Bücher der Reihe The MIT Press

An approach to software design that introduces a fully automated analysis giving designers immediate feedback, now featuring the latest version of the Alloy language.

An expert in management takes on the conventional wisdom about disruption, looking at companies that proved resilient and offering managers tools for survival.

thoroughly revised and updated with new anecdotes, new revelations, and lively discussion of the ethical, social, and professional issues arising from the computer revolution, such as computer crime, software theft, hacking, viruses, and the invasion of privacy

A former college president offers a framework for sustainability on campus, describing initiatives that range from renewable energy to a revamped curriculum to sustainable investment.

An examination of the fundamental role cybernetics played in the birth of cognitive science and the light this sheds on current controversies.

Continuing his exploration of the organization of complexity and the science of design, this new edition of Herbert Simon's classic work on artificial intelligence adds a chapter that sorts out the current themes and tools--chaos, adaptive systems, genetic algorithms--for analyzing complexity and complex systems.

A space cruiser, in search of its sister ship, encounters beings descended from self-replicating machines.In the grand tradition of H. G. Wells and Jules Verne, Stanislaw Lem's The Invincible tells the story of a space cruiser sent to an obscure planet to determine the fate of a sister spaceship whose communication with Earth has abruptly ceased. Landing on the planet Regis III, navigator Rohan and his crew discover a form of life that has apparently evolved from autonomous, self-replicating machines—perhaps the survivors of a "robot war.” Rohan and his men are forced to confront the classic quandary: what course of action can humanity take once it has reached the limits of its knowledge? In The Invincible, Lem has his characters confront the inexplicable and the bizarre: the problem that lies just beyond analytical reach.

Converging and diverging views on the mind, the self, consciousness, the unconscious, free will, perception, meditation, and other topics.Buddhism shares with science the task of examining the mind empirically; it has pursued, for two millennia, direct investigation of the mind through penetrating introspection. Neuroscience, on the other hand, relies on third-person knowledge in the form of scientific observation. In this book, Matthieu Ricard, a Buddhist monk trained as a molecular biologist, and Wolf Singer, a distinguished neuroscientist—close friends, continuing an ongoing dialogue—offer their perspectives on the mind, the self, consciousness, the unconscious, free will, epistemology, meditation, and neuroplasticity. Ricard and Singer's wide-ranging conversation stages an enlightening and engaging encounter between Buddhism's wealth of experiential findings and neuroscience's abundance of experimental results. They discuss, among many other things, the difference between rumination and meditation (rumination is the scourge of meditation, but psychotherapy depends on it); the distinction between pure awareness and its contents; the Buddhist idea (or lack of one) of the unconscious and neuroscience's precise criteria for conscious and unconscious processes; and the commonalities between cognitive behavioral therapy and meditation. Their views diverge (Ricard asserts that the third-person approach will never encounter consciousness as a primary experience) and converge (Singer points out that the neuroscientific understanding of perception as reconstruction is very like the Buddhist all-discriminating wisdom) but both keep their vision trained on understanding fundamental aspects of human life.

How embracing untranslatable terms for well-being-from the Finnish sisu to the Yiddish mensch-can enrich our emotional understanding and experience.

Marine Hydrodynamics was specifically designed to meet the need for an ocean hydrodynamics text that is up-to-date in terms of both content and approach. The book is solidly based on fundamentals, but it also guides the student to an understanding of their engineering applications through its consideration of realistic configurations.

Perceptrons - the first systematic study of parallelism in computation - has remained a classical work on threshold automata networks for nearly two decades.

An economist's perspective on the nuts and bolts of economic policymaking, based on his experience as the Chief Economic Adviser in India.

The final part of the 1st ed. is not included in this revision.

Why our brains aren't built for media multitasking, and how we can learn to live with technology in a more balanced way.

How developments in science and technology may enable the emergence of purely digital minds-intelligent machines equal to or greater in power than the human brain.

An exploration of the smallest and simplest of dwellings offers answers to some of the largest and oldest questions about architecture.This small book on small dwellings explores some of the largest questions that can be posed about architecture. What begins where architecture ends? What was before architecture? The ostensible subject of Ann Cline's inquiry is the primitive hut, a one-room structure built of common or rustic materials. Does the proliferation of these structures in recent times represent escapist architectural fantasy, or deeper cultural impulses? As she addresses this question, Cline gracefully weaves together two stories: one of primitive huts in times of cultural transition, and the other of diminutive structures in our own time of architectural transition. From these narrative strands emerges a deeper inquiry: what are the limits of architecture? What ghosts inhabit its edges? What does it mean to dwell outside it? Cline's project began twenty-five years ago, when she set out to translate the Japanese tea ritual into an American idiom. First researching the traditional tea practices of Japan, then building and designing huts in the United States, she attempted to make the "translation" from one culture to another through the use of common American building materials and technology. But her investigation eventually led her to look at many nonarchitectural ideas and sources, for the hut exists both at the beginning of and at the farthest edge of architecture, in the margins between what architecture is and what it is not. In the resulting narrative, she blends autobiography, historical research, and cultural criticism to consider the place that such structures as shacks, teahouses, follies, casitas, and diners—simple, "undesigned" places valued for their timelessness and authenticity—occupy from both a historical and contemporary perspective. This book is an original and imaginative attempt to rethink architecture by studying its boundary conditions and formative structures.

Lewis Branscomb and Philip Auerswald address early-stage, high-tech innovation in the context of business decision making and innovation policy.

A balanced look at globalization and its potential environmental effects, both destructive and beneficial.

An overview of naturalistic decision making, which views people as inherently skilled and experienced.

A noted Chinese economist examines the mechanisms behind China's economic reforms, arguing that universal principles and specific implementations are equally important.