[Серия] The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series (98/114 книг) [2011-2025, EPUB, ENG]

Год издания: 2011
Автор: John Palfrey
ISBN: 9780262516792
Количество страниц: 192
Description:
How a flexible and creative approach to intellectual property can help an organization accomplish goals ranging from building market share to expanding an industry.
Most managers leave intellectual property issues to the legal department, unaware that an organization's intellectual property can help accomplish a range of management goals, from accessing new markets to improving existing products to generating new revenue streams. In this book, intellectual property expert and Harvard Law School professor John Palfrey offers a short briefing on intellectual property strategy for corporate managers and nonprofit administrators. Palfrey argues for strategies that go beyond the traditional highly restrictive “sword and shield” approach, suggesting that flexibility and creativity are essential to a profitable long-term intellectual property strategy—especially in an era of changing attitudes about media.
Intellectual property, writes Palfrey, should be considered a key strategic asset class. Almost every organization has an intellectual property portfolio of some value and therefore the need for an intellectual property strategy. A brand, for example, is an important form of intellectual property, as is any information managed and produced by an organization. Palfrey identifies the essential areas of intellectual property—patent, copyright, trademark, and trade secret—and describes strategic approaches to each in a variety of organizational contexts, based on four basic steps.
The most innovative organizations employ multiple intellectual property approaches, depending on the situation, asking hard, context-specific questions. By doing so, they achieve both short- and long-term benefits while positioning themselves for success in the global information economy.

Год издания: 2012
Автор: Paul E. Ceruzzi
ISBN: 9780262517676
Количество страниц: 216
Description:
A compact and accessible history, from punch cards and calculators to UNIVAC and ENIAC, the personal computer, Silicon Valley, and the Internet.
The history of computing could be told as the story of hardware and software, or the story of the Internet, or the story of “smart” hand-held devices, with subplots involving IBM, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, and Twitter. In this concise and accessible account of the invention and development of digital technology, computer historian Paul Ceruzzi offers a broader and more useful perspective. He identifies four major threads that run throughout all of computing's technological development: digitization—the coding of information, computation, and control in binary form, ones and zeros; the convergence of multiple streams of techniques, devices, and machines, yielding more than the sum of their parts; the steady advance of electronic technology, as characterized famously by “Moore's Law”; and the human-machine interface.
Ceruzzi guides us through computing history, telling how a Bell Labs mathematician coined the word “digital” in 1942 (to describe a high-speed method of calculating used in anti-aircraft devices), and recounting the development of the punch card (for use in the 1890 U.S. Census). He describes the ENIAC, built for scientific and military applications; the UNIVAC, the first general purpose computer; and ARPANET, the Internet's precursor. Ceruzzi's account traces the world-changing evolution of the computer from a room-size ensemble of machinery to a “minicomputer” to a desktop computer to a pocket-sized smart phone. He describes the development of the silicon chip, which could store ever-increasing amounts of data and enabled ever-decreasing device size. He visits that hotbed of innovation, Silicon Valley, and brings the story up to the present with the Internet, the World Wide Web, and social networking.

Год издания: 2012
Автор: Peter Suber
ISBN: 9780262517638
Количество страниц: 256
Description:
A concise introduction to the basics of open access, describing what it is (and isn’t) and showing that it is easy, fast, inexpensive, legal, and beneficial.
The Internet lets us share perfect copies of our work with a worldwide audience at virtually no cost. We take advantage of this revolutionary opportunity when we make our work “open access”: digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. Open access is made possible by the Internet and copyright-holder consent, and many authors, musicians, filmmakers, and other creators who depend on royalties are understandably unwilling to give their consent. But for 350 years, scholars have written peer-reviewed journal articles for impact, not for money, and are free to consent to open access without losing revenue.
In this concise introduction, Peter Suber tells us what open access is and isn’t, how it benefits authors and readers of research, how we pay for it, how it avoids copyright problems, how it has moved from the periphery to the mainstream, and what its future may hold. Distilling a decade of Suber’s influential writing and thinking about open access, this is the indispensable book on the subject for researchers, librarians, administrators, funders, publishers, and policy makers.

Год издания: 2013
Автор: Limor Shifman
ISBN: 9780262525435
Количество страниц: 216
Description:
Taking “Gangnam Style” seriously: what Internet memes can tell us about digital culture.
In December 2012, the exuberant video “Gangnam Style” became the first YouTube clip to be viewed more than one billion times. Thousands of its viewers responded by creating and posting their own variations of the video—“Mitt Romney Style,” “NASA Johnson Style,” “Egyptian Style,” and many others. “Gangnam Style” (and its attendant parodies, imitations, and derivations) is one of the most famous examples of an Internet meme: a piece of digital content that spreads quickly around the web in various iterations and becomes a shared cultural experience. In this book, Limor Shifman investigates Internet memes and what they tell us about digital culture.
Shifman discusses a series of well-known Internet memes—including “Leave Britney Alone,” the pepper-spraying cop, LOLCats, Scumbag Steve, and Occupy Wall Street's “We Are the 99 Percent.” She offers a novel definition of Internet memes: digital content units with common characteristics, created with awareness of each other, and circulated, imitated, and transformed via the Internet by many users. She differentiates memes from virals; analyzes what makes memes and virals successful; describes popular meme genres; discusses memes as new modes of political participation in democratic and nondemocratic regimes; and examines memes as agents of globalization.
Memes, Shifman argues, encapsulate some of the most fundamental aspects of the Internet in general and of the participatory Web 2.0 culture in particular. Internet memes may be entertaining, but in this book Limor Shifman makes a compelling argument for taking them seriously.

Год издания: 2014
Автор: Mark Balaguer
ISBN: 9780262525794
Количество страниц: 152
Description:
A philosopher considers whether the scientific and philosophical arguments against free will are reason enough to give up our belief in it.
In our daily life, it really seems as though we have free will, that what we do from moment to moment is determined by conscious decisions that we freely make. You get up from the couch, you go for a walk, you eat chocolate ice cream. It seems that we're in control of actions like these; if we are, then we have free will. But in recent years, some have argued that free will is an illusion. The neuroscientist (and best-selling author) Sam Harris and the late Harvard psychologist Daniel Wegner, for example, claim that certain scientific findings disprove free will. In this engaging and accessible volume in the Essential Knowledge series, the philosopher Mark Balaguer examines the various arguments and experiments that have been cited to support the claim that human beings don't have free will. He finds them to be overstated and misguided.
Balaguer discusses determinism, the view that every physical event is predetermined, or completely caused by prior events. He describes several philosophical and scientific arguments against free will, including one based on Benjamin Libet's famous neuroscientific experiments, which allegedly show that our conscious decisions are caused by neural events that occur before we choose. He considers various religious and philosophical views, including the philosophical pro-free-will view known as compatibilism. Balaguer concludes that the anti-free-will arguments put forward by philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists simply don't work. They don't provide any good reason to doubt the existence of free will. But, he cautions, this doesn't necessarily mean that we have free will. The question of whether we have free will remains an open one; we simply don't know enough about the brain to answer it definitively.

Год издания: 2014
Автор: Jonathan Haber
ISBN: 9780262526913
Количество страниц: 248
Description:
Everything you always wanted to know about MOOCs: an account of massive open online courses and what they might mean for the future of higher education.
The New York Times declared 2012 to be “The Year of the MOOC” as millions of students enrolled in massive open online courses (known as MOOCs), millions of investment dollars flowed to the companies making them, and the media declared MOOCs to be earth-shaking game-changers in higher education. During the inevitable backlash that followed, critics highlighted MOOCs' high dropout rate, the low chance of earning back initial investments, and the potential for any earth-shaking game change to make things worse instead of better. In this volume in the Essential Knowledge series, Jonathan Haber offers an account of MOOCs that avoids both hype and doomsaying. Instead, he provides an engaging, straightforward explanation of a rare phenomenon: an education innovation that captures the imagination of the public while moving at the speed of an Internet startup.
Haber explains the origins of MOOCs, what they consist of, the controversies surrounding them, and their possible future role in education. He proposes a new definition of MOOCs based on the culture of experimentation from which they emerged, and adds a student perspective—missing in most MOOC discussion. Haber's unique Degree of Freedom experiment, during which he attempted to learn the equivalent of a four-year liberal arts degree in one year using only MOOCs and other forms of free education, informs his discussion.
Haber urges us to avoid the fallacy of thinking that because MOOCs cannot solve all educational challenges they are not worth pursuing, and he helps us understand what MOOCs—despite their limitations—still offer the world. His book is required reading for anyone trying to sort out the competing claims, aspirations, and accusations that color the MOOC debate.

Год издания: 2014
Автор: Margaret Cuonzo
ISBN: 9780262525497
Количество страниц: 240
Description:
An introduction to paradoxes showing that they are more than mere puzzles but can prompt new ways of thinking.
Thinkers have been fascinated by paradox since long before Aristotle grappled with Zeno's. In this volume in The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Margaret Cuonzo explores paradoxes and the strategies used to solve them. She finds that paradoxes are more than mere puzzles but can prompt new ways of thinking.
A paradox can be defined as a set of mutually inconsistent claims, each of which seems true. Paradoxes emerge not just in salons and ivory towers but in everyday life. (An Internet search for “paradox” brings forth a picture of an ashtray with a “no smoking” symbol inscribed on it.) Proposing solutions, Cuonzo writes, is a natural response to paradoxes. She invites us to rethink paradoxes by focusing on strategies for solving them, arguing that there is much to be learned from this, regardless of whether any of the more powerful paradoxes is even capable of solution.
Cuonzo offers a catalog of paradox-solving strategies—including the Preemptive-Strike (questioning the paradox itself), the Odd-Guy-Out (calling one of the assumptions into question), and the You-Can't-Get-There-from-Here (denying the validity of the reasoning). She argues that certain types of solutions work better in some contexts than others, and that as paradoxicality increases, the success of certain strategies grows more unlikely. Cuonzo shows that the processes of paradox generation and solution proposal are interesting and important ones. Discovering a paradox leads to advances in knowledge: new science often stems from attempts to solve paradoxes, and the concepts used in the new sciences lead to new paradoxes. As Niels Bohr wrote, “How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress.”

Год издания: 2015
Автор: Murray Shanahan
ISBN: 9780262527804
Количество страниц: 270
Description:
The idea of technological singularity, and what it would mean if ordinary human intelligence were enhanced or overtaken by artificial intelligence.
The idea that human history is approaching a “singularity”—that ordinary humans will someday be overtaken by artificially intelligent machines or cognitively enhanced biological intelligence, or both—has moved from the realm of science fiction to serious debate. Some singularity theorists predict that if the field of artificial intelligence (AI) continues to develop at its current dizzying rate, the singularity could come about in the middle of the present century. Murray Shanahan offers an introduction to the idea of the singularity and considers the ramifications of such a potentially seismic event.
Shanahan's aim is not to make predictions but rather to investigate a range of scenarios. Whether we believe that singularity is near or far, likely or impossible, apocalypse or utopia, the very idea raises crucial philosophical and pragmatic questions, forcing us to think seriously about what we want as a species.
Shanahan describes technological advances in AI, both biologically inspired and engineered from scratch. Once human-level AI—theoretically possible, but difficult to accomplish—has been achieved, he explains, the transition to superintelligent AI could be very rapid. Shanahan considers what the existence of superintelligent machines could mean for such matters as personhood, responsibility, rights, and identity. Some superhuman AI agents might be created to benefit humankind; some might go rogue. (Is Siri the template, or HAL?) The singularity presents both an existential threat to humanity and an existential opportunity for humanity to transcend its limitations. Shanahan makes it clear that we need to imagine both possibilities if we want to bring about the better outcome.

Год издания: 2016
Автор: Timothy P. Hubbard, Harry J. Paarsch
ISBN: 9780262528535
Количество страниц: 264
Description:
How auctions work, in theory and practice, with clear explanations and real-world examples that range from government procurement to eBay.
Although it is among the oldest of market institutions, the auction is ubiquitous in today's economy, used for everything from government procurement to selling advertising on the Internet to course assignment at MIT's Sloan School. And yet beyond the small number of economists who specialize in the subject, few people understand how auctions really work. This concise, accessible, and engaging book explains both the theory and the practice of auctions. It describes the main auction formats and pricing rules, develops a simple model to explain bidder behavior, and provides a range of real-world examples.
The authors explain what constitutes an auction and how auctions can be modeled as games of asymmetric information—that is, games in which some players know something that other players do not. They characterize behavior in these strategic situations and maintain a focus on the real world by illustrating their discussions with examples that include not just auctions held by eBay and Sotheby's, but those used by Google, the U.S. Treasury, TaskRabbit, and charities. Readers will begin to understand how economists model auctions and how the rules of the auction shape bidder incentives. They will appreciate the role auctions play in our modern economy and understand why these selling mechanisms are so resilient.

Год издания: 2016
Автор: Nayan B. Ruparelia
ISBN: 9780262529099
Количество страниц: 280
Description:
Why cloud computing represents a paradigm shift for business, and how business users can best take advantage of cloud services.
Most of the information available on cloud computing is either highly technical, with details that are irrelevant to non-technologists, or pure marketing hype, in which the cloud is simply a selling point. This book, however, explains the cloud from the user's viewpoint—the business user's in particular. Nayan Ruparelia explains what the cloud is, when to use it (and when not to), how to select a cloud service, how to integrate it with other technologies, and what the best practices are for using cloud computing.
Cutting through the hype, Ruparelia cites the simple and basic definition of cloud computing from the National Institute of Science and Technology: a model enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources. Thus with cloud computing, businesses can harness information technology resources usually available only to large enterprises. And this, Ruparelia demonstrates, represents a paradigm shift for business. It will ease funding for startups, alter business plans, and allow big businesses greater agility.
Ruparelia discusses the key issues for any organization considering cloud computing: service level agreements, business service delivery and consumption, finance, legal jurisdiction, security, and social responsibility. He introduces novel concepts made possible by cloud computing: cloud cells, or specialist clouds for specific uses; the personal cloud; the cloud of things; and cloud service exchanges. He examines use case patterns in terms of infrastructure and platform, software information, and business process; and he explains how to transition to a cloud service. Current and future users will find this book an indispensable guide to the cloud.

Год издания: 2016
Автор: Ethem Alpaydin
ISBN: 9780262529518
Количество страниц: 224
Description:
A concise overview of machine learning—computer programs that learn from data—which underlies applications that include recommendation systems, face recognition, and driverless cars.
Today, machine learning underlies a range of applications we use every day, from product recommendations to voice recognition—as well as some we don't yet use everyday, including driverless cars. It is the basis of the new approach in computing where we do not write programs but collect data; the idea is to learn the algorithms for the tasks automatically from data. As computing devices grow more ubiquitous, a larger part of our lives and work is recorded digitally, and as “Big Data” has gotten bigger, the theory of machine learning—the foundation of efforts to process that data into knowledge—has also advanced. In this book, machine learning expert Ethem Alpaydın offers a concise overview of the subject for the general reader, describing its evolution, explaining important learning algorithms, and presenting example applications.
Alpaydin offers an account of how digital technology advanced from number-crunching mainframes to mobile devices, putting today's machine learning boom in context. He describes the basics of machine learning and some applications; the use of machine learning algorithms for pattern recognition; artificial neural networks inspired by the human brain; algorithms that learn associations between instances, with such applications as customer segmentation and learning recommendations; and reinforcement learning, when an autonomous agent learns act so as to maximize reward and minimize penalty. Alpaydın then considers some future directions for machine learning and the new field of “data science,” and discusses the ethical and legal implications for data privacy and security.

Год издания: 2016
Автор: Moheb Costandi
ISBN: 9780262529334
Количество страниц: 192
Description:
The real story of how our brains and nervous systems change throughout our lifetimes—with or without “brain training.”
Fifty years ago, neuroscientists thought that a mature brain was fixed like a fly in amber, unable to change. Today, we know that our brains and nervous systems change throughout our lifetimes. This concept of neuroplasticity has captured the imagination of a public eager for self-improvement—and has inspired countless Internet entrepreneurs who peddle dubious “brain training” games and apps. In this book, Moheb Costandi offers a concise and engaging overview of neuroplasticity for the general reader, describing how our brains change continuously in response to our actions and experiences.
Costandi discusses key experimental findings, and describes how our thinking about the brain has evolved over time. He explains how the brain changes during development, and the “synaptic pruning” that takes place before brain maturity. He shows that adult brains can grow new cells (citing, among many other studies, research showing that sexually mature male canaries learn a new song every year). He describes the kind of brain training that can bring about improvement in brain function. It's not gadgets and games that promise to “rewire your brain” but such sustained cognitive tasks as learning a musical instrument or a new language. (Costandi also notes that London cabbies increase their gray matter after rigorous training in their city's complicated streets.) He tells how brains compensate after stroke or injury; describes addiction and pain as maladaptive forms of neuroplasticity; and considers brain changes that accompany childhood, adolescence, parenthood, and aging. Each of our brains is custom-built. Neuroplasticity is at the heart of what makes us human.

Год издания: 2016
Автор: John M. Jordan
ISBN: 9780262529501
Количество страниц: 272
Description:
An accessible and engaging account of robots, covering the current state of the field, the fantasies of popular culture, and implications for life and work.
Robots are entering the mainstream. Technologies have advanced to the point of mass commercialization—Roomba, for example—and adoption by governments—most notably, their use of drones. Meanwhile, these devices are being received by a public whose main sources of information about robots are the fantasies of popular culture. We know a lot about C-3PO and Robocop but not much about Atlas, Motoman, Kiva, or Beam—real-life robots that are reinventing warfare, the industrial workplace, and collaboration. In this book, technology analyst John Jordan offers an accessible and engaging introduction to robots and robotics, covering state-of-the-art applications, economic implications, and cultural context.
Jordan chronicles the prehistory of robots and the treatment of robots in science fiction, movies, and television—from the outsized influence of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein to Isaac Asimov's I, Robot (in which Asimov coined the term “robotics”). He offers a guided tour of robotics today, describing the components of robots, the complicating factors that make robotics so challenging, and such applications as driverless cars, unmanned warfare, and robots on the assembly line.
Roboticists draw on such technical fields as power management, materials science, and artificial intelligence. Jordan points out, however, that robotics design decisions also embody such nontechnical elements as value judgments, professional aspirations, and ethical assumptions, and raise questions that involve law, belief, economics, education, public safety, and human identity. Robots will be neither our slaves nor our overlords; instead, they are rapidly becoming our close companions, working in partnership with us—whether in a factory, on a highway, or as a prosthetic device. Given these profound changes to human work and life, Jordan argues that robotics is too important to be left solely to roboticists.

Год издания: 2016
Автор: Gina Neff, Dawn Nafus
ISBN: 9780262529129
Количество страниц: 248
Description:
What happens when people turn their everyday experience into data: an introduction to the essential ideas and key challenges of self-tracking.
People keep track. In the eighteenth century, Benjamin Franklin kept charts of time spent and virtues lived up to. Today, people use technology to self-track: hours slept, steps taken, calories consumed, medications administered. Ninety million wearable sensors were shipped in 2014 to help us gather data about our lives. This book examines how people record, analyze, and reflect on this data, looking at the tools they use and the communities they become part of. Gina Neff and Dawn Nafus describe what happens when people turn their everyday experience—in particular, health and wellness-related experience—into data, and offer an introduction to the essential ideas and key challenges of using these technologies. They consider self-tracking as a social and cultural phenomenon, describing not only the use of data as a kind of mirror of the self but also how this enables people to connect to, and learn from, others.
Neff and Nafus consider what's at stake: who wants our data and why; the practices of serious self-tracking enthusiasts; the design of commercial self-tracking technology; and how self-tracking can fill gaps in the healthcare system. Today, no one can lead an entirely untracked life. Neff and Nafus show us how to use data in a way that empowers and educates.

Год издания: 2016
Автор: Jonathan Westphal
ISBN: 9780262529563
Количество страниц: 240
Description:
An introduction to the mind–body problem, covering all the proposed solutions and offering a powerful new one.
Philosophers from Descartes to Kripke have struggled with the glittering prize of modern and contemporary philosophy: the mind-body problem. The brain is physical. If the mind is physical, we cannot see how. If we cannot see how the mind is physical, we cannot see how it can interact with the body. And if the mind is not physical, it cannot interact with the body. Or so it seems.
In this book the philosopher Jonathan Westphal examines the mind-body problem in detail, laying out the reasoning behind the solutions that have been offered in the past and presenting his own proposal. The sharp focus on the mind-body problem, a problem that is not about the self, or consciousness, or the soul, or anything other than the mind and the body, helps clarify both problem and solutions.
Westphal outlines the history of the mind-body problem, beginning with Descartes. He describes mind-body dualism, which claims that the mind and the body are two different and separate things, nonphysical and physical, and he also examines physicalist theories of mind; antimaterialism, which proposes limits to physicalism and introduces the idea of qualia; and scientific theories of consciousness.
Finally, Westphal examines the largely forgotten neutral monist theories of mind and body, held by Ernst Mach, William James, and Bertrand Russell, which attempt neither to extract mind from matter nor to dissolve matter into mind. Westphal proposes his own version of neutral monism. This version is unique among neutral monist theories in offering an account of mind-body interaction.

Год издания: 2017
Автор: Nick Montfort
ISBN: 9780262534819
Количество страниц: 192
Description:
How the future has been imagined and made, through the work of writers, artists, inventors, and designers.
The future is like an unwritten book. It is not something we see in a crystal ball, or can only hope to predict, like the weather. In this volume of the MIT Press's Essential Knowledge series, Nick Montfort argues that the future is something to be made, not predicted. Montfort offers what he considers essential knowledge about the future, as seen in the work of writers, artists, inventors, and designers (mainly in Western culture) who developed and described the core components of the futures they envisioned. Montfort's approach is not that of futurology or scenario planning; instead, he reports on the work of making the future—the thinkers who devoted themselves to writing pages in the unwritten book. Douglas Engelbart, Alan Kay, and Ted Nelson didn't predict the future of computing, for instance. They were three of the people who made it.
Montfort focuses on how the development of technologies—with an emphasis on digital technologies—has been bound up with ideas about the future. Readers learn about kitchens of the future and the vision behind them; literary utopias, from Plato's Republic to Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland; the Futurama exhibit at the 1939 New York World's Fair; and what led up to Tim Berners-Lee's invention of the World Wide Web. Montfort describes the notebook computer as a human-centered alterative to the idea of the computer as a room-sized “giant brain”; speculative practice in design and science fiction; and, throughout, the best ways to imagine and build the future.

Год издания: 2017
Автор: Michael Buckland
ISBN: 9780262533386
Количество страниц: 232
Description:
A short, informal account of our ever-increasing dependence on a complex multiplicity of messages, records, documents, and data.
We live in an information society, or so we are often told. But what does that mean? This volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series offers a concise, informal account of the ways in which information and society are related and of our ever-increasing dependence on a complex multiplicity of messages, records, documents, and data. Using information in its everyday, nonspecialized sense, Michael Buckland explores the influence of information on what we know, the role of communication and recorded information in our daily lives, and the difficulty (or ease) of finding information. He shows that all this involves human perception, social behavior, changing technologies, and issues of trust.
Buckland argues that every society is an “information society”; a “non-information society” would be a contradiction in terms. But the shift from oral and gestural communication to documents, and the wider use of documents facilitated by new technologies, have made our society particularly information intensive. Buckland describes the rising flood of data, documents, and records, outlines the dramatic long-term growth of documents, and traces the rise of techniques to cope with them. He examines the physical manifestation of information as documents, the emergence of data sets, and how documents and data are discovered and used. He explores what individuals and societies do with information; offers a basic summary of how collected documents are arranged and described; considers the nature of naming; explains the uses of metadata; and evaluates selection methods, considering relevance, recall, and precision.

Год издания: 2017
Автор: Thierry Poibeau
ISBN: 9780262534215
Количество страниц: 296
Description:
A concise, nontechnical overview of the development of machine translation, including the different approaches, evaluation issues, and major players in the industry.
The dream of a universal translation device goes back many decades, long before Douglas Adams's fictional Babel fish provided this service in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Since the advent of computers, research has focused on the design of digital machine translation tools—computer programs capable of automatically translating a text from a source language to a target language. This has become one of the most fundamental tasks of artificial intelligence. This volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series offers a concise, nontechnical overview of the development of machine translation, including the different approaches, evaluation issues, and market potential. The main approaches are presented from a largely historical perspective and in an intuitive manner, allowing the reader to understand the main principles without knowing the mathematical details.
The book begins by discussing problems that must be solved during the development of a machine translation system and offering a brief overview of the evolution of the field. It then takes up the history of machine translation in more detail, describing its pre-digital beginnings, rule-based approaches, the 1966 ALPAC (Automatic Language Processing Advisory Committee) report and its consequences, the advent of parallel corpora, the example-based paradigm, the statistical paradigm, the segment-based approach, the introduction of more linguistic knowledge into the systems, and the latest approaches based on deep learning. Finally, it considers evaluation challenges and the commercial status of the field, including activities by such major players as Google and Systran.

Год издания: 2018
Автор: Howard J. Herzog
ISBN: 9780262535755
Количество страниц: 216
Description:
A concise overview of carbon dioxide capture and storage (CCS), a promising but overlooked climate change mitigation pathway.
The burning of fossil fuels releases carbon dioxide (CO2), and these CO2 emissions are a major driver of climate change. Carbon capture offers a path to climate change mitigation that has received relatively little attention. In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Howard Herzog offers a concise guide to carbon capture, covering basic information as well as the larger context of climate technology and policy. Carbon capture, or carbon dioxide capture and storage (CCS), refers to a suite of technologies that reduce CO2 emissions by “capturing” CO2 before it is released into the atmosphere and then transporting it to where it will be stored or used. It is the only climate change mitigation technique that deals directly with fossil fuels rather than providing alternatives to them.
Herzog, a pioneer in carbon capture research, begins by discussing the fundamentals of climate change and how carbon capture can be one of the solutions. He explains capture and storage technologies, including chemical scrubbing and the injection of CO2 deep underground. He reports on current efforts to deploy CCS at factories and power plants and attempts to capture CO2 from the air itself. Finally, he explores the policies and politics in play around CCS and argues for elevating carbon capture in the policy agenda.

Год издания: 2018
Автор: John D. Kelleher, Brendan Tierney
ISBN: 9780262535434
Количество страниц: 280
Description:
A concise introduction to the emerging field of data science, explaining its evolution, relation to machine learning, current uses, data infrastructure issues, and ethical challenges.
The goal of data science is to improve decision making through the analysis of data. Today data science determines the ads we see online, the books and movies that are recommended to us online, which emails are filtered into our spam folders, and even how much we pay for health insurance. This volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series offers a concise introduction to the emerging field of data science, explaining its evolution, current uses, data infrastructure issues, and ethical challenges.
It has never been easier for organizations to gather, store, and process data. Use of data science is driven by the rise of big data and social media, the development of high-performance computing, and the emergence of such powerful methods for data analysis and modeling as deep learning. Data science encompasses a set of principles, problem definitions, algorithms, and processes for extracting non-obvious and useful patterns from large datasets. It is closely related to the fields of data mining and machine learning, but broader in scope. This book offers a brief history of the field, introduces fundamental data concepts, and describes the stages in a data science project. It considers data infrastructure and the challenges posed by integrating data from multiple sources, introduces the basics of machine learning, and discusses how to link machine learning expertise with real-world problems. The book also reviews ethical and legal issues, developments in data regulation, and computational approaches to preserving privacy. Finally, it considers the future impact of data science and offers principles for success in data science projects.

Год издания: 2018
Автор: J. M. Berger
ISBN: 9780262535878
Количество страниц: 216
Description:
What extremism is, how extremist ideologies are constructed, and why extremism can escalate into violence.
A rising tide of extremist movements threaten to destabilize civil societies around the globe. It has never been more important to understand extremism, yet the dictionary definition—a logical starting point in a search for understanding—tells us only that extremism is “the quality or state of being extreme.” In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, J. M. Berger offers a nuanced introduction to extremist movements, explaining what extremism is, how extremist ideologies are constructed, and why extremism can escalate into violence. Berger shows that although the ideological content of extremist movements varies widely, there are common structural elements.
Berger, an expert on extremist movements and terrorism, explains that extremism arises from a perception of “us versus them,” intensified by the conviction that the success of “us” is inseparable from hostile acts against “them.” Extremism differs from ordinary unpleasantness—run-of-the-mill hatred and racism—by its sweeping rationalization of an insistence on violence. Berger illustrates his argument with case studies and examples from around the world and throughout history, from the destruction of Carthage by the Romans—often called “the first genocide”—to the apocalyptic jihadism of Al Qaeda, America's new “alt-right,” and the anti-Semitic conspiracy tract The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. He describes the evolution of identity movements, individual and group radicalization, and more. If we understand the causes of extremism, and the common elements of extremist movements, Berger says, we will be more effective in countering it.

Год издания: 2018
Автор: Paul E. Ceruzzi
ISBN: 9780262535953
Количество страниц: 232
Description:
A concise history of GPS, from its military origins to its commercial applications and ubiquity in everyday life.
GPS is ubiquitous in everyday life. GPS mapping is standard equipment in many new cars and geolocation services are embedded in smart phones. GPS makes Uber and Lyft possible; driverless cars won't be able to drive without it. In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Paul Ceruzzi offers a concise history of GPS, explaining how a once-obscure space technology became an invisible piece of our infrastructure, as essential to modern life as electric power or clean water.
GPS relays precise time and positioning information from orbiting satellites to receivers on the ground, at sea, and in the air. It operates worldwide, and its basic signals are free, although private companies can commodify the data provided. Ceruzzi recounts the origins of GPS and its predecessor technologies, including early aircraft navigation systems and satellites. He describes the invention of GPS as a space technology in the post-Apollo, pre-Space Shuttle years and its first military and commercial uses. Ceruzzi explains how the convergence of three major technological developments—the microprocessor, the Internet, and cellular telephony—enabled the development and application of GPS technology. Recognizing the importance of satellite positioning systems in a shifting geopolitical landscape—and perhaps doubting U.S. assurances of perpetual GPS availability—other countries are now building or have already developed their own systems, and Ceruzzi reports on these efforts in the European Union, Russia, India, China, and Japan.

Год издания: 2018
Автор: Lynette Jones
ISBN: 9780262535809
Количество страниц: 192
Description:
An accessible, nontechnical overview of active touch sensing, from sensory receptors in the skin to tactile surfaces on flat screen displays.
Haptics, or haptic sensing, refers to the ability to identify and perceive objects through touch. This is active touch, involving exploration of an object with the hand rather than the passive sensing of a vibration or force on the skin. The development of new technologies, including prosthetic hands and tactile surfaces for flat screen displays, depends on our knowledge of haptics. In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Lynette Jones offers an accessible overview of haptics, or active touch sensing, and its applications.
Jones explains that haptics involves integrating information from touch and kinesthesia—that is, information both from sensors in the skin and from sensors in muscles, tendons, and joints. The challenge for technology is to reproduce in a virtual world some of the sensations associated with physical interactions with the environment.
Jones maps the building blocks of the tactile system, the receptors in the skin and the skin itself, and how information is processed at this interface with the external world. She describes haptic perception, the processing of haptic information in the brain; haptic illusions, or distorted perceptions of objects and the body itself; tactile and haptic displays, from braille to robotic systems; tactile compensation for other sensory impairments; surface haptics, which creates virtual haptic effects on physical surfaces such as touch screens; and the development of robotic and prosthetic hands that mimic the properties of human hands.

Год издания: 2018
Автор: Lee McIntyre
ISBN: 9780262535045
Количество страниц: 240
Description:
How we arrived in a post-truth era, when “alternative facts” replace actual facts, and feelings have more weight than evidence.
Are we living in a post-truth world, where “alternative facts” replace actual facts and feelings have more weight than evidence? How did we get here? In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Lee McIntyre traces the development of the post-truth phenomenon from science denial through the rise of “fake news,” from our psychological blind spots to the public's retreat into “information silos.”
What, exactly, is post-truth? Is it wishful thinking, political spin, mass delusion, bold-faced lying? McIntyre analyzes recent examples—claims about inauguration crowd size, crime statistics, and the popular vote—and finds that post-truth is an assertion of ideological supremacy by which its practitioners try to compel someone to believe something regardless of the evidence. Yet post-truth didn't begin with the 2016 election; the denial of scientific facts about smoking, evolution, vaccines, and climate change offers a road map for more widespread fact denial. Add to this the wired-in cognitive biases that make us feel that our conclusions are based on good reasoning even when they are not, the decline of traditional media and the rise of social media, and the emergence of fake news as a political tool, and we have the ideal conditions for post-truth. McIntyre also argues provocatively that the right wing borrowed from postmodernism—specifically, the idea that there is no such thing as objective truth—in its attacks on science and facts.
McIntyre argues that we can fight post-truth, and that the first step in fighting post-truth is to understand it.

Год издания: 2018
Автор: Michael J. Neufeld
ISBN: 9780262536332
Количество страниц: 248
Description:
A concise history of spaceflight, from military rocketry through Sputnik, Apollo, robots in space, space culture, and human spaceflight today.
Spaceflight is one of the greatest human achievements of the twentieth century. The Soviets launched Sputnik, the first satellite, in 1957; less than twelve years later, the American Apollo astronauts landed on the Moon. In this volume of the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Michael Neufeld offers a concise history of spaceflight, mapping the full spectrum of activities that humans have developed in space.
Neufeld explains that “the space program” should not be equated only with human spaceflight. Since the 1960s, unmanned military and commercial spacecraft have been orbiting near the Earth, and robotic deep-space explorers have sent back stunning images of faraway planets. Neufeld begins with the origins of space ideas and the discovery that rocketry could be used for spaceflight. He then discusses the Soviet-U.S. Cold War space race and reminds us that NASA resisted adding female astronauts even after the Soviets sent the first female cosmonaut into orbit. He analyzes the two rationales for the Apollo program: prestige and scientific discovery (this last something of an afterthought). He describes the internationalization and privatization of human spaceflight after the Cold War, the cultural influence of space science fiction, including Star Trek and Star Wars, space tourism for the ultra-rich, and the popular desire to go into space. Whether we become a multiplanet species, as some predict, or continue to call Earth home, this book offers a useful primer.

Год издания: 2018
Автор: Richard E. Cytowic
ISBN: 9780262535090
Количество страниц: 288
Description:
An accessible, concise primer on the neurological trait of synesthesia—vividly felt sensory couplings—by a founder of the field.
One in twenty-three people carry the genes for the synesthesia. Not a disorder but a neurological trait—like perfect pitch—synesthesia creates vividly felt cross-sensory couplings. A synesthete might hear a voice and at the same time see it as a color or shape, taste its distinctive flavor, or feel it as a physical touch. In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Richard Cytowic, the expert who returned synesthesia to mainstream science after decades of oblivion, offers a concise, accessible primer on this fascinating human experience.
Cytowic explains that synesthesia's most frequent manifestation is seeing days of the week as colored, followed by sensing letters, numerals, and punctuation marks in different hues even when printed in black. Other manifestations include tasting food in shapes, seeing music in moving colors, and mapping numbers and other sequences spatially. One synesthete declares, “Chocolate smells pink and sparkly”; another invents a dish (chicken, vanilla ice cream, and orange juice concentrate) that tastes intensely blue. Cytowic, who in the 1980s revived scientific interest in synesthesia, sees it now understood as a spectrum, an umbrella term that covers five clusters of outwardly felt couplings that can occur via several pathways. Yet synesthetic or not, each brain uniquely filters what it perceives. Cytowic reminds us that each individual's perspective on the world is thoroughly subjective.

Год издания: 2018
Автор: Amaranth Borsuk
ISBN: 9780262535410
Количество страниц: 344
Description:
The book as object, as content, as idea, as interface.
What is the book in a digital age? Is it a physical object containing pages encased in covers? Is it a portable device that gives us access to entire libraries? The codex, the book as bound paper sheets, emerged around 150 CE. It was preceded by clay tablets and papyrus scrolls. Are those books? In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Amaranth Borsuk considers the history of the book, the future of the book, and the idea of the book. Tracing the interrelationship of form and content in the book's development, she bridges book history, book arts, and electronic literature to expand our definition of an object we thought we knew intimately.
Contrary to the many reports of its death (which has been blamed at various times on newspapers, television, and e-readers), the book is alive. Despite nostalgic paeans to the codex and its printed pages, Borsuk reminds us, the term “book” commonly refers to both medium and content. And the medium has proved to be malleable. Rather than pinning our notion of the book to a single form, Borsuk argues, we should remember its long history of transformation. Considering the book as object, content, idea, and interface, she shows that the physical form of the book has always been the site of experimentation and play. Rather than creating a false dichotomy between print and digital media, we should appreciate their continuities.

Год издания: 2019
Автор: John M. Jordan
ISBN: 9780262536684
Количество страниц: 240
Description:
An accessible introduction to 3D printing that outlines the additive manufacturing process, industrial and household markets, and emerging uses.
The use of 3D printing—digitally controlled additive manufacturing—is growing rapidly. Consumer models of 3D printers allow people to fabricate small plastic objects, from cabinet knobs to wedding cake toppers. Industrial uses are becoming widespread, as businesses use the technology to fabricate prototypes, spare parts, custom-fitted prosthetics, and other plastic or metal items, often at lower cost and with greater efficiency than standard manufacturing. In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, John Jordan offers an accessible introduction to 3D printing, describing the printing process, industrial and household markets, and emerging uses.
Jordan outlines the stages of 3D printing, from idea to software model to a printable file that slices the planned object into printable layers to the finished object itself. He describes additive technologies, consumer 3D printing in homes and schools, mass customization (which can create tens of millions of unique items), and industrial uses. Jordan explains that although 3D printers have not become the ubiquitous home appliance once predicted, they are making inroads into mass markets; and he discusses the business factors that may hinder industry adoption of 3D printing technologies. He considers the possible unintended consequences of 3D printing on jobs, as companies scramble to find employees with an uncommon skill set; on business models and supply chains, as manufacturing is decentralized; and on patent law, as machines can be programmed to copy protected property. Finally, Jordan looks at new and emerging uses, including bioprinting, building construction, and micromachines.

Год издания: 2019
Автор: Peter J. Denning, Matti Tedre
ISBN: 9780262536561
Количество страниц: 264
Description:
An introduction to computational thinking that traces a genealogy beginning centuries before the digital computer.
A few decades into the digital era, scientists discovered that thinking in terms of computation made possible an entirely new way of organizing scientific investigation; eventually, every field had a computational branch: computational physics, computational biology, computational sociology. More recently, “computational thinking” has become part of the K–12 curriculum. But what is computational thinking? This volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series offers an accessible overview, tracing a genealogy that begins centuries before digital computers and portraying computational thinking as pioneers of computing have described it.
The authors explain that computational thinking (CT) is not a set of concepts for programming; it is a way of thinking that is honed through practice: the mental skills for designing computations to do jobs for us, and for explaining and interpreting the world as a complex of information processes. Mathematically trained experts (known as “computers”) who performed complex calculations as teams engaged in CT long before electronic computers. The authors identify six dimensions of today's highly developed CT—methods, machines, computing education, software engineering, computational science, and design—and cover each in a chapter. Along the way, they debunk inflated claims for CT and computation while making clear the power of CT in all its complexity and multiplicity.

Год издания: 2019
Автор: John D. Kelleher
ISBN: 9780262537551
Количество страниц: 296
Description:
An accessible introduction to the artificial intelligence technology that enables computer vision, speech recognition, machine translation, and driverless cars.
Deep learning is an artificial intelligence technology that enables computer vision, speech recognition in mobile phones, machine translation, AI games, driverless cars, and other applications. When we use consumer products from Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, or Baidu, we are often interacting with a deep learning system. In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, computer scientist John Kelleher offers an accessible and concise but comprehensive introduction to the fundamental technology at the heart of the artificial intelligence revolution.
Kelleher explains that deep learning enables data-driven decisions by identifying and extracting patterns from large datasets; its ability to learn from complex data makes deep learning ideally suited to take advantage of the rapid growth in big data and computational power. Kelleher also explains some of the basic concepts in deep learning, presents a history of advances in the field, and discusses the current state of the art. He describes the most important deep learning architectures, including autoencoders, recurrent neural networks, and long short-term networks, as well as such recent developments as Generative Adversarial Networks and capsule networks. He also provides a comprehensive (and comprehensible) introduction to the two fundamental algorithms in deep learning: gradient descent and backpropagation. Finally, Kelleher considers the future of deep learning—major trends, possible developments, and significant challenges.

Год издания: 2019
Автор: Hany Farid
ISBN: 9780262537490
Количество страниц: 232
Description:
A concise and accessible guide to techniques for detecting doctored and fake images in photographs and digital media.
Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Mussolini, and other dictators routinely doctored photographs so that the images aligned with their messages. They erased people who were there, added people who were not, and manipulated backgrounds. They knew if they changed the visual record, they could change history. Once, altering images required hours in the darkroom; today, it can be done with a keyboard and mouse. Because photographs are so easily faked, fake photos are everywhere—supermarket tabloids, fashion magazines, political ads, and social media. How can we tell if an image is real or false? In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Hany Farid offers a concise and accessible guide to techniques for detecting doctored and fake images in photographs and digital media.
Farid, an expert in photo forensics, has spent two decades developing techniques for authenticating digital images. These techniques model the entire image-creation process in order to find the digital disruption introduced by manipulation of the image. Each section of the book describes a different technique for analyzing an image, beginning with those requiring minimal technical expertise and advancing to those at intermediate and higher levels. There are techniques for, among other things, reverse image searches, metadata analysis, finding image imperfections introduced by JPEG compression, image cloning, tracing pixel patterns, and detecting images that are computer generated. In each section, Farid describes the techniques, explains when they should be applied, and offers examples of image analysis.

Год издания: 2019
Автор: Nolen Gertz
ISBN: 9780262537179
Количество страниц: 224
Description:
An examination of the meaning of meaninglessness: why it matters that nothing matters.
When someone is labeled a nihilist, it's not usually meant as a compliment. Most of us associate nihilism with destructiveness and violence. Nihilism means, literally, “an ideology of nothing. “ Is nihilism, then, believing in nothing? Or is it the belief that life is nothing? Or the belief that the beliefs we have amount to nothing? If we can learn to recognize the many varieties of nihilism, Nolen Gertz writes, then we can learn to distinguish what is meaningful from what is meaningless. In this addition to the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Gertz traces the history of nihilism in Western philosophy from Socrates through Hannah Arendt and Jean-Paul Sartre.
Although the term “nihilism” was first used by Friedrich Jacobi to criticize the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, Gertz shows that the concept can illuminate the thinking of Socrates, Descartes, and others. It is Nietzsche, however, who is most associated with nihilism, and Gertz focuses on Nietzsche's thought. Gertz goes on to consider what is not nihilism—pessimism, cynicism, and apathy—and why; he explores theories of nihilism, including those associated with Existentialism and Postmodernism; he considers nihilism as a way of understanding aspects of everyday life, calling on Adorno, Arendt, Marx, and prestige television, among other sources; and he reflects on the future of nihilism. We need to understand nihilism not only from an individual perspective, Gertz tells us, but also from a political one.

Год издания: 2019
Автор: Samuel Greengard
ISBN: 9780262537520
Количество страниц: 264
Description:
A comprehensive overview of developments in augmented reality, virtual reality, and mixed reality—and how they could affect every part of our lives.
After years of hype, extended reality—augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), and mixed reality (MR)—has entered the mainstream. Commercially available, relatively inexpensive VR headsets transport wearers to other realities—fantasy worlds, faraway countries, sporting events—in ways that even the most ultra-high-definition screen cannot. AR glasses receive data in visual and auditory forms that are more useful than any laptop or smartphone can deliver. Immersive MR environments blend physical and virtual reality to create a new reality. In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, technology writer Samuel Greengard offers an accessible overview of developments in extended reality, explaining the technology, considering the social and psychological ramifications, and discussing possible future directions.
Greengard describes the history and technological development of augmented and virtual realities, including the latest research in the field, and surveys the various shapes and forms of VR, AR, and MR, including head-mounted displays, mobile systems, and goggles. He examines the way these technologies are shaping and reshaping some professions and industries, and explores how extended reality affects psychology, morality, law, and social constructs. It's not a question of whether extended reality will become a standard part of our world, he argues, but how, when, and where these technologies will take hold. Will extended reality help create a better world? Will it benefit society as a whole? Or will it merely provide financial windfalls for a select few? Greengard's account equips us to ask the right questions about a transformative technology.

Год издания: 2020
Автор: Mark Coeckelbergh
ISBN: 9780262538190
Количество страниц: 248
Description:
An accessible synthesis of ethical issues raised by artificial intelligence that moves beyond hype and nightmare scenarios to address concrete questions.
Artificial intelligence powers Google's search engine, enables Facebook to target advertising, and allows Alexa and Siri to do their jobs. AI is also behind self-driving cars, predictive policing, and autonomous weapons that can kill without human intervention. These and other AI applications raise complex ethical issues that are the subject of ongoing debate. This volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series offers an accessible synthesis of these issues. Written by a philosopher of technology, AI Ethics goes beyond the usual hype and nightmare scenarios to address concrete questions.
Mark Coeckelbergh describes influential AI narratives, ranging from Frankenstein's monster to transhumanism and the technological singularity. He surveys relevant philosophical discussions: questions about the fundamental differences between humans and machines and debates over the moral status of AI. He explains the technology of AI, describing different approaches and focusing on machine learning and data science. He offers an overview of important ethical issues, including privacy concerns, responsibility and the delegation of decision making, transparency, and bias as it arises at all stages of data science processes. He also considers the future of work in an AI economy. Finally, he analyzes a range of policy proposals and discusses challenges for policymakers. He argues for ethical practices that embed values in design, translate democratic values into practices and include a vision of the good life and the good society.

Год издания: 2020
Автор: Panos Louridas
ISBN: 9780262539029
Количество страниц: 312
Description:
An accessible introduction to algorithms, explaining not just what they are but how they work, with examples from a wide range of application areas.
Digital technology runs on algorithms, sets of instructions that describe how to do something efficiently. Application areas range from search engines to tournament scheduling, DNA sequencing, and machine learning. Arguing that every educated person today needs to have some understanding of algorithms and what they do, in this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Panos Louridas offers an introduction to algorithms that is accessible to the nonspecialist reader. Louridas explains not just what algorithms are but also how they work, offering a wide range of examples and keeping mathematics to a minimum.
After discussing what an algorithm does and how its effectiveness can be measured, Louridas covers three of the most fundamental applications areas: graphs, which describe networks, from eighteenth-century problems to today's social networks; searching, and how to find the fastest way to search; and sorting, and the importance of choosing the best algorithm for particular tasks. He then presents larger-scale applications: PageRank, Google's founding algorithm; and neural networks and deep learning. Finally, Louridas describes how all algorithms are nothing more than simple moves with pen and paper, and how from such a humble foundation rise all their spectacular achievements.

Год издания: 2020
Автор: Michael Hallsworth, Elspeth Kirkman
ISBN: 9780262539401
Количество страниц: 248
Description:
The definitive introduction to the behavioral insights approach, which applies evidence about human behavior to practical problems.
Our behavior is strongly influenced by factors that lie outside our conscious awareness, although we tend to underestimate the power of this “automatic” side of our behavior. As a result, governments make ineffective policies, businesses create bad products, and individuals make unrealistic plans. In contrast, the behavioral insights approach applies evidence about actual human behavior—rather than assumptions about it—to practical problems. This volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, written by two leading experts in the field, offers an accessible introduction to behavioral insights, describing core features, origins, and practical examples.
Since 2010, these insights have opened up new ways of addressing some of the biggest challenges faced by societies, changing the way that governments, businesses, and nonprofits work in the process. This book shows how the approach is grounded in a concern with practical problems, the use of evidence about human behavior to address those problems, and experimentation to evaluate the impact of the solutions. It gives an overview of the approach's origins in psychology and behavioral economics, its early adoption by the UK's pioneering “nudge unit,” and its recent expansion into new areas. The book also provides examples from across different policy areas and guidance on how to run a behavioral insights project. Finally, the book outlines the limitations and ethical implications of the approach, and what the future holds for this fast-moving area.

Год издания: 2020
Автор: Jonathan Haber
ISBN: 9780262538282
Количество страниц: 232
Description:
How the concept of critical thinking emerged, how it has been defined, and how critical thinking skills can be taught.
Critical thinking is regularly cited as an essential twenty-first century skill, the key to success in school and work. Given our propensity to believe fake news, draw incorrect conclusions, and make decisions based on emotion rather than reason, it might even be said that critical thinking is vital to the survival of a democratic society. But what, exactly, is critical thinking? In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Jonathan Haber explains how the concept of critical thinking emerged, how it has been defined, and how critical thinking skills can be taught and assessed.
Haber describes the term's origins in such disciplines as philosophy, psychology, and science. He examines the components of critical thinking, including structured thinking, language skills, background knowledge, and information literacy, along with such necessary intellectual traits as intellectual humility, empathy, and open-mindedness. He discusses how research has defined critical thinking, how elements of critical thinking have been taught for centuries, and how educators can teach critical thinking skills now.
Haber argues that the most important critical thinking issue today is that not enough people are doing enough of it. Fortunately, critical thinking can be taught, practiced, and evaluated. This book offers a guide for teachers, students, and aspiring critical thinkers everywhere, including advice for educational leaders and policy makers on how to make the teaching and learning of critical thinking an educational priority and practical reality.

Год издания: 2020
Автор: Felipe Larraín B.
ISBN: 9780262538572
Количество страниц: 296
Description:
An accessible introduction to the basics of macroeconomics and how it affects the local and global economies.
Macroeconomics takes a broad perspective on the economy of a country or region; it studies economic changes in the aggregate, collecting data on production, unemployment, inflation, consumption, investment, trade, and other aspects of national and international economic life. Policymakers depend on macroeconomists' knowledge when making decisions about such issues as taxes and the public budget, monetary and exchange rate policies, and trade policies—all of which, in turn, affect decisions made by individuals and businesses. This volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series offers an introduction to the basics of macroeconomics accessible to the noneconomist. Readers will gain the tools to interpret such economic events as the 2008 financial meltdown, the subsequent euro crisis, and the current protectionist dynamics seen in some developed countries.
The author, an academic economist and two-time Chilean Finance Minister, devotes a substantial part of his analysis to economic development, explaining why some countries achieve continuing economic growth while others become stagnant. He discusses the links between economic activity and employment; employment and unemployment rates; factors behind economic growth; money, inflation, and exchange rate systems; fiscal deficits; balance of payment crises; consumption and savings; investment decisions; fiscal policy; and the process of globalization and its macroeconomic implications.

Год издания: 2020
Автор: Chad Engelland
ISBN: 9780262539319
Количество страниц: 264
Description:
A concise and accessible introduction to phenomenology, which investigates the experience of experience.
This volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series offers a concise and accessible introduction to phenomenology, a philosophical movement that investigates the experience of experience. Founded by Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) and expounded by Max Scheler, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and others, phenomenology ventures forth into the field of experience so that truth might be met in the flesh. It investigates everything as experienced. It does not study mere appearance but the true appearances of things, holding that the unfolding of experience allows us to sort true appearances from mere appearance.
The book unpacks a series of terms—world, flesh, speech, life, truth, love, and wonder—all of which are bound up with each other in experience. For example, world is where experience takes place; flesh names the way our experiential exploration is inscribed into the bearings of our bodily being; speech is instituted in bodily presence; truth concerns the way our claims about things are confirmed by our experience. A chapter on the phenomenological method describes it as a means of clarifying the modality of experience that is written into its very fabric; and a chapter on the phenomenological movement bridges its divisions while responding to criticisms from analytic philosophy and postmodernism.

Год издания: 2020
Автор: Jed Brody
ISBN: 9780262538442
Количество страниц: 184
Description:
An exploration of quantum entanglement and the ways in which it contradicts our everyday assumptions about the ultimate nature of reality.
Quantum physics is notable for its brazen defiance of common sense. (Think of Schrödinger's Cat, famously both dead and alive.) An especially rigorous form of quantum contradiction occurs in experiments with entangled particles. Our common assumption is that objects have properties whether or not anyone is observing them, and the measurement of one can't affect the other. Quantum entanglement—called by Einstein “spooky action at a distance”—rejects this assumption, offering impeccable reasoning and irrefutable evidence of the opposite. Is quantum entanglement mystical, or just mystifying? In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Jed Brody equips readers to decide for themselves. He explains how our commonsense assumptions impose constraints—from which entangled particles break free.
Brody explores such concepts as local realism, Bell's inequality, polarization, time dilation, and special relativity. He introduces readers to imaginary physicists Alice and Bob and their photon analyses; points out that it's easier to reject falsehood than establish the truth; and reports that some physicists explain entanglement by arguing that we live in a cross-section of a higher-dimensional reality. He examines a variety of viewpoints held by physicists, including quantum decoherence, Niels Bohr's Copenhagen interpretation, genuine fortuitousness, and QBism. This relatively recent interpretation, an abbreviation of “quantum Bayesianism,” holds that there's no such thing as an absolutely accurate, objective probability “out there,” that quantum mechanical probabilities are subjective judgments, and there's no “action at a distance,” spooky or otherwise.

Год издания: 2020
Автор: Michael Schrage
ISBN: 9780262539074
Количество страниц: 304
Description:
How companies like Amazon and Netflix know what “you might also like”: the history, technology, business, and social impact of online recommendation engines.
Increasingly, our technologies are giving us better, faster, smarter, and more personal advice than our own families and best friends. Amazon already knows what kind of books and household goods you like and is more than eager to recommend more; YouTube and TikTok always have another video lined up to show you; Netflix has crunched the numbers of your viewing habits to suggest whole genres that you would enjoy. In this volume in the MIT Press's Essential Knowledge series, innovation expert Michael Schrage explains the origins, technologies, business applications, and increasing societal impact of recommendation engines, the systems that allow companies worldwide to know what products, services, and experiences “you might also like.”
Schrage offers a history of recommendation that reaches back to antiquity's oracles and astrologers; recounts the academic origins and commercial evolution of recommendation engines; explains how these systems work, discussing key mathematical insights, including the impact of machine learning and deep learning algorithms; and highlights user experience design challenges. He offers brief but incisive case studies of the digital music service Spotify; ByteDance, the owner of TikTok; and the online personal stylist Stitch Fix. Finally, Schrage considers the future of technological recommenders: Will they leave us disappointed and dependent—or will they help us discover the world and ourselves in novel and serendipitous ways?

Год издания: 2020
Автор: Shashi Shekhar, Pamela Vold
ISBN: 9780262538046
Количество страниц: 256
Description:
An accessible guide to the ideas and technologies underlying such applications as GPS, Google Maps, Pokémon Go, ride-sharing, driverless cars, and drone surveillance.
Billions of people around the globe use various applications of spatial computing daily—by using a ride-sharing app, GPS, the e911 system, social media check-ins, even Pokémon Go. Scientists and researchers use spatial computing to track diseases, map the bottom of the oceans, chart the behavior of endangered species, and create election maps in real time. Drones and driverless cars use a variety of spatial computing technologies. Spatial computing works by understanding the physical world, knowing and communicating our relation to places in that world, and navigating through those places. It has changed our lives and infrastructures profoundly, marking a significant shift in how we make our way in the world. This volume in the MIT Essential Knowledge series explains the technologies and ideas behind spatial computing.
The book offers accessible descriptions of GPS and location-based services, including the use of Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and RFID for position determination out of satellite range; remote sensing, which uses satellite and aerial platforms to monitor such varied phenomena as global food production, the effects of climate change, and subsurface natural resources on other planets; geographic information systems (GIS), which store, analyze, and visualize spatial data; spatial databases, which store multiple forms of spatial data; and spatial statistics and spatial data science, used to analyze location-related data.

Год издания: 2020
Автор: Germaine Halegoua
ISBN: 9780262538053
Количество страниц: 248
Description:
Key concepts, definitions, examples, and historical contexts for understanding smart cities, along with discussions of both drawbacks and benefits of this approach to urban problems.
Over the past ten years, urban planners, technology companies, and governments have promoted smart cities with a somewhat utopian vision of urban life made knowable and manageable through data collection and analysis. Emerging smart cities have become both crucibles and showrooms for the practical application of the Internet of Things, cloud computing, and the integration of big data into everyday life. Are smart cities optimized, sustainable, digitally networked solutions to urban problems? Or are they neoliberal, corporate-controlled, undemocratic non-places? This volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series offers a concise introduction to smart cities, presenting key concepts, definitions, examples, and historical contexts, along with discussions of both the drawbacks and the benefits of this approach to urban life.
After reviewing current terminology and justifications employed by technology designers, journalists, and researchers, the book describes three models for smart city development—smart-from-the-start cities, retrofitted cities, and social cities—and offers examples of each. It covers technologies and methods, including sensors, public wi-fi, big data, and smartphone apps, and discusses how developers conceive of interactions among the built environment, technological and urban infrastructures, citizens, and citizen engagement. Throughout, the author—who has studied smart cities around the world—argues that smart city developers should work more closely with local communities, recognizing their preexisting relationship to urban place and realizing the limits of technological fixes. Smartness is a means to an end: improving the quality of urban life.

Год издания: 2021
Автор: Roberto Pieraccini
ISBN: 9780262542555
Количество страниц: 288
Description:
An accessible explanation of the technologies that enable such popular voice-interactive applications as Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant.
Have you talked to a machine lately? Asked Alexa to play a song, asked Siri to call a friend, asked Google Assistant to make a shopping list? This volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series offers a nontechnical and accessible explanation of the technologies that enable these popular devices. Roberto Pieraccini, drawing on more than thirty years of experience at companies including Bell Labs, IBM, and Google, describes the developments in such fields as artificial intelligence, machine learning, speech recognition, and natural language understanding that allow us to outsource tasks to our ubiquitous virtual assistants.
Pieraccini describes the software components that enable spoken communication between humans and computers, and explains why it's so difficult to build machines that understand humans. He explains speech recognition technology; problems in extracting meaning from utterances in order to execute a request; language and speech generation; the dialog manager module; and interactions with social assistants and robots. Finally, he considers the next big challenge in the development of virtual assistants: building in more intelligence—enabling them to do more than communicate in natural language and endowing them with the capacity to know us better, predict our needs more accurately, and perform complex tasks with ease.

Год издания: 2021
Автор: Remi H. Kalir, Antero Garcia
ISBN: 9780262539920
Количество страниц: 232
Description:
An introduction to annotation as a genre—a synthesis of reading, thinking, writing, and communication—and its significance in scholarship and everyday life.
Annotation—the addition of a note to a text—is an everyday and social activity that provides information, shares commentary, sparks conversation, expresses power, and aids learning. It helps mediate the relationship between reading and writing. This volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series offers an introduction to annotation and its literary, scholarly, civic, and everyday significance across historical and contemporary contexts. It approaches annotation as a genre—a synthesis of reading, thinking, writing, and communication—and offers examples of annotation that range from medieval rubrication and early book culture to data labeling and online reviews.
After introducing such ideas as paratext, multimodality, and intertextuality, the authors discuss the affordances and types of annotation in a variety of contexts. Annotation that provides information, for example, can be a time stamp on a text message or a footnote to a text; annotation that shares commentary can be praise (or the opposite) on Rate My Professors or the texts in the Hebrew Talmud; and annotation that aids learning can be added by experts for students or by students for their peers. Far from being an arcane practice of scholars, annotation allows readers to respond to their texts, interact with various forms of media, and make meaning with and from this everyday activity.

Год издания: 2021
Автор: Ritu Raman
ISBN: 9780262542968
Количество страниц: 216
Description:
How engineered materials and machines powered by living biological cells can tackle technological challenges in medicine, agriculture, and global security.
You are a biological machine whose movement is powered by skeletal muscle, just as a car is a machine whose movement is powered by an engine. If you can be built from the bottom up with biological materials, other machines can be as well. This is the conceptual starting point for biofabrication, the act of building with living cells—building with biology in the same way we build with synthetic materials. In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Ritu Raman offers an accessible introduction to biofabrication, arguing that it can address some of our greatest technological challenges.
After presenting the background information needed to understand the emergence and evolution of biofabrication and describing the fundamental technology that enables building with biology, Raman takes deep dives into four biofabrication applications that have the potential to affect our daily lives: tissue engineering, organs-on-a-chip, lab-grown meat and leather, and biohybrid machines. Organs-on-a-chip (devices composed of miniature model tissues), for example, could be used to test new medicine and therapies, and lab-grown meat could alleviate environmental damage done by animal farming. She shows that biological materials have abilities synthetic materials do not, including the ability to adapt dynamically to their environments. Exploring the principles of biofabrication, Raman tells us, should help us appreciate the beauty, adaptiveness, and persistence of the biological machinery that drives our bodies and our world.

Год издания: 2021
Автор: Duane C. Wilson
ISBN: 9780262542548
Количество страниц: 160
Description:
An accessible guide to cybersecurity for the everyday user, covering cryptography and public key infrastructure, malware, blockchain, and other topics.
It seems that everything we touch is connected to the internet, from mobile phones and wearable technology to home appliances and cyber assistants. The more connected our computer systems, the more exposed they are to cyber attacks—attempts to steal data, corrupt software, disrupt operations, and even physically damage hardware and network infrastructures. In this volume of the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, cyber security expert Duane Wilson offers an accessible guide to cybersecurity issues for everyday users, describing risks associated with internet use, modern methods of defense against cyber attacks, and general principles for safer internet use.
Wilson describes the principles that underlie all cybersecurity defense: confidentiality, integrity, availability, authentication, authorization, and non-repudiation (validating the source of information). He explains that confidentiality is accomplished by cryptography; examines the different layers of defense; analyzes cyber risks, threats, and vulnerabilities; and breaks down the cyber kill chain and the many forms of malware. He reviews some online applications of cybersecurity, including end-to-end security protection, secure ecommerce transactions, smart devices with built-in protections, and blockchain technology. Finally, Wilson considers the future of cybersecurity, discussing the continuing evolution of cyber defenses as well as research that may alter the overall threat landscape.

Год издания: 2021
Автор: Nicole Piemonte, Shawn Abreu
ISBN: 9780262542425
Количество страниц: 248
Description:
An examination of the contemporary medicalization of death and dying that calls us to acknowledge death's existential and emotional realities.
Death is a natural, inevitable, and deeply human process, and yet Western medicine tends to view it as a medical failure. In their zeal to prevent death, physicians and hospitals often set patients and their families on a seemingly unstoppable trajectory toward medical interventions that may actually increase suffering at the end of life. This volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series examines the medicalization of death and dying and proposes a different approach—one that acknowledges death's existential and emotional realities.
The authors—one an academic who teaches and studies end-of-life care, and the other a physician trained in hospice and palliative care—offer an account of Western-style death and dying that is informed by both research and personal experience. They examine the medical profession's attitude toward death as a biological dysfunction that needs fixing; describe the hospice movement, as well as movements for palliative care and aid in dying, and why they failed to influence mainstream medicine; consider our reluctance to have end-of-life conversations; and investigate the commodification of medicine and the business of dying. To help patients die in accordance with their values, they say, those who care for the dying should focus less on delaying death by any means possible and more on being present with the dying on their journey.

Год издания: 2021
Автор: David J. Gunkel
ISBN: 9780262542470
Количество страниц: 200
Description:
An accessible introduction to a concept often considered impossibly abstruse, demonstrating its power as a conceptual tool in the twenty-first century.
This volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series offers a clear and concise introduction to a topic often considered difficult and abstruse: deconstruction. David Gunkel sorts out the concept, terminology, and practices of deconstruction, not to defend academic orthodoxy, or to disseminate the thought of Jacques Derrida—the fabricator of the neologism and progenitor of the concept—but to provide readers with a powerful conceptual tool for the twenty-first century.
Gunkel explains that deconstruction is not simply the opposite of construction—the “deconstructed” jacket hanging in your closet is not, strictly speaking, accurately named—or synonymous with destruction. It is a way to think beyond the construction/destruction dichotomy and all other conceptual dichotomies and logical oppositions. After describing what deconstruction is not, and developing an abstract and schematic characterization derived from Derrida, Gunkel offers examples in (rather than of) deconstruction, including logocentrism (the speech/writing dichotomy) and virtuality (the ruling philosophical binary of real/appearance), remix (the original/copy distinction), and the posthuman figure of the cyborg (the human/machine conceptual pairing). Finally, Gunkel discusses the costs and benefits of deconstruction, considering the many things deconstruction is good for and identifying potential problems, including Eurocentrism, relativism, difficulties in communicating the concept, and reappropriation.

Год издания: 2021
Автор: Kathryn Bond Stockton
ISBN: 9780262542609
Количество страниц: 256
Description:
Why gender is strange, even when it's played straight, and how race and money are two of its most dramatic ingredients.
In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Kathryn Bond Stockton explores the fascinating, fraught, intimate, morphing matter of gender. Stockton argues for gender's strangeness, no matter how “normal” the concept seems; gender is queer for everyone, she claims, even when it's played quite straight. And she explains how race and money dramatically shape everybody's gender, even in sometimes surprising ways. Playful but serious, erudite and witty, Stockton marshals an impressive array of exhibits to consider, including dolls and their new gendering, the thrust of Jane Austen and Lil Nas X, gender identities according to women's colleges, gay and transgender ballroom scenes, and much more.
Stockton also examines gender in light of biology's own strange ways, its out-of-syncness with “male” and “female,” explaining attempts to fortify gender with clothing, language, labor, and hair. She investigates gender as a concept—its concerning history, its bewitching pleasures and falsifications—by meeting the moment of where we are, with its many genders and counters-to-gender. This compelling background propels the question that drives this book and foregrounds race: what is “the opposite sex,” after all? If there is no opposite, doesn't the male/female duo undergirding gender come undone?

Год издания: 2021
Автор: Caitlin Ring Carlson
ISBN: 9780262539906
Количество страниц: 200
Description:
An investigation of hate speech: legal approaches, current controversies, and suggestions for limiting its spread.
Hate speech can happen anywhere—in Charlottesville, Virginia, where young men in khakis shouted, “Jews will not replace us”; in Myanmar, where the military used Facebook to target the Muslim Rohingya; in Capetown, South Africa, where a pastor called on ISIS to rid South Africa of the "homosexual curse.” In person or online, people wield language to attack others for their race, national origin, religion, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, disability, or other aspects of identity. This volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series examines hate speech: what it is, and is not; its history; and efforts to address it.
Author Caitlin Ring Carlson, an expert in communication and mass media, defines hate speech as any expression—spoken words, images, or symbols—that seeks to malign people for their immutable characteristics. Hate speech is not synonymous with offensive speech—saying that you do not like someone does not constitute hate speech—or hate crimes, which are criminal acts motivated by prejudice. Hate speech traumatizes victims and degrades societies that condone it. Carlson investigates legal approaches taken by the EU, Brazil, Canada, Germany, Japan, South Africa, and the United States, with a detailed discussion of how the U.S. addresses, and in most cases, allows, hate speech. She explores recent hate speech controversies, and suggests ways that governments, colleges, media organizations, and other organizations can limit the spread of hate speech.

Год издания: 2021
Автор: Bita Moghaddam
ISBN: 9780262542241
Количество страниц: 200
Description:
The emergence of ketamine—previously known as a combat anesthetic and club drug—as a treatment for depression.
Ketamine, approved in 2019 by the Food and Drug Administration for the treatment of depression, has been touted by scientists and media reports as something approaching a miracle cure. This volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series chronicles the ascent of a drug that has been around for fifty years—in previous incarnations, a Vietnam-era combat anesthetic and a popular club drug—that has now been reinvented as a treatment for depression. Bita Moghaddam, a leading researcher in neuropharmacology, explains the scientific history and the biology of ketamine, its clinical use, and its recently discovered antidepressant properties, for the nonspecialist reader.
Despite the excitement, Moghaddam points out, concerns exist over the unknown long-term effects of the drug; the FDA assigned ketamine a “black box” warning—its most serious safety warning. Moghaddam describes the discovery of ketamine, how it was tested on humans, and how it is used as an anesthetic, club drug, and research tool. She explains ketamine's effects on brain receptors and neurotransmitters; its emergence as an antidepressant; and theories about its antidepressant properties. Finally, she reviews safety concerns and considers future directions for research, discussing whether what we learn about ketamine will change the way we understand and treat psychiatric disorders.

Год издания: 2021
Автор: Ethem Alpaydın
ISBN: 9780262542524
Количество страниц: 280
Description:
A concise overview of machine learning—computer programs that learn from data—the basis of such applications as voice recognition and driverless cars.
Today, machine learning underlies a range of applications we use every day, from product recommendations to voice recognition—as well as some we don't yet use everyday, including driverless cars. It is the basis for a new approach to artificial intelligence that aims to program computers to use example data or past experience to solve a given problem. In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Ethem Alpaydın offers a concise and accessible overview of “the new AI.” This expanded edition offers new material on such challenges facing machine learning as privacy, security, accountability, and bias.
Alpaydın, author of a popular textbook on machine learning, explains that as “Big Data” has gotten bigger, the theory of machine learning—the foundation of efforts to process that data into knowledge—has also advanced. He describes the evolution of the field, explains important learning algorithms, and presents example applications. He discusses the use of machine learning algorithms for pattern recognition; artificial neural networks inspired by the human brain; algorithms that learn associations between instances; and reinforcement learning, when an autonomous agent learns to take actions to maximize reward. In a new chapter, he considers transparency, explainability, and fairness, and the ethical and legal implications of making decisions based on data.

Год издания: 2021
Автор: Sherryl Vint
ISBN: 9780262539999
Количество страниц: 224
Description:
How science fiction has been a tool for understanding and living through rapid technological change.
The world today seems to be slipping into a science fiction future. We have phones that speak to us, cars that drive themselves, and connected devices that communicate with each other in languages we don't understand. Depending on the news of the day, we inhabit either a technological utopia or a Brave New World nightmare. This volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series surveys the uses of science fiction. It focuses on what is at the core of all definitions of science fiction: a vision of the world made otherwise and what possibilities might flow from such otherness.
After a brief overview of the genre's origins, science fiction authority Sherryl Vint considers how and why contemporary science fiction is changing. She explores anxieties in current science fiction over such key sites of technological innovation as artificial intelligence, genomic research and commodified biomedicine, and climate change. Connecting science fiction with speculative design and futurology in the corporate world, she argues that science fiction does not merely reflect these trends, but has a role in directing them.

Год издания: 2021
Автор: Samuel Greengard
ISBN: 9780262542623
Количество страниц: 296
Description:
A guided tour of the rapidly evolving networked world of connected devices, objects, and people that is changing the way we live and work.
Since the publication of the original edition of this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, the Internet of Things (IoT) has evolved from a novelty (look! my phone connects to my lamp!) to a mainstream technology framework that we rely on every day to accomplish many tasks. This revised and updated edition reports on the latest developments in this rapidly evolving networked world of connected devices, objects, and people that is changing the way we live and work.
Business and technology writer Samuel Greengard takes us on a guided tour of the IoT, describing smart lightbulbs, sensors in phones that trigger earthquake warnings, 3D headsets that connect users to business expos through completely immersive virtual reality environments, and more. He offers a clear explanation of the technology that builds and manages the IoT and examines the growing array of consumer devices now available, from smart door locks to augmented reality fitting rooms. Greengard also shows how the IoT is part of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, which is transforming business through smart manufacturing, end-to-end supply chain visibility, integrated artificial intelligence, and much more. He considers risks associated with the IoT, including threats to free speech, growing inequality, and an increase in cybercrime. Finally, he takes a look at the future of a hyperconnected world and what it means to people and human interaction.

Год издания: 2022
Автор: Kate Eichhorn
ISBN: 9780262543286
Количество страниц: 192
Description:
A concise introduction to content and the content industry, from the early internet to the Instagram egg.
From the time we roll out of bed to check overnight updates to our last posts, likes, and views of the previous day, we're consuming and producing content. But what does the term “content” even mean? When did it become ubiquitous? And at what cost? In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Kate Eichhorn offers a concise introduction to content and the content industry, examining the far-reaching effects content has on culture, politics, and labor in a digital age
Eichhorn traces the evolution of our current understanding of content from the early internet to the current social mediaverse. The quintessential example of content, she says, is the Instagram egg—an image that imparted no information or knowledge and circulated simply for the sake of circulation. Eichhorn explores what differentiates user-generated content from content produced by compensated (although often undercompensated) workers; examines how fields from art and literature to journalism and politics have weathered the rise of the content industry; and investigates the increasing importance of artists' “content capital”—the ability of artists, writers, and performers to produce content not about their work but about their status as artists.

Год издания: 2022
Автор: Giosuè Baggio
ISBN: 9780262543262
Количество страниц: 224
Description:
An accessible introduction to the study of language in the brain, covering language processing, language acquisition, literacy, and language disorders.
Neurolinguistics, the study of language in the brain, describes the anatomical structures (networks of neurons in the brain) and physiological processes (ways for these networks to be active) that allow humans to learn and use one or more languages. It draws on neuroscience, linguistics—particularly theoretical linguistics—and other disciplines. In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Giosuè Baggio offers an accessible introduction to the fundamentals of neurolinguistics, covering language processing, language acquisition, literacy, and speech and language disorders.
Baggio first surveys the evolution of the field, describing discoveries by Paul Broca, Carl Wernicke, Noam Chomsky, and others. He discusses mapping language in “brain time” and “brain space” and the constraints of neurolinguistic models. Considering language acquisition, he explains that a child is never a “blank slate”: infants and young children are only able to acquire specific aspects of language in specific stages of cognitive development. He addresses the neural consequences of bilingualism; literacy, discussing how forms of visual language in the brain differ from forms of auditory language; aphasia and the need to understand language disorders in behavioral, functional, and neuroanatomical terms; neurogenetics of language; and the neuroethology of language, tracing the origins of the neural and behavioral building blocks of human linguistic communication to the evolution of avian, mammalian, and primate brains.

Год издания: 2022
Автор: Mark Wolverton
ISBN: 9780262543316
Количество страниц: 280
Description:
A primer on nuclear weapons, from the science of fission and fusion to the pursuit of mutual assured destruction, the SALT treaties, and the Bomb in pop culture.
Although the world's attention has shifted to drone-controlled bombing and cyberwarfare, the threat of nuclear war still exists. There are now fourteen thousand nuclear weapons in the hands of the nine declared nuclear powers. Even though the world survived the Cold War, we need to understand what it means to live with nuclear weapons. In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Mark Wolverton offers a primer on nuclear weapons, from the science of fission and fusion to the pursuit of mutual assured destruction, the SALT and START agreements, and the Bomb in pop culture.
Wolverton explains the basic scientific facts, offers historical perspective, and provides a nuanced view of the unique political, social, and moral dilemmas posed by nuclear weapons. He describes the birth of the Bomb in 1945 and its use against the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; explains how a nuclear bomb works; recounts episodes when the world came close to waging nuclear war, including the Cuban missile crisis in 1962; discusses nuclear policy and nuclear treaties; and traces the influence of such films as On the Beach, Dr. Strangelove, and The Day After.

Год издания: 2022
Автор: Mark Coeckelbergh
ISBN: 9780262544092
Количество страниц: 272
Description:
A guide to the ethical questions that arise from our use of industrial robots, robot companions, self-driving cars, and other robotic devices
Does a robot have moral agency? Can it be held responsible for its actions? Do humans owe robots anything? Will robots take our jobs? These are some of the ethical and moral quandaries that we should address now, as robots and other intelligent devices become more widely used and more technically sophisticated. In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, philosopher Mark Coeckelbergh does just that. He considers a variety of robotics technologies and applications—from robotic companions to military drones—and identifies the ethical implications of their use. Questions of robot ethics, he argues, are not just about robots but are, crucially, about humans as well.
Coeckelbergh examines industrial robots and their potential to take over tasks from humans; “social” robots and possible risks to privacy; and robots in health care and their effect on quality of care. He considers whether a machine can be moral, or have morality built in; how we ascribe moral status; and if machines should be allowed to make decisions about life and death. When we discuss robot ethics from a philosophical angle, Coeckelbergh argues, robots can function as mirrors for reflecting on the human. Robot ethics is more than applied ethics; it is a way of doing philosophy.

Год издания: 2023
Автор: Robert Hassan
ISBN: 9780262544498
Количество страниц: 272
Description:
Why, surrounded by screens and smart devices, we feel a deep connection to the analog—vinyl records, fountain pens, Kodak film, and other nondigital tools.
We're surrounded by screens; our music comes in the form of digital files; we tap words into a notes app. Why do we still crave the “realness” of analog, seeking out vinyl records, fountain pens, cameras with film? In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Robert Hassan explores our deep connection to analog technology. Our analog urge, he explains, is about what we've lost from our technological past, something that's not there in our digital present. We're nostalgic for what we remember indistinctly as somehow more real, more human. Surveying some of the major developments of analog technology, Hassan shows us what's been lost with the digital.
Along the way, he discusses the appeal of the 2011 silent, black-and-white Oscar-winning film The Artist; the revival of the non-e-book book; the early mechanical clocks that enforced prayer and worship times; and the programmable loom. He describes the effect of the typewriter on Nietzsche's productivity, the pivotal invention of the telegraph, and the popularity of the first televisions despite their iffy picture quality.
The transition to digital is marked by the downgrading of human participation in the human-technology relationship. We have unwittingly unmoored ourselves, Hassan warns, from the anchors of analog technology and the natural world. Our analog nostalgia is for those ancient aspects of who and what we are.

Год издания: 2023
Автор: Kristie Macrakis
ISBN: 9780262545020
Количество страниц: 216
Description:
A concise introduction to the history and methods of espionage, illustrated by spy stories from antiquity to today's high-tech world.
Espionage is one of the most secret of human activities. It is also, as the popularity of spy stories suggests, one of the most intriguing. This book pulls the veil back on the real world of espionage, revealing how spying actually works. In a refreshingly clear, concise manner, Kristie Macrakis guides readers through the shadowy world of espionage, from the language and practice of spycraft to its role in international politics, its bureaucratic underpinnings, and its transformation in light of modern technology. Espionage is a mirror of society and human foibles with the added cloak of secrecy and deception. Accordingly, Espionage traces spying all the way back to antiquity, while also moving beyond traditional accounts of military and diplomatic intelligence to shine a light on industrial espionage and the new techno-spy. As thorough—and thoroughly readable—as it is compact, the book is an ideal introduction to the history and anatomy of espionage.

Год издания: 2023
Автор: Tim Lomas
ISBN: 9780262544207
Количество страниц: 304
Description:
A concise and engaging exploration of how we understand happiness.
What does it mean to feel happiness? As a state of mind, it's elusive. As a concept—despite the plethora of pop psychology books on the subject—it's poorly understood. In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, psychologist Tim Lomas offers a concise and engaging overview of our current understanding of happiness. Lomas explains that although the field of positive psychology, which focuses on happiness, emerged only in the last twenty-five years, interest in the meaning of happiness goes back several millennia. Drawing on a variety of disciplines, from philosophy and sociology to economics and anthropology, Lomas offers an expansive vision of what happiness means, exploring a significant range of experiential territory.
After considering such related concepts as wellbeing and flourishing, Lomas traces ideas of happiness from the ancient Buddhist notions of sukha and nirvana through Aristotle's distinction between hedonic and eudaemonic happiness to today's therapeutic and scientific approaches. He discusses current academic perspectives, looking at the breadth of happiness research across disciplines; examines the mechanics of happiness—the physiological, psychological, phenomenological, and sociocultural processes that make up happiness; explores the factors that influence happiness, both individual and social; and discusses the cultivation of happiness.

Год издания: 2023
Автор: Fergus Craik, Larry Jacoby
ISBN: 9780262545204
Количество страниц: 272
Description:
A short, accessible primer on human memory, its workings, feats, and flaws, by two leading psychological researchers.
Why do we vividly recall a traumatic childhood event but forget where we left our keys five minutes ago? How can a scent take us back fifty years while a colleague's name eludes us? In this compact introduction, two leading psychological researchers describe memory—how it works and why it sometimes doesn't; how it can be tricked, trained, or improved; and what changes with time.
In a manner as engaging as it is informative, Fergus Craik and Larry Jacoby explain the strengths and weaknesses of memory. They trace evolving ideas about memory's function and present a down-to-earth account of modern views. Citing the latest research, they outline the processes for acquiring and retrieving memories and explore the distinction between conscious and unconscious processes. With insights into the workings of the brain, Craik and Jacoby also provide a succinct account of feats and failures of memory, emotion and false memories, and the effects of aging. Their book draws a clear picture, at once broad and concise, of current and classical views of memory, that most essential and often mysterious feature of human life.

Год издания: 2024
Автор: Karl Widerquist
ISBN: 9780262546898
Количество страниц: 272
Description:
An accessible introduction to the simple (yet radical) premise that a small cash income, sufficient for basic needs, ought to be provided regularly and unconditionally to every citizen.
The growing movement for universal basic income (UBI) has been gaining attention from politics and the media with the audacious idea of a regular, unconditional cash grant for everyone as a right of citizenship. This volume in the Essential Knowledge series presents the first short, solid UBI introduction that is neither academic nor polemic. It takes a position in favor of UBI, but its primary goal remains the provision of essential knowledge by answering the fundamental questions about it: What is UBI? How does it work? What are the arguments for and against it? What is the evidence?
Karl Widerquist discusses how UBI functions, showing how it differs from other redistributional approaches. He summarizes the common arguments for and against UBI and presents the reasons for believing it is a tremendously important reform. The book briefly discusses the likely cost of UBI; options for paying for it; the existing evidence on the probable effects of UBI; and the history of UBI from its inception more than two hundred years ago through the two waves of support it received in the twentieth century to the third and largest wave of support it is experiencing now. Now more than ever, conditions in much of the world are ripe for such enthusiasm to keep growing, and there are good reasons to believe that this current wave of support will eventually lead to the adoption of UBI in several countries around the world—making this volume an especially timely and necessary read.

Год издания: 2024
Автор: Panos Louridas
ISBN: 9780262549028
Количество страниц: 312
Description:
A broad introduction to cryptography—what it is, how it really works, what its future holds, and why every informed citizen should understand its basics.
We all keep secrets—from our gym locker codes to our email passwords to our online interactions. And we choose to share those secrets only with those whom we trust. So, too, do organizations, businesses, governments, and armies. In this fascinating book Cryptography, Panos Louridas provides a broad and accessible introduction to cryptography, the art and science of keeping and revealing secrets. Louridas explains just how cryptography works to keep our communications confidential, tracing it back all the way to its ancient roots. Then he follows its long and winding path to where we are today and reads the signs that point to where it may go tomorrow.
A few years back, interest in cryptography was restricted to specialists. Today, as we all live our lives attuned to our digital footprint and the privacy issues it entails, it becomes more and more essential to have a basic understanding of cryptography and its applications to everyday life. Starting with classical cryptography, Cryptography takes the reader all the way up to the twenty-first-century cryptographic applications that underpin our lives in the digital realm. Along the way, Louridas also explains concepts such as symmetric cryptography, asymmetric cryptography, cryptographic protocols and applications, and finally, quantum and post-quantum cryptography as well as the links between cryptography and computer security.

Год издания: 2024
Автор: Julian Togelius
ISBN: 9780262549349
Количество страниц: 240
Description:
How to make AI capable of general intelligence, and what such technology would mean for society.
Artificial intelligence surrounds us. More and more of the systems and services you interact with every day are based on AI technology. Although some very recent AI systems are generalists to a degree, most AI is narrowly specific; that is, it can only do a single thing, in a single context. For example, your spellchecker can’t do mathematics, and the world’s best chess-playing program can’t play Tetris. Human intelligence is different. We can solve a variety of tasks, including those we have not seen before. In Artificial General Intelligence, Julian Togelius explores technical approaches to developing more general artificial intelligence and asks what general AI would mean for human civilization.
Togelius starts by giving examples of narrow AI that have superhuman performance in some way. Interestingly, there have been AI systems that are superhuman in some sense for more than half a century. He then discusses what it would mean to have general intelligence, by looking at definitions from psychology, ethology, and computer science. Next, he explores the two main families of technical approaches to developing more general artificial intelligence: foundation models through self-supervised learning, and open-ended learning in virtual environments. The final chapters of the book investigate potential artificial general intelligence beyond the strictly technical aspects. The questions discussed here investigate whether such general AI would be conscious, whether it would pose a risk to humanity, and how it might alter society.

Год издания: 2024
Автор: Evangelia Adamou
ISBN: 9780262548700
Количество страниц: 264
Description:
A concise, accessible introduction to language endangerment and why it is one of the most urgent challenges of our times.
58% of the world’s languages—or approximately 4,000 languages—are endangered. When we break this figure down, we realize that roughly ten percent of languages have fewer than ten language keepers. And, if one language stops being used every three months, this means that in the next 100 years, if we do nothing, 400 more languages will become dormant. In Endangered Languages, Evangelia Adamou, a specialist of endangered languages and a learner of her own community language, Nashta, offers a sobering look at language endangerment and what is truly lost when a language disappears from usage.
Combining recent advances from the Western scientific tradition—from the fields of linguistics, psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, language attrition, population genetics, and natural language processing—and insights from Indigenous epistemology, theory, and ethics, Adamou examines a wealth of issues surrounding endangered languages. She discusses where endangered languages are found, including how they are faring in a digital world, why these languages are no longer used, and how communities can reclaim languages and keep them strong. Adamou also explains the impact of language continuity on community and individual health and well-being, the importance of language transmission in cultural transmission, and why language rights are essentially human rights.
Drawing on varied examples from the Wampanoag Nation to Wales, Endangered Languages offers a powerful reminder of the crucial role every language has in the vitality and well-being of individuals, communities, and our world.

Год издания: 2024
Автор: Or Graur
ISBN: 9780262548755
Количество страниц: 206
Description:
An eminently readable overview of the history and physics of galaxies.
In Galaxies, Or Graur offers a brief and fascinating overview of the history, physics, and astrophysical uses of galaxies. Starting with the history of the last two thousand years of galaxy studies, Graur discusses the types of galaxies we observe and the physics that drive them; the myths and physical structure of the Milky Way; how galaxies were used to discover and study the mysterious phenomena of dark matter and dark energy; and how scientists think galaxies formed shortly after the Big Bang and evolved to their present forms.
Tracing galaxy studies back thousands of years to their beginnings, Graur describes their origin in Ptolemy’s Almagest, written in the first century CE. Almagest catalogued hundreds of stars and a few hazy cloud-like objects, one of which was the Andromeda galaxy. The reader will also encounter well-known figures such as William Herschel, who, along with his sister Caroline (the first professional female astronomer), discovered hundreds of galaxies and laid the foundations for modern galaxy studies. Lesser-known astronomers, including tenth-century Persian astronomer Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi and twentieth-century American astronomer Vesto Melvin Slipher, also played crucial roles in this fascinating field.
Galaxies concludes by showing readers how they can get involved in galaxy studies themselves and do their part to fight light pollution, which today obscures the Milky Way and all but the brightest of stars.
Providing a brief but broad overview of galaxies for the nonspecialist, Galaxies illustrates how modern science is conducted and what the future holds for this field of astronomy.

Год издания: 2024
Автор: Herbert Hovenkamp
ISBN: 9780262548748
Количество страниц: 226
Description:
A serious look at competition problems in tech markets and whether antitrust law can help address them.
In Tech Monopoly, Herbert Hovenkamp explores competition problems in a wide range of high-tech firms—from those selling purely digital products, such as video streaming, search, software, or email services, to companies dealing in more traditional “tactile” products, such as hardware, clothing, groceries, or rides. He offers a realistic analysis of the powers and limitations of antitrust law in tech markets, making this assessment both comprehensive and accessible.
After a general introduction to antitrust law, Tech Monopoly considers how competitive harm should be assessed in these markets and examines unique industry features, such as “two-sided” platform structures. Hovenkamp then delves into the role of large digital platforms—including Amazon, Alphabet, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft—discussing whether their sheer size poses an antitrust issue or if concerns should focus solely on market power. Finally, he addresses the complex issue of remedies: Should we break up big tech? If so, how? Would such breakups actually benefit consumers and competitors? Or are there more effective, less disruptive solutions to ensuring market competition?
Offering simple explanations of the complex economics behind digital platform markets, Tech Monopoly is essential reading for anyone looking to understand the intersection of technology, competition, and regulation in the modern era.