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• 
  

• 
  Bering Strait bridge
  A Bering Strait crossing is a hypothetical bridge or tunnel spanning the relatively narrow and shallow Bering Strait between the Chukotka Peninsula in Russia and the Seward Peninsula in the U.S. state of Alaska. In principle, the bridge or tunnel would provide an overland connection linking Asia with North America, although there is little infrastructure in the nearby parts of Alaska and Russia.
  Since the two Diomede Islands are between the peninsulas, the Bering Strait could be spanned by three bridges. Two long bridges, each almost 40 kilometres (25 mi) long, would connect the mainland on each side to one island, and a third much shorter one between the two islands, giving a total distance of about 80 kilometres (50 mi). Such length is not unprecedented, as the two long bridges each would be shorter than the 41.58-kilometre (25.84 mi) Jiaozhou Bay Bridge, currently the longest sea-crossing bridge in the world. However, the construction of a Bering Strait crossing would face exceptional political, engineering, and financial hurdles.
  
  wn.com/Bering_Strait_bridge
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  Berkeley, California
  Berkeley ( /ˈbɜrkliː/ BURK-lee) is a city on the east shore of the San Francisco Bay in Northern California, United States. Its neighbors to the south are the cities of Oakland and Emeryville. To the north is the city of Albany and the unincorporated community of Kensington. The eastern city limits coincide with the county line (bordering Contra Costa County), which generally follows the ridge line of the Berkeley Hills. Berkeley is located in northern Alameda County. The population was 112,580 at the 2010 census. The city is named after Bishop George Berkeley.
  Berkeley is the site of the University of California, Berkeley, the oldest of the University of California system, and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. It is also home to the Graduate Theological Union. The city is noted as one of the most politically liberal in the nation, with one study placing it as the third most liberal city in the United States.
  The site of today's City of Berkeley was the territory of the Chochenyo/Huchiun band of the Ohlone people when the first Europeans arrived. Evidence of their existence in the area include pits in rock formations, which they used to grind acorns, and a shellmound, now mostly leveled and covered up, along the shoreline of San Francisco Bay at the mouth of Strawberry Creek. Other artifacts were discovered in the 1950s in the downtown area during remodeling of a commercial building, near the upper course of the creek.
  
  wn.com/Berkeley,_California
• 
  Delta Works
  The Delta Works is a series of construction projects in the southwest of the Netherlands to protect a large area of land around the Rhine-Meuse-Scheldt delta from the sea. The works consist of dams, sluices, locks, dikes, levees, and storm surge barriers. The aim of the dams, sluices, and storm surge barriers was to shorten the Dutch coastline, thus reducing the number of dikes that had to be raised.
  Along with the Zuiderzee Works, Delta Works have been declared one of the Seven Wonders of the Modern World by the American Society of Civil Engineers.
  The estuaries of the rivers Rhine, Meuse and Scheldt have been subject to flooding over the centuries. After building the Afsluitdijk, the Dutch started studying the damming of the Rhine-Meuse Delta. Plans were developed for shortening the coastline and turning the delta into a group of freshwater lakes. By shortening the coastline fewer dikes would have to be reinforced.
  Due to indecision and the Second World War, little action was taken. In 1950 two small estuary mouths, the Brielse Gat near Brielle and the Botlek near Vlaardingen were dammed. After the North Sea flood of 1953, a commission was installed which had to come up with a plan to research the causes and seek measures to prevent such disasters in future. They revised some of the old plans and came up with the so called "Deltaplan".
  
  wn.com/Delta_Works
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  Ethiopia
  Ethiopia ( /ˌiːθiˈoʊpiə/) (Ge'ez: ኢትዮጵያ ʾĪtyōṗṗyā), officially known as the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, is a landlocked country located in the Horn of Africa. It is the second-most populous nation in Africa, with over 82 million inhabitants, and the tenth largest by area, occupying 1,100,000 km². Ethiopia is bordered by Eritrea to the north, Djibouti and Somalia to the east, Sudan and South Sudan to the west, and Kenya to the south. With its capital at Addis Ababa, it is also the most populous landlocked nation in the world.
  Ethiopia was a monarchy for most of its history, and the Ethiopian dynasty traces its roots to the 2nd century BC. Ethiopia is also one of the oldest sites of human existence known to scientists today, having yielded some of humanity's oldest traces. It may be the region from which Homo sapiens first set out for the Middle East and points beyond. Alongside Rome, Persia, China and India, the Ethiopian Aksum Empire was considered one of the great world powers of the 3rd century. During the Scramble for Africa, Ethiopia was the only African country beside Liberia that retained its sovereignty as a recognized independent country, and was one of only four African members of the League of Nations. After a brief period of Italian occupation, Ethiopia became a charter member of the United Nations. When other African nations received their independence following World War II, many of them adopted the colors of Ethiopia's flag, and Addis Ababa became the location of several international organizations focused on Africa.
  
  wn.com/Ethiopia
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  Iraq
  Iraq (/ɪˈræk/ or ⁱ/ɪˈrɑːk/; Arabic: العراق‎ al-‘Irāq); officially the Republic of Iraq (Arabic:  جمهورية العراق (help·info) Jumhūriyyat al-‘Irāq), is a country in Western Asia spanning most of the northwestern end of the Zagros mountain range, the eastern part of the Syrian Desert and the northern part of the Arabian Desert.
  Iraq borders Syria to the northwest, Turkey to the north, Iran to the east, Jordan to the southwest and Kuwait and Saudi Arabia to the south. Iraq has a narrow section of coastline measuring 58 km (36 mi) on the northern Persian Gulf. The capital city, Baghdad is in the center-east of the country.
  Two major rivers, the Tigris and Euphrates, run through the center of Iraq, flowing from northwest to southeast. These provide Iraq with agriculturally capable land and contrast with the steppe and desert landscape that covers most of Western Asia.
  Historically, Iraq was the center of the Abbasid Arabic Islamic Empire. Iraq has been known to the west by the Greek toponym 'Mesopotamia' (Land between the rivers) and has been home to continuous successive civilizations since the 6th millennium BC. The region between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers is often referred to as the cradle of civilization and the birthplace of writing, law and the wheel. At different periods in its history, Iraq was the center of the indigenous Akkadian, Sumerian, Assyrian, Babylonian, and Abbasid empires. It was also part of the Achaemenid, Hellenistic, Parthian, Sassanid, Roman, Rashidun, Umayyad, Mongol, Safavid, Afsharid, and Ottoman empires, and under British control as a League of Nations mandate.
  
  wn.com/Iraq
• Palomar College
  Palomar College is a community college with one campus and six education sites in San Diego County, California, United States. The main campus is located in San Marcos, while the six education sites are located elsewhere throughout north San Diego County. The largest of these is the education center located in Escondido. Other education sites are located at Camp Pendleton, Mt. Carmel High School, Fallbrook High School, the Pauma Indian Reservation, and at Ramona High School.
  The Palomar Community College District's facilities improvement measure, Proposition M, was passed by 57% of voters in the November 8, 2006 General Election. As a result, the $694 million provided by the measure, as well as over $200 million in matching funds from the State and an additional $37 million from Proposition 1D, will provide for the implementation of the college's Master Plan 2022.
  In 2009, the college developed an "Integrated Planning, Evaluation, and Resource Allocation Decision-Making Model (IPM). This IPM aligns the college's long-range Master Plan, its mid-range Strategic Plan, and its short-range Program Review and Planning processes while also incorporating the new Resource Allocation Model (RAM).
  
  wn.com/Palomar_College
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  Panama Canal
  The Panama Canal (Spanish: Canal de Panamá) is an 82-kilometre (51 mi) ship canal in Panama that connects the Atlantic Ocean (via the Caribbean Sea) to the Pacific Ocean. The canal cuts across the Isthmus of Panama and is a key conduit for international maritime trade.
  Work on the canal, which began in 1880, was completed in 1914, making it no longer necessary for ships to sail the lengthy Cape Horn route around the southernmost tip of South America and to navigate the dangerous waters of the Strait of Magellan. One of the largest and most difficult engineering projects ever undertaken, the Panama Canal shortcut made it possible for ships to travel between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans in half the time previously required. The shorter, faster, safer route to the U.S. West Coast and to nations in and along the Pacific Ocean allowed those places to become more integrated with the world economy.
  Ownership of the territory that is now the Panama Canal was first Colombian, then French and then American before coming under the control of the Panamanian government in 1999. The Panama Canal has seen annual traffic rise from about 1,000 ships when it opened in 1914, to 14,702 vessels in 2008, the latter measuring a total of 309.6 million Panama Canal/Universal Measurement System (PC/UMS) tons. By 2008, more than 815,000 vessels had passed through the canal, many of them much larger than the original planners could have envisioned; the largest ships that can transit the canal today are called Panamax. The American Society of Civil Engineers has named the Panama Canal one of the seven wonders of the modern world.
  
  wn.com/Panama_Canal
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  Suez Canal
  The Suez Canal (Arabic: قناة السويس‎ Qanāt al-Sūwais), also known by the nickname "The Highway to India", is an artificial sea-level waterway in Egypt, connecting the Mediterranean Sea and the Red Sea. Opened in November 1869 after 10 years of construction work, it allows transportation by water between Europe and Asia without navigation around Africa. The northern terminus is Port Said and the southern terminus is Port Tawfik at the city of Suez. Ismailia lies on its west bank, 3 km (1.9 mi) north of the half-way point.
  When first built, the canal was 164 km (102 mi) long and 8 m (26 ft) deep. After multiple enlargements, the canal is 193.30 km (120.11 mi) long, 24 m (79 ft) deep and 205 metres (673 ft) wide as of 2010. It consists of the northern access channel of 22 km/14 mi, the canal itself of 162.25 km/100.82 mi and the southern access channel of 9 km/5.6 mi.
  The canal is single lane with passing places in Ballah By-Pass and in the Great Bitter Lake. It contains no locks; seawater flows freely through the canal. In general, the canal north of the Bitter Lakes flows north in winter and south in summer. The current south of the lakes changes with the tide at Suez.
  
  wn.com/Suez_Canal
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  Uruk
  Coordinates: 31°19′20″N 45°38′10″E / 31.32222°N 45.63611°E / 31.32222; 45.63611 Uruk (Cuneiform: 𒌷𒀔,^URU UNUG; Sumerian: Unug; Akkadian: Uruk; Aramaic: Erech; Hebrew: Erech; Greek: Ὀρχόη Orchoē, Ὠρύγεια Ōrugeia; Arabic: وركاء‎, Warkā') was an ancient city of Sumer and later Babylonia, situated east of the present bed of the Euphrates river, on the ancient dry former channel of the Euphrates River, some 30 km east of modern As-Samawah, Al-Muthannā, Iraq.
  Uruk gave its name to the Uruk period, the protohistoric Chalcolithic to Early Bronze Age period in the history of Mesopotamia spanning c. 4000 to 3100 BC, succeeded by the Jemdet Nasr period of Sumer proper. Uruk played a leading role in the early urbanization of Sumer in the mid 4th millennium BC. At its height c 2900 BC, Uruk probably had 50,000–80,000 residents living in 6 km² of walled area; making it the largest city in the world at the time. The semi-mythical king Gilgamesh, according to the chronology presented in the Sumerian king list, ruled Uruk in the 27th century BC. The city lost its prime importance around 2000 BC, in the context of the struggle of Babylonia with Elam, but it remained inhabited throughout the Seleucid and Parthian periods until it was finally abandoned shortly before or after the Islamic conquest.
  
  wn.com/Uruk

• Albert Borgmann
  Albert Borgmann (born 1937) is an American philosopher, specializing in the philosophy of technology. He was born in Freiburg, Germany, and is a professor of philosophy at the University of Montana.
  Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life (1984) contributed to the emerging philosophical discussions of issues surrounding modern technology. Following a Heideggerian viewpoint, Borgmann introduced the notion of the device paradigm to explain what constitutes technology's essence loosely based on Heidegger's notion of Gestell (enframing). The book explores the limitations of conventional ways of thinking about technology and its social context, both liberal democratic ideals and Marxist lines of thought.
  Crossing the Postmodern Divide (1992) is a techno-religious book characterized in terms of hyperreality and hyperactivity. Hyperactivity is usually described as a pathological syndrome of the child and workaholic, and associated with the familiar symptoms of stress and overwork. Borgmann extends the concept of hyperactivity to society as a whole, and defines it as "a state of mobilization where the richness and variety of social and cultural pursuits, and the natural pace of daily life, have been suspended to serve a higher, urgent cause" (p. 14). Christopher Lasch sees this as a kind of militarization of society – "the suspension of civility, the rule of the vanguard, and the subordination of civilians." Meanwhile critics such as Douglas Kellner have challenged Borgmann's distinction between the real and hyperreal and his denigration of hyperreality as problematic.
  
  wn.com/Albert_Borgmann
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  Aldous Huxley
  Aldous Leonard Huxley (26 July 1894 – 22 November 1963) was an English writer and one of the most prominent members of the famous Huxley family. Best known for his novels including Brave New World and a wide-ranging output of essays, Huxley also edited the magazine Oxford Poetry, and published short stories, poetry, travel writing, film stories and scripts. Huxley spent the later part of his life in the United States, living in Los Angeles from 1937 until his death.
  Aldous Huxley was a humanist, pacifist, and satirist, and he was latterly interested in spiritual subjects such as parapsychology and philosophical mysticism. He is also well known for advocating and taking psychedelics.
  By the end of his life Huxley was widely recognized to be one of the pre-eminent intellectuals of his time and respected as an important researcher into visual communication and sight-related theories as well.
  Aldous Huxley was born in Godalming, Surrey, UK, in 1894. He was the third son of the writer and schoolmaster Leonard Huxley and his first wife, Julia Arnold, who founded Prior's Field School. Julia was the niece of poet and critic Matthew Arnold and the sister of Mrs. Humphrey Ward. Aldous was the grandson of Thomas Henry Huxley, the zoologist, agnostic and controversialist ("Darwin's Bulldog"). His brother Julian Huxley and half-brother Andrew Huxley also became outstanding biologists. Aldous had another brother, Noel Trevelyan (1891–1914), who committed suicide after a period of clinical depression.
  
  wn.com/Aldous_Huxley
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  Anthony Burgess
  John Burgess Wilson (25 February 1917 – 22 November 1993) – who published under the pen name Anthony Burgess – was an English author, poet, playwright, composer, linguist, translator and critic.
  The dystopian satire A Clockwork Orange is Burgess's most famous novel, though he dismissed it as one of his lesser works. It was adapted into a highly controversial 1971 film by Stanley Kubrick, which Burgess said was chiefly responsible for the popularity of the book. Burgess produced numerous other novels, including the Enderby quartet, and Earthly Powers. He was a prominent critic, writing acclaimed studies of classic writers such as William Shakespeare, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence and Ernest Hemingway. In 2008, The Times placed Burgess number 17 on their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945". Burgess was an accomplished musician and linguist. He composed over 250 musical works, including a first symphony around age 18, wrote a number of libretti, and translated, among other works, Cyrano de Bergerac, Oedipus the King and Carmen.
  
  wn.com/Anthony_Burgess
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  Bernard Stiegler
  Bernard Stiegler (born 1 April 1952, Seine-et-Oise) is a French philosopher at Goldsmiths, University of London and at the Université de Technologie de Compiègne. In addition, he is Director of the Institut de recherche et d'innovation (IRI), founder in 2005 of the political and cultural group, Ars Industrialis, and founder in 2010 of the philosophy school, Ecole de Philosophie d’Epineuil-le-Fleuriel. His best known work is Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus.
  Stiegler's work is influenced by, among others, Sigmund Freud, André Leroi-Gourhan, Gilbert Simondon, Friedrich Nietzsche, Paul Valéry, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Jacques Derrida.
  Key themes are technology, time, individuation, consumerism, consumer capitalism, technological convergence, digitization, Americanization, and the future of politics and human society.
  Between 1978 and 1983 Stiegler was incarcerated for armed robbery, first at the Prison Saint-Michel in Toulouse, and then at the Centre de détention in Muret. It was during this period that he became interested in philosophy, studying it by correspondence with Gérard Granel at the Université de Toulouse-Le-Mirail. His transformation in prison is recounted in his book, Passer à l’acte (2003; the English translation of this work is included in the 2009 volume, Acting Out).
  
  wn.com/Bernard_Stiegler
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  Faust
  Faust is the protagonist of a classic German legend; a highly successful scholar, but also dissatisfied with his life, and so makes a deal with the devil, exchanging his soul for unlimited knowledge and worldly pleasures. Faust's tale is the basis for many literary, artistic, cinematic, and musical works.
  The meaning of the word and name has been reinterpreted through the ages. Faust, and the adjective faustian, are often used to describe an arrangement in which an ambitious person surrenders moral integrity in order to achieve power and success: the proverbial "deal with the devil".
  The Faust of early books—as well as the ballads, dramas, movies and puppet-plays which grew out of them—is irrevocably damned because he prefers human to divine knowledge; "he laid the Holy Scriptures behind the door and under the bench, refused to be called doctor of Theology, but preferred to be styled doctor of Medicine".
  Plays and comic puppet theatre loosely based on this legend were popular throughout Germany in the 16th century, often reducing Faust and Mephistopheles to figures of vulgar fun. The story was popularised in England by Christopher Marlowe, who gave it a classic treatment in his play, The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus. In Goethe's reworking of the story 200 years later, Faust becomes a dissatisfied intellectual who yearns for "more than earthly meat and drink".
  
  wn.com/Faust
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  Francis Fukuyama
  Yoshihiro Francis Fukuyama (born October 27, 1952) is an American political scientist, political economist, and author.
  He is best known for his book The End of History and the Last Man (1992), which argued that the worldwide spread of liberal democracies and free market capitalism of the West and its lifestyle may signal the end point of humanity's sociocultural evolution and become the final form of human government. However, his subsequent book "Trust: Social Virtues and Creation of Prosperity" (1995) modified his earlier position to acknowledge that culture cannot be cleanly separated from economics. Fukuyama is also associated with the rise of the neoconservative movement, from which he has since distanced himself.
  Fukuyama is a Senior Fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford University. Before that he served as a professor and director of the International Development program at the School of Advanced International Studies of the Johns Hopkins University.
  
  wn.com/Francis_Fukuyama
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  Frank Popper
  Frank Popper (born 1918) is a historian of art and technology and Professor Emeritus of Aesthetics and the Science of Art at the University of Paris VIII. He has been decorated with the medal of the Légion d'honneur by the French Government. He is author of the books: Origins and Development of Kinetic Art, Art, Action, and Participation, Art of the Electronic Age and From Technological to Virtual Art.
  Popper documents the historical record of the relationship between technology and participatory forms of art, especially between the late 1960s and the early 1990s. Sharing his focus on art and technology are Jack Burnham (Beyond Modern Sculpture 1968) and Gene Youngblood (Expanded Cinema 1970). They show how art has become, in Frank Popper's terms, virtualized.
  In his books 'Origins and Development of Kinetic Art' and 'Art, Action and Participation', Popper showed how Kinetic Art played an important part in pioneering the unambiguous use of optical movement and in fashioning links between science, technology, art and the environment. Popper has been a champion of the humanizing effects of such an interdisciplinary synthesis.
  
  wn.com/Frank_Popper
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  George Orwell
  Eric Arthur Blair (25 June 1903 – 21 January 1950), better known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English novelist and journalist. His work is marked by keen intelligence and wit, a profound awareness of social injustice, an intense opposition to totalitarianism, a passion for clarity in language and a belief in democratic socialism.
  Considered perhaps the 20th century's best chronicler of English culture, Orwell wrote literary criticism, poetry, fiction and polemical journalism. He is best known for the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) and the allegorical novella Animal Farm (1945), which together have sold more copies than any two books by any other 20th-century author. His book Homage to Catalonia (1938), an account of his experiences in the Spanish Civil War, is widely acclaimed, as are his numerous essays on politics, literature, language and culture. In 2008, The Times ranked him second on a list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".
  Orwell's influence on popular and political culture endures, and several of his neologisms, along with the term Orwellian—a byword for totalitarian or manipulative social practices—have entered the vernacular.
  
  wn.com/George_Orwell
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  Goethe
  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (German pronunciation: [ˈjoːhan ˈvɔlfɡaŋ fɔn ˈɡøːtə] ( listen), 28 August 1749 – 22 March 1832) was a German writer, pictorial artist, biologist, theoretical physicist, and polymath. He is considered the supreme genius of modern German literature. His works span the fields of poetry, drama, prose, philosophy, and science. His Faust has been called one of the greatest dramatic works of modern European literature. His other well-known literary works include his numerous poems, the Bildungsroman Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, and the epistolary novel The Sorrows of Young Werther.
  Goethe was one of the key figures of German literature and the movement of Weimar Classicism in the late 18th and early 19th centuries; this movement coincides with Enlightenment, Sentimentalism (Empfindsamkeit), Sturm und Drang and Romanticism. The author of the scientific text Theory of Colours, his influential ideas on plant and animal morphology and homology were extended and developed by 19th century naturalists including Charles Darwin. He also served at length as the Privy Councilor of the duchy of Saxe-Weimar.
  
  wn.com/Goethe
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  Herbert Marcuse
  Herbert Marcuse (German pronunciation: [maʁˈkuːzə]; July 19, 1898 – July 29, 1979) was a German Jewish philosopher, sociologist and political theorist, associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory. Active in the United States after 1934, his intellectual concerns were the dehumanizing effects of capitalism and modern technology. Celebrated as the "Father of the New Left," his best known works are Eros and Civilization (1955) and One-Dimensional Man (1964). His Marxist scholarship inspired many radical intellectuals and political activists in the 1960s and '70s, both in the U.S. and internationally.
  Herbert Marcuse was born in Berlin to Carl Marcuse and Gertrud Kreslawsky and raised in a Jewish family. In 1916 he was drafted into the German Army, but only worked in horse stables in Berlin during World War I. He then became a member of a Soldiers' Council that participated in the aborted socialist Spartacist uprising. He completed his Ph.D. thesis at the University of Freiburg in 1922 on the German Künstlerroman after which he moved back to Berlin, where he worked in publishing. In 1924 he married Sophie Wertheim, a mathematician. He returned to Freiburg in 1928 to study with Edmund Husserl and write a Habilitation with Martin Heidegger, which was published in 1932 as Hegel's Ontology and Theory of Historicity. This study was written in the context of the Hegel renaissance that was taking place in Europe with an emphasis on Hegel's ontology of life and history, idealist theory of spirit and dialectic. With his academic career blocked by the rise of the Third Reich, in 1933 Marcuse joined the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research.
  
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  Hubert Dreyfus
  Hubert Lederer Dreyfus (born October 15, 1929) is an American philosopher. He is a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley.
  His main interests include phenomenology, existentialism and the philosophy of both psychology and literature, as well as the philosophical implications of artificial intelligence. Dreyfus is known for his exegesis of Martin Heidegger.
  Born in Terre Haute, Indiana to Stanley S. and Irene Lederer Dreyfus, Dreyfus was educated at Harvard University, earning three degrees there, with a BA in 1951, an MA in 1952, and a PhD in 1964, under the supervision of Dagfinn Føllesdal. He is considered a leading interpreter of the work of Edmund Husserl, Michel Foucault, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, but especially of Martin Heidegger. His Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger's "Being and Time," Division 1, is thought by many who have attempted to teach Heidegger to undergraduates to be the authoritative text on Heidegger's most significant contribution to philosophy. He also co-authored Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, translated Merleau-Ponty's Sense and Non-Sense, and authored the controversial 1972 book What Computers Can't Do, revised first in 1979, and then again in 1992 with a new introduction as What Computers Still Can't Do. While spending most of his teaching career at Berkeley, Professor Dreyfus has also taught at Brandeis University (1957 to 1959), the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (from 1960 to 1968), the University of Frankfurt, and Hamilton College. His philosophical work has influenced Richard Rorty, Charles Taylor, John Searle, and his former student John Haugeland, among others. His critical comments on the existential phenomenology and subsequent dialectical philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre may well have played a significant role in the demise of Sartre's influence on recent thought.
  
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  Hunter-gatherer
  A hunter-gatherer or forager society is one in which most or all food is obtained from wild plants and animals, in contrast to agricultural societies which rely mainly on domesticated species.
  Hunting and gathering was the ancestral subsistence mode of Homo, and all modern humans were hunter-gatherers until around 10,000 years ago. Following the invention of agriculture hunter-gatherers have been displaced by farming or pastoralist groups in most parts of the world. Only a few contemporary societies are classified as hunter-gatherers, and many supplement, sometimes extensively, their foraging activity with farming and/or keeping animals.
  The earliest humans probably lived primarily on scavenging, not actual hunting. Early humans in the Lower Paleolithic lived in mixed habitats which allowed them to collect seafood, eggs, nuts, and fruits besides scavenging. Rather than killing large animals themselves for meat, they used carcasses of large animals killed by other predators or carcasses from animals that died by natural causes.
  
  wn.com/Hunter-gatherer
• Jacques Ellul
  Jacques Ellul (January 6, 1912–May 19, 1994) was a French philosopher, law professor, sociologist, lay theologian, and Christian anarchist. He wrote several books about the technological society and the interaction between Christianity and politics.
  A philosopher who approached technology from a dialectical viewpoint, Ellul, professor at the University of Bordeaux, authored 58 books and more than a thousand articles over his lifetime, the dominant theme of which has been the threat to human freedom and Christian faith created by modern technology. His constant concern has been the emergence of a technological tyranny over humanity. As a philosopher and lay theologian, he further explored the religiosity of the technological society.
  Ellul was born in Bordeaux, France on 6 January 1912 to Marthe Mendes (Protestant; French-Portuguese) and Joseph Ellul (initially Greek Orthodox, but then Voltarian by conviction; born in Malta of an Italo-Maltese father and Serb mother). As a teenager he wanted to be a naval officer but his father made him read law. He was married to Yvette Lensvelt in 1937.
  
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  John Zerzan
  John Zerzan (born 1943) is an American anarchist and primitivist philosopher and author. His works criticize agricultural civilization as inherently oppressive, and advocate drawing upon the ways of life of hunter gatherers as an inspiration for what a free society should look like. Some subjects of his criticism include domestication, language, symbolic thought (such as mathematics and art) and the concept of time.
  His five major books are Elements of Refusal (1988), Future Primitive and Other Essays (1994), Running on Emptiness (2002), Against Civilization: Readings and Reflections (2005) and Twilight of the Machines (2008).
  Zerzan was born in Salem, Oregon. He received his bachelor's degree from Stanford University and later received a master's degree in History from San Francisco State University. He completed his coursework towards a PhD at the University of Southern California but dropped out before completing his dissertation. He is of Bohemian/Czech descent.
  Zerzan's theories draw on Theodor Adorno's concept of negative dialectics to construct a theory of civilization as the cumulative construction of alienation. According to Zerzan, original human societies in paleolithic times, and similar societies today such as the !Kung, Bushmen and Mbuti, live a non-alienated and non-oppressive form of life based on primitive abundance and closeness to nature. Constructing such societies as a kind of political ideal, or at least an instructive comparison against which to denounce contemporary (especially industrial) societies, Zerzan uses anthropological studies from such societies as the basis for a wide-ranging critique of aspects of modern life. He portrays contemporary society as a world of misery built on the psychological production of a sense of scarcity and lack. The history of civilization is the history of renunciation; what stands against this is not progress but rather the Utopia which arises from its negation.
  
  wn.com/John_Zerzan
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  Jürgen Habermas
  Jürgen Habermas ( /ˈjɜrɡən/ or /ˈjʊərɡən ˈhɑːbərmɑːs/;German: [ˈjʏʁɡən ˈhaːbɐmaːs]; born June 18, 1929) is a German sociologist, geographer and philosopher in the tradition of critical theory and pragmatism. He is perhaps best known for his theory on the concepts of 'communicative rationality' and the 'public sphere'. His work focuses on the foundations of social theory and epistemology, the analysis of advanced capitalistic societies and democracy, the rule of law in a critical social-evolutionary context, and contemporary politics, particularly German politics. Habermas's theoretical system is devoted to revealing the possibility of reason, emancipation, and rational-critical communication latent in modern institutions and in the human capacity to deliberate and pursue rational interests. Habermas is known for his work on the concept of modernity, particularly with respect to the discussions of "rationalization" originally set forth by Max Weber. While influenced by American pragmatism, action theory, and even poststructuralism, many of the central tenets of Habermas' thought remain broadly Marxist in nature. Global polls identified him as one of the leading intellectuals of the present day.
  
  wn.com/Jürgen_Habermas
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  Karl Marx
  Karl Heinrich Marx (5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883) was a German philosopher, economist, sociologist, historian, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. His ideas played a significant role in the development of social science and the socialist political movement. He published various books during his lifetime, with the most notable being The Communist Manifesto (1848) and Capital (1867–1894); some of his works were co-written with his friend and fellow German revolutionary socialist, Friedrich Engels.
  Born into a wealthy middle class family in Trier, formerly in Prussian Rhineland now called Rhineland-Palatinate, Marx studied at both the University of Bonn and the University of Berlin, where he became interested in the philosophical ideas of the Young Hegelians. In 1836, he became engaged to Jenny von Westphalen, marrying her in 1843. After his studies, he wrote for a radical newspaper in Cologne, and began to work out his theory of dialectical materialism. Moving to Paris in 1843, he began writing for other radical newspapers. He met Engels in Paris, and the two men worked together on a series of books. Exiled to Brussels, he became a leading figure of the Communist League, before moving back to Cologne, where he founded his own newspaper. In 1849 he was exiled again and moved to London together with his wife and children. In London, where the family was reduced to poverty, Marx continued writing and formulating his theories about the nature of society and how he believed it could be improved, and also campaigned for socialism—he became a significant figure in the International Workingmen's Association.
  
  wn.com/Karl_Marx
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  Lewis Mumford
  Lewis Mumford (October 19, 1895 – January 26, 1990) was an American historian, sociologist, philosopher of technology, and influential literary critic. Particularly noted for his study of cities and urban architecture, he had a broad career as a writer. Mumford was influenced by the work of Scottish theorist Sir Patrick Geddes.
  Mumford was also a contemporary and friend of Frank Lloyd Wright, Clarence Stein, Frederic Osborn, Edmund N. Bacon, and Vannevar Bush.
  Mumford was born in Flushing, Queens, New York, and graduated from Stuyvesant High School in 1912. He studied at the City College of New York and The New School for Social Research, but became ill with tuberculosis and never finished his degree. In 1918 he joined the navy to serve in World War I and was assigned as a radio electrician. He was discharged in 1919 and became associate editor of The Dial, an influential modernist literary journal. He later worked for The New Yorker where he wrote architectural criticism and commentary on urban issues.
  
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  Luddite
  The Luddites were a social movement of 19th-century English textile artisans who protested – often by destroying mechanized looms – against the changes produced by the Industrial Revolution, that replaced them with less-skilled, low-wage labour, and which they felt were leaving them without work and changing their way of life. Eric Hobsbawm called machine wrecking: "collective bargaining by riot". It had been used in Britain since the Restoration as, due to the scattering of manufactories throughout different regions, large-scale strikes were impractical. The movement was named after Ned Ludd, a youth who had allegedly smashed two stocking frames thirty years earlier, and whose name had become emblematic of machine destroyers. The name evolved into the imaginary General Ludd or King Ludd, a figure who also, like Robin Hood, was reputed to live in Sherwood Forest.
  The movement emerged in the harsh economic climate of the Napoleonic Wars and difficult working conditions in the new textile factories. The principal objection of the Luddites was to the introduction of new wide-framed automated looms that could be operated by cheap, relatively unskilled labour, resulting in the loss of jobs for many skilled textile workers. The movement began in Nottingham in 1811 and spread rapidly throughout England in 1811 and 1812. Mills and pieces of factory machinery were burned by handloom weavers, and for a short time Luddites were so strong that they clashed in battles with the British Army. Many wool and cotton mills were destroyed until the British government suppressed the movement.
  
  wn.com/Luddite
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  Martin Heidegger
  Martin Heidegger (September 26, 1889 – May 26, 1976); German pronunciation: [ˈmaɐ̯tiːn ˈhaɪdɛɡɐ]) was a German philosopher known for his existential and phenomenological explorations of the "question of Being."
  Heidegger argues that philosophy is preoccupied with what exists and has forgotten the question of the "ground" of being. We find ourselves "always already" fallen into a world that already existed; but he insists that we have forgotten the basic question of what being itself is. This question defines our central nature. He argues that we are practical agents, caring and concerned about our projects in the world, and allowing it to reveal, or "unconceal" itself to us. He also says that our manipulation of reality is often harmful and hides our true being as essentially limited participants, not masters, of the world which we discover.
  Heidegger wrote about these issues in his best-known book, Being and Time (1927), which is considered to be one of the most important philosophical works of the 20th century. Heidegger's influence is far reaching, from philosophy to deconstructionism and literary theory, theology, architecture, and artificial intelligence.
  
  wn.com/Martin_Heidegger
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  Michael Kremer
  Michael Robert Kremer (born November 12, 1964) is an American development economist and is currently the Gates Professor of Developing Societies at Harvard University. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and a Presidential Faculty Fellowship, and was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. Kremer is also a Research Affiliate at Innovations for Poverty Action, a New Haven, Connecticut based research outfit dedicated to creating and evaluating solutions to social and international development problems. Kremer is founder and president of WorldTeach, a Harvard-based organization which places college students and recent graduates as volunteer teachers on summer and year-long programs in developing countries around the world.
  His work focuses on the use of incentives, particularly the design of incentive mechanisms to encourage the development of vaccines for use in developing countries, and the use of randomized trials to evaluate interventions in the social sciences. He created the well known economic theory regarding skill complementarities, Kremer's O-Ring Theory of Economic Development.
  
  wn.com/Michael_Kremer
• Neil Postman
  Neil Postman (March 8, 1931 – October 5, 2003) was an American author, media theorist and cultural critic, who is best known by the general public for his 1985 book about television, Amusing Ourselves to Death. For more than forty years, he was associated with New York University. Postman was a humanist, who believed that "new technology can never substitute for human values."
  Postman was born and spent most of his life in New York City. In 1953, he graduated from State University of New York at Fredonia where he played basketball. He received a master's degree in 1955 and an Ed.D in 1958, both from the Teachers College, Columbia University, and started teaching at New York University (NYU) in 1959. In 1971, he founded a graduate program in media ecology at the Steinhardt School of Education originally known as SEHNAP, School of Education, Health, Nursing, and Arts Professions, of NYU. In 1993 he was appointed a University Professor, the only one in the School of Education, and was chairman of the Department of Culture and Communication until 2002. Among his students were authors Paul Levinson, Joshua Meyrowitz, Jay Rosen, Lance Strate, and Dennis Smith. He died of lung cancer in Flushing, Queens on October 5, 2003.
  
  wn.com/Neil_Postman
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  Nikolas Kompridis
  Nikolas Kompridis is a professor at the Centre for Citizenship and Public Policy at the University of Western Sydney. His scholarly work addresses a wide range of subjects in contemporary social and political philosophy, as well as in aesthetics and philosophy of culture. Kompridis' published works cover topics that include: critical theory; democratic theory; theories of agency and action; theories of rationality; theories of identity, recognition, and culture; the role of social criticism in social change; the renewal of romanticism; and issues in philosophy of art, literature, music and film.
  After gaining his Ph.D at Toronto's York University, Kompridis was invited to work with the renowned philosopher and Frankfurt School standard-bearer Jürgen Habermas. However, he was eventually troubled by what he saw as serious shortcomings in the German philosopher's work. The result was the publication of Critique and Disclosure: Critical Theory between Past and Future, a book that, while drawing on many of his insights, is intensely critical of Habermas. In addition to presenting a "meta-critique" of his thought, it offers an alternative interpretation of Frankfurt School critical theory, based on alternative conceptions of agency, reason, and argument, and alternative sources of normativity.
  
  wn.com/Nikolas_Kompridis
• Philip K. Dick
  Philip Kindred Dick (December 16, 1928 – March 2, 1982) was an American novelist, short story writer and essayist whose published work is almost entirely in the science fiction genre. Dick explored sociological, political and metaphysical themes in novels dominated by monopolistic corporations, authoritarian governments, and altered states. In his later works Dick's thematic focus strongly reflected his personal interest in metaphysics and theology. He often drew upon his own life experiences in addressing the nature of drug abuse, paranoia, schizophrenia, and transcendental experiences in novels such as A Scanner Darkly and VALIS.
  The novel The Man in the High Castle bridged the genres of alternate history and science fiction, earning Dick a Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1963.Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, a novel about a celebrity who awakens in a parallel universe where he is unknown, won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best novel in 1975. "I want to write about people I love, and put them into a fictional world spun out of my own mind, not the world we actually have, because the world we actually have does not meet my standards," Dick wrote of these stories. "In my writing I even question the universe; I wonder out loud if it is real, and I wonder out loud if all of us are real."
  
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  Theodore Kaczynski
  Theodore John "Ted" Kaczynski ( /kəˈzɪnski/ ka-ZIN-skee, or ka-CHIN-skee; Polish: Kaczyński, pronounced [kaˈt͡ʂɨȷ̃skʲi]; born May 22, 1942), also known as the "Unabomber" (a portmanteau of UNiversity and Airline BOMBER), is an American mathematician, social critic, and Neo-Luddite who engaged in a mail bombing campaign that spanned nearly 20 years, killing three people and injuring 23 others.
  Kaczynski was born in Chicago, Illinois, where, as an intellectual child prodigy, he excelled academically from an early age. Kaczynski was accepted into Harvard University at the age of 16, where he earned an undergraduate degree, and later earned a PhD in mathematics from the University of Michigan. He became an assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley at age 25, but resigned two years later.
  In 1971, he moved to a remote cabin without electricity or running water, in Lincoln, Montana, where he lived as a recluse while learning survival skills in an attempt to become self-sufficient. He decided to start a bombing campaign after watching the wilderness around his home being destroyed by development. From 1978 to 1995, Kaczynski sent 16 bombs to targets including universities and airlines, killing 3 people and injuring 23. Kaczynski sent a letter to The New York Times on April 24, 1995 and promised "to desist from terrorism" if the Times or The Washington Post published his manifesto, Industrial Society and Its Future (also called the "Unabomber Manifesto"), in which he argued that his bombings were extreme but necessary to attract attention to the erosion of human freedom necessitated by modern technologies requiring large-scale organization.
  
  wn.com/Theodore_Kaczynski
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  Unabomber
  Theodore John "Ted" Kaczynski ( /kəˈzɪnski/ ka-ZIN-skee, or ka-CHIN-skee; Polish: Kaczyński, pronounced [kaˈt͡ʂɨȷ̃skʲi]; born May 22, 1942), also known as the "Unabomber" (a portmanteau of UNiversity and Airline BOMBER), is an American mathematician, social critic, and Neo-Luddite who engaged in a mail bombing campaign that spanned nearly 20 years, killing three people and injuring 23 others.
  Kaczynski was born in Chicago, Illinois, where, as an intellectual child prodigy, he excelled academically from an early age. Kaczynski was accepted into Harvard University at the age of 16, where he earned an undergraduate degree, and later earned a PhD in mathematics from the University of Michigan. He became an assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley at age 25, but resigned two years later.
  In 1971, he moved to a remote cabin without electricity or running water, in Lincoln, Montana, where he lived as a recluse while learning survival skills in an attempt to become self-sufficient. He decided to start a bombing campaign after watching the wilderness around his home being destroyed by development. From 1978 to 1995, Kaczynski sent 16 bombs to targets including universities and airlines, killing 3 people and injuring 23. Kaczynski sent a letter to The New York Times on April 24, 1995 and promised "to desist from terrorism" if the Times or The Washington Post published his manifesto, Industrial Society and Its Future (also called the "Unabomber Manifesto"), in which he argued that his bombings were extreme but necessary to attract attention to the erosion of human freedom necessitated by modern technologies requiring large-scale organization.
  
  wn.com/Unabomber
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  Ursula Franklin
  Ursula Martius Franklin, CC OOnt FRSC (born September 16, 1921 in Munich, Germany), is a Canadian metallurgist, research physicist, author and educator who has taught at the University of Toronto for more than 40 years. She is the author of The Real World of Technology, which is based on her 1989 Massey Lectures, and The Ursula Franklin Reader: Pacifism as a Map, a collection of her papers, interviews, and talks. Franklin is a practising Quaker and has been active in working on behalf of pacifist and feminist causes. She has written and spoken extensively about the futility of war and the connection between peace and social justice. Franklin has received numerous honours and awards, including the Governor General's Award in Commemoration of the Persons Case for promoting the equality of girls and women in Canada and the Pearson Medal of Peace for her work in advancing human rights. A Toronto high school, Ursula Franklin Academy, has been named in her honour.
  Franklin is best known for her writings on the political and social effects of technology. For her, technology is much more than machines, gadgets or electronic transmitters. It is a comprehensive system that includes methods, procedures, organization, "and most of all, a mindset". She distinguishes between holistic technologies used by craft workers or artisans and prescriptive ones associated with a division of labour in large-scale production. Holistic technologies allow artisans to control their own work from start to finish. Prescriptive technologies organize work as a sequence of steps requiring supervision by bosses or managers. Franklin argues that the dominance of prescriptive technologies in modern society discourages critical thinking and promotes "a culture of compliance".
  
  wn.com/Ursula_Franklin
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  Vannevar Bush
  Vannevar Bush ( /væˈniːvɑr/ van-NEE-var; March 11, 1890 – June 28, 1974) was an American engineer, inventor and science administrator known for his work on analog computers, his role as an initiator and administrator of the Manhattan Project, as the founder of Raytheon, and for the memex, an adjustable microfilm viewer analogous to the structure of the World Wide Web. He is credited with inspiring the creation of the New Media.
  For his master's thesis, Bush invented and patented a "profile tracer", a device for assisting surveyors that mapped the terrain over which it traveled. It was the first of a string of inventions. He joined the Department of Electrical Engineering at MIT in 1919, and founded the company now known as Raytheon in 1922. Starting in 1927, Bush constructed a differential analyzer, an analog computer with some digital components that could solve differential equations with as many as 18 independent variables. An offshoot of the work at MIT by Bush and others was the beginning of digital circuit design theory. Bush became Vice President of MIT and Dean of the MIT School of Engineering in 1932, and president of the Carnegie Institution of Washington in 1938.
  
  wn.com/Vannevar_Bush
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  William Gibson
  William Ford Gibson (born March 17, 1948) is an American-Canadian speculative fiction novelist who has been called the "noir prophet" of the cyberpunk subgenre. Gibson coined the term "cyberspace" in his short story "Burning Chrome" (1982) and later popularized the concept in his debut novel, Neuromancer (1984). In envisaging cyberspace, Gibson created an iconography for the information age before the ubiquity of the Internet in the 1990s. He is also credited with predicting the rise of reality television and with establishing the conceptual foundations for the rapid growth of virtual environments such as video games and the World Wide Web.
  Having changed residence frequently with his family as a child, Gibson became a shy, ungainly teenager who often read science fiction. After spending his adolescence at a private boarding school in Arizona, Gibson evaded the draft during the Vietnam War by emigrating to Canada in 1968, where he became immersed in the counterculture and after settling in Vancouver eventually became a full-time writer. He retains dual citizenship. Gibson's early works are bleak, noir near-future stories about the effect of cybernetics and computer networks on humans—a "combination of lowlife and high tech". The short stories were published in popular science fiction magazines. The themes, settings and characters developed in these stories culminated in his first novel, Neuromancer, which garnered critical and commercial success, virtually initiating the cyberpunk literary genre.
  
  wn.com/William_Gibson
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  William Joy
  William Nelson Joy (born November 8, 1954), commonly known as Bill Joy, is an American computer scientist. Joy co-founded Sun Microsystems in 1982 along with Vinod Khosla, Scott McNealy and Andy Bechtolsheim, and served as chief scientist at the company until 2003. He is widely known for having written the essay "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us", where he expresses deep concerns over the development of modern technologies. He played an integral role in the early development of BSD UNIX while a graduate student at Berkeley, and he is the original author of the vi text editor.
  Joy was born in the Detroit suburb Farmington Hills, Michigan to William Joy, a school vice-principal and counselor, and Ruth Joy. Joy received a Bachelor of Science in electrical engineering from the University of Michigan and a Master of Science in electrical engineering and computer science from the University of California, Berkeley in 1979. Joy's graduate advisor was Bob Fabry.
  As a UC Berkeley graduate student, Joy worked for Fabry's Computer Systems Research Group CSRG in managing the BSD support and rollout where many claim he was largely responsible for managing the authorship of BSD UNIX, from which sprang many modern forms of UNIX, including FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD. Apple Inc. has based much of the Mac OS X kernel and OS Services on the BSD technology.
  
  wn.com/William_Joy

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