MODERN DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY: FROM IDEAS TO DEVICES

Modern Digital Technology: From ideas to devices aims to expose elements of digital technology logic, code, flow, multiple kinds of programs, and underlying computational issues to a broad and general audience. The material presents fundamental ideas in readable text that eliminates technical words and names, and uses simple-to-understand illustrations to show how technology and culture are connected. Modern Digital Technology develops the everyday connections of fundamental ideas instead of putting technical terms forward as steps that must be accomplished. It introduces tools like drawing, numbering, partitioning, and limits, and explores how solids and gaming are connected through randomness. Its medical imaging applications illustrate how more than one answer can be valid and how training literature describes physical events. The text provides an overview of events that led from mechanical desk calculators to digital devices like smart phones, tablets and gaming consoles. This material is supplemented by appendices that open the reader to means for binary numbers to be implemented in electronic circuits. Sample questions and quizzes are included in this book. They offer a model for assessing the accomplishments of students at secondary/high school levels, and go along with visuals that enable responding with answers that reward the full disclosure of partial knowledge. Groups of questions can be compiled into a short quiz, while larger accumulations of questions can be a way to compare different levels of achievement by individuals. The last chapter of the book offers as a starting point for in depth study. Some prior material and these suggested terms and citations could lead people into issues in computer science, machine learning, mathematics, and software development.