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Appropriate Technology: Tools, Choices, and Implications
By Barrett Hazeltine, Christopher Bull, and Lars Wanhammar.
Academic Press; 1998; 350 pp., $49.95.
Reviewed by Mary Bonhomme
Growing out of an engineering course taught at Brown University for liberal arts students, Appropriate Technology demonstrates how to broaden the impact of engineering on the nonengineer. Both the course and the book advocate using technology as a vehicle to "foster the goals of a liberal arts education: increasing students' analytical ability, their understanding of the contemporary world, their confidence in dealing with complex problems, and their ethical and aesthetic sensitivity."
Appropriate technologies, as defined by the U.S. Congress Office of Technology Assessment, are "small scale, energy efficient, environmentally sound, labor-intensive, and...