Search Results

“... cunningly, PageRank), one of Google’s founders and now once more its CEO; and his model, as Steven Levy explains in In the Plex, was the system of scholarly citation, by which journal articles and books are considered important if they are referred to by other important journal articles and books. Levy is big on ...”

“... where intuition and judgment come to the fore. ‘When I covered the Kasparov-Deep Blue match,’ Steven Levy has written, ‘I thought the drama came from a battle between computer and human. But it was really a story of people, with brutal capitalist impulse, teaming up with AI to destroy the confidence and dignity of the greatest champion the world ...”

“... lack of rigour of fractal geometry was the subject of fierce criticism in 1989 by a mathematician, Steven Krantz, who condemned its heavy use of ‘computer output’ and ‘pictures’ rather than conventional theorems and proofs. As the historians of economics Philip Mirowski and Esther-Mirjam Sent have shown, however, it’s Mandelbrot’s relations to ...”

“... consumer of his own propaganda. Whether Henry’s subjects shared his affection for war is, as Steven Gunn’s book shows, less certain. War was, however, central to the English experience, both in the practical sense that armies were sent frequently into battle, but also in the more amorphous sense that national identity was shaped by the memory of the ...”

“... standards and their enforcement are tools of statecraft. So too is the ability effectively to levy taxes – and to make visible their material and legitimate bases. The power of the British state, its capacity to wage war and extend empire in the 18th and 19th centuries, was dependent on excise taxes, and especially the excise on alcohol: government ran ...”

“... ideas before the public – Joseph Needham, J.B.S. Haldane, Julian Huxley, Lancelot Hogben, Hyman Levy and Polanyi’s Manchester colleague and political sparring partner, the physicist P.M.S. Blackett (the subject of one of Nye’s previous books). In 1939, the publication of The Social Function of Science by the charismatic crystallographer (and one-time ...”

“... At the end of the mangy, scrambling movie decade that gave us Robert Altman, Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese, there was nary a murmur from her (just imagine what she might have made of Elaine May’s Mikey and Nicky). We know from Nunez and others that Sontag boogied in Studio 54, and yet where was her disco inferno deep-think? Disco ...”

“... people caring for unwell or disabled family members – around one in ten of the population. Steven Forbes, who runs Leicester city’s adult social care services, pointed out to me that people with life-shortening inherited conditions like Down’s were experiencing the same lifespan-lengthening marvel as everyone else, except that in their ...”