Bücher veröffentlicht von MIT Press

"Many business leaders know that diversity in organizational leadership is important; this book ushers executives through the next steps of understanding exactly why diverse leadership teams produce better business outcomes and how to diversify their companies' leaders"--

An award-winning neurologist on the Stone-Age roots of our screen addictions, and what to do about them.The human brain hasn’t changed much since the Stone Age, let alone in the mere thirty years of the Screen Age. That’s why, according to neurologist Richard Cytowic—who, Oliver Sacks observed, “changed the way we think of the human brain”—our brains are so poorly equipped to resist the incursions of Big Tech: They are programmed for the wildly different needs of a prehistoric world. In Your Stone-Age Brain in the Screen Age, Cytowic explains exactly how this programming works—from the brain’s point of view. What he reveals in this book shows why we are easily addicted to screen devices, why young, developing brains are particularly vulnerable, why we need silence, and what we can do to push back.In the engaging storytelling style of his popular TED Talk, Cytowic draws an easily comprehensible picture of the Stone-Age brain’s workings—the function of neurotransmitters like dopamine in basic instincts for survival such as wanting and reward; the role of comparison in emotion, and emotion in competition; and, most significantly, the orienting reflex, one of the unconscious circuits that automatically focus, shift, and sustain attention. In light of this picture, the nature of our susceptibility to digital devices becomes clear, along with the possibility of how to break their spell.Full of practical actions that we can start taking right away, Your Stone-Age Brain in the Screen Age is compelling evidence that we can change the way we use technology, resist its addictive power over us, and take back the control we have lost.

"An expert on AI safety explains what we must do now to minimize the serious harms and threats that AI poses while realizing its benefits for society"--

"Davis addresses the "screen time" debate by recognizing that children's experiences of technology and social relationships are qualitatively distinct at different stages of development"--

"Blockchain Governance offers an accessible, critical overview of legal and political issues related to blockchain technology. It moves beyond the hype, showing how blockchain offers a fertile ground for experimentation with radically new ways to govern people and institutions"--

The affects, aesthetics, and ethics of voice in the new materialist turn, explored through encounters with creative works in media and the arts.

In this book, Michael Madary examines visual experience, drawing on both phenomenological and empirical methods of investigation. He finds that these two approaches -- careful, philosophical description of experience and the science of vision -- independently converge on the same result: Visual perception is an ongoing process of anticipation and fulfillment. Madary first makes the case for the descriptive premise, arguing that the phenomenology of vision is best described as on ongoing process of anticipation and fulfillment. He discusses visual experience as being perspectival, temporal, and indeterminate; considers the possibility of surprise when appearances do not change as we expect; and considers the content of visual anticipation. Madary then makes the case for the empirical premise, showing that there are strong empirical reasons to model vision using the general form of anticipation and fulfillment. He presents a range of evidence from perceptual psychology and neuroscience, and reinterprets evidence for the two-visual-systems hypothesis. Finally, he considers the relationship between visual perception and social cognition. An appendix discusses Husserlian phenomenology as it relates to the argument of the book.Madary argues that the fact that there is a convergence of historically distinct methodologies itself is an argument that supports his findings. With Visual Phenomenology, he creates an exchange between the humanities and the sciences that takes both methods of investigation seriously.

A description of perturbation-based methods developed in machine learning to augment novel optimization methods with strong statistical guarantees.In nearly all machine learning, decisions must be made given current knowledge. Surprisingly, making what is believed to be the best decision is not always the best strategy, even when learning in a supervised learning setting. An emerging body of work on learning under different rules applies perturbations to decision and learning procedures. These methods provide simple and highly efficient learning rules with improved theoretical guarantees. This book describes perturbation-based methods developed in machine learning to augment novel optimization methods with strong statistical guarantees, offering readers a state-of-the-art overview.Chapters address recent modeling ideas that have arisen within the perturbations framework, including Perturb & MAP, herding, and the use of neural networks to map generic noise to distribution over highly structured data. They describe new learning procedures for perturbation models, including an improved EM algorithm and a learning algorithm that aims to match moments of model samples to moments of data. They discuss understanding the relation of perturbation models to their traditional counterparts, with one chapter showing that the perturbations viewpoint can lead to new algorithms in the traditional setting. And they consider perturbation-based regularization in neural networks, offering a more complete understanding of dropout and studying perturbations in the context of deep neural networks.

The lives of people (mostly women) who help to produce science or who are affected by it.The stories in Schrödinger's Wife (and Other Possibilities) travel through laboratories, observatories, rockets, hotel rooms, hospitals, out to the Antarctic and into outer space, following the trails of women scientists, technicians, patients, doctors, and spouses in their encounters with some of the most extraordinary aspects of modern science.In these science-inspired tales the nuclear physicist Lise Meitner discovers the secrets of nuclear fission while fleeing from the Nazis. An employee in the underground laboratory CERN refuses to have her own photo taken. The biologist Margaret Bastock must figure our the impact of genes on behavior while coping with post-war expectations of women’s own behavior. Scientists from East and West Germany stationed at opposite sides of Antarctica experience their own fall of the Berlin Wall. The elusive physicist Bruno Pontecorvo theorizes about an equally elusive particle. Schrödinger’s wife Anny uses his theory to get her revenge on her philandering husband. A scientific theory worries about being discovered by a woman, and a resident in a special institution extrapolates the history of the universe from a piece of toast. In this, her second collection of short stories, Pippa Goldschmidt explores the lives of real and imaginary scientists, focusing on the human emotions and social connections behind the discoveries.

Artist and teacher White delivers and develops art school lessons, striking an instructive balance between technical advice and sage concepts. These 101 maxims, meditations, and demonstrations offer both a toolkit of ideas for the art student and a set of guiding principles for the artist.

This edition . . . provides pictures situated in the text of all the plants to which [Goethe] refers, so that we can see for ourselves the specific points to which he is drawing our attention.--Henri Bortoft, author of "The Wholeness of Nature."

"This is a book about cities - how unexpectedly different they were in various countries and times, and cities that never existed, but someone dreamed of them or feared them. The project uses examples from a wide spectrum of different cultures, it researches the existential and universal question of what means to be human - as a child and as an adult - in order to explore the diversity of how people live globally and throughout history"--

An argument that conceiving of economic value as a social force makes it possible to develop a new and more powerful theory of market behavior.With the advent of the 2007–2008 financial crisis, the economics profession itself entered into a crisis of legitimacy from which it has yet to emerge. Despite the obviousness of their failures, however, economists continue to rely on the same methods and to proceed from the same underlying assumptions. André Orléan challenges the neoclassical paradigm in this book, with a new way of thinking about perhaps its most fundamental concept, economic value.Orléan argues that value is not bound up with labor, or utility, or any other property that preexists market exchange. Economic value, he contends, is a social force whose vast sphere of influence, amounting to a kind of empire, extends to every aspect of economic life. Markets are based on the identification of value with money, and exchange value can only be regarded as a social institution. Financial markets, for example, instead of defining an extrinsic, objective value for securities, act as a mechanism for arriving at a reference price that will be accepted by all investors. What economists must therefore study,Orléan urges, is the hold that value has over individuals and how it shapes their perceptions and behavior.Awarded the prestigious Prix Paul Ricoeur on its original publication in France in 2011, The Empire of Value has been substantially revised and enlarged for this edition, with an entirely new section discussing the financial crisis of 2007–2008.

How sonically distinctive digital “signatures”—including reverb, glitches, and autotuning—affect the aesthetics of popular music, analyzed in works by Prince, Lady Gaga, and others.Is digital production killing the soul of music? Is Auto-Tune the nadir of creative expression? Digital technology has changed not only how music is produced, distributed, and consumed but also—equally important but not often considered—how music sounds. In this book, Ragnhild Brøvig and Anne Danielsen examine the impact of digitization on the aesthetics of popular music. They investigate sonically distinctive “digital signatures”—musical moments when the use of digital technology is revealed to the listener. The particular signatures of digital mediation they examine include digital reverb and delay, MIDI and sampling, digital silence, the virtual cut-and-paste tool, digital glitches, microrhythmic manipulation, and autotuning—all of which they analyze in specific works by popular artists.Combining technical and historical knowledge of music production with musical analyses, aesthetic interpretations, and theoretical discussions, Brøvig and Danielsen offer unique insights into how digitization has changed the sound of popular music and the listener's experience of it. For example, they show how digital reverb and delay have allowed experimentation with spatiality by analyzing Kate Bush's “Get Out of My House”; they examine the contrast between digital silence and the low-tech noises of tape hiss or vinyl crackle in Portishead's “Stranger”; and they describe the development of Auto-Tune—at first a tool for pitch correction—into an artistic effect, citing work by various hip-hop artists, Bon Iver, and Lady Gaga.

Experts discuss the challenges faced in agrobiodiversity and conservation, integrating disciplines that range from plant and biological sciences to economics and political science.Wide-ranging environmental phenomena—including climate change, extreme weather events, and soil and water availability—combine with such socioeconomic factors as food policies, dietary preferences, and market forces to affect agriculture and food production systems on local, national, and global scales. The increasing simplification of food systems, the continuing decline of plant species, and the ongoing spread of pests and disease threaten biodiversity in agriculture as well as the sustainability of food resources. Complicating the situation further, the multiple systems involved—cultural, economic, environmental, institutional, and technological—are driven by human decision making, which is inevitably informed by diverse knowledge systems. The interactions and linkages that emerge necessitate an integrated assessment if we are to make progress toward sustainable agriculture and food systems.This volume in the Strüngmann Forum Reports series offers insights into the challenges faced in agrobiodiversity and sustainability and proposes an integrative framework to guide future research, scholarship, policy, and practice. The contributors offer perspectives from a range of disciplines, including plant and biological sciences, food systems and nutrition, ecology, economics, plant and animal breeding, anthropology, political science, geography, law, and sociology. Topics covered include evolutionary ecology, food and human health, the governance of agrobiodiversity, and the interactions between agrobiodiversity and climate and demographic change.

"How will the history of the present be written? As life continues to move online, the web becomes ever more important for an understanding of the past. This book offers an original theoretical framework for approaching the web of the past, both as a source and as an object of study in its own right"--

Interdisciplinary perspectives on the evolutionary and biological roots of syntax, describing current research on syntax in fields ranging from linguistics to neurology.