Books about Gelernter from Amazon.com

Why did the Victorians drape their buildings in elaborately ornate decoration? Why was the Arts and Crafts movement so popular with the American middle class at the end of the 19th century? Why did Modernism replace traditional architectural styles after World War II? Mark Gelernter provides fresh answers to questions like these, convincingly showing how buildings express powerful cultural forces.

Embodying deeply felt attitudes about fundamental issues, buildings express our relationship with nature, our social relations with others, the importance of the individual, the value of science and technology, and our political role in the world. He explains how designers sometimes expressed these ideas with available building technologies, while at other times they invented new technologies in order to realize new ideas. Each of the ten chronological chapters, accompanied by almost 300 photographs, drawings, and maps, begins with a broad survey of the dominant cultural forces and technologies, and then discusses how designers of the day responded with particular architectural forms..
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What does it mean to “believe” in America? Why do we always speak of our country as having a mission or purpose that is higher than other nations?
Modern liberals have invested a great deal in the notion that America was founded as a secular state, with religion relegated to the private sphere. David Gelernter argues that America is not secular at all, but a powerful religious idea—indeed, a religion in its own right.
Gelernter argues that what we have come to call “Americanism” is in fact a secular version of Zionism. Not the Zionism of the ancient Hebrews, but that of the Puritan founders who saw themselves as the new children of Israel, creating a new Jerusalem in a new world. Their faith-based ideals of liberty, equality, and democratic governance had a greater influence on the nation’s founders than the Enlightenment.
Gelernter traces the development of the American religion from its roots in the Puritan Zionism of seventeenth-century New England to the idealistic fighting faith it has become, a militant creed dedicated to spreading freedom around the world. The central figures in this process were Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson, who presided over the secularization of the American Zionist idea into the form we now know as Americanism.
If America is a religion, it is a religion without a god, and it is a global religion. People who believe in America live all over the world. Its adherents have included oppressed and freedom-loving peoples everywhere—from the patriots of the Greek and Hungarian revolutions to the martyred Chinese dissidents of Tiananmen Square.
Gelernter also shows that anti-Americanism, particularly the virulent kind that is found today in Europe, is a reaction against this religious conception of America on the part of those who adhere to a rival religion of pacifism and appeasement.
A startlingly original argument about the religious meaning of America and why it is loved—and hated—with so much passion at home and abroad.

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Technology doesn't flow smoothly; it's the big surprises that matter, and Yale computer expert David Gelernter sees one such giant leap right on the horizon Today's small scale software programs are about to be joined by vast public software works that will revolutionize computing and transform society as a whole. One such vast program is the "Mirror World."
Imagine looking at your computer screen and seeing reality--an image of your city, for instance, complete with moving traffic patterns, or a picture that sketches the state of an entire far-flung corporation at this second. These representations are called Mirror Worlds, and according to Gelernter they will soon be available to everyone. Mirror Worlds are high-tech voodoo dolls: by interacting with the images, you interact with reality. Indeed, Mirror Worlds will revolutionize the use of computers, transforming them from (mere) handy tools to crystal balls which will allow us to see the world more vividly and see into it more deeply. Reality will be replaced gradually, piece-by-piece, by a software imitation; we will live inside the imitation; and the surprising thing is--this will be a great humanistic advance. We gain control over our world, plus a huge new measure of insight and vision.
In this fascinating book--part speculation, part explanation--Gelernter takes us on a tour of the computer technology of the near future. Mirror Worlds, he contends, will allow us to explore the world in unprecedented depth and detail without ever changing out of our pajamas. A hospital administrator might wander through an entire medical complex via a desktop computer. Any citizen might explore the performance of the local schools, chat electronically with teachers and other Mirror World visitors, plant software agents to report back on interesting topics; decide to run for the local school board, hire a campaign manager, and conduct the better part of the campaign itself--all by interacting with the Mirror World.
Gelernter doesn't just speculate about how this amazing new software will be used--he shows us how it will be made, explaining carefully and in detail how to build a Mirror World using technology already available. We learn about "disembodied machines," "trellises," "ensembles," and other computer components which sound obscure, but which Gelernter explains using familiar metaphors and terms. (He tells us that a Mirror World is a microcosm just like a Japanese garden or a Gothic cathedral, and that a computer program is translated by the computer in the same way a symphony is translated by a violinist into music.)
Mirror Worlds offers a lucid and humanistic account of the coming software revolution, told by a computer scientist at the cutting edge of his field..
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Gelernter's lyrical rant on the critical role of beauty and aesthetics in computer technology comes just in time. Computer engineers and designers, who create software that is bloated with seldom-used features and that intrusively draws our attention to it rather than the task at hand, could greatly benefit from the pursuit of what Gelernter calls "deep beauty," the marriage of power and simplicity.

Gelernter suggests that the dichotomy between art/beauty and science/technology has led to inadequate academic training of computer-science students. He points out that the greatest minds in science and industry have always pursued beauty. "Machine beauty is the driving force behind technology and science," he says, and yet "beauty bothers us." Somehow it's perceived to be softer and less rigorous to train computer scientists in art, music, architecture, and design. However, Gelernter sees these disciplines as closely aligned with the mathematics and science that are the foundation of technology. Because of this lack of aesthetic education, much user interface has been poorly designed.

Gelernter's persuasive arguments are far-reaching as he casts a shrewd eye on everything from postmodernism to architecture to the nature of beauty itself. This short, often witty book is written by someone who has paid a price for his opinion--Gelernter was a target of the Unabomber and was critically injured in a mail-bomb attack in 1993..
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This book is a strange beast: a meditation on the meaning of the 1939 New York World's Fair seen through the lens of David Gelernter's angry political opinion that society today has gone to moral rot and ruin--mostly because of the ideas of New York-style liberals, who have led us astray. Richly detailed observations of the 1939 World's Fair and its social milieu are interspersed with a rather sparse fictional account of an old-fashioned romance that got its fuse lit on the fairgrounds. If you want a straightforward 1939 World's Fair novel, the classic is still World's Fair, by E. L. Doctorow. But Gelernter writes likes nobody else. His historical research is painstaking, and his pro-1939, anti-modern political jeremiad gives the book an eccentric but propulsive narrative drive. Gelernter has a qualified love of two-fisted old-time social engineers, such as Robert Moses, and he yearns for a time when society was ruled by authority figures instead of celebrities. Ah, the good old days, when the 1939 World's Fair introduced America to TV, the fax machine, nylons, fluorescent lighting, long-distance phone calls, and an underwater Salvador Dali exhibit starring live, half-nude women. Gelernter wrote this book while recovering from a murder attempt by the Unabomber (recounted in Gelernter's Drawing Life), but his true claim to fame is the cranky individualism of his mind..
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When most of us think of Artificial Intelligence, we separate the notion of emotion from our imaginings And portrayals of the likely consequences of emotions in computers invariably suggest that there would be a systemic breakdown in the computer's functionality. For example, it is the childish emotionalism of HAL in 2001 that wreaked havoc, not its superhuman intellectual capacity.

Gelertner, esteemed CS professor of AI at Yale University, has written a fascinating book on why it may be absolutely necessary to create emotionality if there is to be true Artificial Intelligence. My father used to say, "If there's Artificial Intelligence, there's bound to be artificial stupidity"; Gelertner would say, "without artificial emotionalism, there cannot be Artificial Intelligence.".
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In 1993, Yale computer science professor David Gelernter opened what he thought was an unsolicited doctoral dissertation It exploded, destroying his right hand and eye and making his torso resemble a construction site. Gelernter, bleeding and "royally annoyed," walked to the local hospital, keeping his feet trudging along in time with "an old Zionist marching song with a good strong beat." When he got there, his blood pressure measured zero and surgeons barely saved his life. "Music is useful," Gelernter observes.

While doctors rebuilt Gelernter, he published three books. In this one, Gelernter talks about getting blown up and sewn up and vehemently argues that society is losing its lifeblood--its belief in moral authority. He blames this on the takeover of the national mindset by the liberal intellectual elite, whose anything-goes ethic has silenced the drumbeat of tradition that used to keep us all in line. Though he doesn't directly blame the intellectual liberals for the Unabomber's actions, he does locate the madman on a continuum of modern social degradation. Drawing Life is an impassioned, not tightly reasoned argument and will make few converts to Gelernter's brand of conservatism. It's interesting as all get out though, with lots of clever lines and quirky insights. It's a good thing the Unabomber didn't silence Gelernter--a stubborn mind is a terrible thing to waste..
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This digital document is an article from Information Outlook, published by Thomson Gale on December 1, 2005. The length of the article is 7403 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Loss Prevention Strategies for the 21st Century Library: why theft prevention should be high priority.(Security)(Cover Story)
Author: Judith Gelernter
Publication:Information Outlook (Magazine/Journal)
Date: December 1, 2005
Publisher: Thomson Gale
Volume: 9 Issue: 12 Page: 12(9)

Article Type: Cover Story

Distributed by Thomson Gale.
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