Search:

Defiant dreams : the journey of an Afghan girl who risked everything for education / by Mahfouz, Sola,1996-author.; Kapoor, Malaina,author.;
"A searing, deeply personal memoir of a tenacious Afghan girl who educated herself behind closed doors and fought her way to a new life. Sola Mahfouz was born in Kandahar, Afghanistan, in 1996. That same year, the Taliban took over her country for the first time. They banned television and photographs, presided over brutal public executions, and turned the clock backwards on women's rights, practically imprisoning women within their own homes and forcing them to wear cruel, tent-like burqas. At age eleven, Sola was forced to stop attending school after a group of men threatened to throw acid in her face if she continued. After that she was confined to her home, required to cook and clean and prepare for an arranged marriage. She saw the outside world only a handful of times each year. As time passed, Sola began to understand that she was condemned to the same existence as millions of women in Afghanistan. Her future was empty. The rest of her life would be controlled entirely by men, fathers and husbands and sons who would never allow her to study, to earn money, or even to dream. Driven by this devastating realization, Sola began a years-long fight to change the trajectory of her life. She decided that education would be her way out. At age sixteen, without even a basic ability to add or subtract, she began secretly to teach herself math and English. She progressed rapidly, and within just two years she was already studying topics such as philosophy and physics. Faced with obstacles at every turn, Sola still managed to sneak into Pakistan to take the SAT. In 2016, she escaped to the United States, where she is now a quantum computing researcher at Tufts University. An engrossing, dramatic memoir, co-written with young Indian American human rights activist Malaina Kapoor, Defiant Dreams is the story of one girl, but it's also the untold story of a generation of women brimming with potential and longing for freedom"--
Subjects: Autobiographies.; Personal narratives.; Mahfouz, Sola, 1996-; Girls; Sex discrimination in education; Women;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
unAPI

The coming wave : technology, power, and the twenty-first century's greatest dilemma / by Suleyman, Mustafa,author.; Bhaskar, Michael,author.;
Includes bibliographical references and index."A stark and urgent warning on the unprecedented risks that a wave of fast-developing technologies poses to global order, and how we might contain them while we have the chance--from a cofounder of the pioneering AI company DeepMind. Imagine a world in which anyone with a $20,000 desktop DNA synthesizer could develop and unleash a deadly virus. Imagine an undetectable deepfake video of a U.S. president making a racial slur racing across the internet on the eve of an election. Imagine terrorists or paramilitaries stockpiling autonomous weapons designed to make their own decisions about when to engage. As cofounder of DeepMind, the pioneering AI company now owned by Google, Mustafa Suleyman has witnessed firsthand just how rapidly our technology is advancing--and how flawed our approaches to grappling with these changes are. The coming decades, he argues, will be defined by a burst of innovation, an inevitable wave of powerful, fast-proliferating new technologies across fields like synthetic biology, artificial intelligence, and quantum computing. Driven forward by immense strategic and financial incentives, these breakthroughs will solve huge challenges and create vast wealth--but upheaval, too, on a once unimaginable scale. Will humankind make it through the narrow corridor between dystopia and catastrophe? In The Coming Wave, Suleyman shows how this new technological super-wave fits a historical pattern of innovation and proliferation, while departing from it in key ways: namely, the speed of change, the breadth of risks, and the wave's potential to democratize access to dangerous, world-altering power. The cumulative risks threaten the very nation state, humanity's centuries' old "grand bargain" of living under centralized authority in exchange for security. As our fragile governments sleepwalk into catastrophe, humanity is left in an existential bind, with techno-authoritarianism on one side and even more catastrophic outcomes, like societal collapse, on the other. We are about to cross a critical threshold in the history of our species. In this groundbreaking book from the ultimate AI insider, Suleyman firmly establishes "the containment problem"--or the challenge of maintaining human control over dangerous technologies--as the essential dilemma of our age, showing that radical steps must be taken if we are to live alongside technology of once unimaginable power"--
Subjects: Artificial intelligence; Information technology;
Available copies: 0 / Total copies: 1
unAPI

Atari 50 [electronic resource] : the anniversary celebration. by Nintendo of America Inc.;
Game.Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration is an interactive journey through 50 years of video games through interviews with designers, developers and industry leaders, documentary footage, product design documents, and of course, more than 100 playable games. At the heart of the 50th Anniversary Collection is a curated list of over 100 games that span seven different hardware platforms--a true feat of emulation by the team at Digital Eclipse. Behind every game are the stories of Atari, what was happening at the company, what went into the creation of the games and the hardware they ran on ... told by the people who were there. It is a rare opportunity to get a rich, behind the scenes look at the history of video games. The talented team at Digital Eclipse also created six new games that revisit, mash-up and re-envision Atari Classics.ESRB Content Rating: T, Teen (Fantasy violence, blood, mild sexual themes, language, drug reference).Cartridge compatible with Nintendo Switch video game system ; HDTV 720p/1080i/1080p ; in game surround sound ; Nintendo Switch Pro controller compatible.
Subjects: Nintendo video games.; Arcade-style video games.; Adventure video games.; Platform video games.; Simulation video games.; Sports video games.; Video games.; Nintendo Switch (Video game console); Nintendo Switch video games.; Video games.; Computer games.; Atari 50 the anniversary celebration (Game);
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
unAPI