In this age of an open Internet, it is easy to forget that every American information industry, beginning with the telephone, has eventually been taken captive by some ruthless monopoly or cartel. With all our media now traveling a single network, an unprecedented potential is building for centralized control over what Americans see and hear. Could history repeat itself with th...(展开全部)

The Internet Age: on the face of it, an era of unprecedented freedom in both communication and culture. Yet in the past, each major new medium, from telephone to satellite television, has crested on a wave of similar idealistic optimism, before succumbing to the inevitable undertow of industrial consolidation. Every once free and open technology has, in time, become centralized...(展开全部)

It is easy to forget that every development in the history of the American information industry–from the telephone to radio to film–once existed in an open and chaotic marketplace inhabited by entrepreneurs and utopians, just as the Internet does today. Each of these, however, grew to be dominated by a monopolist or cartel. In this pathbreaking book, Tim Wu asks: will the Inter...(展开全部)

Like Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs, and Steel, Peter Turchin in War and Peace and War uses his expertise in evolutionary biology to make a highly original argument about the rise and fall of empires. Turchin argues that the key to the formation of an empire is a societys capacity for collective action. He demonstrates that high levels of cooperation are found where people have t...(展开全部)

欧阳莹之（Sunny Y. Auyang），女，美籍华裔物理学家、科学学家。1972年获麻省理工学院物理学博士学位，毕业后曾在美国惠普公司供职，后在麻省理工学院任职，主要从事固态物理与科学哲学研究，特别是复杂系统理论研究，著有《复杂系统理论基础》、《工程学：无尽的前沿》等。近年来转治文史，第一个成果就是《龙与鹰的帝国》（英文版The Dragon and the Eagle，已由M. E. Sharpe出版）。

欧阳莹之（Sunny Y. Auyang），女，美籍华裔物理学家、科学学家。1972年获麻省理工学院物理学博士学位，毕业后曾在美国惠普公司供职，后在麻省理工学院任职，主要从事固态物理与科学哲学研究，特别是复杂系统理论研究，著有《复杂系统理论基础》、《工程学：无尽的前沿》等。近年来转治文史，第一个成果就是《龙与鹰的帝国》（英文版The Dragon and the Eagle，已由M. E. Sharpe出版）。

"This is scientific storytelling at its most visceral, striding with the beasts through their Triassic dawn, Jurassic dominance, and abrupt demise in the Cretaceous." — Nature The dinosaurs. Sixty-six million years ago, the Earth’s most fearsome creatures vanished. Today they remain one of our planet’s great mysteries. Now The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs reveals their extrao...(展开全部)

"This is scientific storytelling at its most visceral, striding with the beasts through their Triassic dawn, Jurassic dominance, and abrupt demise in the Cretaceous." — Nature The dinosaurs. Sixty-six million years ago, the Earth’s most fearsome creatures vanished. Today they remain one of our planet’s great mysteries. Now The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs reveals their extrao...(展开全部)

This book puts forward a different approach to language change, the punctuated equilibrium model. This is based on the premise that during most of the 100,000 or more years that humans have had language, states of equilibrium have existed during which linguistic features diffused across the languages in a given area so that they gradually converged on a common prototype. From t...(展开全部)

This book puts forward a different approach to language change, the punctuated equilibrium model. This is based on the premise that during most of the 100,000 or more years that humans have had language, states of equilibrium have existed during which linguistic features diffused across the languages in a given area so that they gradually converged on a common prototype. From t...(展开全部)