Böcker i The MIT Press-serien

Mapping the new geography of the visual arts, from the explosion of biennials to the emerging art markets in Asia and the Middle East.

More than 140 illustrated biographical profiles map the innovative modern California design community.

A solutions manual for all 582 exercises in the second edition of Intermediate Public Economics.

A framework for the theory and practice of organizing that integrates the concepts and methods of information organization and information retrieval.Organizing is such a common activity that we often do it without thinking much about it. In our daily lives we organize physical things—books on shelves, cutlery in kitchen drawers—and digital things—Web pages, MP3 files, scientific datasets. Millions of people create and browse Web sites, blog, tag, tweet, and upload and download content of all media types without thinking "I'm organizing now” or "I'm retrieving now.”This book offers a framework for the theory and practice of organizing that integrates information organization (IO) and information retrieval (IR), bridging the disciplinary chasms between Library and Information Science and Computer Science, each of which views and teaches IO and IR as separate topics and in substantially different ways. It introduces the unifying concept of an Organizing System—an intentionally arranged collection of resources and the interactions they support—and then explains the key concepts and challenges in the design and deployment of Organizing Systems in many domains, including libraries, museums, business information systems, personal information management, and social computing.Intended for classroom use or as a professional reference, the book covers the activities common to all organizing systems: identifying resources to be organized; organizing resources by describing and classifying them; designing resource-based interactions; and maintaining resources and organization over time. The book is extensively annotated with disciplinary-specific notes to ground it with relevant concepts and references of library science, computing, cognitive science, law, and business.

Two leading economists develop a theory explaining the demand for and supply of liquid assets.

An examination of subversive games—games designed for political, aesthetic, and social critique.For many players, games are entertainment, diversion, relaxation, fantasy. But what if certain games were something more than this, providing not only outlets for entertainment but a means for creative expression, instruments for conceptual thinking, or tools for social change? In Critical Play, artist and game designer Mary Flanagan examines alternative games—games that challenge the accepted norms embedded within the gaming industry—and argues that games designed by artists and activists are reshaping everyday game culture. Flanagan provides a lively historical context for critical play through twentieth-century art movements, connecting subversive game design to subversive art: her examples of "playing house” include Dadaist puppet shows and The Sims. She looks at artists' alternative computer-based games and explores games for change, considering the way activist concerns—including worldwide poverty and AIDS—can be incorporated into game design.Arguing that this kind of conscious practice—which now constitutes the avant-garde of the computer game medium—can inspire new working methods for designers, Flanagan offers a model for designing that will encourage the subversion of popular gaming tropes through new styles of game making, and proposes a theory of alternate game design that focuses on the reworking of contemporary popular game practices.

Philosophical reflections on creativity in science, humanities, and human experience as a whole.

This book begins with the Gaia hypothesis and ends with the selfish gene theory, making a grand tour of biology from the biggest to the small scale.

In this broad-ranging view of architecture and urbanism across cultural boundaries, the author evaluates the connections between the natural and man-made in our towns and cities, farms and gardens, architecture and works of civil engineering.

In this evocative book, Edwin Diamond points out that what we see on television today closely reflects our culture and society and politics and will continue to do so.

In this text Mark Dowie reveals the inside stories behind American environmentalism's triumphs and failures, in an attempt to explain why, what was once a promising political movement, is now being pushed to what he considers to be the brink of irrelevance.

In this sweeping cultural history, James Flink provides a fascinating account of the creation of the world's first automobile culture.

Beginning with a detailed analysis of all aspects of Sino-Soviet relations from November 1963 through November 1965, this summary takes up where the author's The Sino-Soviet Rift left off and, like it, includes the text of, or key excerpts from, the main documents of the period.This book first deals with Khrushchev's unsuccessful attempt to reactivate the collective expulsion or condemnation of the Chinese by an overwhelming majority of the world Communist movement, the Chinese gains arising from his failure, and the resultant growth of pluralistic tendencies among his supporters. After Khrushchev's fall, the book turns to the more indirect and therefore more successful policies of Brezhnev and Kosygin against the Chinese.Beginning with the seventh Chinese Comment, the documentation includes Togliatti's Testament and the April 1964 Romanian Central Committee Statement and concludes with the October 27, 1965, Pravda restatement of post-Khrushchev foreign policy and the November 11, 1965, Chinese attack on Moscow's united front policy on the Vietnam crisis.

A collection of topical essays on noteworthy discoveries in the biological sciences published in the journal Nature.

Rapidly quenched metals are the subject of an increasing research effort, spurred on both by advancements in metal processing techniques that have made commercial utilization of these metals feasible and by the recent discoveries of unique and potentially useful properties of these materials. Among the processes that have been perfected is splat cooling, in which a liquid metal is cooled by being spread as a thin film against a metal substrate. Other processes involve vacuum evaporation, sputtering, and chemical deposition. Such processes are considered in this book, but its main emphasis is on the remarkable physical, mechanical, chemical, magnetic, electronic, and other properties of rapidly quenched metals.

Selected segments of Erwin H. Schell's books, articles, and unpublished material on industrial management, assembled and reviewed by Herbert F. Goodwin and Leo B. Moore.

A detailed analysis of Soviet historiography between 1956 and 1966 and the special tensions placed on the Soviet historian of that period.

This unique workbook reflects the research and teaching experience of two outstanding phonologists. Morris Halle, a Slavicist, essentially developed the entire field and continues to offer influential results. Nick Clements, an Africanist, has made fundamental theoretical contributions to the analysis of tone and vowel harmony, two areas of current research.

A revisionist history of New York Dada, with appearances by Baroness Elsa as the embodiment of irrational modernism.

As Chairman of the Civil Aeronautics Board in the late 1970s, Alfred E. Kahn presided over the deregulation of the airlines and his book, published earlier in that decade, presented the first comprehensive integration of the economic theory and institutional practice of economic regulation.

Lerner has spent four years searching out what he calls "eco-pioneers"--people who are working to reduce the pace of environmental degradation. Here he provides case studies of eco-pioneers who are exploring sustainable ways to log forests, grow food, save plant species, clean up cities, conserve water, protect rivers and wildlife, treat hazardous waste, and reduce both waste and consumption. 45 illustrations.

These essays center around two questions: Does truth have an underlying nature? And if so, what sort of nature does it have?

This paperback edition contains a new greatly expanded bibliography of Habermas's work.

Authoritative and comprehensive, yet comprehensible. A remarkable blend of rigorous elegance and economic wisdom.

Using Muncie, Indiana, as a touchstone, David Nye explores how electricity seeped into and redefined American culture.

Scholars working at the intersection of African-American history and the history of technology are redefining the idea of technology to include the work of the skilled artisan and the ingenuity of the self-taught inventor. Although denied access through most of American history to many new technologies and to the privileged education of the engineer, African-Americans have been engaged with a range of technologies, as makers and as users, since the colonial era. A Hammer in Their Hands (the title comes from the famous song about John Henry, "the steel-driving man" who beat the steam drill) collects newspaper and magazine articles, advertisements for runaway slaves, letters, folklore, excerpts from biography and fiction, legal patents, protest pamphlets, and other primary sources to document the technological achievements of African-Americans. Included in this rich and varied collection are a letter from Cotton Mather describing an early method of smallpox inoculation brought from Africa by a slave; selections from Frederick Douglass's autobiography and Uncle Tom's Cabin; the Confederate Patent Act, which barred slaves from holding patents; articles from 1904 by Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. DuBois, debating the issue of industrial education for African-Americans; a 1924 article from Negro World, "Automobiles and Jim Crow Regulations"; a photograph of an all-black World War II combat squadron; and a 1998 presidential executive order on environmental justice. A Hammer in Their Hands and its companion volume of essays, Technology and the African-American Experience (MIT Press, 2004) will be essential references in an emerging area of study.

Universalism vs. Communitarianism focuses on the question, raised by recent work in normative philosophy, of whether ethical norms are best derived and justified on the basis of universal or communitarian standards.

Robert Schrank is a Project Specialist at the Ford Foundation, and he holds a master's and doctorate in the sociology of work. He serves as consultant to the New York City Mayor's Productivity Council, the National Academy of Sciences, the U.S. Department of Labor, other governmental bodies, and universities. So another academic specialist has written another book about the values and goals--or the lack of them, or their decline, or whatever--of working stiffs, about which he knows from nothing, right?Wrong. This particular academic specialist didn't get to college until he was over forty, and earned (the right word for a working man) his doctorate when he was in his fifties. For more than forty years--ten thousand working days--from the age of fourteen on, he has held down an astonishing variety of jobs that cover both a wide occupational range and just about every level, from the top to the bottom, in the organizational scheme of things. He has been a plumber, a city commissioner, a plant manager and engineer, an auto mechanic, an antipoverty program bureaucrat, a machinist, a union official, a coal miner, a foundation professional, a farmhand. Not in that order, but the point is that the experiences, commingling in the memory, all have an equal value in human terms. Always onward-and-upward, the American-Dream-come-true, is exactly not the point.Robert Schrank writes about each of these jobs in a personal, chronological, specific, narrative way, but always from a perspective that has been enlarged by the scope of his professional training and and commitments. His memories give his experiences uniqueness. His sociological insights lend them a kind of universality.But this author is his own best advocate: I was moved to write this book as a result of listening to and reading about what behavioral scientists, academics, and other literati had perceived at places of work. I felt that in the pursuit of psychology or sociology they had missed the humanity, the poetry, and the community of people that is created by the workers at their workplaces. I hope in this book to catch some of that sense of community, camaraderie, conflict, and humor.... I will be tempted from time to time to write in my present profession as a sociologist. But I will do my best to resist that in favor of trying to catch the language and the feel of the workplaces I am writing about. I will try to differentiate between the job and the actual work on tasks. The job I define as the container, the institution, or the structure in which a person performs something for which he or she gets paid. If we think about the job as a container, what interests me in this book is what goes on inside that container. This includes the work tasks, physical surroundings, the benefits, the amenities, and most important, the social milieu of the community.The author also brings critical acuteness and common sense to his examination of such issues as the quality of work (and of workmanship), work as a means of self-definition and personal fulfillment, and the point at which diminishing rewards--material and psychological--make the alternative of not working (or working at a minimal level of commitment) the preferred way of life.