Böcker i The MIT Press-serien

A proposal to reframe the Anthropocene as an age of actual and emerging coexistence with earth system variability, encompassing both human dignity and environmental sustainability.

An updated edition of a guide to the basic science of climate change, and a call to action.The vast majority of scientists agree that human activity has significantly increased greenhouse gases in the atmosphere—most dramatically since the 1970s. Yet global warming skeptics and ill-informed elected officials continue to dismiss this broad scientific consensus. In this updated edition of his authoritative book, MIT atmospheric scientist Kerry Emanuel outlines the basic science of global warming and how the current consensus has emerged. Although it is impossible to predict exactly when the most dramatic effects of global warming will be felt, he argues, we can be confident that we face real dangers. Emanuel warns that global warming will contribute to an increase in the intensity and power of hurricanes and flooding and more rapidly advancing deserts. But just as our actions have created the looming crisis, so too might they avert it. Emanuel calls for urgent action to reduce greenhouse gases and criticizes the media for downplaying the dangers of global warming (and, in search of "balance,” quoting extremists who deny its existence). This edition has been updated to include the latest climate data, a discussion of the earth's carbon cycle, the warming hiatus of the first decade of this century, the 2017 hurricanes, advanced energy options, the withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement, and more. It offers a new foreword by former U.S. Representative Bob Inglis (R-SC), who now works on climate action through his organization RepublicEN.

How Chinese characters triumphed over the QWERTY keyboard and laid the foundation for China's information technology successes today.Chinese writing is character based, the one major world script that is neither alphabetic nor syllabic. Through the years, the Chinese written language encountered presumed alphabetic universalism in the form of Morse Code, Braille, stenography, Linotype, punch cards, word processing, and other systems developed with the Latin alphabet in mind. This book is about those encounters—in particular thousands of Chinese characters versus the typewriter and its QWERTY keyboard. Thomas Mullaney describes a fascinating series of experiments, prototypes, failures, and successes in the century-long quest for a workable Chinese typewriter. The earliest Chinese typewriters, Mullaney tells us, were figments of popular imagination, sensational accounts of twelve-foot keyboards with 5,000 keys. One of the first Chinese typewriters actually constructed was invented by a Christian missionary, who organized characters by common usage (but promoted the less-common characters for "Jesus" to the common usage level). Later came typewriters manufactured for use in Chinese offices, and typewriting schools that turned out trained "typewriter girls” and "typewriter boys.” Still later was the "Double Pigeon” typewriter produced by the Shanghai Calculator and Typewriter Factory, the typewriter of choice under Mao. Clerks and secretaries in this era experimented with alternative ways of organizing characters on their tray beds, inventing an input method that was the first instance of "predictive text.”Today, after more than a century of resistance against the alphabetic, not only have Chinese characters prevailed, they form the linguistic substrate of the vibrant world of Chinese information technology. The Chinese Typewriter, not just an "object history” but grappling with broad questions of technological change and global communication, shows how this happened.A Study of the Weatherhead East Asian InstituteColumbia University

The cultural contradictions of early video games: a medium for family fun (but mainly for middle-class boys), an improvement over pinball and television (but possibly harmful)

A comprehensive account of how energy has shaped society throughout history, from pre-agricultural foraging societies through today's fossil fuel-driven civilization.

A call to redefine mobility so that it is connected, heterogeneous, intelligent, and personalized, as well as sustainable, adaptable, and city-friendly.

FBI files on writers with dangerous ideas, including Hannah Arendt, Allen Ginsberg, Ernest Hemingway, Susan Sontag, and James Baldwin.

A guide to both theory and practice of blended learning offering rigorous research, case studies, and methods for the assessment of educational effectiveness.Blended learning combines traditional in-person learning with technology-enabled education. Its pedagogical aim is to merge the scale, asynchrony, and flexibility of online learning with the benefits of the traditional classroom—content-rich instruction and the development of learning relationships. This book offers a guide to both theory and practice of blended learning, offering rigorous research, case studies, and methods for the assessment of educational effectiveness. The contributors to this volume adopt a range of approaches to blended learning and different models of implementation and offer guidelines for both researchers and instructors, considering such issues as research design and data collection. In these courses, instructors addressed problems they had noted in traditional classrooms, attempting to enhance student engagement, include more active learning strategies, approximate real-world problem solving, and reach non-majors. The volume offers a cross-section of approaches from one institution, Georgia Tech, to provide both depth and breadth. It examines the methodologies of implementation in a variety of courses, ranging from a first-year composition class that incorporated the video game Assassin's Creed II to a research methods class for psychology and computer science students. Blended Learning will be an essential resource for educators, researchers, administrators, and policy makers.ContributorsJoe Bankoff, Paula Braun, Mark Braunstein, Marion L. Brittain, Timothy G. Buchman, Rebecca E. Burnett, Aldo A. Ferri, Bonnie Ferri, Andy Frazee, Mohammed M. Ghassemi, Ashok K. Goel, Alyson B. Goodman, Joyelle Harris, Cheryl Hiddleson, David Joyner, Robert S. Kadel, Kenneth J. Knoespel, Joe Le Doux, Amanda G. Madden, Lauren Margulieux, Olga Menagarishvili, Shamim Nemati, Vjollca Sadiraj, Donald Webster

A memoir of MIT life, from being Noam Chomsky's boss to negotiating with student protesters.

The transformative effect of technological change on households and culture, seen from a macroeconomic perspective through simple economic models.In Evolving Households, Jeremy Greenwood argues that technological progress has had as significant an effect on households as it had on industry. Taking a macroeconomic perspective, Greenwood develops simple economic models to study such phenomena as the rise in married female labor force participation, changes in fertility rates, the decline in marriage, and increased longevity. These trends represent a dramatic transformation in everyday life, and they were made possible by advancements in technology. Greenwood also addresses how technological progress can cause social change.Greenwood shows, for example, how electricity and labor-saving appliances freed women from full-time household drudgery and enabled them to enter the labor market. He explains that fertility dropped when higher wages increased the opportunity cost of having children; he attributes the post-World War II baby boom to a combination of labor-saving household technology and advances in obstetrics and pediatrics. Marriage rates declined when single households became more economically feasible; people could be more discriminating in their choice of a mate. Technological progress also affects social and cultural norms. Innovation in contraception ushered in a sexual revolution. Labor-saving technological progress at home, together with mechanization in industry that led to an increase in the value of brain relative to brawn for jobs, fostered the advancement of women's rights in the workplace. Finally, Greenwood attributes increased longevity to advances in medical technology and rising living standards, and he examines healthcare spending, the development of new drugs, and the growing portion of life now spent in retirement.

Tracing two centuries of rise, fall, and rebirth in the heart of downtown Detroit.Downtown Detroit is in the midst of an astonishing rebirth. Its sidewalks have become a dreamland for an aspiring creative class, filled with shoppers, office workers, and restaurant-goers. Cranes dot the skyline, replacing the wrecking balls seen there only a few years ago. But venture a few blocks in any direction and this liveliness gives way to urban blight, a nightmare cityscape of crumbling concrete, barbed wire, and debris. In Dream City, urban designer Conrad Kickert examines the paradoxes of Detroit's landscape of extremes, arguing that the current reinvention of downtown is the expression of two centuries of Detroiters' conflicting hopes and dreams. Kickert demonstrates the materialization of these dreams with a series of detailed original morphological maps that trace downtown's rise, fall, and rebirth.Kickert writes that downtown Detroit has always been different from other neighborhoods; it grew faster than other parts of the city, and it declined differently, forced to reinvent itself again and again. Downtown has been in constant battle with its own offspring—the automobile and the suburbs the automobile enabled—and modernized itself though parking attrition and land consolidation. Dream City is populated by a varied cast of downtown power players, from a 1920s parking lot baron to the pizza tycoon family and mortgage billionaire who control downtown's fate today. Even the most renowned planners and designers have consistently yielded to those with power, land, and finances to shape downtown. Kickert thus finds rhyme and rhythm in downtown's contemporary cacophony. Kickert argues that Detroit's case is extreme but not unique; many other American cities have seen a similar decline—and many others may see a similar revitalization.

A project-based guide to the basics of deep learning.This concise, project-driven guide to deep learning takes readers through a series of program-writing tasks that introduce them to the use of deep learning in such areas of artificial intelligence as computer vision, natural-language processing, and reinforcement learning. The author, a longtime artificial intelligence researcher specializing in natural-language processing, covers feed-forward neural nets, convolutional neural nets, word embeddings, recurrent neural nets, sequence-to-sequence learning, deep reinforcement learning, unsupervised models, and other fundamental concepts and techniques. Students and practitioners learn the basics of deep learning by working through programs in Tensorflow, an open-source machine learning framework. "I find I learn computer science material best by sitting down and writing programs,” the author writes, and the book reflects this approach.Each chapter includes a programming project, exercises, and references for further reading. An early chapter is devoted to Tensorflow and its interface with Python, the widely used programming language. Familiarity with linear algebra, multivariate calculus, and probability and statistics is required, as is a rudimentary knowledge of programming in Python. The book can be used in both undergraduate and graduate courses; practitioners will find it an essential reference.

A catalog of wonders, from walking fish to self-medicating chimpanzees.This Atlas of Poetic Zoology leads readers into a world of wonders where turtles fly under the sea, lizards walk on water, insects impersonate flowers, birds don't fly, frogs come back from the dead, and virgin sharks give birth. Animals, writes Emmanuelle Pouydebat, are lyric poets; they discover and shape the world when they sing, dance, explore, and reproduce. The animal kingdom has been evolving for millions of years, weathering many crises of extinction; this book allows us to draw inspiration from animals' enduring vitality.Pouydebat's text, accompanied by striking color illustrations by artist Julie Terrazzoni, offers a catalog of wondrous beings. Pouydebat describes the African bush elephant—the biggest land mammal of them all, but the evolutionary descendant of a tiny animal that stood less than fifty centimeters (nineteen inches) high sixty million years ago; the scaly, toothless pangolin, the world's most endangered mammal—and perhaps its most atypical; the red-lipped batfish, which walks, rather than swims, across the ocean floor; and the great black cockatoo, a gifted percussionist. Chimpanzees, she tells us, self-medicate with medicinal plants; the jellyfish, under stress, reverts to juvenile polyp-hood; and the sweetly named honey badger feeds on reptiles, termites, scorpions, and earthworms. Pouydebat, a researcher at the French Museum of Natural History, and Terrazzoni capture the astonishment promised by any excursion into nature—the happiness that comes from watching a dragonfly, spider, frog, lizard, elephant, parrot, mouse, orangutan, or ladybug. It's the joy of witnessing life itself. We need only open our eyes to see.

How the scientific study of magic reveals intriguing—and often unsettling—insights into the mysteries of the human mind.What do we see when we watch a magician pull a rabbit out of a hat or read a person's mind? We are captivated by an illusion; we applaud the fact that we have been fooled. Why do we enjoy experiencing what seems clearly impossible, or at least beyond our powers of explanation? In Experiencing the Impossible, Gustav Kuhn examines the psychological processes that underpin our experience of magic. Kuhn, a psychologist and a magician, reveals the intriguing—and often unsettling—insights into the human mind that the scientific study of magic provides. Magic, Kuhn explains, creates a cognitive conflict between what we believe to be true (for example, a rabbit could not be in that hat) and what we experience (a rabbit has just come out of that hat!). Drawing on the latest psychological, neurological, and philosophical research, he suggests that misdirection is at the heart of all magic tricks, and he offers a scientific theory of misdirection. He explores, among other topics, our propensity for magical thinking, the malleability of our perceptual experiences, forgetting and misremembering, free will and mind control, and how magic is applied outside entertaiment—the use of illusion in human-computer interaction, politics, warfare, and elsewhere. We may be surprised to learn how little of the world we actually perceive, how little we can trust what we see and remember, and how little we are in charge of our thoughts and actions. Exploring magic, Kuhn illuminates the complex—and almost magical—mechanisms underlying our daily activities.

How to predict and calculate the positions of stars, planets, the sun, the moon, and satellites using a personal computer and high school mathematics.Our knowledge of the universe is expanding rapidly, as space probes launched decades ago begin to send information back to earth. There has never been a better time to learn about how planets, stars, and satellites move through the heavens. This book is for amateur astronomers who want to move beyond pictures of constellations in star guides and solve the mysteries of a starry night. It is a book for readers who have wondered, for example, where Saturn will appear in the night sky, when the sun will rise and set, or how long the space station will be over their location. In Celestial Calculations, J. L. Lawrence shows readers how to find the answers to these and other astronomy questions with only a personal computer and high school math. Using an easy-to-follow step-by-step approach, Lawrence explains what calculations are required, why they are needed, and how they all fit together.Lawrence begins with basic principles: unit of measure conversions, time conversions, and coordinate systems. He combines these concepts into a computer program that can calculate the location of a star, and uses the same methods for predicting the locations of the sun, moon, and planets. He then shows how to use these methods for locating the many satellites we have sent into orbit. Finally, he describes a variety of resources and tools available to the amateur astronomer, including star charts and astronomical tables. Diagrams illustrate the major concepts, and computer programs that implement the algorithms are included. Photographs of actual celestial objects accompany the text, and interesting astronomical facts are interspersed throughout.Source code (in Python 3, JAVA, and Visual Basic) and executables for all the programs and examples presented in the book are available for download at https://CelestialCalculations.github.io.

Reclaiming the artist Ana Mendieta as a formally innovative maker of performative art who forged connections to the marginalized around the world.The artist Ana Mendieta (1948-1985) is remembered as the creator of powerful works expressing a vibrant and unflinching second-wave feminist sensibility. In Radical Virtuosity, art historian Genevieve Hyacinthe offers a new view of Mendieta, connecting her innovative artwork to the art, cultural aesthetics and concerns, feminisms, and sociopolitical messages of the black Atlantic. Mendieta left Cuba as a preteen, fleeing the Castro regime, and spent years in U.S. foster care. Her sense of exile, Hyacinthe argues, colors her work. Hyacinthe examines the development of Mendieta's performative artworks—particularly the Silueta series (1973-1985), which documented the silhouette of her body in the earth over time (a series "without end,” Mendieta said)—and argues that these works were shaped by Mendieta's appropriation and reimagining of Afro-Cuban ritual. Mendieta's effort to create works that invited audience participation, Hyacinthe says, signals her interest in forging connections with the marginalized, particularly those of the black Atlantic and Global South. Hyacinthe describes the "counter entropy” of Mendieta's small-scale earthworks (contrasting them with more massive works created by Robert Smithson and other male artists); considers the resonance of Mendieta's work with the contemporary practices of black Atlantic female artists including Wangechi Mutu, Renee Green, and Damali Abrams; and connects Mendieta's artistic and political expressions to black Atlantic feminisms of such popular artists as Princess Nokia. Mendieta's life and work are often overshadowed in popular perception by her early and tragic death—at thirty-six, she plunged from the window of the thirty-fourth floor Greenwich Village apartment she shared with her husband, the artist Carl Andre. (Andre was charged with her murder and acquitted.) Hyacinthe's account—profusely illustrated, with many images in color—reclaims Mendieta's work and legacy for its artistic significance.

Investigating the entanglement of industry, politics, culture, and economics at the frontier of ocean excavations through an innovative union of art and science.The oceans are crucial to the planet's well-being. They help regulate the global carbon cycle, support the resilience of ecosystems, and provide livelihoods for communities. The oceans as guardians of planetary health are threatened by many forces, including growing extractivist practices. Through the innovative lens of artistic research, Prospecting Ocean investigates the entanglement of industry, politics, culture, and economics at the frontier of ocean excavation. The result is a richly illustrated study that unites science and art to examine the ecological, cultural, philosophical, and aesthetic reverberations of this current threat to the oceans.Prospecting Oceans takes as its starting point an exhibition by the photographer and filmmaker Armin Linke, which was commissioned by TBA21-Academy, London, and first shown at the Institute of Marine Science (CNR-ISMAR) in Venice. Linke is concerned with making the invisible visible, and here he unmasks the technologies that enable extractions from the ocean, including future seabed mining for minerals and sampling of genetic data. But the book extends far beyond Linke's research, presenting the latest research from a variety of fields and employing art as the place where disciplines can converge. Integrating the work of artists with scientific, theoretical, and philosophical analysis, Prospecting Ocean demonstrates that visual culture offers new and urgent perspectives on ecological crises.

An argument that health is optimal responsiveness and is often best treated at the system level.Medical education centers on the venerable "no-fault” concept of homeostasis, whereby local mechanisms impose constancy by correcting errors, and the brain serves mainly for emergencies. Yet, it turns out that most parameters are not constant; moreover, despite the importance of local mechanisms, the brain is definitely in charge. In this book, the eminent neuroscientist Peter Sterling describes a broader concept: allostasis (coined by Sterling and Joseph Eyer in the 1980s), whereby the brain anticipates needs and efficiently mobilizes supplies to prevent errors.Allostasis evolved early, Sterling explains, to optimize energy efficiency, relying heavily on brain circuits that deliver a brief reward for each positive surprise. Modern life so reduces the opportunities for surprise that we are driven to seek it in consumption: bigger burgers, more opioids, and innumerable activities that involve higher carbon emissions. The consequences include addiction, obesity, type 2 diabetes, and climate change. Sterling concludes that solutions must go beyond the merely technical to restore possibilities for daily small rewards and revivify the capacities for egalitarianism that were hard-wired into our nature.Sterling explains that allostasis offers what is not found in any medical textbook: principled definitions of health and disease: health as the capacity for adaptive variation and disease as shrinkage of that capacity. Sterling argues that since health is optimal responsiveness, many significant conditions are best treated at the system level.

An elaborately illustrated A to Z of the face, from historical mugshots to Instagram posts.By turns alarming and awe-inspiring, Face offers up an elaborately illustrated A to Z—from the didactic anthropometry of the late-nineteenth century to the selfie-obsessed zeitgeist of the twenty-first.Jessica Helfand looks at the cultural significance of the face through a critical lens, both as social currency and as palimpsest of history. Investigating everything from historical mugshots to Instagram posts, she examines how the face has been perceived and represented over time; how it has been instrumentalized by others; and how we have reclaimed it for our own purposes. From vintage advertisements for a "nose adjuster” to contemporary artists who reconsider the visual construction of race, Face delivers an intimate yet kaleidoscopic adventure while posing universal questions about identity.

An introduction to financial tools and concepts from an operations perspective, addressing finance/operations trade-offs and explaining financial accounting, working capital, investment analysis, and more.Students and practitioners in engineering and related areas often lack the basic understanding of financial tools and concepts necessary for a career in operations or supply chain management. This book offers an introduction to finance fundamentals from an operations perspective, enabling operations and supply chain professionals to develop the skills necessary for interacting with finance people at a practical level and for making sound decisions when confronted by tradeoffs between operations and finance. Readers will learn about the essentials of financial statements, valuation tools, and managerial accounting.The book first discusses financial accounting, explaining how to create and interpret balance sheets, income statements, and cash flow statements, and introduces the idea of operating working capital—a key concept developed in subsequent chapters. The book then covers financial forecasting, addressing such topics as sustainable growth and the liquidity/profitability tradeoff; concepts in managerial accounting, including variable versus fixed costs, direct versus indirect costs, and contribution margin; tools for investment analysis, including net present value and internal rate of return; creation of value through operating working capital, inventory management, payables, receivables, and cash; and such strategic and tactical tradeoffs as offshoring versus local and centralizing versus decentralizing. The book can be used in undergraduate and graduate courses and as a reference for professionals. No previous knowledge of finance or accounting is required.

An examination of the implications for society of rapidly advancing artificial intelligence systems, combining a humanities perspective with technical analysis; includes exercises and discussion questions.AI and Humanity provides an analytical framing and a common language for understanding the effects of technological advances in artificial intelligence on society. Coauthored by a computer scientist and a scholar of literature and cultural studies, it is unique in combining a humanities perspective with technical analysis, using the tools of literary explication to examine the societal impact of AI systems. It explores the historical development of these technologies, moving from the apparently benign Roomba to the considerably more sinister semi-autonomous weapon system Harpy. The book is driven by an exploration of the cultural and etymological roots of a series of keywords relevant to both AI and society. Works examined range from Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, given a close reading for its themes of literacy and agency, to Simon Head's critique of the effects of surveillance and automation on the Amazon labor force in Mindless.Originally developed as a textbook for an interdisciplinary humanities-science course at Carnegie Mellon, AI & Humanity offers discussion questions, exercises (including journal writing and concept mapping), and reading lists. A companion website provides updated resources and a portal to a video archive of interviews with AI scientists, sociologists, literary theorists, and others.

Scientists attempt to decode what may be a message from intelligent beings in outer space.By pure chance, scientists detect a signal from space that may be communication from rational beings. How can people of Earth understand this message, knowing nothing about the senders—even whether or not they exist? Written as the memoir of a mathematician who participates in the government project (code name: His Master's Voice) attempting to decode what seems to be a message from outer space, this classic novel shows scientists grappling with fundamental questions about the nature of reality, the confines of knowledge, the limitations of the human mind, and the ethics of military-sponsored scientific research.

An astronaut returns to Earth after a ten-year mission and finds a society that he barely recognizes.Stanislaw Lem's Return from the Stars recounts the experiences of Hal Bregg, an astronaut who returns from an exploratory mission that lasted ten years—although because of time dilation, 127 years have passed on Earth. Bregg finds a society that he hardly recognizes, in which danger has been eradicated. Children are "betrizated” to remove all aggression and violence—a process that also removes all impulse to take risks and explore. The people of Earth view Bregg and his crew as "resuscitated Neanderthals,” and pressure them to undergo betrization. Bregg has serious difficulty in navigating the new social mores.While Lem's depiction of a risk-free society is bleak, he does not portray Bregg and his fellow astronauts as heroes. Indeed, faced with no opposition to his aggression, Bregg behaves abominably. He is faced with a choice: leave Earth again and hope to return to a different society in several hundred years, or stay on Earth and learn to be content. With Return from the Stars, Lem shows the shifting boundaries between utopia and dystopia.

Selections from Gabriel Orozco''s notebooks: sketches, photographs, and texts that offer a rare look inside his art-making process.Written Matter presents selections from the notebooks of the prolific and celebrated artist Gabriel Orozco. These texts, sketches, and images from notebooks spanning 1992 to 2012 offer insights into Orozco''s artmaking process, revealing his thinking, methods, and rationales. The texts, translated from the original handwritten Spanish, offer personal truisms, compelling insights, observations, and notes on process and method, forming a subterranean stream that runs parallel to his artwork. “Art is the opposite of spectacle,” he writes. “Art does not try to convince anyone, that''s why it''s shocking.” The notebooks are fundamental to Orozco''s work, serving as a travelogue and personal dictionary that, when consulted, allow him to resume the trajectory of his thought anywhere. Because Orozco chooses not to work in a studio, his notebooks act as a different kind of studio space, on paper and bound between covers. Orozco works in a variety of media—drawing, installation, photography, sculpture, video. His notebooks reveal and revel in the style and substance of his art.Profusely illustrated and designed under Orozco''s art direction, Written Matter offers an unusually intimate look at an artist''s process and practice.

A frontline account of how to fight corruption, from Nigeria's former finance minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala.

How curating has changed art and how art has changed curating: an examination of the emergence contemporary curatorship.

An authority on creativity introduces us to AI-powered computers that are creating art, literature, and music that may well surpass the creations of humans.

A new edition of a book, written in a humorous question-and-answer style, that shows how to implement and use an elegant little programming language for logic programming.