Author: Elizabeth Fay File Type: pdf The constant flow of people, ideas, and commodities across the Atlantic propelled the development of a public sphere and a transnational urban imaginary, influencing national and international cultural and political intersections and innovations. The contributors in Urban Identity and the Atlantic World explore the multiple ways in which a growing urban consciousness was integrated into the more cosmopolitan and transnational creation of an Atlantic public sphere. Wide-ranging, this volume brings together research using a variety of interdisciplinary approaches from social history to literary studies, and from indigenous studies and Africana studies to theatre history. **

Author: Ray Kurzweil File Type: pdf From Publishers WeeklyStarred Review. Renowned inventor Kurzweil (_The Age of Spiritual Machines_) may be technologys most credibly hyperbolic optimist. Elsewhere he has argued that eliminating fat intake can prevent cancer here, his quarry is the future of consciousness and intelligence. Humankind, it runs, is at the threshold of an epoch (the singularity, a reference to the theoretical limitlessness of exponential expansion) that will see the merging of our biology with the staggering achievements of GNR (genetics, nanotechnology and robotics) to create a species of unrecognizably high intelligence, durability, comprehension, memory and so on. The word unrecognizable is not chosen lightly wherever this is heading, it wont look like us. Kurzweils argument is necessarily twofold its not enough to argue that there are virtually no constraints on our capacity he must also convince readers that such developments are desirable. In essence, he conflates the wholesale transformation of the species with immortality, for which read a repeal of human limit. In less capable hands, this phantasmagoria of speculative extrapolation, which incorporates a bewildering variety of charts, quotations, playful Socratic dialogues and sidebars, would be easier to dismiss. But Kurzweil is a true scientista large-minded one at thatand gives due space both to the panoply of existential risks as he sees them and the many presumed lines of attack others might bring to bear. Whats arresting isnt the degree to which Kurzweils heady and bracing vision fails to convincegiven the scope of his projections, thats inevitablebut the degree to which it seems downright plausible. (Sept.) Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. FromKurzweil is one of the worlds most respected thinkers and entrepreneurs. Yet the thesis he posits in Singularity is so singular that many readers will be astoundedand perhaps skeptical. Think Blade Runner or Being John Malkovich magnified trillion-fold. Even if one were to embrace his techno-optimism, which he backs up with fascinating details, Kurzweil leaves some important questions relating to politics, economics, and morality unanswered. If machines in our bodies can rebuild cells, for example, why couldnt they be reengineered as weapons? Or think of singularity, notes the New York Times Book Review, as the Manhattan Project model of pure science without ethical constraints. Kurzweils vision requires technology, which we continue to build. But it also requires mass acceptance and faith. 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.