Bücher der Reihe The MIT Press

A compilation of current scientific knowledge about psychoactive herbal drugs.

A realistic yet encouraging look at how society can change in ways that will allow us to feed an expanding global population.This book addresses the question of how we can best feed the ten billion or so people who will likely inhabit the Earth by the middle of the twenty-first century. He asks whether human ingenuity can produce enough food to support healthy and vigorous lives for all these people without irreparably damaging the integrity of the biosphere.What makes this book different from other books on the world food situation is its consideration of the complete food cycle, from agriculture to post-harvest losses and processing to eating and discarding. Taking a scientific approach, Smil espouses neither the catastrophic view that widespread starvation is imminent nor the cornucopian view that welcomes large population increases as the source of endless human inventiveness. He shows how we can make more effective use of current resources and suggests that if we increase farming efficiency, reduce waste, and transform our diets, future needs may not be as great as we anticipate.Smil's message is that the prospects may not be as bright as we would like, but the outlook is hardly disheartening. Although inaction, late action, or misplaced emphasis may bring future troubles, we have the tools to steer a more efficient course. There are no insurmountable biophysical reasons we cannot feed humanity in the decades to come while easing the burden that modern agriculture puts on the biosphere.

Representations of Musical Signals describes a new generation of digital audio and computer music systems made possible by recent advances in digital signal processing theory, hardware design, and programming techniques.

Volume 1: Econometric General Equilibrium Modeling presents an econometric approach to general equilibrium modeling of the impact of economic policies. Earlier approaches were based on the "calibration" of general equilibrium models to a single data point. The obvious disadvantage of calibration is that it requires highly restrictive assumptions about technology and preferences, such as fixed input-output coefficients. These assumptions are contradicted by the massive evidence of energy conservation in response to higher world energy prices, beginning in 1973. The econometric approach to general equilibrium modeling successfully freed economic policy analysis from the straitjacket imposed by calibration.As a consequence of changes in energy prices and new environmental policies, a wealth of historical experience has accumulated over the past two decades. Interpreted within the framework of the neoclassical theory of economic growth, this experience provides essential guidelines for future policy formation. Volume 2: Energy, the Environment, and Economic Growth presents a new econometric general equilibrium model of the United States that captures the dynamic mechanisms underlying growth trends and responses to energy and environmental policies. Jorgenson uses the model to analyze the impacts of environmental regulations on US economic growth and tax policies for controlling US emissions of carbon dioxide.

Why we learn the wrong things from narrative history, and how our love for stories is hard-wired.To understand something, you need to know its history. Right? Wrong, says Alex Rosenberg in How History Gets Things Wrong. Feeling especially well-informed after reading a book of popular history on the best-seller list? Don't. Narrative history is always, always wrong. It's not just incomplete or inaccurate but deeply wrong, as wrong as Ptolemaic astronomy. We no longer believe that the earth is the center of the universe. Why do we still believe in historical narrative? Our attachment to history as a vehicle for understanding has a long Darwinian pedigree and a genetic basis. Our love of stories is hard-wired. Neuroscience reveals that human evolution shaped a tool useful for survival into a defective theory of human nature. Stories historians tell, Rosenberg continues, are not only wrong but harmful. Israel and Palestine, for example, have dueling narratives of dispossession that prevent one side from compromising with the other. Henry Kissinger applied lessons drawn from the Congress of Vienna to American foreign policy with disastrous results. Human evolution improved primate mind reading—the ability to anticipate the behavior of others, whether predators, prey, or cooperators—to get us to the top of the African food chain. Now, however, this hard-wired capacity makes us think we can understand history—what the Kaiser was thinking in 1914, why Hitler declared war on the United States—by uncovering the narratives of what happened and why. In fact, Rosenberg argues, we will only understand history if we don't make it into a story.

The contributors represent the complete spectrum of positions between a relativism that challenges the very concept of a single world and the idea that there are ascertainable, objective universals.

Two experts on the information economy explore the true economic value of technology and innovation.

How tiny variations in our personal DNA can determine how we look, how we behave, how we get sick, and how we get well.

An engaging introduction to the science of vision that offers a coherent account of vision based on general information processing principlesIn this accessible and engaging introduction to modern vision science, James Stone uses visual illusions to explore how the brain sees the world. Understanding vision, Stone argues, is not simply a question of knowing which neurons respond to particular visual features, but also requires a computational theory of vision. Stone draws together results from David Marr's computational framework, Barlow's efficient coding hypothesis, Bayesian inference, Shannon's information theory, and signal processing to construct a coherent account of vision that explains not only how the brain is fooled by particular visual illusions, but also why any biological or computer vision system should also be fooled by these illusions.This short text includes chapters on the eye and its evolution, how and why visual neurons from different species encode the retinal image in the same way, how information theory explains color aftereffects, how different visual cues provide depth information, how the imperfect visual information received by the eye and brain can be rescued by Bayesian inference, how different brain regions process visual information, and the bizarre perceptual consequences that result from damage to these brain regions. The tutorial style emphasizes key conceptual insights, rather than mathematical details, making the book accessible to the nonscientist and suitable for undergraduate or postgraduate study.

Two experts show that innovation is a skill that can be learned and describe eight essential practices for achieving success.Innovation is the ruling buzzword in business today. Technology companies invest billions in developing new gadgets; business leaders see innovation as the key to a competitive edge; policymakers craft regulations to foster a climate of innovation. And yet businesses report a success rate of only four percent for innovation initiatives. Can we significantly increase our odds of success? In The Innovator's Way, innovation experts Peter Denning and Robert Dunham reply with an emphatic yes. Innovation, they write, is not simply an invention, a policy, or a process to be managed. It is a personal skill that can be learned, developed through practice, and extended into organizations.Denning and Dunham identify and describe eight personal practices that all successful innovators perform: sensing, envisioning, offering, adopting, sustaining, executing, leading, and embodying. Together, these practices can boost a fledgling innovator to success. Weakness in any of these practices, they show, blocks innovation. Denning and Dunham chart the path to innovation mastery, from individual practices to teams and social networks.

The CLOS metaobject protocol is a high-performance extension to the CommonLisp Object System. The authors, who developed CLOS, introduce this approach to programming language design, describe its evolution and design principles and present a specification of a metaobject protocol for CLOS.

Through candid interviews, New Yorker Craig Castleman documents the inside story of the lives and activities of these young graffitists.

An exploration of the dialogue that emerged after 1776 between different visions of what it meant to use new technologies to transform the land.

Exploring Boston's past and present: 12 walks that trace the creation of the city's man-made land in the central waterfront, Back Bay, South End, Charlestown, and elsewhere.

This fascinating introduction to classical art and architecture is the first book to investigate the way classical buildings are put together as formal structures.

The history of a long-running environmental catastrophe chronicles the harmful effects of lead pipes and their continued use despite evidence that they pose a significant health risk.

The purpose of this book is to bring together existing and new methodologies of random field theory and indicate how they can be applied to these diverse areas where a "deterministic treatment is inefficient and conventional statistics insufficient."

This source book presents the essential technical, political, legal, and historical background needed for informed judgments about the recent expansion of military interest in the life sciences - particularly in the weapons potential of the new biotechnology.

An organized compilation of tables of dipole moments, important for the interpretation of the dielectric properties of gases, liquids, and solids.

This book is the first to study the significant-growth in foreign direct investment by such countries and its impact on the international economic order.

Based in large part on previously inaccessible letters and other papers, the book traces Rutherford's life from his upbringing in the pioneering society of New Zealand to his burial in Westminster Abbey as Lord Rutherford of Nelson.

A roboticist imagines life with robots that sell us products, drive our cars, even allow us to assume new physical form, and more.

A neuroscientific perspective on the mind-body problem that focuses on how the brain actually accomplishes mental causation.

Case studies from around the world and theoretical discussion show how the capacity to act collectively on local problems can be developed, strengthening democracy while changing social and economic outcomes.

A guide to first purchases in science and engineering undergraduate libraries.

A comprehensive exposition of mathematics, tracing the history and cultural significance of mathematical ideas from antiquity to the present day.

A comprehensive anthology of real-life cases, integrating diverse perspectives on moral problems in medicine.

The evolution of Robert McNamara's poverty-oriented redirections at the World Bank from 1968 to 1981.