Bücher veröffentlicht von MIT Press Ltd

How Americans make energy choices, why they think locally (not globally), and how this can shape U.S. energy and climate change policy.

How young people think about the moral and ethical dilemmas they encounter when they share and use online content and participate in online communities.

When Mary Kelly's best-known work, Post-Partum Document (1973-1979), was shown at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London in 1977, it caused a sensation¿an unexpected response to an intellectually demanding and aesthetically restrained installation of conceptual art. The reception signaled cultural resistance to the themes of the work: feminism and the cultural mythologizing of motherhood. This volume of essays and interviews begins with this foundational work, offering an early statement by the artist, a subsequent interview, and an essay situating the work within a broader feminist discourse that includes Martha Rosler and Judy Chicago. The collection examines such themes in Kelly's work as labor, war trauma, and the politics of care, while emphasizing the artist's sustained engagement with multiple feminisms, multiple histories of feminism, and multiple generations of feminists.

Hao Wang (1921-1995) was one of the few confidants of the great mathematician and logician Kurt Gödel. A Logical Journey is a continuation of Wang's Reflections on Gödel and also elaborates on discussions contained in From Mathematics to Philosophy. A decade in preparation, it contains important and unfamiliar insights into Gödel's views on a wide range of issues, from Platonism and the nature of logic, to minds and machines, the existence of God, and positivism and phenomenology.The impact of Gödel's theorem on twentieth-century thought is on par with that of Einstein's theory of relativity, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, or Keynesian economics. These previously unpublished intimate and informal conversations, however, bring to light and amplify Gödel's other major contributions to logic and philosophy. They reveal that there is much more in Gödel's philosophy of mathematics than is commonly believed, and more in his philosophy than his philosophy of mathematics.Wang writes that "it is even possible that his quite informal and loosely structured conversations with me, which I am freely using in this book, will turn out to be the fullest existing expression of the diverse components of his inadequately articulated general philosophy."The first two chapters are devoted to Gödel's life and mental development. In the chapters that follow, Wang illustrates the quest for overarching solutions and grand unifications of knowledge and action in Gödel's written speculations on God and an afterlife. He gives the background and a chronological summary of the conversations, considers Gödel's comments on philosophies and philosophers (his support of Husserl's phenomenology and his digressions on Kant and Wittgenstein), and his attempt to demonstrate the superiority of the mind's power over brains and machines. Three chapters are tied together by what Wang perceives to be Gödel's governing ideal of philosophy: an exact theory in which mathematics and Newtonian physics serve as a model for philosophy or metaphysics. Finally, in an epilog Wang sketches his own approach to philosophy in contrast to his interpretation of Gödel's outlook.

Can religion cure poverty? The first book to explore the ideas about God and government behind the faith-based initiative.

A comprehensive introduction and reference guide to the minimum description length (MDL) Principle that is accessible to researchers dealing with inductive reference in diverse areas including statistics, pattern classification, machine learning, data mining, biology, econometrics, and experimental psychology, as well as philosophers interested in the foundations of statistics.The minimum description length (MDL) principle is a powerful method of inductive inference, the basis of statistical modeling, pattern recognition, and machine learning. It holds that the best explanation, given a limited set of observed data, is the one that permits the greatest compression of the data. MDL methods are particularly well-suited for dealing with model selection, prediction, and estimation problems in situations where the models under consideration can be arbitrarily complex, and overfitting the data is a serious concern. This extensive, step-by-step introduction to the MDL Principle provides a comprehensive reference (with an emphasis on conceptual issues) that is accessible to graduate students and researchers in statistics, pattern classification, machine learning, and data mining, to philosophers interested in the foundations of statistics, and to researchers in other applied sciences that involve model selection, including biology, econometrics, and experimental psychology. Part I provides a basic introduction to MDL and an overview of the concepts in statistics and information theory needed to understand MDL. Part II treats universal coding, the information-theoretic notion on which MDL is built, and part III gives a formal treatment of MDL theory as a theory of inductive inference based on universal coding. Part IV provides a comprehensive overview of the statistical theory of exponential families with an emphasis on their information-theoretic properties. The text includes a number of summaries, paragraphs offering the reader a "e;fast track"e; through the material, and boxes highlighting the most important concepts.

Does action always arise out of desire? G.F. Schueler examines this hotly debated topic in philosophy of action and moral philosophy, arguing that once two senses of "desire" are distinguished-roughly, genuine desires and pro attitudes-apparently plausible explanations of action in terms of the agent's desires can be seen to be mistaken.

Bernard Salanie studies situations where competitive markets fail to achieve a collective optimum and the interventions used to remedy these so-called market failures.

State-of-the-art algorithms and theory in a novel domain of machine learning, prediction when the output has structure.

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.

Viewing digital libraries as sociotechnical systems, networks of people and technology interacting with society.

An interdisciplinary overview of current research on imitation in animals and artifacts.

The MIT Sloan School of Management perspective on future management challenges.

What can humans do? What can machines do? How do humans delegate actions to machines? In this book, Harry Collins and Martin Kusch combine insights from sociology and philosophy to provide a novel answer to these increasingly important questions.The authors begin by distinguishing between two basic types of intentional behavior, which they call polimorphic actions and mimeomorphic actions. Polimorphic actions (such as writing a love letter) are ones that community members expect to vary with social context. Mimeomorphic actions (such a swinging a golf club) do not vary. Although machines cannot act, they can mimic mimeomorphic actions. Mimeomorphic actions are thus the crucial link between what humans can do and what machines can do.Following a presentation of their detailed categorization of actions, the authors apply their approach to a broad range of human-machine interactions and to learning. Key examples include bicycle riding and the many varieties of writing machines. They also show how their theory can be used to explain the operation of organizations such as restaurants and armies. Finally, they look at a historical case—the technological development of the air pump—applying their categorization of actions to the processes of mechanization and automation. Automation, they argue, can occur only where what we want to bring about can be brought about through mimeomorphic action.

The broad range of material included in these volumes suggests to the newcomer the nature of the field of artificial intelligence, while those with some background in AI will appreciate the detailed coverage of the work being done at MIT. The results presented are related to the underlying methodology. Each chapter is introduced by a short note outlining the scope of the problem begin taken up or placing it in its historical context.Contents, Volume IExpert Problem Solving: Qualitative and Quantitative Reasoning in Classical Mechanics • Problem Solving About Electrical Circuits • Explicit Control of Reasoning • A Glimpse of Truth Maintenance • Design of a Programmer's Apprentice • Natural Language Understanding and Intelligent Computer Coaches: A Theory of Syntactic Recognition for Natural Language • Disambiguating References and Interpreting Sentence Purpose in Discourse • Using Frames in Scheduling • Developing Support Systems for Information Analysis • Planning and Debugging in Elementary Programming • Representation and Learning: Learning by Creating and Justifying Transfer Frames • Descriptions and the Specialization of Concept • The Society Theory of Thinking • Representing and Using Real-World Knowledge

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

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.

Analysis and evidence of how the factors that give rise to boom-bust cycles in fast-growing developing economies also enhance long-run growth.

These original contributions by symbiosis biologists and evolutionary theorists address the adequacy of the prevailing neo-Darwinian concept of evolution in the light of growing evidence that hereditary symbiosis, supplemented by the gradual accumulation of heritable mutation, results in the origin of new species and morphological novelty.

Josef Stern addresses the question: Given the received conception of the form and goals of semantic theory, does metaphorical interpretation, in whole or part, fall within its scope?

Scientists from different disciplines, including anthropology, psychology, psychiatry, pediatrics, neurobiology, endocrinology, and molecular biology, explore the concepts of attachment and bonding from varying scientific perspectives.

A comprehensive assessment and analysis of the validity, trustworthiness, and effectiveness, of such environmental ratings as ENERGY STAR, LEED, and USDA Organic.

Prominent scholars and practitioners consider the role of global environmental politics in the face of increasing environmental stress.Humanity's collective impact on the Earth is vast. The rate and scale of human-driven environmental destruction is quickly outstripping our political and social capacities for managing it. We are in effect creating an Earth 2.0 on which the human signature is everywhere, a “new earth” in desperate need of humane and insightful guidance. In this volume, prominent scholars and practitioners in the field of global environmental politics consider the ecological and political realities of life on the new earth, and probe the field's deepest and most enduring questions at a time of increasing environmental stress. Arranged in complementary pairs, the essays in this volume include reflections on environmental pedagogy, analysis of new geopolitical realities, reflections on the power of social movements and international institutions, and calls for more compelling narratives to promote environmental action. At the heart of the volume is sustained attention to the role of traditional scholarly activities in a world confronting environmental disaster. Some contributors make the case that it is the scholar's role to provide activists with the necessary knowledge and tools; others argue for more direct engagement and political action. All the contributors confront the overriding question: What is the best use of their individual and combined energies, given the dire environmental reality?ContributorsErik Assadourian, Frank Biermann, Wil Burns, Ken Conca, Peter Dauvergne, Daniel Deudney, Navroz Dubash, Richard Falk, Joyeeta Gupta, Maria Ivanova, Peter Jacques, Sikina Jinnah, Karen T. Litfin, Michael F. Maniates, Elizabeth Mendenhall, Simon Nicholson, Kate O'Neill, Judith Shapiro, Paul Wapner, Oran R. Young

A former college president offers a framework for sustainability on campus, describing initiatives that range from renewable energy to a revamped curriculum to sustainable investment.

Why Keynes is relevant to today's global economic crisis, and how Keynesian ideas can point the way to renewed economic growth.

An approach to software design that introduces a fully automated analysis giving designers immediate feedback, now featuring the latest version of the Alloy language.