Bücher veröffentlicht von MIT Press Ltd

An examination of young people's everyday new media practices-including video-game playing, text-messaging, digital media production, and social media use.

How productivity culture and technology became emblematic of the American economic system in pre- and postwar Germany.The concept of productivity originated in a statistical measure of output per worker or per work-hour, calculated by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. A broader productivity culture emerged in 1920s America, as Henry Ford and others linked methods of mass production and consumption to high wages and low prices. These ideas were studied eagerly by a Germany in search of economic recovery after World War I, and, decades later, the Marshall Plan promoted productivity in its efforts to help post-World War II Europe rebuild. In Productivity Machines, Corinna Schlombs examines the transatlantic history of productivity technology and culture in the two decades before and after World War II. She argues for the interpretive flexibility of productivity: different groups viewed productivity differently at different times. Although it began as an objective measure, productivity came to be emblematic of the American economic system; post-World War II West Germany, however, adapted these ideas to its own political and economic values. Schlombs explains that West German unionists cast a doubtful eye on productivity's embrace of plant-level collective bargaining; unions fought for codetermination—the right to participate in corporate decisions. After describing German responses to US productivity, Schlombs offers an in-depth look at labor relations in one American company in Germany—that icon of corporate America, IBM. Finally, Schlombs considers the emergence of computer technology—seen by some as a new symbol of productivity but by others as the means to automate workers out of their jobs.

Case studies from cities on five continents demonstrate the advantages of thinking comparatively about urban environments.

Selections from FBI files on political activists including Betty Friedan, Abbie Hoffman, Martin Luther King, Aaron Swartz, and Malcolm X.

A milestone work that examines the democratic idea of photography and its expansion in common culture, particularly in the United States; generously illustrated.

An engaging and unabashedly opinionated examination of what translation is and isn't.

An account of technology in Africa from an African perspective, examining hunting in Zimbabwe as an example of an innovative mobile workspace.

Experiments in innovation, design, and democracy that search not for a killer app but for a collaboratively created sustainable future.Innovation and design need not be about the search for a killer app. Innovation and design can start in people's everyday activities. They can encompass local services, cultural production, arenas for public discourse, or technological platforms. The approach is participatory, collaborative, and engaging, with users and consumers acting as producers and creators. It is concerned less with making new things than with making a socially sustainable future. This book describes experiments in innovation, design, and democracy, undertaken largely by grassroots organizations, non-governmental organizations, and multi-ethnic working-class neighborhoods.These stories challenge the dominant perception of what constitutes successful innovations. They recount efforts at social innovation, opening the production process, challenging the creative class, and expanding the public sphere. The wide range of cases considered include a collective of immigrant women who perform collaborative services, the development of an open-hardware movement, grassroots journalism, and hip-hop performances on city buses. They point to the possibility of democratized innovation that goes beyond solo entrepreneurship and crowdsourcing in the service of corporations to include multiple futures imagined and made locally by often-marginalized publics. ContributorsMåns Adler, Erling Björgvinsson, Karin Book, David Cuartielles, Pelle Ehn, Anders Emilson, Per-Anders Hillgren, Mads Hobye, Michael Krona, Per Linde, Kristina Lindström, Sanna Marttila, Elisabet M. Nilsson, Anna Seravalli, Pernilla Severson, Åsa Ståhl, Lucy Suchman, Richard Topgaard, Laura Watts

How food pantries stigmatize their clients through a discourse that emphasizes hard work, self help, and economic productivity rather than food justice and equity.

An account of the Flint water crisis shows that Flint's struggle for safe and affordable water is part of a broader struggle for democracy.

How the scientific study of magic reveals intriguing—and often unsettling—insights into the mysteries of the human mind.What do we see when we watch a magician pull a rabbit out of a hat or read a person's mind? We are captivated by an illusion; we applaud the fact that we have been fooled. Why do we enjoy experiencing what seems clearly impossible, or at least beyond our powers of explanation? In Experiencing the Impossible, Gustav Kuhn examines the psychological processes that underpin our experience of magic. Kuhn, a psychologist and a magician, reveals the intriguing—and often unsettling—insights into the human mind that the scientific study of magic provides. Magic, Kuhn explains, creates a cognitive conflict between what we believe to be true (for example, a rabbit could not be in that hat) and what we experience (a rabbit has just come out of that hat!). Drawing on the latest psychological, neurological, and philosophical research, he suggests that misdirection is at the heart of all magic tricks, and he offers a scientific theory of misdirection. He explores, among other topics, our propensity for magical thinking, the malleability of our perceptual experiences, forgetting and misremembering, free will and mind control, and how magic is applied outside entertaiment—the use of illusion in human-computer interaction, politics, warfare, and elsewhere. We may be surprised to learn how little of the world we actually perceive, how little we can trust what we see and remember, and how little we are in charge of our thoughts and actions. Exploring magic, Kuhn illuminates the complex—and almost magical—mechanisms underlying our daily activities.

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

A critical examination of translational medicine, when private risk is transferred to the public sector and university research teams become tech startups for global investors.A global shift has secretly transformed science and medicine. Starting in 2003, biomedical research in the West has been reshaped by the emergence of translational science and medicine—the idea that the aim of research is to translate findings as quickly as possible into medical products. In The Market in Mind, Mark Dennis Robinson charts this shift, arguing that the new research paradigm has turned university research teams into small biotechnology startups and their industry partners into early-stage investment firms. There is also a larger, surprising consequence from this shift: according to Robinson, translational science and medicine enable biopharmaceutical firms, as part of a broader financial strategy, to outsource the riskiest parts of research to nonprofit universities. Robinson examines the implications of this new configuration. What happens, for example, when universities absorb unknown levels of risk? Robinson argues that in the years since the global financial crisis translational science and medicine has brought about "the financialization of health.”Robinson explores such topics as shareholder anxiety and industry retreat from Alzheimer's and depression research; how laboratory research is understood as health innovation even when there is no product; the emergence of investor networking events as crucial for viewing science in a market context; and the place of patients in research decisions. Although translational medicine justifies itself by the goal of relieving patients' suffering, Robinson finds patients' voices largely marginalized in translational neuroscience.

A critical exploration of today's global imperative to innovate, by champions, critics, and reformers of innovation.

Scientists debate the role of scientific research in the military-industrial complex and consider the complicity of academic science in American wars.

An in-depth examination of the novel ways young people support and learn from each other though participation in online fanfiction communities.

A leading economist and former central banker discusses the evolution of central bank communication from secretiveness to transparency and accountability.Central bank communication has evolved from secretiveness to transparency and accountability—from a reluctance to give out any information at all to the belief in communication as a panacea for effective policy. In this book, Otmar Issing, himself a former central banker, discusses the journey toward transparency in central bank communication. Issing traces the development of transparency, examining the Bank of England as an example of extreme reticence and European Central Bank's President Mario Draghi as a practitioner of effective communication. He argues that the ultimate goal of central bank communication is to make monetary policy more effective, and describes the practice and theory of communication as an evolutionary process. For a long time, the Federal Reserve never made its monetary policy decisions public; the European Central Bank, on the other hand, had to adopt a modern communication strategy from the outset. Issing discusses the importance of guiding expectations in central bank communication, and points to financial markets as the most important recipients of this communication. He discusses the obligations of accountability and transparency, although he notes that total transparency is a "mirage.” Issing argues that the central message to the public must always be that the stability of a nation's currency is the bank's priority.

A historical and ethnographic study of the conflict between global transportation and rural development as the two intersect at the Panama Canal.

These readings carefully selected from the entire range of Viollet-le-Duc's work make available the historical insights and practical principles of one of the most imaginative, and inspiring architectural theorists of the modern era.

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.

Bringing together the best critical essays on one of the most fascinating literary figures of our time, this book immediately takes its place as a major source for Benjamin scholarship.

four essays, drawn from two books by one of Germany's foremost philosophers, go to the heart of a number of contemporary issues: Adorno's aesthetics, the nature of a postmodern ethics, and the persistence of modernity in the so-called postmodern age

How the breeding of new animals and plants was central to fascist regimes in Italy, Portugal, and Germany and to their imperial expansion.

A concise history of GPS, from its military origins to its commercial applications and ubiquity in everyday life.GPS is ubiquitous in everyday life. GPS mapping is standard equipment in many new cars and geolocation services are embedded in smart phones. GPS makes Uber and Lyft possible; driverless cars won't be able to drive without it. In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Paul Ceruzzi offers a concise history of GPS, explaining how a once-obscure space technology became an invisible piece of our infrastructure, as essential to modern life as electric power or clean water. GPS relays precise time and positioning information from orbiting satellites to receivers on the ground, at sea, and in the air. It operates worldwide, and its basic signals are free, although private companies can commodify the data provided. Ceruzzi recounts the origins of GPS and its predecessor technologies, including early aircraft navigation systems and satellites. He describes the invention of GPS as a space technology in the post-Apollo, pre-Space Shuttle years and its first military and commercial uses. Ceruzzi explains how the convergence of three major technological developments—the microprocessor, the Internet, and cellular telephony—enabled the development and application of GPS technology. Recognizing the importance of satellite positioning systems in a shifting geopolitical landscape—and perhaps doubting U.S. assurances of perpetual GPS availability—other countries are now building or have already developed their own systems, and Ceruzzi reports on these efforts in the European Union, Russia, India, China, and Japan.

Questions about the physical world, the mind, and technology in conversations that reveal a rich seam of interacting ideas.

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.

How memetic media-aggregate texts that are collectively created, circulated, and transformed-become a part of public conversations that shape broader cultural debates.