Monday, January 20, 2025

Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought AI to Google, Facebook, and the World

Cade Metz
online access from EBSCOhost Ebooks
online access from iRead eBook (in Chinese)
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"This colorful page-turner puts artificial intelligence into a human perspective. Through the lives of Geoff Hinton and other major players, Metz explains this transformative technology and makes the quest thrilling." (Walter Isaacson, author of The Code Breaker)

Recipient of starred reviews in both Kirkus and Library Journal

The Untold Tech Story of Our Time

What does it mean to be smart? To be human? What do we really want from life and the intelligence we have, or might create?

With deep and exclusive reporting, across hundreds of interviews, New York Times Silicon Valley journalist Cade Metz brings you into the rooms where these questions are being answered. Where an extraordinarily powerful new artificial intelligence has been built into our biggest companies, our social discourse, and our daily lives, with few of us even noticing.

Long dismissed as a technology of the distant future, artificial intelligence was a project consigned to the fringes of the scientific community. Then two researchers changed everything. One was a 64-year-old computer science professor who didn’t drive and didn’t fly because he could no longer sit down - but still made his way across North America for the moment that would define a new age of technology. The other was a 36-year-old neuroscientist and chess prodigy who laid claim to being the greatest game player of all time before vowing to build a machine that could do anything the human brain could do.

They took two very different paths to that lofty goal, and they disagreed on how quickly it would arrive. But both were soon drawn into the heart of the tech industry. Their ideas drove a new kind of arms race, spanning Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and OpenAI, a new lab founded by Silicon Valley kingpin Elon Musk. But some believed that China would beat them all to the finish line.

Genius Makers dramatically presents the fierce conflict among national interests, shareholder value, the pursuit of scientific knowledge, and the very human concerns about privacy, security, bias, and prejudice. Like a great Victorian novel, this world of eccentric, brilliant, often unimaginably yet suddenly wealthy characters draws you into the most profound moral questions we can ask. And like a great mystery, it presents the story and facts that lead to a core, vital question:

How far will we let it go?

(Excerpt from amazon.com)

透視我城:香港文學文化十二講

蔡益懷
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一個城巿有她的面相,還有內在的肌理,探究一個城巿的文化現象,除了看她的表相,還要掌握脈相,細察肌理。在這次的研究與教學中,集中探究了香港文學文化的一些熱點、焦點議題,如都巿性、現代性、本土性等,並以這些維度展開不同的扇面,對都巿文化空間、社會意識型態、集體記憶、族群意識與身份認同等現象展開論述。此外從不同的側面切入,以點帶面,探索香港文學文化的不同版塊與元素,如香港大眾文化中的忠義元素、生死愛欲、懷舊風潮、流行歌曲、居住空間、飲食文化等,以形成一張大致展現香港文學文化風貌的拼圖。

(摘錄自博客來網路書店)


Monday, January 13, 2025

Linguaphile: A Life of Language Love

Julie Sedivy
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A celebration of the beauty and mystery of language and how it shapes our lives, our loves, and our world.

If there is one feature that defines the human condition, it is language: written, spoken, signed, understood, and misunderstood, in all its infinite glory. In this ingenious, lyrical exploration, Julie Sedivy draws on years of experience in the lab and a lifetime of linguistic love to bring the discoveries of linguistics home, to the place language itself lives: within the yearnings of the human heart and amid the complex social bonds that it makes possible.

Linguaphile: A Life of Language Love follows the path that language takes through a human life―from an infant’s first attempts at sense-making to the vulnerabilities and losses that accompany aging. As Sedivy shows, however, language and life are inextricable, and here she offers them together: a childish misunderstanding of her mother’s meaning reveals the difficulty of relating to other minds; frustration with “professional” communication styles exposes the labyrinth of standards that define success; the first signs of hearing loss lead to a meditation on society’s discomfort with physical and mental limitations.

Part memoir, part scientific exploration, and part cultural commentary, this book epitomizes the thrills of a life steeped in the aesthetic delights of language and the joys of its scientific scrutiny.

(Excerpt from amazon.com)

被遺忘的香港管樂史

連家駿
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管樂,是首種傳入香港的西樂,在香港開埠時,便以軍樂形式來到香港,從此落地生根,蓬勃發展,在香港的音樂歷史中佔有重要的位置。然而,社會對管樂團的重視卻遠遠低於管弦樂團,以致在研究或社會上都會被忽視。

本書從歷史的角度,詳細記述管樂由香港成為英國殖民地至現在一百八十多年的發展,是首本完整而有系統地剖析香港及周邊地區管樂歷史的書籍。作者把這段歷史分為啟蒙時代、轉變時代及當代三大部分,並加入嶺南地區和南洋與香港管樂發展關係的部分,記錄不同時代的重要管樂團,並且仔細闡述社會和管樂的關係,包括政府、社區、學校對管樂的看法,同時觀察香港政治、文化政策、青年政策、教學方針等對管樂發展的影響,以小觀大,展現香港西洋音樂歷史的轉變。作者亦專訪了多位管樂界重要人物,以大量第一手資料及圖片,呈現香港管樂的歷史圖像。最後希望藉着探討本地管樂發展的難處和期望,為日後管樂的發展管理、演奏及研究,提供不同的思考 角度,具有極高的參考價值。

(摘錄自 cityu.edu.hk/upress)


Monday, January 6, 2025

The Logic of Information: A Theory of Philosophy as Conceptual Design

Luciano Floridi
online access from Ebook Central Academic Complete
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Luciano Floridi presents an innovative approach to philosophy, conceived as conceptual design. He explores how we make, transform, refine, and improve the objects of our knowledge. His starting point is that reality provides the data, to be understood as constraining affordances, and we transform them into information, like semantic engines. Such transformation or repurposing is not equivalent to portraying, or picturing, or photographing, or photocopying anything. It is more like cooking: the dish does not represent the ingredients, it uses them to make something else out of them, yet the reality of the dish and its properties hugely depend on the reality and the properties of the ingredients. Models are not representations understood as pictures, but interpretations understood as data elaborations, of systems. Thus, he articulates and defends the thesis that knowledge is design and philosophy is the ultimate form of conceptual design.

Although entirely independent of Floridi's previous books, The Philosophy of Information (OUP 2011) and The Ethics of Information (OUP 2013), The Logic of Information complements the existing volumes and presents new work on the foundations of the philosophy of information.

(Excerpt from amazon.com)

我們為何吃太多?全新的食慾科學與現代節食迷思 (Why We Eat (Too Much):)

安德魯‧詹金森 (Andrew Jenkinson)
online access from HyRead ebook
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給有志控制體重,但厭倦各種節食法的人。
已經吃很少了,為何身體卻覺得你吃很多,讓你越來越重?
不瞭解食慾和新陳代謝的科學,將無法擺脫反覆節食的輪迴!

蔡依橙醫師:「即使怎樣都瘦不下來,
也要搞清楚自己為什麼失敗!」(蔡依橙的閱讀筆記 板主)

「我可以減肥,但無法繼續減下去!」
為什麼飢餓感永遠是贏家?


我們都聽過這樣的黃金法則:少吃多運動就可以減肥。然而事情沒那麼簡單。減肥外科手術專家詹金森醫師在超過二十年的職涯中,治療過上千名陷入無止境減肥循環的肥胖症患者。本書結合他行醫時面對的實例,以及全新的新陳代謝科學研究,告訴你人體的食慾和代謝到底如何運作,你的身體如何決定你的體重。 這本書系統化地解釋為何「節食」如何適得其反。從脂肪被汙名化、植物油和加工食品的崛起,談到現代人攝取飲食中omega-3的不足、糖分的增加,都讓我們更加容易飢餓,並最終讓我們的體重設定點提高。作者探索了農業、製藥、人類學和醫學等各種領域,揭示我們不良的飲食習慣和日益嚴重的肥胖危機,背後隱藏的真相。

你可能也這樣想過……

•節食對我無效,我嘗試過所有節食方法,但最後體重比開始節食時更重。
•我只要看一眼奶油蛋糕就會變胖。
•我無法控制飢餓感,如果不吃飯我就會變得虛弱。

在這本書中,作者會為我們解釋以下幾件事:

•為何某些飲食建議會適得其反,讓減肥變得更加困難?
•為什麼體重越減越重?感覺被肥胖給困住了?
‧體重設定點是什麼?減肥的目的是下調體重設定點,該如何做?

作者帶領我們瞭解身體在能量代謝上的調節能力,這完全不像能量輸入和輸出那麼簡單。我們的環境、歷史和家庭背景中的各種因素,也會決定每個人最初的體重設定點,亦即設定為苗條、肥胖或其他。既然體重設定點是體重的主要控制因素,若能「識別」控制體重設定點的信號(從我們所吃食物類型及生活方式),我們的體重設定點及體重,便能真正處在自己的掌控之下。

幸好有這本深入探討最新的「食慾和人體能量代謝」科學的書,我們可以徹底改變自己與食物之間的關係,並開始停止透過激烈的節食減肥,而是從生活習慣和飲食習慣著手,真正達到降低體重設定點的目的。

(摘錄自博客來網路書店)