Bücher veröffentlicht von MIT Press

Philosophers and cognitive scientists address the relationships among the senses and the connections between conscious experiences that form unified wholes.

An account of a new theory and method of voting, judging and ranking, majority judgment, shown to be superior to all other known methods.

An overview of recent efforts in the machine learning community to deal with dataset and covariate shift, which occurs when test and training inputs and outputs have different distributions.

A rigorous theory of money, credit, and bankruptcy in the context of a mixed economy, uniting Walrasian general equilibrium with macroeconomic dynamics and Schumpeterian innovation.This book offers a rigorous study of control, guidance, and coordination problems of an enterprise economy, with attention to the roles of money and financial institutions. The approach is distinctive in drawing on game theory, methods of physics and experimental gaming, and, more generally, a broader evolutionary perspective from the biological and behavioral sciences. The proposed theory unites Walrasian general equilibrium with macroeconomic dynamics and Schumpeterian innovation utilizing strategic market games. Problems concerning the meaning of rational economic behavior and the concept of solution are noted.The authors argue that process models of the economy can be built that are consistent with the general equilibrium system but become progressively more complex as new functions are added. Explicit embedding of the economy within the framework of government and society provides a natural, both formal and informal, control system.The authors describe how to build and analyze multistate models with simple assumptions about behavior, and develop a general modeling methodology for the construction of models as playable games.

The first book on the philosophy and aesthetics of digital preservation examines the challenge posed by new media to our long-term social memory.How will our increasingly digital civilization persist beyond our lifetimes? Audio and videotapes demagnetize; CDs delaminate; Internet art links to websites that no longer exist; Amiga software doesn't run on iMacs. In Re-collection, Richard Rinehart and Jon Ippolito argue that the vulnerability of new media art illustrates a larger crisis for social memory. They describe a variable media approach to rescuing new media, distributed across producers and consumers who can choose appropriate strategies for each endangered work.New media art poses novel preservation and conservation dilemmas. Given the ephemerality of their mediums, software art, installation art, and interactive games may be heading to obsolescence and oblivion.Rinehart and Ippolito, both museum professionals, examine the preservation of new media art from both practical and theoretical perspectives, offering concrete examples that range from Nam June Paik to Danger Mouse. They investigate three threats to twenty-first-century creativity: technology, because much new media art depends on rapidly changing software or hardware; institutions, which may rely on preservation methods developed for older mediums; and law, which complicates access with intellectual property constraints such as copyright and licensing. Technology, institutions, and law, however, can be enlisted as allies rather than enemies of ephemeral artifacts and their preservation. The variable media approach that Rinehart and Ippolito propose asks to what extent works to be preserved might be medium-independent, translatable into new mediums when their original formats are obsolete.

This book reflects decades of important research on the mathematical foundations of speech recognition. It focuses on underlying statistical techniques such as hidden Markov models, decision trees, the expectation-maximization algorithm, information theoretic goodness criteria, maximum entropy probability estimation, parameter and data clustering, and smoothing of probability distributions. The author's goal is to present these principles clearly in the simplest setting, to show the advantages of self-organization from real data, and to enable the reader to apply the techniques.Bradford Books imprint

Psychiatrists and neuroscientists discuss the potential of computational approaches to address problems in psychiatry including diagnosis, treatment, and integration with neurobiology.Modern psychiatry is at a crossroads, as it attempts to balance neurological analysis with psychological assessment. Computational neuroscience offers a new lens through which to view such thorny issues as diagnosis, treatment, and integration with neurobiology. In this volume, psychiatrists and theoretical and computational neuroscientists consider the potential of computational approaches to psychiatric issues.This unique collaboration yields surprising results, innovative synergies, and novel open questions. The contributors consider mechanisms of psychiatric disorders, the use of computation and imaging to model psychiatric disorders, ways that computation can inform psychiatric nosology, and specific applications of the computational approach.Contributors Susanne E. Ahmari, Huda Akil, Deanna M. Barch, Matthew Botvinick, Michael Breakspear, Cameron S. Carter, Matthew V. Chafee, Sophie Denève, Daniel Durstewitz, Michael B. First, Shelly B. Flagel, Michael J. Frank, Karl J. Friston, Joshua A. Gordon, Katia M. Harlé, Crane Huang, Quentin J. M. Huys, Peter W. Kalivas, John H. Krystal, Zeb Kurth-Nelson, Angus W. MacDonald III, Tiago V. Maia, Robert C. Malenka, Sanjay J. Mathew, Christoph Mathys, P. Read Montague, Rosalyn Moran, Theoden I. Netoff, Yael Niv, John P. O'Doherty, Wolfgang M. Pauli, Martin P. Paulus, Frederike Petzschner, Daniel S. Pine, A. David Redish, Kerry Ressler, Katharina Schmack, Jordan W. Smoller, Klaas Enno Stephan, Anita Thapar, Heike Tost, Nelson Totah, Jennifer L. Zick

How Americans adapted European royal illuminations for patriotic celebrations, spectacular expositions, and intensely bright commercial lighting to create the world's most dazzling and glamorous cities.Illuminated fêtes and civic celebrations began in Renaissance Italy and spread through the courts of Europe. Their fireworks, torches, lamps, and special effects glorified the monarch, marked the birth of a prince, or celebrated military victory. Nineteenth-century Americans rejected such monarchial pomp and adapted spectacular lighting to their democratic, commercial culture. In American Illuminations, David Nye explains how they experimented with gas and electric light to create illuminated cityscapes far brighter and more dynamic than those of Europe, and how these illuminations became symbols of modernity and the conquest of nature.Americans used gaslight and electricity in parades, expositions, advertising, elections, and political spectacles. In the 1880s, cities erected powerful arc lights on towers to create artificial moonlight. By the 1890s they adopted more intensive, commercial lighting that defined distinct zones of light and glamorized the city's White Ways, skyscrapers, bridges, department stores, theaters, and dance halls. Poor and blighted areas disappeared into the shadows. American illuminations also became integral parts of national political campaigns, presidential inaugurations, and victory celebrations after the Spanish-American War and World War I.

An argument that the material arrangements of information—how it is represented and interpreted—matter significantly for our experience of information and information systems.Virtual entities that populate our digital experience, like e-books, virtual worlds, and online stores, are backed by the large-scale physical infrastructures of server farms, fiber optic cables, power plants, and microwave links. But another domain of material constraints also shapes digital living: the digital representations sketched on whiteboards, encoded into software, stored in databases, loaded into computer memory, and transmitted on networks. These digital representations encode aspects of our everyday world and make them available for digital processing. The limits and capacities of those representations carry significant consequences for digital society.In The Stuff of Bits, Paul Dourish examines the specific materialities that certain digital objects exhibit. He presents four case studies: emulation, the creation of a “virtual” computer inside another; digital spreadsheets and their role in organizational practice; relational databases and the issue of “the databaseable”; and the evolution of digital networking and the representational entailments of network protocols. These case studies demonstrate how a materialist account can offer an entry point to broader concerns—questions of power, policy, and polity in the realm of the digital.

Rationalists about the psychology of moral judgment argue that moral cognition has a rational foundation. Recent challenges to this account, based on findings in the empirical psychology of moral judgment, contend that moral thinking has no rational basis. In this book, Hanno Sauer argues that moral reasoning does play a role in moral judgment -- but not, as is commonly supposed, because conscious reasoning produces moral judgments directly. Moral reasoning figures in the acquisition, formation, maintenance, and reflective correction of moral intuitions. Sauer proposes that when we make moral judgments we draw on a stable repertoire of intuitions about what is morally acceptable, which we have acquired over the course of our moral education -- episodes of rational reflection that have established patterns for automatic judgment foundation. Moral judgments are educated and rationally amenable moral intuitions. Sauer engages extensively with the empirical evidence on the psychology of moral judgment and argues that it can be shown empirically that reasoning plays a crucial role in moral judgment. He offers detailed counterarguments to the anti-rationalist challenge (the claim that reason and reasoning play no significant part in morality and moral judgment) and the emotionist challenge (the argument for the emotional basis of moral judgment). Finally, he uses Joshua Greene's Dual Process model of moral cognition to test the empirical viability and normative persuasiveness of his account of educated intuitions. Sauer shows that moral judgments can be automatic, emotional, intuitive, and rational at the same time.

"Argues that hacking provides a privileged vantage point for probing the logic of informational capitalism since hackers are at the forefront of structural transformations of late modernity"--

The electric vehicle revival reflects negotiations between public policy, which promotes clean, fuel-efficient vehicles, and the auto industry, which promotes high-performance vehicles.Electric cars were once as numerous as internal combustion engine cars before all but vanishing from American roads around World War I. Now, we are in the midst of an electric vehicle revival, and the goal for a sustainable car seems to be within reach. In Age of Auto Electric, Matthew N. Eisler shows that the halting development of the electric car in the intervening decades was a consequence of tensions between environmental, energy, and economic policy imperatives that informed a protracted reappraisal of the automobile system. These factors drove the electric vehicle revival, argues Eisler, hastening automaking’s transformation into a science-based industry in the process.Challenging the common assumption that the electric vehicle revival is due to the development of better batteries, Age of Auto Electric instead focuses on changing environmental and socioeconomic conditions, energy and environmental policies, systems of energy conversion and industrial production, and innovation practices that affected the prevalence and popularity of electric vehicles in recent decades. Eisler describes a world in transition from legacy to alternative energy-conversion systems and the promises, compromises, new problems, and unintended consequences that enterprise has entailed.

A wide range of philosophical essays informed by the work of Harry Frankfurt, who offers a response to each essay.

Vygotsky opened up an original field in the science of psychology, based on the sociohistorical theory of the nature of man's consciousness.This work, written more than forty years ago and now translated into English for the first time, approaches the study of art from a psychological basis. However, Vygotsky's view is free of the old subjective-empirical outlook. His method, while objective and analytical, found its basis in the reasoning that to analyze the structure of artistic creation one must re-create the total concept motivated Vygotsky to evolve the means by which artistic accomplishments could be examined and the elements of their validity "revealed.”The Psychology of Art discusses the literary genre in its classical forms - the fable, the epic, the short story, and Shakespearean tragedy. The heightened levels of perception and feeling that are created by great literature and drama are discussed by Vygotsky with clarity and conviction.Many of the appraisals in this work resulted from Vygotsky's reaction to the fallacious "solutions” proposed by the one-sided, traditional views of the literary critics of his time. An entire chapter, "Art as Technique,” investigates and expresses his contradistinctive views of the formalistic view of the nature of art. For Vygotsky, form did not and could not exist independently as a valid dimension - form appeared only in relation to the medium or the material it incarnated.Vygotsky's presentation of his thesis in The Psychology of Art is a logical procession of his basic thoughts. In the first chapter, "The Psychological Problem of Art,” he clarifies the major pitfall of criticism up to his day, where he points out: "The fundamental error of experimental aesthetics consists in starting from the wrong end, that of aesthetic pleasure and aesthetic appraisal, all the while intentionally ignoring the fact that both pleasure and appraisal may be arbitrary, secondary, or even irrelevant features of aesthetic behavior.” From here he goes on to investigate the psychological premises of art.In viewing a work of art as "a combination of aesthetic symbols aimed at arousing emotions in people,” Vygotsky proceeds to analyze these symbols and re-create the basic, "impersonal” components that make up the psychology of the work - without specific references to author-creator or reader-subject - examining only the elements of form and material that are combined in the work. For example, in his chapter on Hamlet Vygotsky examines the structure from "subjective” and "objective” viewpoints, presents the problems of "identification” of the hero, and discusses the play in its various levels of consciousness.Essentially a work of synthesis, The Psychology of Art laid the foundations for a new science of art, and as such is a major contribution to its study.

Change in View offers an entirely original approach to the philosophical study of reasoning by identifying principles of reasoning with principles for revising one's beliefs and intentions and not with principles of logic.

Available again from the MIT Press.

Assessing the influence of scientific advice in societies that increasingly question scientific authority and expertise.Today, scientific advice is asked for (and given) on questions ranging from stem-cell research to genetically modified food. And yet it often seems that the more urgently scientific advice is solicited, the more vigorously scientific authority is questioned by policy makers, stakeholders, and citizens. This book examines a paradox: how scientific advice can be influential in society even when the status of science and scientists seems to be at a low ebb. The authors do this by means of an ethnographic study of the creation of scientific authority at one of the key sites for the interaction of science, policy, and society: the scientific advisory committee. The Paradox of Scientific Authority offers a detailed analysis of the inner workings of the influential Health Council of the Netherlands (the equivalent of the National Academy of Science in the United States), examining its societal role as well as its internal functioning, and using the findings to build a theory of scientific advising. The question of scientific authority has political as well as scholarly relevance. Democratic political institutions, largely developed in the nineteenth century, lack the institutional means to address the twenty-first century's pervasively scientific and technological culture; and science and technology studies (STS) grapples with the central question of how to understand the authority of science while recognizing its socially constructed nature.

Experts report on the latest research on extending access to financial services to the 2.5 billion adults around the world who lack it.