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In the bestselling tradition of Stuff Matters and The Disappearing Spoon: a clever and engaging look at materials, the innovations they made possible, and how these technologies changed us.

How conflicting ideas of nature threaten to fracture America''s identity.Amber waves of grain, purple mountain majesties: American invest much of their national identity in sites of natural beauty. And yet American lands today are torn by conflicts over science, religion, identity, and politics. Creationists believe that the Biblical flood carved landscapes less than 10,000 years ago; environmentalists protest pipelines; Western states argue that the federal government''s land policies throttle free enterprise; Native Americans demand protection for sacred sites. In this book, David Nye looks at Americans'' irreconcilably conflicting ideas about nature.A landscape is conflicted when different groups have different uses for the same location—for example, when some want to open mining sites that others want to preserve or when suburban development impinges on agriculture. Some landscapes are so degraded from careless use that they become toxic “anti-landscapes.” Nye traces these conflicts to clashing conceptions of nature—ranging from pastoral to Native American to military–industrial—that cannot be averaged into a compromise. Nye argues that today’s environmental crisis is rooted in these conflicting ideas about land. Depending on your politics, global warming is either an inconvenient truth or fake news. America’s contradictory conceptions of nature are at the heart of a broken national consensus. 

An introduction to annotation as a genre--a synthesis of reading, thinking, writing, and communication--and its significance in scholarship and everyday life.Annotation--the addition of a note to a text--is an everyday and social activity that provides information, shares commentary, sparks conversation, expresses power, and aids learning. It helps mediate the relationship between reading and writing. This volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series offers an introduction to annotation and its literary, scholarly, civic, and everyday significance across historical and contemporary contexts. It approaches annotation as a genre--a synthesis of reading, thinking, writing, and communication--and offer examples of annotation that range from medieval rubrication and early book culture to data labeling and online reviews.

Comparative analyses of the influence of public opinion on education policy in developed countries.Although research has suggested a variety of changes to education policy that have the potential to improve educational outcomes, politicians are often reluctant to implement such evidence-based reforms. Public opinion and pressure by interest groups would seem to have a greater role in shaping education policy than insights drawn from empirical data. The construction of a comparative political economy of education that seeks to explain policy differences among nations is long overdue. This book offers the first comparative inventory and analysis of public opinion and education in developed countries, drawing on data primarily from Europe and the United States.

An investigation of hate speech: legal approaches, current controversies, and suggestions for limiting its spread.Hate speech can happen anywhere--in Charlottesville, Virginia, where young men in khakis shouted, "Jews will not replace us"; in Myanmar, where the military used Facebook to target the Muslim Rohingya; in Capetown, South Africa, where a pastor called on ISIS to rid South Africa of the "homosexual curse." In person or online, people wield language to attack others for their race, national origin, religion, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, disability, or other aspects of identity. This volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series examines hate speech: what it is, and is not; its history; and efforts to address it.

A new approach to understanding the culture of ubiquitous connectivity, arguing that our dependence on networked infrastructure does not equal addiction.In this book, Susanna Paasonen takes on a dominant narrative repeated in journalistic and academic accounts for more than a decade: that we are addicted to devices, apps, and sites designed to distract us, that drive us to boredom, with detrimental effect on our capacities to focus, relate, remember, and be. Paasonen argues instead that network connectivity is a matter of infrastructure and necessary for the operations of the everyday. Dependencies on it do not equal addiction but speak to the networks within which our agency can take shape.

Why, when we have been largely socialized into good behavior, are there more laws that govern our behavior than ever before? Voted one of the best law books of 2021 by the UK Times.Levels of violent crime have been in a steady decline for centuries--for millennia, even. Over the past five hundred years, homicide rates have decreased a hundred-fold. We live in a time that is more orderly and peaceful than ever before in human history. Why, then, does fear of crime dominate modern politics? Why, when we have been largely socialized into good behavior, are there more laws that govern our behavior than ever before? In Command and Persuade, Peter Baldwin examines the evolution of the state''s role in crime and punishment over three thousand years. Baldwin explains that the involvement of the state in law enforcement and crime prevention is relatively recent. In ancient Greece, those struck by lightning were assumed to have been punished by Zeus. In the Hebrew Bible, God was judge, jury, and prosecutor when Cain killed Abel. As the state’s power as lawgiver grew, more laws governed behavior than ever before; the sum total of prohibited behavior has grown continuously. At the same time, as family, community, and church exerted their influences, we have become better behaved and more law-abiding. Even as the state stands as the socializer of last resort, it also defines through law the terrain on which we are schooled into acceptable behavior.

Quantum computing explained in terms of elementary linear algebra, emphasizing computation and algorithms and requiring no background in physics.This introduction to quantum algorithms is concise but comprehensive, covering many key algorithms. It is mathematically rigorous but requires minimal background and assumes no knowledge of quantum theory or quantum mechanics. The book explains quantum computation in terms of elementary linear algebra; it assumes the reader will have some familiarity with vectors, matrices, and their basic properties, but offers a review of the relevant material from linear algebra. By emphasizing computation and algorithms rather than physics, it makes quantum algorithms accessible to students and researchers in computer science who have not taken courses in quantum physics or delved into fine details of quantum effects, apparatus, circuits, or theory.

Leading scientists argue for a new paradigm for cancer research, proposing a complex systems view of cancer supported by empirical evidence.Current consensus in cancer research explains cancer as a disease caused by specific mutations in certain genes. After dramatic advances in genome sequencing, never before have we known so much about the individual cancer cell--and yet never before has it been so unclear what to do with this knowledge. In this volume, leading researchers argue for a new theory framework for understanding and treating cancer. The contributors propose a complex systems view of cancer, presenting conceptual building blocks for a new research paradigm supported by empirical evidence.The contributors first discuss the new research framework in terms of theoretical foundations and then take up the relevance of a systems approach, reviewing such topics as nonlinearity, recurrence after treatment, the cellular attractor concept, network theory, and non-coding DNA--the "dark matter" of our genome. They address the temporality of cancer progression, drawing on evolutionary theory and clinical experience. Finally, they cover the dominant role of the tissue microenvironment in cancer, analyzing topics including altered metabolic pathways, the disease-defining influence on metastasis, and the interconnectedness of different environmental niches across levels of organization.

Reclaiming the first century as common ground rather than the origin of deeply entrenched differences: liberating the past to speak to us in another way.Conventional readings of antiquity cast Athens against Jerusalem, with Athens standing in for "reason" and Jerusalem for "faith." And yet, Susan Buck-Morss reminds us, recent scholarship has overturned this separation. Naming the first century as a zero point--"year one"--that divides time into before and after is equally arbirtrary, nothing more than a convenience that is empirically meaningless. In YEAR 1, Buck-Morss liberates the first century so it can speak to us in another way, reclaiming it as common ground rather than the origin of deeply entrenched differences.Buck-Morss aims to topple various conceptual givens that have shaped modernity as an episteme and led us into some unhelpful postmodern impasses. She approaches the first century through the writings of three thinkers often marginalized in current discourse: Flavius Josephus, historian of the Judaean war; the neo-Platonic philosopher Philo of Alexandria; and John of Patmos, author of Revelation, the last book of the Christian Bible. Also making appearances are Antigone and John Coltrane, Plato and Bulwer-Lytton, al-Farabi and Jean Anouilh, Nicholas of Cusa and Zora Neale Hurston--not to mention Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Kristeva, and Derrida.Buck-Morss shows that we need no longer partition history as if it were a homeless child in need of the protective wisdom of Solomon. Those inhabiting the first century belong together in time, and therefore not to us.

An examination of dating app culture in China, across user demographics--straight women, straight men, queer women, and queer men.In this exploration of dating app culture in China, Lik Sam Chan argues that these popular mobile apps are not merely a platform for personal relationships but also an emerging arena for gender and queer politics. Chan examines the opportunities dating apps present for women's empowerment and men's performances of masculinity, and he links experiences of queer dating app users with their vulnerable position as sexual minorities. He finds that dating apps are both portals to an exciting virtual world of relational possibilities and sites of power dynamics that reflect the heteronormativity and patriarchy of Chinese society.

The definitive and essential collection of classic and new essays on analytic theories of truth, revised and updated, with nineteen new chapters.The question "What is truth?" is so philosophical it can seem rhetorical. And yet truth matters, especially in a "post-truth" society in which lies are tolerated and facts are ignored. If we want to understand why truth matters, we first need to understand what it is. The Nature of Truth offers the definitive collection of classic and contemporary essays on analytic theories of truth. This second edition has been extensively revised and updated, incorporating both historically central readings on truth's nature as well as up-to-the-moment contemporary essays, Nineteen new chapters reflect analytic truth's current trajectory.

An authoritative and unbiased guide to nuclear technology and the controversies that surround it.Are you for nuclear power or against it? What's the basis of your opinion? Did you know a CT scan gives you some 2 millisieverts of radiation? Do you know how much a millisievert is? Does irradiation make foods safer or less safe? What is the point of a bilateral Russia-US nuclear weapons treaty in a multipolar world? These are nuclear questions that call for nuclear choices, and this book equips citizens to make these choices informed ones. It explains, clearly and accessibly, the basics of nuclear technology and describes the controversies surrounding its use.

A human-inspired, linguistically sophisticated model of language understanding for intelligent agent systems.One of the original goals of artificial intelligence research was to endow intelligent agents with human-level natural language capabilities. Recent AI research, however, has focused on applying statistical and machine learning approaches to big data rather than attempting to model what people do and how they do it. In this book, Marjorie McShane and Sergei Nirenburg return to the original goal of recreating human-level intelligence in a machine They present a human-inspired, linguistically sophisticated model of language understanding for intelligent agent systems that emphasizes meaning--the deep, context-sensitive meaning that a person derives from spoken or written language.

A data-driven exploration of how children's language learning varies across different languages, providing both a theoretical framework and reference.The Wordbank Project examines variability and consistency in children's language learning across different languages and cultures, drawing on Wordbank, an open database with data from more than 75,000 children and twenty-nine languages or dialects. This big data approach makes the book the most comprehensive cross-linguistic analysis to date of early language learning. Moreover, its data-driven picture of which aspects of language learning are consistent across languages suggests constraints on the nature of children's language learning mechanisms. The book provides both a theoretical framework for scholars of language learning, language, and human cognition, and a resource for future research.

The history and controversial roots of the social design movement, explored through the life and work of its leading pioneer, Victor Papanek.In Victor Papanek: Designer for the Real World, Alison Clarke explores the social design movement through the life of its leading pioneer, the Austrian American designer, theorist, and activist Victor Papanek. Papanek's 1971 best seller, Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change has been translated into 22 languages and never fallen out of print. Its politics of social design, anti-corporatism, and environmental sustainability have found renewed pertinence in the twenty-first century and dominate the agendas of design schools today. Drawing extensively on previously unexplored archival sources, Clarke uncovers and contextualizes the movement's controversial origins and contradictions.

Leading economists and policymakers consider what economic tools are most effective in reversing the rise in inequality.Economic inequality is the defining issue of our time. In the United States, the wealth share of the top 1% has risen from 25% in the late 1970s to around 40% today. The percentage of children earning more than their parents has fallen from 90% in the 1940s to around 50% today. In Combating Inequality, leading economists, many of them current or former policymakers, bring good news: we have the tools to reverse the rise in inequality. In their discussions, they consider which of these tools are the most effective at doing so.The contributors express widespread agreement that we need to aim policies at economic inequality itself; deregulation and economic stimulus will not do the job. No longer does anyone ask, in relation to expanded social programs, “Can we pay for it?” And most believe that US taxes will have to rise—although they debate whether the progressivity should focus on the revenue side or the expenditure side, through broad-based taxes like the VAT or through a wealth tax aimed at the very top of the income scale. They also consider the philosophical aspects of inequality—whether it is bad in itself or because of its consequences; the risks and benefits of more radical interventions to change the nature of production and trade; and future policy directions.ContributorsDaron Acemoglu, Philippe Aghion, Danielle Allen, Ben Ansell, David Autor, Sheri Berman, Marianne Bertrand, Olivier Blanchard, Lucas Chancel, William Darity Jr., Peter Diamond, Christian Dustmann, David T. Ellwood, Richard Freeman, Caroline Freund, Jason Furman, Hilary Hoynes, Lawrence F. Katz, Wojciech Kopczuk, N. Gregory Mankiw, Nolan McCarty, Dani Rodrik, Jesse Rothstein, Emmanuel Saez, T. M. Scanlon, Heidi Shierholz, Tharman Shanmugaratnam, Stefanie Stantcheva, Michael Stynes, Laura D'Andrea Tyson, Philippe Van Parijs, Gabriel Zucman

How people judge humans and machines differently, in scenarios involving natural disasters, labor displacement, policing, privacy, algorithmic bias, and more.How would you feel about losing your job to a machine? How about a tsunami alert system that fails? Would you react differently to acts of discrimination depending on whether they were carried out by a machine or by a human? What about public surveillance? How Humans Judge Machines compares people's reactions to actions performed by humans and machines. Using data collected in dozens of experiments, this book reveals the biases that permeate human-machine interactions. Are there conditions in which we judge machines unfairly? Is our judgment of machines affected by the moral dimensions of a scenario? Is our judgment of machine correlated with demographic factors such as education or gender? César Hidalgo and colleagues use hard science to take on these pressing technological questions. Using randomized experiments, they create revealing counterfactuals and build statistical models to explain how people judge artificial intelligence and whether they do it fairly. Through original research, How Humans Judge Machines bring us one step closer tounderstanding the ethical consequences of AI.

A reconceptualization of origins research that exploits a modern understanding of non-covalent molecular forces that stabilize living prokaryotic cells.Scientific research into the origins of life remains exploratory and speculative. Science has no definitive answer to the biggest questions--"What is life?" and "How did life begin on earth?" In this book, Jan Spitzer reconceptualizes origins research by exploiting a modern understanding of non-covalent molecular forces and covalent bond formation--a physicochemical approach propounded originally by Linus Pauling and Max Delbrück. Spitzer develops the Pauling-Delbrück premise as a physicochemical jigsaw puzzle that identifies key stages in life's emergence, from the formation of first oceans, tidal sediments, and proto-biofilms to progenotes, proto-cells and the first cellular organisms.

Rules for building formal models that use fast-and-frugal heuristics, extending the psychological study of classification to the real world of uncertainty.This book focuses on classification--allocating objects into categories--"in the wild," in real-world situations and far from the certainty of the lab. In the wild, unlike in typical psychological experiments, the future is not knowable and uncertainty cannot be meaningfully reduced to probability. Connecting the science of heuristics with machine learning, the book shows how to create formal models using classification rules that are simple, fast, and transparent and that can be as accurate as mathematically sophisticated algorithms developed for machine learning.