Mark Priestley

machines, logic and the invention of programming

A science of operations

Thomas Haigh

Crispin Rope

The history of the first programmable electronic computer, from its conception, construction, and use to its afterlife as a part of computing folklore.

Making and Remaking the Modern Computer

ENIAC in Action

Sonali Shah

'Disability and Social Change' will reveal how life has changed for disabled people growing up in Britain over the past 70 years, from the 1940s to the present day. It seeks to provide an in-depth examination of the interplay between individual biography and social context.

Private Lives and Public Policies

Disability and Social Change

Gert Biesta

Sarah Robinson

Recent worldwide education policy has reinvented teachers as agents of change and professional developers of the school curriculum. Academic literature has analyzed changes in how teacher professionalism is conceived in policy and in practice but Teacher Agency provides a fresh perspective on this issue, drawing upon an ecological theory of agency. Using this model for understanding agency, Mark Priestley, Gert Biesta and Sarah Robinson explore empirical findings from the 'Teacher Agency and Curriculum Change' project, funded by the UK-based Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). Drawing together this research with the authors' international experiences and perspectives, Teacher Agency addresses theoretical and practical issues of international significance. The authors illustrate how teacher agency should be understood not only in terms of individual capacity of teachers, but also in respect of the cultures and structures of schooling.

An Ecological Approach

Teacher Agency

Disability: a Life Course Approach provides students and teachers with easy access to many of the most important current disability issues and debates. It provides a clearly focused account, and bridges some important gaps in the existing disability literature by including issues relevant to disabled people of all ages. If offers a unique approach to understanding disabling societies in a systematic way, using a novel life course approach. This book examines how contemporary societies organise and control generational boundaries and progression through the life course for disabled people. There are specific chapters on birthrights and eugenics, childhood, youth transitions, interdependence and adulthood, old age and death and dying. The emphasis is on contemporary policy and politics (located within a broader sociological and cultural context) including the claims and struggles of the disabled people's movement. The discussion is framed within a social model approach and draws extensively on contemporary international debates about the citizenship and human rights of disabled people. The book functions both as a resource guide and as a tool for learning. The various chapters include reviews of existing literature and theoretical debates, alongside specific examples of disabling policies and practices in different countries. There are also case studies illustrating key issues, together with relevant discussion and teaching points, and suggestions for further research and reading. The book addresses an international readership and will be of particular interest to students and teachers of disability studies, sociology, human development, social policy; to professionals and students within rehabilitation and social work; and to disabled people and lay readers with an interest in contemporary disability issues and debates.

A Life Course Approach

Disability

The history of the first programmable electronic computer, from its conception, construction, and use to its afterlife as a part of computing folklore. Conceived in 1943, completed in 1945, and decommissioned in 1955, ENIAC (the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) was the first general-purpose programmable electronic computer. But ENIAC was more than just a milestone on the road to the modern computer. During its decade of operational life, ENIAC calculated sines and cosines and tested for statistical outliers, plotted the trajectories of bombs and shells, and ran the first numerical weather simulations. ENIAC in Action tells the whole story for the first time, from ENIAC's design, construction, testing, and use to its afterlife as part of computing folklore. It highlights the complex relationship of ENIAC and its designers to the revolutionary approaches to computer architecture and coding first documented by John von Neumann in 1945. Within this broad sweep, the authors emphasize the crucial but previously neglected years of 1947 to 1948, when ENIAC was reconfigured to run what the authors claim was the first modern computer program to be executed: a simulation of atomic fission for Los Alamos researchers. The authors view ENIAC from diverse perspectives—as a machine of war, as the “first computer,” as a material artifact constantly remade by its users, and as a subject of (contradictory) historical narratives. They integrate the history of the machine and its applications, describing the mathematicians, scientists, and engineers who proposed and designed ENIAC as well as the men—and particularly the women who—built, programmed, and operated it.

Today, computers fulfil a dazzling array of roles, a flexibility resulting from the great range of programs that can be run on them. A Science of Operations examines the history of what we now call programming, defined not simply as computer programming, but more broadly as the definition of the steps involved in computations and other information-processing activities. This unique perspective highlights how the history of programming is distinct from the history of the computer, despite the close relationship between the two in the 20th century. The book also discusses how the development of programming languages is related to disparate fields which attempted to give a mechanical account of language on the one hand, and a linguistic account of machines on the other. Topics and features: Covers the early development of automatic computing, including Babbage’s “mechanical calculating engines” and the applications of punched-card technology, examines the theoretical work of mathematical logicians such as Kleene, Church, Post and Turing, and the machines built by Zuse and Aiken in the 1930s and 1940s, discusses the role that logic played in the development of the stored program computer, describes the “standard model” of machine-code programming popularised by Maurice Wilkes, presents the complete table for the universal Turing machine in the Appendices, investigates the rise of the initiatives aimed at developing higher-level programming nota tions, and how these came to be thought of as ‘languages’ that could be studied independently of a machine, examines the importance of the Algol 60 language, and the framework it provided for studying the design of programming languages and the process of software development and explores the early development of object-oriented languages, with a focus on the Smalltalk project. This fascinating text offers a new viewpoint for historians of science and technology, as well as for the general reader. The historical narrative builds the story in a clear and logical fashion, roughly following chronological order.

Machines, Logic and the Invention of Programming

A Science of Operations

Daniel Alvunger

Stavroula Philippou

Tiina Soini

In the context of profound social, political and technological changes, recent global trends in education have included the emergence of new forms of curriculum policy. Addressing a gap in the literature, this book investigates the ways in which curriculum policy is influenced, formulated, and enacted in a number of countries-cases in Europe.

Policy and Practice Within and Across Diverse Contexts

Curriculum Making in Europe

This work is a historical and philosophical study of the programming work carried out by John von Neumann in the period 1945-8. At the heart of the book is an examination of a manuscript featuring the earliest known surviving example of von Neumann’s coding, a routine written in 1945 to ‘mesh’ two sequences of data and intended to be part of a larger program implementing the algorithm now known as mergesort. The text of the manuscript itself, along with a preliminary document describing the code he used to write this program, are reproduced as appendices. The program is approached in three chapters describing the historical background to von Neumann’s work, the significance of the sorting application itself, and the development of the EDVAC, the machine for which the program was written. The subsequent chapters widen the focus again, discussing the subsequent evolution of the program and the crucial topic of subroutines, before concluding by situating von Neumann’s work in a number of wider contexts. The book also offers a unifying philosophical interpretation of von Neumann’s approach to coding.

John von Neumann’s Work on Software Development, 1945–1948

Routines of Substitution

First published in 2001, this book explores the global experience of disability using a novel life course approach.

Global Perspectives

Disability and the Life Course

An analysis of modern curricular policy trends, drawing upon Scotland's Curriculum for Excellence, and featuring inputs from acknowledged experts in the field.

Mark Priestley

Books

Your next favorite book is out there