introduction


jeremy foss

June 16th, 2010

Editor Keith Richards in his Introduction to The New Optimists says Jeremy Foss gives stimulating but disturbing revelations about quantum information.

The future Net, digital technologies expert Jeremy Foss says, will be a Net that knows you better than you know yourself. Interactivity and more efficient interfaces are encouraging us to betray more and more of our behaviour and preferences.

Jeremy Foss, as well as being a lecturer and researcher at Birmingham City University, has over 30 years’ industry experience with GEC, GPT and Marconi Communications in distributed computing, broadband development (including IPTV triple play services), network strategy, intelligence agents and collaborative virtual environments.

keith richards

June 9th, 2010

Dr Keith Richards edited and wrote the Introduction to The New Optimists: Scientists view tomorrow’s world and what it means to us.

A specialist in applied linguistics, Keith is in charge of graduate studies at the Centre of Applied Linguistics at the University of Warwick. As well as a distinguished academic and teaching career, he has also designed, developed and delivered learning programmes for industrial clients.

In his Introduction, he explains how he organised the essay collection into four parts, each comprising chapters related to the same broad theme, and within each chapter, he gathered the contributions themselves:

  • Part 1:  The Microcosm: Tackling the big challenges
    Chapter 1: Cancer
    Chapter 2: Changing bodies
  • Part 2:  The Macrocosm: Interacting with our world
    Chapter 3: Living in the natural world
    Chapter 4: Living in the virtual world
  • Part 3:  Transformations
    Chapter 5: Getting to the heart of things
    Chapter 6: Changing behaviour
  • Part 4:   The ways of science
    Chapter 7: Working together
    Chapter 8: Thinking differently
    Chapter 9: From where I stand