Böcker i The MIT Press-serien

The definitive edition of one of the most important scientific books of the twentieth century, setting out the conceptual structure underlying evolutionary biology.This classic work by Julian Huxley, first published in 1942, captured and synthesized all that was then known about evolutionary biology and gave a name to the Modern Synthesis, the conceptual structure underlying the field for most of the twentieth century. Many considered Huxley's book a popularization of the ideas then emerging in evolutionary biology, but in fact Evolution: The Modern Synthesis is a work of serious scholarship that is also accessible to the general educated public. It is a book in the intellectual tradition of Charles Darwin and Thomas Henry Huxley—Julian Huxley's grandfather, known for his energetic championing of Darwin's ideas. A contemporary reviewer called Evolution: The Modern Synthesis "the outstanding evolutionary treatise of the decade, perhaps the century.” This definitive edition brings one of the most important and successful scientific books of the twentieth century back into print. It includes the entire text of the 1942 edition, Huxley's introduction to the 1963 second edition (which demonstrates his continuing command of the field), and the introduction to the 1974 third edition, written by nine experts (many of them Huxley's associates) from different areas of evolutionary biology.

How the twenty-one-layer Apollo spacesuit, made by Playtex, was a triumph of intimacy over engineering. When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped onto the lunar surface in July of 1969, they wore spacesuits made by Playtex: twenty-one layers of fabric, each with a distinct yet interrelated function, custom-sewn for them by seamstresses whose usual work was fashioning bras and girdles. This book is the story of that spacesuit. It is a story of the triumph over the military-industrial complex by the International Latex Corporation, best known by its consumer brand of "Playtex"—a victory of elegant softness over engineered hardness, of adaptation over cybernetics. Playtex's spacesuit went up against hard armor-like spacesuits designed by military contractors and favored by NASA's engineers. It was only when those attempts failed—when traditional engineering firms could not integrate the body into mission requirements—that Playtex, with its intimate expertise, got the job. In Spacesuit, Nicholas de Monchaux tells the story of the twenty-one-layer spacesuit in twenty-one chapters addressing twenty-one topics relevant to the suit, the body, and the technology of the twentieth century. He touches, among other things, on eighteenth-century androids, Christian Dior's New Look, Atlas missiles, cybernetics and cyborgs, latex, JFK's carefully cultivated image, the CBS lunar broadcast soundstage, NASA's Mission Control, and the applications of Apollo-style engineering to city planning. The twenty-one-layer spacesuit, de Monchaux argues, offers an object lesson. It tells us about redundancy and interdependence and about the distinctions between natural and man-made complexity; it teaches us to know the virtues of adaptation and to see the future as a set of possibilities rather than a scripted scenario.

The major reference work for a rapidly advancing field synthesizes central themes, reports on current findings, and offers a blueprint for future research. Scientists' attempts to understand the physiology underlying our apprehension of the physical world was long dominated by a focus on the individual senses. The 1980s saw the beginning of systematic efforts to examine interactions among different sensory modalities at the level of the single neuron. And by the end of the 1990s, a recognizable and multidisciplinary field of "multisensory processes" had emerged. More recently, studies involving both human and nonhuman subjects have focused on relationships among multisensory neuronal ensembles and their behavioral, perceptual, and cognitive correlates. The New Handbook of Multisensory Processing synthesizes the central themes in this rapidly developing area, reports on current findings, and offers a blueprint for future research. The contributions, all of them written for this volume by leading experts, reflect the evolution and current state of the field. This handbook does more than simply review the field. Each of the volume's eleven sections broadly surveys a major topic, and each begins with a substantive and thought-provoking commentary by the section editor that identifies the major issues being explored, describes their treatment in the chapters that follow, and sets these findings within the context of the existing body of knowledge. Together, the commentaries and chapters provide an invaluable guide to areas of general agreement, unresolved issues, and topics that remain to be explored in this fast-moving field.

The hidden material histories of music.Music is seen as the most immaterial of the arts, and recorded music as a progress of dematerialization—an evolution from physical discs to invisible digits. In Decomposed, Kyle Devine offers another perspective. He shows that recorded music has always been a significant exploiter of both natural and human resources, and that its reliance on these resources is more problematic today than ever before. Devine uncovers the hidden history of recorded music—what recordings are made of and what happens to them when they are disposed of. Devine''s story focuses on three forms of materiality. Before 1950, 78 rpm records were made of shellac, a bug-based resin. Between 1950 and 2000, formats such as LPs, cassettes, and CDs were all made of petroleum-based plastic. Today, recordings exist as data-based audio files. Devine describes the people who harvest and process these materials, from women and children in the Global South to scientists and industrialists in the Global North. He reminds us that vinyl records are oil products, and that the so-called vinyl revival is part of petrocapitalism. The supposed immateriality of music as data is belied by the energy required to power the internet and the devices required to access music online. We tend to think of the recordings we buy as finished products. Devine offers an essential backstory. He reveals how a range of apparently peripheral people and processes are actually central to what music is, how it works, and why it matters.

A concise treatment of modern econometrics and statistics, including underlying ideas from linear algebra, probability theory, and computer programming.This book offers a cogent and concise treatment of econometric theory and methods along with the underlying ideas from statistics, probability theory, and linear algebra. It emphasizes foundations and general principles, but also features many solved exercises, worked examples, and code listings. After mastering the material presented, readers will be ready to take on more advanced work in different areas of quantitative economics and to understand papers from the econometrics literature. The book can be used in graduate-level courses on foundational aspects of econometrics or on fundamental statistical principles. It will also be a valuable reference for independent study.One distinctive aspect of the text is its integration of traditional topics from statistics and econometrics with modern ideas from data science and machine learning; readers will encounter ideas that are driving the current development of statistics and increasingly filtering into econometric methodology. The text treats programming not only as a way to work with data but also as a technique for building intuition via simulation. Many proofs are followed by a simulation that shows the theory in action. As a primer, the book offers readers an entry point into the field, allowing them to see econometrics as a whole rather than as a profusion of apparently unrelated ideas.

The career of the pioneering designer Muriel Cooper, whose work spanned media from printed book to software interface; generously illustrated in color.Muriel Cooper (1925-1994) was the pioneering designer who created the iconic MIT Press colophon (or logo)—seven bars that represent the lowercase letters "mitp” as abstracted books on a shelf. She designed a modernist monument, the encyclopedic volume The Bauhaus (1969), and the graphically dazzling and controversial first edition of Learning from Las Vegas (1972). She used an offset press as an artistic tool, worked with a large-format Polaroid camera, and had an early vision of e-books. Cooper was the first design director of the MIT Press, the cofounder of the Visible Language Workshop at MIT, and the first woman to be granted tenure at MIT's Media Lab, where she developed software interfaces and taught a new generation of designers. She began her four-decade career at MIT by designing vibrant printed flyers for the Office of Publications; her final projects were digital. This lavishly illustrated volume documents Cooper's career in abundant detail, with prints, sketches, book covers, posters, mechanicals, student projects, and photographs, from her work in design, teaching, and research at MIT.A humanist among scientists, Cooper embraced dynamism, simultaneity, transparency, and expressiveness across all the media she worked in. More than two decades after her career came to a premature end, Muriel Cooper's legacy is still unfolding. This beautiful slip-cased volume, designed by Yasuyo Iguchi, looks back at a body of work that is as contemporary now as it was when Cooper was experimenting with IBM Selectric typewriters. She designed design's future.

How non-IT managers can turn IT from an expensive liability into a cost-effective competitive tool.Firms spend more on information technology (IT) than on all other capital assets combined. And yet despite this significant cash outlay, businesses often end up with IT that is uneconomical and strategically feeble. What is missing in many organizations' IT strategy is the business acumen of managers from non-IT departments. This book presents tools for non-IT managers to turn IT from an expensive liability into a cost-effective competitive tool. It equips readers with the concepts and analytical skills necessary to understand IT needs and opportunities from both sides of the business-IT divide.Each chapter opens with a jargon decoder-nontechnical explanations of the key ideas in the chapter—and ends with a checklist summarizing non-IT factors to consider in IT decisions. Chapters cover such topics as infusing competitive firepower into IT strategy; amalgamating software and data for a hard-to-duplicate competitive advantage; making choices that meet today's business needs without handicapping future strategy; establishing who decides what about IT strategies; sourcing IT and its challenges; protecting IT assets against disaster in ways that IT professionals cannot; and recognizing the business potential of emerging technologies. Examples are drawn from large corporations, small businesses, and nonprofits around the world.The book is suitable for use in the MBA core IT course, and is aimed especially at students in professional or executive MBA programs. It will also be a valuable reference for managers.

A novel contribution to the age-old debate about free will versus determinism.

What altered states of consciousness—the dissolution of feelings of time and self—can tell us about the mystery of consciousness.During extraordinary moments of consciousness—shock, meditative states and sudden mystical revelations, out-of-body experiences, or drug intoxication—our senses of time and self are altered; we may even feel time and self dissolving. These experiences have long been ignored by mainstream science, or considered crazy fantasies. Recent research, however, has located the neural underpinnings of these altered states of mind. In this book, neuropsychologist Marc Wittmann shows how experiences that disturb or widen our everyday understanding of the self can help solve the mystery of consciousness. Wittmann explains that the relationship between consciousness of time and consciousness of self is close; in extreme circumstances, the experiences of space and self intensify and weaken together. He considers the emergence of the self in waking life and dreams; how our sense of time is distorted by extreme situations ranging from terror to mystical enlightenment; the experience of the moment; and the loss of time and self in such disorders as depression, schizophrenia, and epilepsy. Dostoyevsky reported godly bliss during epileptic seizures; neurologists are now investigating the phenomenon of the epileptic aura. Wittmann describes new studies of psychedelics that show how the brain builds consciousness of self and time, and discusses pilot programs that use hallucinogens to treat severe depression, anxiety, and addiction.If we want to understand our consciousness, our subjectivity, Wittmann argues, we must not be afraid to break new ground. Studying altered states of consciousness leads us directly to the heart of the matter: time and self, the foundations of consciousness.

How to rebuild higher education from the ground up for the twenty-first century.Higher education is in crisis. It is too expensive, ineffective, and impractical for many of the world's students. But how would you reinvent it for the twenty-first century—how would you build it from the ground up? Many have speculated about changing higher education, but Minerva has actually created a new kind of university program. Its founders raised the funding, assembled the team, devised the curriculum and pedagogy, recruited the students, hired the faculty, and implemented a bold vision of a new and improved higher education. This book explains that vision and how it is being realized.The Minerva curriculum focuses on "practical knowledge” (knowledge students can use to adapt to a changing world); its pedagogy is based on scientific research on learning; it uses a novel technology platform to deliver small seminars in real time; and it offers a hybrid residential model where students live together, rotating through seven cities around the world. Minerva equips students with the cognitive tools they need to succeed in the world after graduation, building the core competencies of critical thinking, creative thinking, effective communication, and effective interaction. The book offers readers both the story of this grand and sweeping idea and a blueprint for transforming higher education.

An introduction to applying predicate logic to testing and verification of software and digital circuits that focuses on applications rather than theory.Computer scientists use logic for testing and verification of software and digital circuits, but many computer science students study logic only in the context of traditional mathematics, encountering the subject in a few lectures and a handful of problem sets in a discrete math course. This book offers a more substantive and rigorous approach to logic that focuses on applications in computer science. Topics covered include predicate logic, equation-based software, automated testing and theorem proving, and large-scale computation. Formalism is emphasized, and the book employs three formal notations: traditional algebraic formulas of propositional and predicate logic; digital circuit diagrams; and the widely used partially automated theorem prover, ACL2, which provides an accessible introduction to mechanized formalism. For readers who want to see formalization in action, the text presents examples using Proof Pad, a lightweight ACL2 environment. Readers will not become ALC2 experts, but will learn how mechanized logic can benefit software and hardware engineers. In addition, 180 exercises, some of them extremely challenging, offer opportunities for problem solving. There are no prerequisites beyond high school algebra. Programming experience is not required to understand the book's equation-based approach. The book can be used in undergraduate courses in logic for computer science and introduction to computer science and in math courses for computer science students.

Leading thinkers from a range of disciplines discuss the compatibility of power and care, in conversation with the Dalai Lama.For more than thirty years, the Dalai Lama has been in dialogue with thinkers from a range of disciplines, helping to support pathways for knowledge to increase human wellbeing and compassion. These conversations, which began as private meetings, are now part of the Mind & Life Institute and Mind & Life Europe. This book documents a recent Mind & Life Institute dialogue with the Dalai Lama and others on two fundamental forces: power and care—power over and care for others in human societies.The notion of power is essentially neutral; power can be used to benefit others or to harm them, to build or to destroy. Care, on the other hand, is not a neutral force; it aims at increasing the wellbeing of others. Power and care are not incompatible: power, imbued with care, can achieve more than a powerless motivation to care; power, without the intention to benefit others, can be ruthless. The contributors—who include such celebrated figures as Frans B. M. de Waal, Olafur Eliasson, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, and Jody Williams—discuss topics including the interaction of power and care among our closest relatives, the chimpanzees; the effect of meditation and mental training practices on the brain; the role of religion in promoting peace and compassion; and the new field of Caring Economics.ContributorsPaul Collier, Brother Thierry-Marie Courau, Frans B. M. de Waal, Olafur Eliasson, Scilla Elworthy, Alexandra M. Freund, Tenzin Gyatso (His Holiness the Dalai Lama), Markus Heinrichs, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Frédéric Laloux, Alaa Murabit, Matthieu Ricard, Johan Rockström, Richard Schwartz, Tania Singer, Dennis J. Snower, Rabbi Awraham Soetendorp, Theo Sowa, Pauline Tangiora, Jody Williams

An impassioned look at games and game design that offers the most ambitious framework for understanding them to date.As pop culture, games are as important as film or television—but game design has yet to develop a theoretical framework or critical vocabulary. In Rules of Play Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman present a much-needed primer for this emerging field. They offer a unified model for looking at all kinds of games, from board games and sports to computer and video games. As active participants in game culture, the authors have written Rules of Play as a catalyst for innovation, filled with new concepts, strategies, and methodologies for creating and understanding games. Building an aesthetics of interactive systems, Salen and Zimmerman define core concepts like "play," "design," and "interactivity." They look at games through a series of eighteen "game design schemas," or conceptual frameworks, including games as systems of emergence and information, as contexts for social play, as a storytelling medium, and as sites of cultural resistance.Written for game scholars, game developers, and interactive designers, Rules of Play is a textbook, reference book, and theoretical guide. It is the first comprehensive attempt to establish a solid theoretical framework for the emerging discipline of game design.

Co-founder and co-editor of October magazine, a veteran of Artforum of the 1960s and early 1970s, Rosalind Krauss has presided over and shared in the major formulation of the theory of postmodernism.In this challenging collection of fifteen essays, most of which originally appeared in October, she explores the ways in which the break in style that produced postmodernism has forced a change in our various understandings of twentieth-century art, beginning with the almost mythic idea of the avant-garde. Krauss uses the analytical tools of semiology, structuralism, and poststructuralism to reveal new meanings in the visual arts and to critique the way other prominent practitioners of art and literary history write about art. In two sections, "Modernist Myths" and "Toward Postmodernism," her essays range from the problem of the grid in painting and the unity of Giacometti's sculpture to the works of Jackson Pollock, Sol Lewitt, and Richard Serra, and observations about major trends in contemporary literary criticism.

Architecture and Utopia leads the reader beyond architectural form into a broader understanding of the relation of architecture to society and the architect to the workforce and the marketplace.Written from a neo-Marxist point of view by a prominent Italian architectural historian, Architecture and Utopia leads the reader beyond architectural form into a broader understanding of the relation of architecture to society and the architect to the workforce and the marketplace. It discusses the Garden Cities movement and the suburban developments it generated, the German-Russian architectural experiments of the 1920s, the place of the avant-garde in the plastic arts, and the uses and pitfalls of seismological approaches to architecture, and assesses the prospects of socialist alternatives.

Game theory has become increasingly popular among undergraduate aswell as business school students. This text is the first to provideboth a complete theoretical treatment of the subject and a variety ofreal-world applications, primarily in economics, but also in business,political science, and the law.Game theory has become increasingly popular among undergraduate as well as business school students. This text is the first to provide both a complete theoretical treatment of the subject and a variety of real-world applications, primarily in economics, but also in business, political science, and the law. Strategies and Games grew out of Prajit Dutta's experience teaching a course in game theory over the last six years at Columbia University.The book is divided into three parts: Strategic Form Games and Their Applications, Extensive Form Games and Their Applications, and Asymmetric Information Games and Their Applications. The theoretical topics include dominance solutions, Nash equilibrium, backward induction, subgame perfect equilibrium, repeated games, dynamic games, Bayes-Nash equilibrium, mechanism design, auction theory, and signaling. An appendix presents a thorough discussion of single-agent decision theory, as well as the optimization and probability theory required for the course.Every chapter that introduces a new theoretical concept opens with examples and ends with a case study. Case studies include Global Warming and the Internet, Poison Pills, Treasury Bill Auctions, and Final Jeopardy. Each part of the book also contains several chapter-length applications including Bankruptcy Law, the NASDAQ market, OPEC, and the Commons problem. This is also the first text to provide a detailed analysis of dynamic strategic interaction.

An attempt to free architecture from site and program constraints and to counter the profusion of ever bigger architecture books with ever smaller content.Some may call it the first manifesto of the twenty-first century, for it lays down a new way to think about architecture. Others may think of it as the last architectural treatise, for it provides a discursive container for ideas that would otherwise be lost. Whatever genre it belongs to, SITELESS is a new kind of architecture book that seems to have come out of nowhere. Its author, a young French architect practicing in Tokyo, admits he "didn't do this out of reverence toward architecture, but rather out of a profound boredom with the discipline, as a sort of compulsive reaction.” What would happen if architects liberated their minds from the constraints of site, program, and budget? he asks. The result is a book that is saturated with forms, and as free of words as any architecture book the MIT Press has ever published.The 1001 building forms in SITELESS include structural parasites, chain link towers, ball bearing floors, corrugated corners, exponential balconies, radial facades, crawling frames, forensic housing—and other architectural ideas that may require construction techniques not yet developed and a relation to gravity not yet achieved. SITELESS presents an open-ended compendium of visual ideas for the architectural imagination to draw from. The forms, drawn freehand (to avoid software-specific shapes) but from a constant viewing angle, are presented twelve to a page, with no scale, order, or end to the series. After setting down 1001 forms in siteless conditions and embryonic stages, Blanciak takes one of the forms and performs a "scale test,” showing what happens when one of these fantastic ideas is subjected to the actual constraints of a site in central Tokyo. The book ends by illustrating the potential of these shapes to morph into actual building proportions.

Leading international artists and art educators consider the challenges of art education in today's dramatically changed art world.The last explosive change in art education came nearly a century ago, when the German Bauhaus was formed. Today, dramatic changes in the art world—its increasing professionalization, the pervasive power of the art market, and fundamental shifts in art-making itself in our post-Duchampian era—combined with a revolution in information technology, raise fundamental questions about the education of today's artists. Art School (Propositions for the 21st Century) brings together more than thirty leading international artists and art educators to reconsider the practices of art education in academic, practical, ethical, and philosophical terms. The essays in the book range over continents, histories, traditions, experiments, and fantasies of education. Accompanying the essays are conversations with such prominent artist/educators as John Baldessari, Michael Craig-Martin, Hans Haacke, and Marina Abramovic, as well as questionnaire responses from a dozen important artists—among them Mike Kelley, Ann Hamilton, Guillermo Kuitca, and Shirin Neshat—about their own experiences as students. A fascinating analysis of the architecture of major historical art schools throughout the world looks at the relationship of the principles of their designs to the principles of the pedagogy practiced within their halls. And throughout the volume, attention is paid to new initiatives and proposals about what an art school can and should be in the twenty-first century—and what it shouldn't be. No other book on the subject covers more of the questions concerning art education today or offers more insight into the pressures, challenges, risks, and opportunities for artists and art educators in the years ahead.ContributorsMarina Abramovic, Dennis Adams, John Baldessari, Ute Meta Bauer, Daniel Birnbaum, Saskia Bos, Tania Bruguera, Luis Camnitzer, Michael Craig-Martin, Thierry de Duve, Clémentine Deliss, Charles Esche, Liam Gillick, Boris Groys, Hans Haacke, Ann Lauterbach, Ken Lum, Steven Henry Madoff, Brendan D. Moran, Ernesto Pujol, Raqs Media Collective, Charles Renfro, Jeffrey T. Schnapp, Michael Shanks, Robert Storr, Anton Vidokle

One of the most successful public relations campaigns in history, featuring heroic astronauts, press-savvy rocket scientists, enthusiastic reporters, deep-pocketed defense contractors, and Tang.In July 1969, ninety-four percent of American televisions were tuned to coverage of Apollo 11's mission to the moon. How did space exploration, once the purview of rocket scientists, reach a larger audience than My Three Sons? Why did a government program whose standard operating procedure had been secrecy turn its greatest achievement into a communal experience? In Marketing the Moon, David Meerman Scott and Richard Jurek tell the story of one of the most successful marketing and public relations campaigns in history: the selling of the Apollo program. Primed by science fiction, magazine articles, and appearances by Wernher von Braun on the "Tomorrowland” segments of the Disneyland prime time television show, Americans were a receptive audience for NASA's pioneering "brand journalism.” Scott and Jurek describe sophisticated efforts by NASA and its many contractors to market the facts about space travel—through press releases, bylined articles, lavishly detailed background materials, and fully produced radio and television features—rather than push an agenda. American astronauts, who signed exclusive agreements with Life magazine, became the heroic and patriotic faces of the program. And there was some judicious product placement: Hasselblad was the "first camera on the moon”; Sony cassette recorders and supplies of Tang were on board the capsule; and astronauts were equipped with the Exer-Genie personal exerciser. Everyone wanted a place on the bandwagon.Generously illustrated with vintage photographs, artwork, and advertisements, many never published before, Marketing the Moon shows that when Neil Armstrong took that giant leap for mankind, it was a triumph not just for American engineering and rocketry but for American marketing and public relations.

Experts discuss the potential for open education tools, resources, and knowledge to transform the economics and ecology of education.

Architecture as imprint, as brand, as the new media of transformation-of places, communities, corporations, and people.

Dirt as fertile medium and metaphor in cities, landscapes, process, and design: dirty attitudes in essays, interviews, and projects.

An illustrated study of the early twentieth-century transformation from Expressionism to Constructivism and beyond in the Central European arts.

A detailed examination of WTO agreements regulating trade in goods, discussing legal context, policy background, economic rationale, and case law. The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) has extended its institutional arsenal since the Kennedy round in the early 1960s. The current institutional design is the outcome of the Uruguay round and agreements reached in the ongoing Doha round (begun in 2001). One of the institutional outgrowths of GATT is the World Trade Organization (WT0), created in 1995. In this book, Petros Mavroidis offers a detailed examination of WTO agreements regulating trade in goods, discussing legal context, policy background, economic rationale, and case law. Each chapter examines a given legal norm and its subsequent practice. In particular, he discusses agreements dealing with customs clearance; "contingent protection” instruments, which allow WTO members unilaterally to add to the negotiated amount of protection when a certain contingency (for example, dumping) has occurred; TBT (Technical Barriers to Trade) and SPS (Sanitary and Phyto-sanitary Measures) agreements, both of which deal with such domestic instruments as environmental, health policy, or consumer information; the agreement on Trade Related Investment Measures (TRIM); sector-specific agreements on agriculture and textiles; plurilateral agreements (binding a subset of WTO membership) on government procurement and civil aviation; and transparency in trade relations. This book's companion volume examines the GATT regime for international trade.