Work and Academic Politics

by William Humbert Form

In Work and Academic Politics: A Journeyman's Story, Form reflects on his own experience to provide an examplary intellectual autobiography against the background of modernity and change in America."--BOOK JACKET.

The Santee Canal

by Elizabeth Connor, Richard Dwight Porcher, Jr., William Robert Judd

2024 · Univ of South Carolina Press

A history of one of America's earliest canals and its impact on the people of the South Carolina Lowcountry Completed in 1800, the Santee Canal provided the first inland navigation route from the Upcountry of the South Carolina Piedmont to the port of Charleston and the Atlantic Ocean. By connecting the Cooper, Santee, Congaree, and Wateree rivers, the engineered waterway transformed the lives of many in the state and affected economic development in the Southeast region of the newly formed United States. In The Santee Canal, authors Elizabeth Connor, Richard Dwight Porcher Jr., and William Robert Judd provide an authoritative and richly illustrated history of one of America's first canals. Connor, Porcher, and Judd tell a comprehensive story of the canal's origins and history. Never-before published historical plans and maps, photographs from personal archives and field research, and technical drawings enhance the text, allowing readers to appreciate the development, evolution, and effect of the Santee Canal on the land and the people of South Carolina.

The Lost History of “Talking to Computers”

by William Meisel

2025 · Archway Publishing

Much science fiction has humans talking to computers, an early example being HAL in the movie 2001 in 1968. That vision motivated many people to attempt making the imagined technology real, including the author, who founded a company developing speech recognition technology in the 1980s. Speech recognition was an early part of Artificial Intelligence, computers doing a task that had previously been exclusive to humans, and proved to be more difficult than early pioneers expected. The Lost History of “Talking to Computers” documents 27 years of those efforts; the source of the history is the author’s 309 monthly issues of a newsletter tracking the hundreds of companies trying to make a business out of this challenging technology. Today, we talk to computers frequently on our smartphones (e.g., Apple’s Siri or Google Assistant) or to a home speaker (e.g., Amazon’s Alexa) and often when we telephone a customer service number. Most doctors use computer transcription of their notes for Electronic Healthcare Systems. Speech recognition is teaching how to speak a new language and finding specific content in a video file. How did we get here and where will it take us? What can we learn from this history that has implications for the huge investments in more general AI today? Readers will be amazed at how many companies were inspired by this challenge beginning more than three decades ago.