer's office in October 1943 and archived in the Los Alamos Historical Museum, in which the eminent scientist repeatedly requests a nail in the wall upon which he could hang his hat. The persistence and specificity of the request for this nail inspired the international art collective Futurefarmers to create, by hand (and after more than a half-century delay), three nails for the theoretical physicist: one forged from a meteorite, one cast using 1943 steel pennies, and a third made by re-fusing Trinitite, a material formed by residue from the Trinity nuclear bomb test.Growing out of a site-specific contribution to an exhibition in Santa Fe, New Mexico, this book engages the region's complex nuclear history as it relates to land use, resource extraction, and the far-reaching decisions that were made within the Manhattan Project. Throughout this multidisciplinary project, Futurefarmers constructs a narrative that runs parallel, and in some cases counter to, the conventional accounts of the Manhattan Project and Oppenheimer, its chief architect. Through video stills, production shots, essays, and interviews-presented in a book with uncut, unopened pages that the reader may cut to access more images-For Want of a Nail not only opens new ways to think about the region's particular atomic history, but also prompts more general reflections on how knowledge and narrative are embedded and communicated in material objects, both ephemeral and ancient.ContributorsPeter Galison, Patrick Kiley, Lucy Lippard, Megan Prelinger and Rick Prelinger, Anne Walsh

Explore functional programming and discover new ways of thinking about code. You know you need to master functional programming, but learning one functional language is only the start. In this book, through articles drawn from PragPub magazine and articles written specifically for this book, you'll explore functional thinking and functional style and idioms across languages. Led by expert guides, you'll discover the distinct strengths and approaches of Clojure, Elixir, Haskell, Scala, and Swift and learn which best suits your needs. Contributing authors: Rich Hickey, Stuart Halloway, Aaron Bedra, Michael Bevilacqua-Linn, Venkat Subramaniam, Paul Callaghan, Jose Valim, Dave Thomas, Natasha Murashev, Tony Hillerson, Josh Chisholm, and Bruce Tate. Functional programming is on the rise because it lets you write simpler, cleaner code, and its emphasis on immutability makes it ideal for maximizing the benefits of multiple cores and distributed solutions. So far nobody's invented the perfect functional language - each has its unique strengths. In Functional Programming: A PragPub Anthology, you'll investigate the philosophies, tools, and idioms of five different functional programming languages.See how Swift, the development language for iOS, encourages you to build highly scalable apps using functional techniques like map and reduce. Discover how Scala allows you to transition gently but deeply into functional programming without losing the benefits of the JVM, while with Lisp-based Clojure, you can plunge fully into the functional style. Learn about advanced functional concepts in Haskell, a pure functional language making powerful use of the type system with type inference and type classes. And see how functional programming is becoming more elegant and friendly with Elixir, a new functional language built on the powerful Erlang base.The industry has been embracing functional programming more and more, driven by the need for concurrency and parallelism. This collection of articles will lead you to mastering the functional approach to problem solving. So put on your explorer's hat and prepare to be surprised. The goal of exploration is always discovery.What You Need:Familiarity with one or more programming languages.

In the 1970s, while their contemporaries were protesting the computer as a tool of dehumanization and oppression, a motley collection of college dropouts, hippies, and electronics fanatics were engaged in something much more subversive. Obsessed with the idea of getting computer power into their own hands, they launched from their garages a hobbyist movement that grew into an industry, and ultimately a social and technological revolution. What they did was invent the personal computer: not just a new device, but a watershed in the relationship between man and machine. This is their story. Fire in the Valley is the definitive history of the personal computer, drawn from interviews with the people who made it happen, written by two veteran computer writers who were there from the start. Working at InfoWorld in the early 1980s, Swaine and Freiberger daily rubbed elbows with people like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates when they were creating the personal computer revolution. A rich story of colorful individuals, Fire in the Valley profiles these unlikely revolutionaries and entrepreneurs, such as Ed Roberts of MITS, Lee Felsenstein at Processor Technology, and Jack Tramiel of Commodore, as well as Jobs and Gates in all the innocence of their formative years. This completely revised and expanded third edition brings the story to its completion, chronicling the end of the personal computer revolution and the beginning of the post-PC era. It covers the departure from the stage of major players with the deaths of Steve Jobs and Douglas Engelbart and the retirements of Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer; the shift away from the PC to the cloud and portable devices; and what the end of the PC era means for issues such as personal freedom and power, and open source vs. proprietary software.

Describes Taiwan's foreign and defense policies and influences on them; assesses their implications for U.S. policy. Taiwan's foreign and defense policies have evolved greatly since the days of Chiang Kai-Shek. Its leaders have created a government based on popular sovereignty rather than Chinese nationalism; adopted pragmatic and creative approaches to expanding its international presence, and sought to make itself safe from attack or coercion by Mainland China through acquiring modern weapons, building a more efficient military, and developing closer military and political ties with the United States. China, in turn, has adopted a complex strategy of pressures and enticements to arrest Taiwan's moves toward greater independence. The United States and Japan also wield substantial influence over Taiwan's foreign and defense policies, but U.S. influence is clearly the dominant influence on Taiwan's decisions about theater ballistic missile defenses(-providing information and advice that will strongly shape the course of Taiwan's planning, procurement, and deployment. The authors conclude that the United States should continue to maintain a public allegiance to the "One China" concep

Spurred by a perceived growing ballistic missile threat from within the Asia-Pacific region and requests from the United States to support research and development on components of a missile defense system, the Japanese government decided in late 1998 and early 1999 to move forward with joint research and development with the United States on ballistic missile defense (BMD). This book explores both the benefits and potential problems of deploying a BMD system in Japan. It examines the main policies and actions undertaken thus far by Japan in the area of BMD, discusses several future milestones and likely next steps, and identifies the major Japanese individuals and organizations influencing future decisions on BMD. It also assesses how such issues as alliance maintenance, cost, feasibility, commercial incentives, and Chinese behavior are addressed by key Japanese players. It finds that, to date, Japan has undertaken no effort to develop or acquire a dedicated BMD system nor has it assessed in any thorough or systematic manner the larger political and strategic implications of a BMD system.More importantly, no consensus has yet emerged in favor of the development or deployment of a full-fledged BMD system in Japan. The book concludes that Japan could gradually acquire many of the elements of a BMD system while avoiding an explicit, formal deployment decision. The development or deployment of a complete BMD system with the United States, however, will likely pose many challenges to the U.S.-Japan alliance.