Bücher veröffentlicht von MIT Press Ltd

An accessible scientific explanation for the traditional rules of voice leading, including an account of why listeners find some musical textures more pleasing than others.

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

This second volume of "Productivity" focuses on comparisons among industrialized countries. Although Germany and Japan are often portrayed as economic adversaries of the US, post-war experiences in these countries support policies that give priority to stimulating and rewarding capital formation.

This text presents an extensive and practical overview of almost every aspect of MLP (multilayer perceptrons) methodology, progressing from an initial discussion of what MLPs are and how they might be used to an in-depth examination of technical factors affecting performance.

This text is part of a three-volume critical history of the utopian vision and an exploration of the possible reality of utopia. This first volume lays the foundations of the philosophy of process and introduces the idea of the "not-yet-conscious."

In this provocative study, Robert Cummins takes on philosophers, both old and new, who pursue the question of mental representation as an abstraction, apart from the constraints of any particular theory or framework.

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

One of the most important books on the modernist movement in architecture, written by a founder of the Bauhaus school.One of the most important books on the modern movement in architecture, The New Architecture and The Bauhaus poses some of the fundamental problems presented by the relations of art and industry and considers their possible, practical solution. Gropius traces the rise of the New Architecture and the work of the now famous Bauhaus and, with splendid clarity, calls for a new artist and architect educated to new materials and techniques and directly confronting the requirements of the age.

In this major work, Blumenberg takes issue with Karl Lowith's well-known thesis that the idea of progress is a secularized version of Christian eschatology, which promises a dramatic intervention that will consummate the history of the world from outside.

A vision of a green democratic state, how to realize it, and the implications for democracy, citizenship, sovereignty, and international cooperation.

The story of molecular biologist Elizabeth Blackburn and her groundbreaking research on telomeres and what it reveals about the resourceful opportunism that characterizes the best scientific thinking.Molecular biologist Elizabeth Blackburn—one of Time magazine's 100 “Most Influential People in the World” in 2007—made headlines in 2004 when she was dismissed from the President's Council on Bioethics after objecting to the council's call for a moratorium on stem cell research and protesting the suppression of relevant scientific evidence in its final report. But it is Blackburn's groundbreaking work on telomeric DNA, which launched the field of telomere research, that will have the more profound and long-lasting effect on science and society. In this compelling biography, Catherine Brady tells the story of Elizabeth Blackburn's life and work and the emergence of a new field of scientific research on the specialized ends of chromosomes and the enzyme, telomerase, that extends them. In the early stages of telomere research, telomerase, heralded as a potential cure for cancer and diseases related to aging, attracted the voracious interest of biotech companies. The surrounding hype succeeded in confusing the role of telemorase in extending the life of a cell with a mechanism that might extend the lifespan of an entire organism. In Brady's hands, Blackburn's story reveals much about the tension between pure and applied science, the politicking that makes research science such a competitive field, and the resourceful opportunism that characterizes the best scientific thinking.Brady describes the science accessibly and compellingly. She explores Blackburn's struggle to break down barriers in an elite, male-dominated profession, her role as a mentor to other women scientists (many of whom have made their mark in telomere research), and the collaborative nature of scientific work. This book gives us a vivid portrait of an exceptional woman and a new understanding of the combination of curiosity, imaginative speculation, and aesthetic delight that powers scientific discovery.

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.

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 brief foray into a moral thicket, exploring why we should protect nature despite tsunamis, malaria, bird flu, cancer, killer asteroids, and tofu. Most of us think that in order to be environmentalists, we have to love nature. Essentially, we should be tree huggers--embracing majestic redwoods, mighty oaks, graceful birches, etc. We ought to eat granola, drive hybrids, cook tofu, and write our appointments in Sierra Club calendars. Nature's splendor, in other words, justifies our protection of it. But, asks Benjamin Hale in this provocative book, what about tsunamis, earthquakes, cancer, bird flu, killer asteroids? They are nature, too. For years, environmentalists have insisted that nature is fundamentally good. In The Wild and the Wicked, Benjamin Hale adopts the opposite position--that much of the time nature can be bad--in order to show that even if nature is cruel, we still need to be environmentally conscientious. Hale argues that environmentalists needn't feel compelled to defend the value of nature, or even to adopt the attitudes of tree-hugging nature lovers. We can acknowledge nature's indifference and periodic hostility. Deftly weaving anecdote and philosophy, he shows that we don't need to love nature to be green. What really ought to be driving our environmentalism is our humanity, not nature's value. Hale argues that our unique burden as human beings is that we can act for reasons, good or bad. He claims that we should be environmentalists because environmentalism is right, because we humans have the capacity to be better than nature. As humans, we fail to live up to our moral potential if we act as brutally as nature. Hale argues that despite nature's indifference to the plight of humanity, humanity cannot be indifferent to the plight of nature.

An examination of technology-based education initiatives--from MOOCs to virtual worlds--that argues against treating education as a product rather than a process. Behind the lectern stands the professor, deploying course management systems, online quizzes, wireless clickers, PowerPoint slides, podcasts, and plagiarism-detection software. In the seats are the students, armed with smartphones, laptops, tablets, music players, and social networking. Although these two forces seem poised to do battle with each other, they are really both taking part in a war on learning itself. In this book, Elizabeth Losh examines current efforts to "reform" higher education by applying technological solutions to problems in teaching and learning. She finds that many of these initiatives fail because they treat education as a product rather than a process. Highly touted schemes--video games for the classroom, for example, or the distribution of iPads--let students down because they promote consumption rather than intellectual development. Losh analyzes recent trends in postsecondary education and the rhetoric around them, often drawing on first-person accounts. In an effort to identify educational technologies that might actually work, she looks at strategies including MOOCs (massive open online courses), the gamification of subject matter, remix pedagogy, video lectures (from Randy Pausch to "the Baked Professor"), and educational virtual worlds. Finally, Losh outlines six basic principles of digital learning and describes several successful university-based initiatives. Her book will be essential reading for campus decision makers--and for anyone who cares about education and technology.

A radically empirical exploration of movement and technology and the transformations of choreography in a digital realm.

Drawing on current research in psychology, a new philosophical account of remembering as imagining the past. In this book, Kourken Michaelian builds on research in the psychology of memory to develop an innovative philosophical account of the nature of remembering and memory knowledge. Current philosophical approaches to memory rest on assumptions that are incompatible with the rich body of theory and data coming from psychology. Michaelian argues that abandoning those assumptions will result in a radically new philosophical understanding of memory. His novel, integrated account of episodic memory, memory knowledge, and their evolution makes a significant step in that direction. Michaelian situates episodic memory as a form of mental time travel and outlines a naturalistic framework for understanding it. Drawing on research in constructive memory, he develops an innovative simulation theory of memory; finding no intrinsic difference between remembering and imagining, he argues that to remember is to imagine the past. He investigates the reliability of simulational memory, focusing on the adaptivity of the constructive processes involved in remembering and the role of metacognitive monitoring; and he outlines an account of the evolution of episodic memory, distinguishing it from the forms of episodic-like memory demonstrated in animals. Memory research has become increasingly interdisciplinary. Michaelian's account, built systematically on the findings of empirical research, not only draws out the implications of these findings for philosophical theories of remembering but also offers psychologists a framework for making sense of provocative experimental results on mental time travel.