Böcker utgivna av MIT Press Ltd

A framework for knowledge ownership that challenges the mechanisms of inequality in modern society.Scholars of science, technology, medicine, and law have all tended to emphasize knowledge as the sum of human understanding, and its ownership as possession by law. Breaking with traditional discourse on knowledge property as something that concerns mainly words and intellectual history, or science and law, Dagmar Schäfer, Annapurna Mamidipudi, and Marius Buning propose technology as a central heuristic for studying the many implications of knowledge ownership. Toward this end, they focus on the notions of knowledge and ownership in courtrooms, workshops, policy, and research practices, while also shedding light on scholarship itself as a powerful tool for making explicit the politics inherent in knowledge practices and social order.  The book presents case studies showing how diverse knowledge economies are created and how inequalities arise from them. Unlike scholars who have fragmented this discourse across the disciplines of anthropology, sociology, and history, the editors highlight recent developments in the emerging field of the global history of knowledge—as science, as economy, and as culture. The case studies reveal how notions of knowing and owning emerge because they reciprocally produce and determine each other’s limits and possibilities; that is, how we know inevitably affects how we can own what we know; and how we own always impacts how and what we are able to know.Contributors (Listed in Order of Appearance)Dagmar Schäfer, Annapurna Mamidipudi, Cynthia Brokaw, Marius Buning, Viren Murthy, Marjolijn Bol, Amy E. Slaton, James Leach, Myles W. Jackson, Lissant Bolton, Vivek S. Oak, Jörn Oeder

A new way to teach media studies that centers students’ lived experiences and diverse perspectives from around the world.From the intimate to the mundane, most aspects of our lives—how we learn, love, work, and play—take place in media. Taking an expansive, global perspective, this introductory textbook covers what it means to live in, rather than with, media. Mark Deuze focuses on the lived experience—how people who use smartphones, the internet, and television sets make sense of their digital environment—to investigate the broader role of media in society and everyday life.  Life in Media uses relatable examples and case studies from around the world to illustrate the foundational theories, concepts, and methods of media studies. The book is structured around six core themes: how media inform and inspire our daily activities; how we live our lives in the public eye; how we make distinctions between real and fake; how we seek and express love; how we use media to effect change; how we create media and shared narratives; and how we seek to create well-being within media. By deliberately including diverse voices and radically embracing the everyday and mundane aspects of media life, this book innovates ways to teach and talk about media.Highlights diverse international voices, images, and casesUses accessible examples from everyday life to contextualize theory Offers a comprehensive, student-centered introduction to media studiesExtensively annotated bibliography offers dynamic sources for further study, including readings and documentary films

How marketers learned to dream of optimization and speak in the idiom of management science well before the widespread use of the Internet.Algorithms, data extraction, digital marketers monetizing "eyeballs": these all seem like such recent features of our lives. And yet, Lee McGuigan tells us in this eye-opening book, digital advertising was well underway before the widespread use of the Internet.  Explaining how marketers have brandished the tools of automation and management science to exploit new profit opportunities, Selling the American People traces data-driven surveillance all the way back to the 1950s, when the computerization of the advertising business began to blend science, technology, and calculative cultures in an ideology of optimization. With that ideology came adtech, a major infrastructure of digital capitalism.To help make sense of today's attention merchants and choice architects, McGuigan explores a few key questions: How did technical experts working at the intersection of data processing and management sciences come to command the center of gravity in the advertising and media industries? How did their ambition to remake marketing through mathematical optimization shape and reflect developments in digital technology? In short, where did adtech come from, and how did data-driven marketing come to mediate the daily encounters of people, products, and public spheres? His answers show how the advertising industry's efforts to bend information technologies toward its dream of efficiency and rational management helped to make "surveillance capitalism" one of the defining experiences of public life.

The first reader in critical plant studies, exploring a rapidly growing multidisciplinary field—the intersection of philosophy with plant science and the visual arts.In recent years, philosophy and art have testified to how anthropocentrism has culturally impoverished our world, leading to the wide destruction of habitats and ecosystems. In this book, Giovanni Aloi and Michael Marder show that the field of critical plant studies can make an important contribution, offering a slew of possibilities for scientific research, local traditions, Indigenous knowledge, history, geography, anthropology, philosophy, and aesthetics to intersect, inform one another, and lead interdisciplinary and transcultural dialogues. Vegetal Entwinements in Philosophy and Art considers such topics as the presence of plants in the history of philosophy, the shifting status of plants in various traditions, what it means to make art with growing life-forms, and whether or not plants have moral standing. In an experimental vegetal arrangement, the reader presents some of the most influential writing on plants, philosophy, and the arts, together with provocative new contributions, as well as interviews with groundbreaking contemporary artists whose work has greatly enhanced our appreciation of vegetal being.Contributors:Catriona A.H. Sandilands, Giovanni Aloi, Marlene Atleo, Monica Bakke, Emily Blackmer, Jodi Brandt, Teresa Castro, Dan Choffness, D. Denenge Duyst-Akpem, Mark Dion, Elisabeth E. Schussler, Braden Elliott, Monica Gagliano, Elaine Gan, Prudence Gibson, James H. Wandersee, Manuela Infante,  Luce Irigaray, Nicholas J. Reo, Jonathon Keats, Zayaan Khan, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Eduardo Kohn, Stefano Mancuso, Michael Marder, Anguezomo Mba Bikoro, Elaine Miller, Samaneh Moafi, Uriel Orlow, Mark Payne, Allegra Pesenti, Špela Petrič, Michael Pollan, Darren Ranco, Angela Roothaan, Marcela Salinas, Diana Scherer, Vandana Shiva, Linda Tegg, Maria Theresa Alves, Krista Tippet, Anthony Trewavas, Alessandra Viola, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, B+W, Mathai Wangari, Lois Weinberger, Kyle Whyte, David Wood, Anicka Yi

An innovative historical analysis of the intersection of religion and technology in making the modern state, focusing on bodily production and reproduction across the human-animal divide.In Milk and Honey, Tamar Novick writes a revolutionary environmental history of the state that centers on the intersection of technology and religion in modern Israel/Palestine. Focusing on animals and the management of their production and reproduction across three political regimes—the late-Ottoman rule, British rule, and the early Israeli state—Novick draws attention to the ways in which settlers and state experts used agricultural technology to recreate a biblical idea of past plenitude, literally a “land flowing with milk and honey,” through the bodies of animals and people. Novick presents a series of case studies involving the management of water buffalo, bees, goats, sheep, cows, and peoplein Palestine/Israel. She traces the intimate forms of knowledge and bodily labor—production and reproduction—in which this process took place, and the intertwining of bodily, political, and environmental realms in the transformation of Palestine/Israel. Her wide-ranging approach shows technology never replaced religion as a colonial device. Rather, it merged with settler-colonial aspirations to salvage the land, bolstering the effort to seize control over territory and people.Fusing technology, religious fervor, bodily labor, and political ecology, Milk and Honey provides a novel account of the practices that defined and continue to shape settler-colonialism in the Palestine/Israel, revealing the ongoing entanglement of technoscience and religion in our time.

"A theorization of habit that emphasizes its excessive, unsettling, and disturbing material and temporal qualities rather than its mediating and stabilizing functions"--

Essays on evolvability from the perspectives of quantitative and population genetics, evolutionary developmental biology, systems biology, macroevolution, and the philosophy of science.Evolvability—the capability of organisms to evolve—wasn’t recognized as a fundamental concept in evolutionary theory until 1990. Though there is still some debate as to whether it represents a truly new concept, the essays in this volume emphasize its value in enabling new research programs and facilitating communication among the major disciplines in evolutionary biology. The contributors, many of whom were instrumental in the development of the concept of evolvability, synthesize what we have learned about it over the past thirty years. They focus on the historical and philosophical contexts that influenced the emergence of the concept and suggest ways to develop a common language and theory to drive further evolvability research. The essays, drawn from a workshop on evolvability hosted in 2019–2020 by the Center of Advanced Study at the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, in Oslo, provide scientific and historical background on evolvability. The contributors represent different disciplines of evolutionary biology, including quantitative and population genetics, evolutionary developmental biology, systems biology and macroevolution, as well as the philosophy of science. This pl[urality of approaches allows researchers in disciplines as diverse as developmental biology, molecular biology, and systems biology to communicate with those working in mainstream evolutionary biology. The contributors also discuss key questions at the forefront of research on evolvability.Contributors:J. David Aponte, W. Scott Armbruster, Geir H. Bolstad, Salomé Bourg, Ingo Brigandt, Anne Calof, James M. Cheverud, Josselin Clo, Frietson Galis, Mark Grabowski, Rebecca Green, Benedikt Hallgrímsson, Thomas F. Hansen, Agnes Holstad, David Houle, David Jablonski, Arthur Lander, Arnaud LeRouzic, Alan C. Love, Ralph Marcucio, Michael B. Morrissey, Laura Nuño de la Rosa, Øystein H. Opedal, Mihaela Pavličev, Christophe Pélabon, Jane M. Reid, Heather Richbourg, Jacqueline L. Sztepanacz, Masahito Tsuboi, Cristina Villegas, Marta Vidal-García, Kjetil L. Voje, Andreas Wagner, Günter P. Wagner, Nathan M. Young

From the influential author of Dynamics in Action, how the concepts of constraints provide a way to rethink relationships, opening the way to intentional, meaningful causation.Grounding her work in the problem of causation, Alicia Juarrero challenges previously held beliefs that only forceful impacts are causes. Constraints, she claims, bring about effects as well, and they enable the emergence of coherence. In Context Changes Everything, Juarrero shows that coherence is induced by enabling constraints, not forceful causes, and that the resulting coherence is then maintained by constitutive constraints. Constitutive constraints, in turn, become governing constraints that regulate and modulate the way coherent entities behave. Using the tools of complexity science, she offers a rigorously scientific understanding of identity, hierarchy, and top-down causation, and in so doing, presents a new way of thinking about the natural world. Juarrero argues that personal identity, which has been thought to be conferred through internal traits (essential natures), is grounded in dynamic interdependencies that keep coherent structures whole. This challenges our ideas of identity, as well as the notion that stability means inflexible rigidity. On the contrary, stable entities are brittle and cannot persist. Complexity science, says Juarrero, can shape how we meet the world, how what emerges from our interactions finds coherence, and how humans can shape identities that are robust and resilient. This framework has significant implications for sociology, economics, political theory, business, and knowledge management, as well as psychology, religion, and theology. It points to a more expansive and synthetic philosophy about who we are and about the coherence of living and nonliving things alike.

A ground-breaking study on how natural disasters can escalate or defuse wars, insurgencies, and other strife.Armed conflict and natural disasters have plagued the twenty-first century. Not since the end of World War II has the number of armed conflicts been higher. At the same time, natural disasters have increased in frequency and intensity over the past two decades, their impacts worsened by climate change, urbanization, and persistent social and economic inequalities. Providing the first comprehensive analysis of the interplay between natural disasters and armed conflict, Catastrophes, Confrontations, and Constraints explores the extent to which disasters facilitate the escalation or abatement of armed conflicts—as well as the ways and contexts in which combatants exploit these catastrophes.Tobias Ide utilizes both qualitative insights and quantitative data to explain the link between disasters and the (de-)escalation of armed conflict and presents over thirty case studies of earthquakes, droughts, floods, and storms in Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and Latin America. He also examines the impact of COVID-19 on armed conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, Nigeria, and the Philippines.Catastrophes, Confrontations, and Constraints is an invaluable addition to current debates on climate change, environmental stress, and security. Professionals and students will greatly appreciate the wealth of timely data it provides for their own investigations.

What global shifts in markets and power mean for the politics and governance of sustainability.In recent years, major shifts in global markets from North to South have created a new geography of trade and consumption, particularly in the agricultural sector. How this shift affects the governance of sustainability, and thus the future of the planet, is the pressing topic Philip Schleifer takes up in this book. The processes of twenty-first-century globalization are fundamentally changing the politics and governance of commodity production, Schleifer argues, with profound implications for the environment in the food-producing countries of the Global South. At the center of Schleifer's study are Brazil and Indonesia—two key sites of experimentation in new models of global environmental and commodity governance—where palm oil and soy supply chains have seen unprecedented degrees of private environmental governance in recent years. However, instead of transforming these industries, the diffusion of transnational sustainability standards has accompanied a worsening ecological crisis, with mounting evidence of increasingly strong links between deforestation and globalization in twenty-first-century agricultural trade. To uncover the causes of this governance failure, Schleifer develops a multi-level framework for analyzing how contemporary globalization is reconfiguring the political economies of such industries. The result is the first comprehensive analysis of the shift of global agricultural trade to the South and the deepening crisis of commodity-driven deforestation—and a complex and evolving picture of both the risks and opportunities for sustainability presented by this transformative shift.

Essays on the challenges and risks of designing algorithms and platforms for children, with an emphasis on algorithmic justice, learning, and equity.One in three Internet users worldwide is a child, and what children see and experience online is increasingly shaped by algorithms. Though children’s rights and protections are at the center of debates on digital privacy, safety, and Internet governance, the dominant online platforms have not been constructed with the needs and interests of children in mind. The editors of this volume, Mizuko Ito, Remy Cross, Karthik Dinakar, and Candice Odgers, focus on understanding diverse children’s evolving relationships with algorithms, digital data, and platforms and offer guidance on how stakeholders can shape these relationships in ways that support children’s agency and protect them from harm. This book includes essays reporting original research on educational programs in AI relational robots and Scratch programming, on children’s views on digital privacy and artificial intelligence, and on discourses around educational technologies. Shorter opinion pieces add the perspectives of an instructional designer, a social worker, and parents. The contributing social, behavioral, and computer scientists represent perspectives and contexts that span education, commercial tech platforms, and home settings. They analyze problems and offer solutions that elevate the voices and agency of parents and children. Their essays also build on recent research examining how social media, digital games, and learning technologies reflect and reinforce unequal childhoods.Contributors:Paulo Blikstein, Izidoro Blikstein, Marion Boulicault, Cynthia Breazeal, Michelle Ciccone, Sayamindu Dasgupta, Devin Dillon, Stefania Druga, Jacqueline M. Kory-Westlund, Aviv Y. Landau, Benjamin Mako Hill, Adriana Manago, Siva Mathiyazhagan, Maureen Mauk, Stephanie Nguyen, W. Ian O’Byrne, Kathleen A. Paciga, Milo Phillips-Brown, Michael Preston, Stephanie M. Reich, Nicholas D. Santer, Allison Stark, Elizabeth Stevens, Kristen Turner, Desmond Upton Patton, Veena Vasudevan, Jason Yip

The art of mashup music, its roots in parody, and its social and legal implications.Parody needn’t recognize copyright—but does an algorithm recognize parody? The ever-increasing popularity of remix culture and mashup music, where parody is invariably at play, presents a conundrum for internet platforms, with their extensive automatic, algorithmic policing of content. Taking a wide-ranging look at mashup music—the creative and technical considerations that go into making it; the experience of play, humor, enlightenment, and beauty it affords; and the social and legal issues it presents—Parody in the Age of Remix offers a pointed critique of how society balances the act of regulating art with the act of preserving it. In several jurisdictions, national and international, parody is exempted from copyright laws. And mashups should be understood as a form of parody, Ragnhild Brøvig-Hanssen contends, and thus protected from removal from hosting platforms. Nonetheless, current copyright-related content-moderation regimes, relying on algorithmic detection and automated decision making, frequently eliminate what might otherwise be deemed gray-area content—to the detriment of human listeners and, especially, artists. Given the inaccuracy of takedowns, Parody in the Age of Remix makes a persuasive argument for greater protection for remix creativity in the future—but it also suggests that the content moderation challenges facing mashup producers and other remixers are symptomatic of larger societal issues concerning positional power, the privatization of the law, and the unjust regulation of culture.

How modern notions of architectural style were born—and the debates they sparked in nineteenth-century Germany.The term style has fallen spectacularly out of fashion in architectural circles. Once a conceptual key to understanding architecture’s inner workings, today style seems to be associated with superficiality, formalism, and obsolete periodization. But how did style—once defined by German sociologist Georg Simmel as a place where one is “no longer alone”—in architecture actually work? How was it used and what did it mean? In Style and Solitude, Mari Hvattum seeks to understand the apparent death of style, returning to its birthplace in the late eighteenth century, and charting how it grew to influence modern architectural discourse and practice. As Hvattum explains, German thinkers of the eighteenth and nineteenth century offered competing ideas of what style was and how it should be applied in architecture. From Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s thoughtful eclecticism to King Maximilian II’s attempt to capture the zeitgeist in an architectural competition, style was at the center of fascinating experiments and furious disputes. Starting with Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s invention of the period style and ending a century later with Gottfried Semper’s generative theory of style, Hvattum explores critical debates that are still ongoing today.

Literature and neuroscience come together to illuminate the human experience of beauty, which unfolds in time.How does beauty exist in time? This is Gabrielle Starr’s central concern in Just in Time as she explores the experience of beauty not as an abstraction, but as the result of psychological and neurological processes in which time is central. Starr shows that aesthetic experience has temporal scale. Starr, a literary scholar and pioneer in the field and method of neuroaesthetics, which seeks the neurological basis of aesthetic experience, applies this methodology to the study of beauty in literature, considering such authors as Rita Dove, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Henry James, Toni Morrison, and Wallace Stevens, as well as the artists Dawoud Bey and Jasper Johns.Just in Time is richly informed by the methods and findings of neuroscientists, whose instruments let them investigate encounters with art down to the millisecond, but Starr goes beyond the laboratory to explore engagements with art that unfold over durations experiments cannot accommodate. In neuroaesthetics, Starr shows us, the techniques of the empirical sciences and humanistic interpretation support and complement one another. To understand the temporal quality of aesthetic experience we need both cognitive and phenomenological approaches, and this book moves boldly toward their synthesis.

Ideologically opposed, technologically cooperative—an original account of US and USSR industrialization between the world wars.Between 1927 and 1945, a tide of hyperindustrialization washed over the United States and the Soviet Union. While the two countries remained ideologically opposed, the factories that amassed in Stalingrad, Moscow, Detroit, Buffalo, and Cleveland were strikingly similar, as were the new forms of modern work and urban and infrastructural development that supported this industrialization. Drawing on previously unknown archival materials and photographs, the essays in Detroit-Moscow-Detroit document a stunning two-way transfer of technical knowledge between the United States and the USSR that greatly influenced the built environment in both countries, upgrading each to major industrial power by the start of the Second World War. The innovative research presented here explores spatial development, manufacturing, mass production, and organizational planning across geopolitical lines to demonstrate that capitalist and communist built environments in the twentieth century were not diametrically opposed and were, on certain sites, coproduced in a period of intense technical exchange between the two world wars. A fresh account of the effects of industrialization and globalization on US and Soviet cultures, architecture, and urban history, Detroit-Moscow-Detroit will find wide readership among architects, urban designers, and scholars of architectural, urban, and twentieth-century history. Contributors: Richard Anderson, Robert Bird, Oksana Chabanyuk, Jean-Louis Cohen, Christina E. Crawford, Robert Fishman, Christina Kiaer, Evgeniia Konysheva, Mark G. Meerovich, Sonia Melnikova-Raich, Lewis H. Siegelbaum, Maria C. Taylor, Claire Zimmerman, Katherine Zubovich.

How modern architectural language was invented to communicate with the divine—challenging a common narrative of European architectural history.The architectural drawing might seem to be a quintessentially modern form, and indeed many histories of the genre begin in the early modern period with Italian Renaissance architects such as Alberti. Yet the Middle Ages also had a remarkably sophisticated way of drawing and writing about architecture. God’s Own Language takes us to twelfth-century Paris, where a Scottish monk named Richard of Saint Victor, along with his mentor Hugh, developed an innovative visual and textual architectural language. In the process, he devised techniques and terms that we still use today, from sectional elevations to the word “plan.”Surprisingly, however, Richard’s detailed drawings appeared not in an architectural treatise but in a widely circulated set of biblical commentaries. Seeing architecture as a way of communicating with the divine, Richard drew plans and elevations for such biblical constructions as Noah’s ark and the temple envisioned by the prophet Ezekiel. Interpreting Richard and Hugh’s drawings and writings within the context of the thriving theological and intellectual cultures of medieval Paris, Karl Kinsella argues that the popularity of these works suggests that, centuries before the Renaissance, there was a large circle of readers with a highly developed understanding of geometry and the visual language of architecture.

An accessible introduction to constructing and interpreting Bayesian models of perceptual decision-making and action.Many forms of perception and action can be mathematically modeled as probabilistic—or Bayesian—inference, a method used to draw conclusions from uncertain evidence. According to these models, the human mind behaves like a capable data scientist or crime scene investigator when dealing with noisy and ambiguous data. This textbook provides an approachable introduction to constructing and reasoning with probabilistic models of perceptual decision-making and action. Featuring extensive examples and illustrations, Bayesian Models of Perception and Action is the first textbook to teach this widely used computational framework to beginners.Introduces Bayesian models of perception and action, which are central to cognitive science and neuroscienceBeginner-friendly pedagogy includes intuitive examples, daily life illustrations, and gradual progression of complex conceptsBroad appeal for students across psychology, neuroscience, cognitive science, linguistics, and mathematicsWritten by leaders in the field of computational approaches to mind and brain

An intimate foray into the invisible work that made it possible for pictures to circulate in print and online from the 1830s to the 2010s.Picture Research focuses on how pictures were saved, stored, and searched for in a time before scanners, servers, and search engines, and describes the dramatic difference it made when images became scannable, searchable, and distributable via the internet. While the camera, the darkroom, and the printed page are well-known sites of photographic production that have been replaced by cell phones, imaging software, and websites, the cultural intermediaries of mass-circulation photography—picture librarians and researchers, editors, and archivists—are less familiar. In this book, Nina Lager Vestberg artfully details the range of research skills, reproduction machinery, and communication infrastructures that was needed to make pictures available to a public before digitization.Drawing on documents and representations across a range of cultural expressions, Picture Research reveals the intermediation that has been performed by skilled workers in a variety of roles, making use of pre-photographic, photographic, and digital machineries of capture, accumulation, extraction, and transmission. Tracing a history of the modern pictorial economy from the pre-photographic 1830s to the post-digitized 2010s, it makes visible and explicit the invisible labor that has built—and still sustains—the visual commodity culture of everyday life.

"An in-depth look at the infrastructural landscape of Africa's 3rd wave urbanization, drawing on case studies from Africa and the US"--

"The book covers the fundamentals of safety engineering that includes general discussions of risk, ethics, and societal/policy implications. It also presents the historical and legal frameworks in which this field exists"--

"Presents a synthesis of specific properties of living organisms as they can be described by modern research in order to generate a coherent theory of life"--

"Portrait and interviews that will illustrate the whole story of dementia; not only fear, loss, and despair, but also the love, connection, dignity, and the powerful humanity that always remain"--

"An upper-level undergrad and graduate level textbook, on the genetic basis of evolution, and is also a succinct reference for established scientists in biology, medicine, and computer science"--

How the use of machine learning to analyze art images has revived formalism in art history, presenting a golden opportunity for art historians and computer scientists to learn from one another.Though formalism is an essential tool for art historians, much recent art history has focused on the social and political aspects of art. But now art historians are adopting machine learning methods to develop new ways to analyze the purely visual in datasets of art images. Amanda Wasielewski uses the term “computational formalism” to describe this use of machine learning and computer vision technique in art historical research. At the same time that art historians are analyzing art images in new ways, computer scientists are using art images for experiments in machine learning and computer vision. Their research, says Wasielewski, would be greatly enriched by the inclusion of humanistic issues.The main purpose in applying computational techniques such as machine learning to art datasets is to automate the process of categorization using metrics such as style, a historically fraught concept in art history. After examining a fifteen-year trajectory in image categorization and art dataset creation in the fields of machine learning and computer vision, Wasielewski considers deep learning techniques that both create and detect forgeries and fakes in art. She investigates examples of art historical analysis in the fields of computer and information sciences, placing this research in the context of art historiography. She also raises  questions as which artworks are chosen for digitization, and of those artworks that are born digital, which works gain acceptance into the canon of high art.

How prisoners serve as media laborers, while the prison serves as a testing ground for new media technologies.Prisons are not typically known for cutting-edge media technologies. Yet from photography in the nineteenth century to AI-enhanced tracking cameras today, there is a long history of prisons being used as a testing ground for technologies that are later adopted by the general public. If we recognize the prison as a central site for the development of media technologies, how might that change our understanding of both media systems and carceral systems? Prison Media foregrounds the ways in which the prison is a model space for the control and transmission of information, a place where media is produced, and a medium in its own right. Examining the relationship between media and prison architecture, as surveillance and communication technologies are literally built into the facilities, this study also considers the ways in which prisoners themselves often do hard labor as media workers—labor that contributes in direct and indirect ways to the latest technologies developed and sold by multinational corporations like Amazon. There is a fine line between ankle monitors and Fitbits, and Prison Media helps us make sense of today’s carceral society.

How a generation of tech-savvy young Cambodians is restoring historical media artifacts from before the war—and, in the process, helping to repair the Khmer Rouge’s cultural destruction.During the Khmer Rouge regime (1975–1979), an estimated quarter to a third of the Cambodian population perished from execution, starvation, or disease. The regime especially targeted artists and intellectuals and their work, including films, photographs, and audio recordings. In Media Ruins, Margaret Jack charts the critical role of media in the historical political landscape of Cambodia as well as in its post-conflict reconstruction and reconciliation. Along the way, Jack tells the remarkable stories of resourceful Cambodians in the decades that followed the end of the regime—those who worked to reconstruct their country’s media infrastructure and restore their damaged cultural heritage.Jack describes the crucial role that media has played in helping the nation grapple with the traumas of its past and imagine brighter futures. She explores how tech-savvy Cambodian media creators have engaged in practices of infrastructural restitution—work that is both emotionally cathartic and politically vital. She also examines the ways these media creators have used digital tools to restore and disseminate lost media artifacts, while embracing an aesthetic of material decay as a visible reminder of loss. As these creators reconcile with the past, they are also finding ways to navigate the country’s increasingly authoritarian media landscape. Bringing media and technology studies into conversation with trauma and memory studies, the book provides a unique, and necessary, perspective on post-conflict reconstruction.

An introduction to how neuroethology can inform the development of robots controlled by synaptic networks instead of algorithms, from a pioneer in biorobotics.The trait most fundamental to the evolution of animals is the capability to adapt to novel circumstances in unpredictable environments. Recent advances in biomimetics have made it feasible to construct robots modeled on such unsupervised autonomous behavior, and animal models provide a library of existence proofs. Filling an important gap in the field, this introductory textbook illuminates how neurobiological principles can inform the development of robots that are controlled by synaptic networks, as opposed to algorithms. Joseph Ayers provides a comprehensive overview of the sensory and motor systems of a variety of model biological systems and shows how their behaviors may be implemented in artificial systems, such as biomimetic robots.  Introduces the concept of biological intelligence as applied to robots, building a strategy for autonomy based on the neuroethology of simple animal modelsProvides a mechanistic physiological framework for the control of innate behaviorIllustrates how biomimetic vehicles can be operated in the field persistently and adaptivelyDeveloped by a pioneer in biorobotics with decades of teaching experienceProven in the classroom Suitable for professionals and researchers as well as undergraduate and graduate students in cognitive science and computer science

The first comprehensive guide to distributional reinforcement learning, providing a new mathematical formalism for thinking about decisions from a probabilistic perspective.Distributional reinforcement learning is a new mathematical formalism for thinking about decisions. Going beyond the common approach to reinforcement learning and expected values, it focuses on the total reward or return obtained as a consequence of an agent's choices—specifically, how this return behaves from a probabilistic perspective. In this first comprehensive guide to distributional reinforcement learning, Marc G. Bellemare, Will Dabney, and Mark Rowland, who spearheaded development of the field, present its key concepts and review some of its many applications. They demonstrate its power to account for many complex, interesting phenomena that arise from interactions with one's environment.The authors present core ideas from classical reinforcement learning to contextualize distributional topics and include mathematical proofs pertaining to major results discussed in the text. They guide the reader through a series of algorithmic and mathematical developments that, in turn, characterize, compute, estimate, and make decisions on the basis of the random return. Practitioners in disciplines as diverse as finance (risk management), computational neuroscience, computational psychiatry, psychology, macroeconomics, and robotics are already using distributional reinforcement learning, paving the way for its expanding applications in mathematical finance, engineering, and the life sciences. More than a mathematical approach, distributional reinforcement learning represents a new perspective on how intelligent agents make predictions and decisions.