Bücher der Reihe The MIT Press

Error-Correcting Codes, by Professor Peterson, was originally published in 1961. Now, with E. J. Weldon, Jr., as his coauthor, Professor Peterson has extensively rewritten his material. The book contains essentially all of the material of the first edition; however, the authors state that because there has been so much new work published in error-correcting codes, the preparation of this second edition proved to be a much greater task than writing the original book. The major additions are the chapters on majority-logic codes, synchronization, and convolutional codes. Much new material has also been added to the chapters on important linear block codes and cyclic codes. The authors cite some highly regarded books on recent work done in Eastern Europe and an extensive bibliography on coding theory in the Soviet Union [sic]. In its much-expanded form, Error-Correcting Codes may be considered another valuable contribution to computer coding.

A provocative call for delegitimizing fossil fuels rather than accommodating them, accompanied by case studies from Ecuador to Appalachia and from Germany to Norway.Not so long ago, people North and South had little reason to believe that wealth from oil, gas, and coal brought anything but great prosperity. But the presumption of net benefits from fossil fuels is eroding as widening circles of people rich and poor experience the downside.A positive transition to a post-fossil fuel era cannot wait for global agreement, a swap-in of renewables, a miracle technology, a carbon market, or lifestyle change. This book shows that it is now possible to take the first step toward the post-fossil fuel era, by resisting the slow violence of extreme extraction and combustion, exiting the industry, and imagining a good life after fossil fuels. It shows how an environmental politics of transition might occur, arguing for going to the source rather than managing byproducts, for delegitimizing fossil fuels rather than accommodating them, for engaging a politics of deliberately choosing a post-fossil fuel world. Six case studies reveal how individuals, groups, communities, and an entire country have taken first steps out of the fossil fuel era, with experiments that range from leaving oil under the Amazon to ending mountaintop removal in Appalachia.

A concise analysis of legal issues in the anarchic world of cyberspace (on-line services, bulletin board systems, and networks), for members of the on-line world who have little or no legal background. The author discusses issues such as copyright law, freedom of speech and adult material.

A comprehensive and accessible overview of major economic issues facing Latin America today, including balance-of-payments problems, inflation, stabilization and poverty. Each chapter centres on an economic problem, presenting economic theories about the causes and possible solutions.

This book analyzes how the bank-dominated financial system-a key element of the oft-heralded "Japanese economic model"-broke down in the 1990s and spawned sweeping reforms.

Stefan Brands proposes cryptographic building blocks for the design of digital certificates that preserve privacy without sacrificing security.

Burroughs brings an especially wide range of explanatory models-from social history, cultural anthropology, iconology and semiotics-to bear in his analysis of urban reform and the shifts in architectural design that emerged in early Renaissance Rome.

According to Rosalind Picard, if we want computers to be genuinely intelligent and to interact naturally with us, we must give computers the ability to recognize, understand, even to have and express emotions.

Over the past decade, a small group of economists has challenged traditional wisdom about international trade. Rethinking International Trade provides a coherent account of this research program and traces the key steps in an exciting new trade theory that offers, among other possibilities, new arguments against free trade.

A brief, simple introduction to the theory of radiation and its application in astrophysics and a manual for researchers.

Most of Simon's papers on classical and neoclassical economic theory are contained in volume one.

An explanation of why animals behave in unusual ways prior to the onset of an earthquake.

This groundbreaking collection of thirteen original essays analyzes connections between film and two highly influential twentieth-century movements.

This monograph addresses the problem of real-time curve fitting in the presence of noise, from the computational and statistical viewpoints. It examines the problem of nonlinear regression, where observations are made on a time series whose mean-value function is known except for a vector parameter. In contrast to the traditional formulation, data are imagined to arrive in temporal succession. The estimation is carried out in real time so that, at each instant, the parameter estimate fully reflects all available data. Specifically, the monograph focuses on estimator sequences of the so-called differential correction type. The term differential correction refers to the fact that the difference between the components of the updated and previous estimators is proportional to the difference between the current observation and the value that would be predicted by the regression function if the previous estimate were in fact the true value of the unknown vector parameter. The vector of proportionality factors (which is generally time varying and can depend upon previous estimates) is called the gain or smoothing vector. The main purpose of this research is to relate the large-sample statistical behavior of such estimates (consistency, rate of convergence, large-sample distribution theory, asymptotic efficiency) to the properties of the regression function and the choice of smoothing vectors. Furthermore, consideration is given to the tradeoff that can be effected between computational simplicity and statistical efficiency through the choice of gains.Part I deals with the special cases of an unknown scalar parameter-discussing probability-one and mean-square convergence, rates of mean-square convergence, and asymptotic distribution theory of the estimators for various choices of the smoothing sequence. Part II examines the probability-one and mean-square convergence of the estimators in the vector case for various choices of smoothing vectors. Examples are liberally sprinkled throughout the book. Indeed, the last chapter is devoted entirely to the discussion of examples at varying levels of generality. If one views the stochastic approximation literature as a study in the asymptotic behavior of solutions to a certain class of nonlinear first-order difference equations with stochastic driving terms, then the results of this monograph also serve to extend and complement many of the results in that literature, which accounts for the authors' choice of title. The book is written at the first-year graduate level, although this level of maturity is not required uniformly. Certainly the reader should understand the concept of a limit both in the deterministic and probabilistic senses (i.e., almost sure and quadratic mean convergence). This much will assure a comfortable journey through the first fourth of the book. Chapters 4 and 5 require an acquaintance with a few selected central limit theorems. A familiarity with the standard techniques of large-sample theory will also prove useful but is not essential. Part II, Chapters 6 through 9, is couched in the language of matrix algebra, but none of the classical results used are deep. The reader who appreciates the elementary properties of eigenvalues, eigenvectors, and matrix norms will feel at home. MIT Press Research Monograph No. 42

The conclusive volume of the Brandeis University Summer Institute lecture series of 1970 on theories of interacting elementary particles consisting of five sets of lectures.

A collection of papers exploring why children acquire speech easily yet bog down when it comes to learning to read.

The book summarizes a large literature in a quick, thorough way and adds a useful glossary and rich bibliography.

In a daring revisionist history of modern architecture, Mark Wigley opens up a new understanding of the historical avant-garde. He explores the most obvious, but least discussed, feature of modern architecture: white walls. Although the white wall exemplifies the stripping away of the decorative masquerade costumes worn by nineteenth-century buildings, Wigley argues that modern buildings are not naked. The white wall is itself a form of clothing—the newly athletic body of the building, like that of its occupants, wears a new kind of garment and these garments are meant to match. Not only did almost all modern architects literally design dresses, Wigley points out, their arguments for a modern architecture were taken from the logic of clothing reform. Architecture was understood as a form of dress design.Wigley follows the trajectory of this key subtext by closely reading the statements and designs of most of the protagonists, demonstrating that it renders modern architecture's relationship with the psychosexual economy of fashion much more ambiguous than the architects' endlessly repeated rejections of fashion would suggest. Indeed, Wigley asserts, the very intensity of these rejections is a symptom of how deeply they are embedded in the world of clothing. By drawing on arguments about the relationship between clothing and architecture first formulated in the middle of the nineteenth century, modern architects in fact presented a sophisticated theory of the surface, modernizing architecture by transforming the status of the surface.White Walls, Designer Dresses shows how this seemingly incidental clothing logic actually organizes the detailed design of the modern building, dictating a system of polychromy, understood as a multicolored outfit. The familiar image of modern architecture as white turns out to be the effect of a historiographical tradition that has worked hard to suppress the color of the surfaces of the buildings that it describes. Wigley analyzes this suppression in terms of the sexual logic that invariably accompanies discussions of clothing and color, recovering those sensuously colored surfaces and the extraordinary arguments about clothing that were used to defend them.

A study in the systematic policy analysis of the MIT Libraries. The study identifies two principal missions for the MIT library system: provide material for students' course work and provide material in general support of research at MIT. The problem is how to organize future library resources into a set of programs that best fulfill these objectives.

In a highly engaging style, Rheingold tells the story of what he calls the patriarchs, pioneers, and infonauts of the computer, focusing in particular on such pioneers as J. C. R. Licklider, Doug Engelbart, Bob Taylor, and Alan Kay.

Nathan Glazer has called Marshall Kaplan the best social planner of the 1960s and asserts that this book does for 1973 what Herbert Gans's People and Plans did for 1963. Kaplan states at the outset that it can be said that one need not look far for evidence, even if anecdotal, to show that the impact of the planning profession on the quality of urban life has been marginal at best and, at times, negative. Certainly, twenty years of federal planning assistance programs have not visibly built up the planning capacity of local governments or improved the quality of local life. Indeed, the prime beneficiaries of such aid seem to be, not local governments or local residents, but local and national consultants.Most plans prepared by most city planners have failed to pay heed to the many culturally and economically determined differences in life style of residents of the nation's cities and suburban areas. Plans, when heeded, have often either led to an allocation of scarce resources away from the least advantaged members of urban society or, as in urban renewal, had a directly negative effect on their lives. Somewhat surprisingly, even the more affluent members of society have not found their legitimate needs and their observed behavior patterns reflected in most community plans.

Mathematicians, science historians, and general readers will find this book a lively history; women will find it a reminder of a proud tradition and a challenge to take their rightful place in academic life today.

A collection of Fidel Castro's chief statements-letters, articles, interviews, press releases, proclamations, and decrees-from the late 1940s to the fall of the Batista regime in 1959.

Georg Lukács's most recent work of literary criticism, on the Nobel Prize winner Alexander Solzhenitsyn, hails the Russian author as a major force in redirecting socialist realism toward the level it once occupied in the 1920s when Soviet writers portrayed the turbulent transition to socialist society.In the first essay Lukács compares the novella One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich to short pieces by bourgeois writers Conrad and Hemingway and explains the nature of Solzhenitsyn's criticism of the Stalinist period implied in the situation, characters, and their interaction. He also briefly describes Matriona's House, An Incident at the Kretchetovka Station, and For the Good of the Cause--stories that depict various aspects of life in Stalinist Russia. In the second, longer section, Lukács greets Solzhenitsyn's novels The First Circle and Cancer Ward, which were published outside Russia, as representing a new high point in contemporary world literature. These books mark Solzhenitsyn as heir to the best tendencies in postrevolutionary socialist realism and to the literary tradition of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Moreover, from the point of view of the development of the novel, Lukács finds the Russian author to be a successful exponent of innovative methods originating in Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain.The central problem of contemporary socialist realism is a predominant theme in the book: how to come to critical terms with the legacy of Stalin. The enthusiasm with which Lukács acclaims Solzhenitsyn will not surprise those who have followed his persistent refusal to endorse the so-called socialist realist writers of the Stalinist era. He outlines the aspects of Solzhenitsyn's creative method that allows him to cross the ideological boundaries of the Stalinist tradition, yet he finds a basic pessimism in Solzhenitsyn's work that makes him a plebeian rather than a socialist writer. Of Ivan Denisovich and the future of socialist realist literature, Lukács urges: If socialist writers were to reflect upon their task, if they were again to feel an artistic responsibility towards the great problems of the present, powerful forces could be unleashed leading in the direction of relevant socialist literature. In this process of transformation and renewal, which signifies an abrupt departure from the socialist realism of the Stalin era, the role of landmark on the road to the future falls to Solzhenitsyn's story.