Böcker utgivna av MIT Press Ltd

"This book addresses the need for scientists to understand the framework and approach in large science projects, both from the technical project management side as well as the sociology and governance of large science collaborations"--

A novel, interdisciplinary exploration of the relative contributions of rigidity and flexibility in the adoption, maintenance, and evolution of technical traditions.Techniques can either be used in rigid, stereotypical ways or in flexibly adaptive ways, or in some combination of the two. The Evolution of Techniques, edited by Mathieu Charbonneau, addresses the impacts of both flexibility and rigidity on how techniques are used, transformed, and reconstructed, at varying social and temporal scales. The multidisciplinary contributors demonstrate the important role of the varied learning contexts and social configurations involved in the transmission, use, and evolution of techniques. They explore the diversity of cognitive, behavioral, sociocultural, and ecological mechanisms that promote and constrain technical flexibility and rigidity, proposing a deeper picture of the enablers of, and obstacles to, technical transmission and change.In line with the extended evolutionary synthesis, the book proposes a more inclusive and materially grounded conception of technical evolution in terms of promiscuous, dynamic, and multidirectional causal processes. Offering new evidence and novel theoretical perspectives, the contributors deploy a diversity of methods, including ethnographies, field and laboratory experiments, cladistics and phylogenetic tree building, historiography, and philosophical analysis. Examples of the wide range of topics covered include field experiments with potters from five cultures, stability and change in Paleolithic toolmaking, why children lack flexibility when making tools, and cultural techniques in nonhuman animals.The volume’s three thematic sections are:·      Timescales of technical rigidity and flexibility·      Rigid copying to flexible reconstruction·      Exogenous factors of technical rigidity and flexibilityThe volume closes with a discussion by philosopher Kim Sterelny.ContributorsRita Astuti, Adam Howell Boyette, Blandine Bril, Josep Call, Mathieu Charbonneau, Arianna Curioni, Nicola Cutting, Bert De Munck, György Gergely, Anne-Lise Goujon, Ildikó Király, Catherine Lara, Sébastien Manem, Luke McEllin, Helena Miton, Giulio Ongaro, Sarah Pope-Caldwell, Valentine Roux, Manon Schweinfurth, Dan Sperber, Kim Sterelny, Dietrich Stout, James W. A. Strachan, Sadie Tenpas

"An argument for the moral right of democratically elected governments to impose vaccine mandates on citizens, even those who are "vaccine hesitant.""--

"A thoughtful account of how optimization (also known as theorycrafting or the "moneyballing effect") has changed the way we play games from World of Warcraft to soccer"--

How computers simulate cities and how they are also being embedded in cities, changing our behavior and the way in which cities evolve.At every stage in the history of computers and communications, it is safe to say we have been unable to predict what happens next. When computers first appeared nearly 75 years ago, primitive computer models were used to help understand and plan cities, but as computers became faster, smaller, more powerful, and ever more ubiquitous, cities themselves began to embrace them. As a result, the smart city emerged. In The Computable City, Michael Batty investigates the circularity of this peculiar evolution: how computers and communications changed the very nature of our city models, which, in turn, are used to simulate systems composed of those same computers.Batty first charts the origins of computers and examines how our computational urban models have developed and how they have been enriched by computer graphics. He then explores the sequence of digital revolutions and how they are converging, focusing on continual changes in new technologies, as well as the twenty-first-century surge in social media, platform economies, and the planning of the smart city. He concludes by revisiting the digital transformation as it continues to confound us, with the understanding that the city, now a high-frequency twenty-four-hour version of itself, changes our understanding of what is possible.

"A joyful look at understanding the rules of games, from Magic The Gathering to ski jumping. The authors discuss five broad categories of rules: formal rules, internal rules, social norms, external regulation, and materially embodied rules"--

A fascinating interdisciplinary approach to how everyday Western music works, and why the tones, melodies, and chords combine as they do.Despite the cultural diversity of our globalized world, most Western music is still structured around major and minor scales and chords. Countless thinkers and scientists of the past have struggled to explain the nature and origin of musical structures. In Psychoacoustic Foundations of Major-Minor Tonality, music psychologist Richard Parncutt offers a fresh take, combining music theory—Rameau’s fundamental bass, Riemann’s harmonic function, Schenker’s hierarchic analysis, Forte’s pitch-class set theory—with psychology—Bregman’s auditory scene, Terhardt’s virtual pitch, Krumhansl’s tonal hierarchy. Drawing on statistical analyses of notated music corpora, Parncutt charts a middle path between cultural relativism and scientific positivism to bring music theory into meaningful discourse with empirical research.Our musical subjectivity, Parncutt explains, depends on our past musical experience and hence on music history and its social contexts. It also depends on physical sound properties, as investigated in psychoacoustics with auditory experiments and mathematical models. Parncutt’s evidence-based theory of major-minor tonality draws on his interdisciplinary background to present a theory that is comprehensive, creative, and critical. Examining concepts of interval, consonance, chord root, leading tone, harmonic progression, and modulation, he asks:Why are some scale tones and chord progressions more common than others?What aspects of major-minor tonality are based on human biology or general perceptual principles? What aspects are culturally arbitrary? And what about colonial history?Original and provocative, Psychoacoustic Foundations of Major-Minor Tonality promises to become a foundational text in both music theory and music cognition.

An insightful and evidence-based assessment of our urgent need to enact labor law reform—and how to achieve it.Millions of non-union workers want unionization, but our current labor-management relations law conspires to deny them meaningful opportunities to secure collective workplace representation. The resulting low rates of collective bargaining impose economic, political, and social costs on us all. In Fulfilling the Pledge, Roger Hartley addresses the plight of American workers, who face a grim, uncertain future, as the digital workplace reshapes the hierarchical post–World War II industrial relations system that once gave workers a voice. Through empirical evidence and the lens of law and policy, Hartley examines what industrial sociologists call the chronic “representation gap” and clarifies how a wide-ranging movement could build a vocal constituency for the congressional enactment of labor law reform.The pledge made in the 1935 National Labor Relations Act to encourage establishment of industrial democracy—where workers possess a voice in their places of work—remains unfulfilled. Speaking to policymakers, scholars, historians, and the average citizen, Fulfilling the Pledge makes a compelling case for collective workplace representation that serves the greater good, even as American labor relations law continues to undermine collective bargaining by workers and becomes an increasingly significant political and social issue.

An unflinching look at the unique challenges posed by complex technologies we cannot afford to let fail—and why the remarkable achievements of civil aviation can help us understand those challenges.Nuclear reactors, deep-sea drilling platforms, deterrence infrastructures—these are all complex and formidable technologies with the potential to fail catastrophically. In Rational Accidents, John Downer outlines a new perspective on technological failure, arguing that undetectable errors can lurk in even the most rigorous and “rational” assessments of these systems due to the inherent limits of engineering tests and models. Downer finds that it should be impossible, from an epistemological viewpoint, to achieve the near-perfect reliability that we require of our most safety-critical technologies. There is, however, one such technology that demonstrably appears to achieve these “impossible” reliabilities: jetliners.Downer looks closely at civil aviation and how it has reckoned with the problem of failure. He finds that the way we conceive of jetliner reliability hides the real practices by which it is achieved. And he shows us why those practices are much less transferrable across technological domains than we are led to believe. Fully understanding why jetliners don't crash, he concludes, should lead us to doubt the safety of other “ultra-reliable” technologies.A unique and sobering exploration of technological reliability from an STS perspective, Rational Accidents is essential reading for understanding why our most safety-critical technologies are even more dangerous than we believe.

A landmark art historical study of German Notgeld, the emergency money produced during World War I, and the hyperinflation that followed.Emergency Money is the first art historical study of Germany’s emergency money, Notgeld. Issued during World War I and the tumultuous interwar period, these wildly artful banknotes featured landscapes, folk figures, scenes of violence and humor, and even inflation itself in the form of figures staring into empty purses or animals defecating coins. Until now, art historians have paid Notgeld scant attention, but Wilkinson looks closely at these amusing, often disturbing, artifacts and their grim associations to cast new light on the Weimar Republic’s visual culture, as well as the larger relationship between art and money.As Wilkinson shows, Germany’s early twentieth-century economic crisis was also a crisis of culture. Retelling the period’s gripping story through thematic investigations into prevalent Notgeld motifs, Wilkinson illuminates how the vexed relationship between aesthetic value and exchange value was an inextricable part of everyday life.A landmark contribution to our understanding of twentieth-century Germany, Emergency Money brings together art, economics, critical theory, and media theory to create a book for our own inflationary moment, as the world’s new materialisms confront the specter of this older, more fundamental materialism.

Why the privatization of British Telecom signaled a pivotal moment in the rise of neoliberalism, and how it was shaped by the longer development and digitalization of Britain’s telecommunications infrastructure.When Margaret Thatcher sold British Telecom for £3.6 billion in 1984, it became not only, at the time, the largest stock flotation in history, but also a watershed moment in the rise of neoliberalism and deregulation. In Visions of a Digital Nation, Jacob Ward offers an incisive interdisciplinary perspective on how technology prefigured this pivot. Giving due consideration to the politicians, engineers, and managers who paved the way for this historic moment, Ward illustrates how the decision validated the privatization of public utilities and tied digital technology to free market rationales.In this examination of the national and, at times, global history of technology, Ward’s approach is sweeping. Utilizing infrastructure studies, environmental history, and urban and local history, Ward explores Britain’s nationalist and welfarist plans for a digital information utility and shows how these projects contested and adapted to the “market turn” under Margaret Thatcher. Ultimately, Visions of a Digital Nation compellingly argues that politicians did not impose neoliberalism top-down, but that technology, engineers, and managers shaped these politics from the bottom up.

An edited collection that looks deeply at how humans transform their environments and how these environments, in turn, shape humans.Countless permutations of physical, built, and social environments surround us in space and time, influencing the air we breathe, how hot or cold we are, how many steps we take, and with whom we interact as we go about our daily lives. Assessing the dynamic processes that play out between humans and the environment is challenging. Digital Ethology, edited by Tomáš Paus and Hye-Chung Kum, explores how aggregate area-level data, produced at multiple locations and points in time, can reveal bidirectional—and iterative—relationships between human behavior and the environment through their digital footprints.Experts from geospatial and data science, behavioral and brain science, epidemiology and public health, ethics, and law, as well as urban planning consider how humans transform their environments and how environments shape human behavior.Contributors José Balsa-Barreiro, Kim A. Bard, Steven Bedrick, Michael Brauer, Thomas Brinkhoff, Nitesh V. Chawla, Ciro Cattuto, Tamas Dávid-Barrett, Megan Doerr, Guillaume Dumas, Peter Ejbye-Ernst, Sophia Frangou, Camilla Bank Friis, Jason Gilliland, Kimmo Kaski, Heidi Keller, Fabio Kon, Hye-Chung Kum, Lasse Suonperä Liebst, Gina S. Lovasi, Daniel P. Lupp, Claudia Bauzer Medeiros, Maria Melchior, Mónica Menendez, Virginia Pallante, Tomáš Paus, Beate Ritz, Marie Rosenkrantz Lindegaard, Sven Sandin, Abeed Sarker, Cason D. Schmit, Lindsey Smith, Kimberly M. Thompson, Henning Tiemeier, Michele C. Weigle

How the Soviet forestry industry developed a unique form of industrial ecology—a commonsense approach toward natural resources for the economy and society.In The Green Power of Socialism, Elena Kochetkova examines the relationship between nature and humans under state socialism by looking at the industrial role of Soviet forests. The book explores evolving Soviet policies of wood consumption, discussing how professionals working in the forestry industry of the Soviet state viewed the present and future of forests by considering them both a natural resource and a trove of industrial material. When faced with the prospect of wood shortages, these specialists came to develop new industry-ecology paradigms. Kochetkova looks at the materiality of Soviet industry through forests and wood to show how, paradoxically, industrial ecology emerged and developed as a by-product of the Soviet industrialization project.The Green Power of Socialism also discusses how post-Soviet industry has abandoned these socialist practices and the idea of nature as a complicated ecosystem that provides a crucial service to society. Emphasizing the technological and environmental impacts of the Cold War, Kochetkova critically reconsiders two explanatory models that have become dominant in the historiography of Soviet approaches to nature over the last decades—ecocide and environmentalism. Within the context of the current environmental crisis, the book invites readers to reevaluate state socialism as a complex phenomenon with sophisticated interactions between nature and industry. In so doing, it contributes a fresh perspective on the activities of socialist experts and their view of nature, shedding light on Soviet state industrial and environmental policy and its continuing legacy in the present day.

How global workers, influencers, and activists develop tactics of algorithmic resistance by appropriating and repurposing the same algorithms that control our lives.Algorithms are all around us, permeating more and more aspects of our daily lives. While accounts of platform power tend to come across as bleak and monolithic, Algorithms of Resistance shows how people can resist algorithms across a variety of domains. Drawing from rich ethnographic materials and perspectives from both the Global North and South, authors Tiziano Bonini and Emiliano Treré explore how people appropriate and reconfigure algorithms to pursue their objectives in three domains of everyday life: gig work, cultural industries, and politics. They reveal how forms of algorithmic agency and resistance are endemic and mundane and how the platform society is a contested battleground of contrasting forces. Bonini and Treré begin by outlining their key theoretical framework of moral economies. This framework argues that algorithms exist on a continuum. At its two extremes are two competing moral economies: the user moral economy and the platform moral economy. From here, Algorithms of Resistance chronicles the various inventive ways that individuals can work to achieve agency and resist the ubiquitous power of algorithms. Casting a wide net with a diverse range of case studies, Bonini and Treré reveal the moral imperative for all of us—from delivery drivers to artists to social movements—to resist algorithms.

The little-known stories of the people responsible for what we know today as modern medical ethics.In Making Modern Medical Ethics, Robert Baker tells the counter history of the birth of bioethics, bringing to the fore the stories of the dissenters and whistleblowers who challenged the establishment. Drawing on his earlier work on moral revolutions and the history of medical ethics, Robert Baker traces the history of modern medical ethics and its bioethical turn to the moral insurrections incited by the many unsung dissenters and whistleblowers: African American civil rights leaders, Jewish Americans harboring Holocaust memories, feminists, women, and Anglo-American physicians and healthcare professionals who were veterans of the World Wars, the Cold War, and the Vietnam War.The standard narrative for bioethics typically emphasizes the morally disruptive medical technologies of the latter part of the twentieth century, such as the dialysis machine, the electroencephalograph, and the ventilator, as they created the need to reconsider traditional notions of medical ethics. Baker, however, tells a fresh narrative, one that has historically been neglected (e.g., the story of the medical veterans who founded an international medical organization to rescue medicine and biomedical research from the scandal of Nazi medicine), and also reveals the penalties that moral change agents paid (e.g., the stubborn bureaucrat who was demoted for her insistence on requiring and enforcing research subjects’ informed consent). Analyzing major statements of modern medical ethics from the 1946–1947 Nuremberg Doctors Trials and Nuremberg Code to A Patient’s Bill of Rights, Making Modern Medical Ethics is a winning history of just how respect and autonomy for patients and research subjects came to be codified.

How artists wield demonstration to question the status quo both aesthetically and politically, marshaling art and education as powerful agents of change.Demonstration, in short, says: See here. It is the practice of pointing to something in order to explain or contest it. As such, Sven Spieker argues that demonstration has helped reshape art from the height of the Cold War to the late twentieth century, reformatting our understanding of how art and political engagement relate to each other. Focusing on Western Europe (especially Germany), Eastern Europe, and the United States, Art as Demonstration expands on contemporary discussions of art-as-protest, activism, and resistance. Spieker shows how a closer, more historical look at art’s connection with demonstration reconnects us with earlier efforts, notably by the early twentieth-century avant-garde, to marshal art for the purpose of instruction and engagement.Art as Demonstration reconceives the history of postwar art in Eastern and Western Europe from the perspective of demonstration, understood formally (as a technique for showing and pointing) as well as politically (as protest, resistance, etc.). Close analyses of individual artworks reveal how the deployment of demonstration has changed over time. Spieker shows how “protest” and “resistance” organize art and artists not only politically but also and especially formally and aesthetically—a development of particular importance in the Cold War art and politics of Eastern Europe. The book illustrates how from the 1960s onward demonstration radically changed the way artists thought about art: no longer as an object but as a form of education.

Contributors from a range of disciplines consider the disconnect between human evolutionary studies and the rest of evolutionary biology.The study of human evolution often seems to rely on scenarios and received wisdom rather than theory and methodology, with each new fossil or molecular analysis interpreted as supporting evidence for the presumed lineage of human ancestry. We might wonder why we should pursue new inquiries if we already know the story. Is paleoanthropology an evolutionary science? Are analyses of human evolution biological? In this volume, contributors from disciplines that range from paleoanthropology to philosophy of science consider the disconnect between human evolutionary studies and the rest of evolutionary biology. All of the contributors reflect on their own research and its disciplinary context, considering how their fields of inquiry can move forward in new ways. The goal is to encourage a more multifaceted intellectual environment for the understanding of human evolution.Topics discussed include paleoanthropology's history of procedural idiosyncrasies; the role of mind and society in our evolutionary past; humans as large mammals rather than a special case; genomic analyses; computational approaches to phylogenetic reconstruction; descriptive morphology versus morphometrics; and integrating insights from archaeology into the interpretation of human fossils.Contributors Markus Bastir, Fred L. Bookstein, Claudine Cohen, Richard G. Delisle, Robin Dennell, Rob DeSalle, John de Vos, Emma M. Finestone, Huw S. Groucutt, Gabriele A. Macho, Fabrizzio Mc Manus, Apurva Narechania, Michael D. Petraglia, Thomas W. Plummer, J.W. F. Reumer, Jeff Rosenfeld, Jeffrey H. Schwartz, Dietrich Stout, Ian Tattersall, Alan R. Templeton, Michael Tessler, Peter J. Waddell, Martine Zilversmit

The essential guide for writing portable, parallel programs for GPUs using the OpenMP programming model.Today’s computers are complex, multi-architecture systems: multiple cores in a shared address space, graphics processing units (GPUs), and specialized accelerators. To get the most from these systems, programs must use all these different processors. In Programming Your GPU with OpenMP, Tom Deakin and Timothy Mattson help everyone, from beginners to advanced programmers, learn how to use OpenMP to program a GPU using just a few directives and runtime functions. Then programmers can go further to maximize performance by using CPUs and GPUs in parallel—true heterogeneous programming. And since OpenMP is a portable API, the programs will run on almost any system.Programming Your GPU with OpenMP shares best practices for writing performance portable programs. Key features include:The most up-to-date APIs for programming GPUs with OpenMP with concepts that transfer to other approaches for GPU programming.Written in a tutorial style that embraces active learning, so that readers can make immediate use of what they learn via provided source code.Builds the OpenMP GPU Common Core to get programmers to serious production-level GPU programming as fast as possible.Additional features:A reference guide at the end of the book covering all relevant parts of OpenMP 5.2.An online repository containing source code for the example programs from the book—provided in all languages currently supported by OpenMP: C, C++, and Fortran.Tutorial videos and lecture slides.

A critical examination of the complex legacies of early Californian anthropology and linguistics for twenty-first-century communities.In January 2021, at a time when many institutions were reevaluating fraught histories, the University of California removed anthropologist and linguist Alfred Kroeber’s name from a building on its Berkeley campus. Critics accused Kroeber of racist and dehumanizing practices that harmed Indigenous people; university leaders repudiated his values. In The Unnaming of Kroeber Hall, Andrew Garrett examines Kroeber’s work in the early twentieth century and his legacy today, asking how a vigorous opponent of racism and advocate for Indigenous rights in his own era became a symbol of his university’s failed relationships with Native communities. Garrett argues that Kroeber’s most important work has been overlooked: his collaborations with Indigenous people throughout California to record their languages and stories.The Unnaming of Kroeber Hall offers new perspectives on the early practice of anthropology and linguistics and on its significance today and in the future. Kroeber’s documentation was broader and more collaborative and multifaceted than is usually recognized. As a result, the records Indigenous people created while working with him are relevant throughout California as communities revive languages, names, songs, and stories. Garrett asks readers to consider these legacies, arguing that the University of California chose to reject critical self-examination when it unnamed Kroeber Hall.

A rallying manifesto for the innovative problem-solving we need to build a better, more verdant, and sustainable planetary existence.Academics are letting Africa down. With all that we know, what do we have to show for it? Whose lives have been changed for the better by it? What have we done for and with our communities lately? In this provocative book—the first in a trilogy—Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga argues that our critical thinkers must become actual thinker-doers. Taking its title from one of Thomas Sankara’s most inspirational speeches, Dare to Invent the Future looks for moments in Africa’s story where precedents of critical thought and knowledge in service of problem-solving are evident to inspire readers to dare to invent such a knowledge system.Mavhunga revisits insights from Edward Wilmot Blyden, Booker T. Washington, Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Amílcar Cabral, Julius Nyerere, and Sankara to illustrate how the academic disciplines have been, and could be, deployed in the service of and through problem-solving, building on what people are doing and know. At its core, he writes, knowledge in the service of and through problem-solving derives from reading the past for new questions, doing due diligence on the present, and contriving an anticipatory approach toward the future.Questioning the fundamental premises of Western and white knowledge production, especially regarding science and technology, Mavhunga proposes in this book refreshingly new approaches to thinking-doing that stem from African realities, in the hopes of inspiring a generation that will run toward, not away from, problems to solve them.

A practical, comprehensive textbook that uses active learning techniques to teach about the challenges and opportunities associated with urban sustainability.While the problem of urban sustainability has long been a subject of great scholarly interest, there has, until now, been no single source providing a multi-disciplinary, exhaustive view of how it can be effectively taught. Filling this gap, Our Urban Future uses active learning techniques to comprehensively relate the theory of urban sustainability and the what, why, and how of sustainable cities. This practical, pedagogically rich textbook concisely covers all the key subjects of the field, including ecosystem services and transects, the internal design and patterning of urban elements, how cities mitigate and adapt to climate change, and questions of environmental justice. It functions as both an illuminating roadmap and active reference to which any student of sustainability can turn to find essential resources and perspectives in pursuit of creating sustainable cities.Approachable, discrete exercises introduce students to key sustainability subjectsLearn-by-doing approach encourages critically engaging from multiple anglesIdeal for students across environmental sustainability, urban planning, urban design, urban studies, sociology architecture, landscape architecture, and geographyRobust suite of ancillaries includes links and downloadable data to support activities, and additional readings and resources

A new approach to addressing the contemporary world’s most difficult challenges, such as climate change and poverty.Conflicts over “the problem” and “the solution” plague the modern world and land problem solvers in what has been called “wicked problem territory”—a social space with high levels of conflict over problems and solutions. In Design Strategy, Nancy C. Roberts proposes design as a strategy of problem solving to close the gap between an existing state and a desired state. Utilizing this approach, designers and change agents are better able to minimize self-defeating conflicts over problems and solutions, break the logjam of opposition, and avoid the traps that lock problem solvers into a never-ending cycle of conflict.Design as a field continues to grow and evolve, but Design Strategy focuses on three levels of design where “wicked problems” tend to lurk—strategic design (of private and public organizations), systemic design (of networked and overlapping economic, technical, political, and social subsystems), and regenerative design (of life-giving realignment between humanity and nature). Within this framework, Roberts presents refreshingly interdisciplinary case studies that integrate theory and practice across diverse fields to guide professionals in any domain—from business and nonprofit organizations to educational and healthcare systems—and finally offers hope that humanity can tackle the existential challenges we face in the twenty-first century.

A captivating history of NASA’s Space Transportation System—the space shuttle—chronicling the inevitable failures of a doomed design.In Dark Star, Matthew Hersch challenges the existing narrative of the most significant human space program of the last fifty years, NASA’s space shuttle. He begins with the origins of the space shuttle: a century-long effort to develop a low-cost, reusable, rocket-powered airplane to militarize and commercialize space travel, which Hersch explains was built the wrong way, at the wrong time, and for all the wrong reasons. Describing the unique circumstances that led to the space shuttle’s creation by the administration of President Richard Nixon in 1972 and its subsequent flights from 1981 through 2011, Hersch illustrates how the space shuttle was doomed from the start.While most historians have accepted the view that the space shuttle’s fatal accidents—including the 1986 Challenger explosion—resulted from deficiencies in NASA’s management culture that lulled engineers into a false confidence in the craft, Dark Star reveals the widespread understanding that the shuttle was predestined for failure as a technology demonstrator. The vehicle was intended only to give the United States the appearance of a viable human spaceflight program until funds became available to eliminate its obvious flaws. Hersch’s work seeks to answer the perilous questions of technological choice that confront every generation, and it is a critical read for anyone interested in how we can create a better world through the things we build.

The essential reader on the philosophical foundations and implications of artificial intelligence, now comprehensively updated for the twenty-first century.In the quarter century since the publication of John Haugeland’s Mind Design II, computer scientists have hit many of their objectives for successful artificial intelligence. Computers beat chess grandmasters, driverless cars navigate streets, autonomous robots vacuum our homes, and ChatGPT answers existential queries in iambic pentameter on command. Engineering has made incredible strides. But have we made progress in understanding and building minds? Comprehensively updated by Carl Craver and Colin Klein to reflect the astonishing ubiquity of machine learning in modern life, Mind Design III offers an essential collection of classic and contemporary essays on the philosophical foundations and implications of artificial intelligence. Contributions from a diverse range of philosophers and computer scientists address the nature of computation, the nature of thought, and the question of whether computers can be made to think. With extensive new material reflecting the explosive growth and diversification of AI approaches, this classic reader equips students to assess the possibility of, and progress toward, building minds out of computers.New edition highlights: New chapters on advances in deep neural networks, reinforcement learning, and causal learningNew material on the complementary intersection of neuroscience and AIOrganized thematically rather than chronologically Brand new introductions to each section that include suggestions for coursework and further reading

An illuminating overview of the development, benefits, and importance of ritual in everyday life, written by a leading cognitive anthropologist.The Hidden Powers of Ritual is an engaging introduction to ritual studies that presents ritual as an evolved form of human behavior of almost unimaginable significance to our species. Every day across the globe, people gather to share meals, brew caffeinated beverages, or honor their ancestors. In this book, Bradd Shore, a respected anthropologist, reaches beyond familiar “big-R” rituals to present life’s humbler, overshadowed moments, exploring everything from the Balinese Pelebon to baseball to family Zoom sessions in the age of Covid to the sobering reenactment rituals surrounding the Moore’s Ford lynchings. In each ritual, Shore shows how our capacity to ritualize behavior is a remarkable part of the human story.Encompassing both the commonly unlabeled “interaction rituals” studied by sociologists and the symbolically elaborated sacred rituals of religious studies, Shore organizes his conception around detailed case studies drawn from international research and personal experience, weaving scholarship with a memoir of a life encompassed by ritual. A probing exploration that matches breadth with accessibility, The Hidden Powers of Ritual is a provocative contribution to ritual theory that will appeal to a wide range of readers curious about why these unique repetitive acts matter in our lives.

An exploration of food, ingestion, and digestion in the emerging field of the metabolic arts.Food appears everywhere in the arts. But what happens after viewers carry food away in the intestinal networks activated by social practice art, the same way digestion turns food into a body? Exploring the emerging field of metabolic arts, After Eating claims digestion and metabolism as key cultural, creative, and political processes that demand attention. Taking an artist-centered approach to nutrition, Lindsay Kelley cultivates a neglected middle ground between the everyday and the scientific, using metabolism as a lens through which to read and write about art.Divided into two parts and full of playful chapter titles such as “Food Babies” and “Poop Circus,” After Eating investigates multiple facets of the sociocultural implications of body image and body process in body art from the 1970s to the present. By engaging the notion of “after” as an artistic homage or tribute, metabolism moves beyond the cell to transform into a method for responding to the most difficult cultural, philosophical, and political challenges of the contemporary moment. Metabolic reading rethinks feminist, queer, bioart, installation, and performance projects, providing artists, students, and teachers new pathways into art theory.

The history of pregnancy testing, and how it transformed from an esoteric laboratory tool to a commonplace of everyday life.Pregnancy testing has never been easier. Waiting on one side or the other of the bathroom door for a “positive” or “negative” result has become a modern ritual and rite of passage. Today, the ubiquitous home pregnancy test is implicated in personal decisions and public debates about all aspects of reproduction, from miscarriage and abortion to the “biological clock” and IVF. Yet, only three generations ago, women typically waited not minutes but months to find out whether they were pregnant. A Woman’s Right to Know tells, for the first time, the story of pregnancy testing—one of the most significant and least studied technologies of reproduction.Focusing on Britain from around 1900 to the present day, Jesse Olszynko-Gryn shows how demand shifted from doctors to women, and then goes further to explain the remarkable transformation of pregnancy testing from an obscure laboratory service to an easily accessible (though fraught) tool for every woman. Lastly, the book reflects on resources the past might contain for the present and future of sexual and reproductive health.Solidly researched and compellingly argued, Olszynko-Gryn demonstrates that the rise of pregnancy testing has had significant—and not always expected—impact and has led to changes in the ways in which we conceive of pregnancy itself.

A ground-breaking anthology that places dispositifs (“apparatuses”) at the center of contemporary thought.Dispositif is one of the most prevalent yet elusive terms in contemporary thought. This comprehensive anthology brings together formative, seminal, and contemporary texts and visual applications to illuminate how central dispositifs are to contemporary theory. Greg Bird and Giovanbattista Tusa’s selection and placement of critical texts invite readers to explore common themes and genealogies, different interpretations and readings, and their diverse deployments across multiple disciplines and genres by such figures as Karl Marx, Franz Kafka, Judith Butler, Martin Heidegger, Gilbert Simondon, Michel Foucault, Edward Said, Jasbir Puar, Donna Haraway, Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Derrida, Tiqqun, Claire Fontaine, and many others.Dispositif: A Cartography is a true toolbox for the development of technological ecology thinking that accounts for situated knowledge. This collection provides coordinates for reorienting oneself in a permanently changing world, offering possible roadmaps for navigating these profoundly uncertain times. More than just a compilation of interventions on the dispositif, this volume acts as a guide for understanding the complex interaction between technology, philosophy, and the languages of the arts and media.

How to level up to the next transformative phase of publishing—with a critical methodology that transcends the dichotomy of paper and digital media production.Publishing is experiencing one of the most transformative phases in its history. In Tactical Publishing, a sequel to Post-Digital Print, Alessandro Ludovico explores the forces driving this historical phase, highlighting the tremendous opportunities it presents. Our task, he believes, is to develop an alternative publishing system that transcends the dichotomy between paper and digital media. He focuses first on the two activities on which publishing is premised—reading and writing (with an emphasis on writing machines and post-truth in the latter)—and then deconstructs the concept, proposing alternative strategies inspired by recent practices and unconventional uses of technology. Ludovico shows how the radical and strategic use of print in the past can serve as the basis for our transition to the next phase of publishing. He argues that the new ecology of publishing should be based on three main elements: the stimulation of our senses, the role of software in forming the publishing infrastructure, and the importance of archives. During this transition from the current post-digital phase to the next phase, independent publishers and artists, as well as readers and machines, will enable new structures and actions that realize the potential of publishing and the preservation of content, thereby enriching social practices. The author also considers the crucial social role played by new forms of libraries, as artists and publishers shape the coming publishing world in its various manifestations. Combining analytical accounts of tactical strategies with examples from artworks and experimental practices, the book concludes with a manifesto for publishing in the twenty-first century and an appendix with a selection of one hundred publications representing the “periodic table” of future publishing.

An authoritative, accessible, and up-to-date treatment of deep learning that strikes a pragmatic middle ground between theory and practice.Deep learning is a fast-moving field with sweeping relevance in today’s increasingly digital world. Understanding Deep Learning provides an authoritative, accessible, and up-to-date treatment of the subject, covering all the key topics along with recent advances and cutting-edge concepts. Many deep learning texts are crowded with technical details that obscure fundamentals, but Simon Prince ruthlessly curates only the most important ideas to provide a high density of critical information in an intuitive and digestible form. From machine learning basics to advanced models, each concept is presented in lay terms and then detailed precisely in mathematical form and illustrated visually. The result is a lucid, self-contained textbook suitable for anyone with a basic background in applied mathematics.Up-to-date treatment of deep learning covers cutting-edge topics not found in existing texts, such as transformers and diffusion modelsShort, focused chapters progress in complexity, easing students into difficult concepts Pragmatic approach straddling theory and practice gives readers the level of detail required to implement naive versions of modelsStreamlined presentation separates critical ideas from background context and extraneous detailMinimal mathematical prerequisites, extensive illustrations, and practice problems make challenging material widely accessible Programming exercises offered in accompanying Python Notebooks