Bøker utgitt av MIT Press Ltd

The life of Nobel-winning biologist Salvador Luria, whose passion for science was equaled by his commitment to political engagement in Cold War America.Blacklisted from federal funding review panels but awarded a Nobel Prize for his research on bacteriophage, biologist Salvador Luria (1912–1991) was as much an activist as a scientist. In this first full-length biography of Luria, Rena Selya draws on extensive archival research; interviews with Luria’s family, colleagues, and students; and FBI documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act to create a compelling portrait of a man committed to both science and society.In addition to his work with viruses and bacteria in the 1940s, Luria broke new ground in molecular biology and cancer research from the 1950s to the 1980s and was a leader in calling for scientists to accept an educational and advisory responsibility to the public. In return, he believed, the public should rely on science to strengthen social and political institutions.Luria was born in Italy, where the Fascists came to power when he was ten. He left Italy for France due to the antisemitic Race Laws of 1938, and then fled as a Jewish refugee from Nazi Europe, making his way to the United States. Once an American citizen, Luria became a grassroots activist on behalf of civil rights, labor representation, nuclear disarmament, and American military disengagement from the Vietnam and Gulf Wars. Luria joined the MIT faculty in 1960 and was the founding director of the Center for Cancer Research. Throughout his life he remained as passionate about his engagement with political issues as about his science, and continued to fight for peace and freedom until his death.

How the way we perceive our bodies plays a critical role in the way we perceive ourselves: stories of phantom limbs, rubber hands, anorexia, and other phenomena.The body is central to our sense of identity. It can be a canvas for self-expression, decorated with clothing, jewelry, cosmetics, tattoos, and piercings. But the body is more than that. Bodily awareness, says scientist-writer Moheb Costandi, is key to self-consciousness. In Body Am I, Costandi examines how the brain perceives the body, how that perception translates into our conscious experience of the body, and how that experience contributes to our sense of self. Along the way, he explores what can happen when the mechanisms of bodily awareness are disturbed, leading to such phenomena as phantom limbs, alien hands, and amputee fetishes. Costandi explains that the brain generates maps and models of the body that guide how we perceive and use it, and that these maps and models are repeatedly modified and reconstructed. Drawing on recent bodily awareness research, the new science of self-consciousness, and historical milestones in neurology, he describes a range of psychiatric and neurological disorders that result when body and brain are out of sync, including not only the well-known phantom limb syndrome but also phantom breast and phantom penis syndromes; body integrity identity disorder, which compels a person to disown and then amputate a healthy arm or leg; and such eating disorders as anorexia. Wide-ranging and meticulously researched, Body Am I (the title comes from Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra) offers new insight into self-consciousness by describing it in terms of bodily awareness.

"A complete, scientifically accurate guide to CBD (cannabidiol), a nonpsychoactive component of cannabis that is widely touted ... as a miracle cure"--

"Essays on Freud by the most important Italian psychoanalytic theorist of the 20th century"--

"Care-Centered Politics provides a framework for the vision and the linkages needed to help create a more care-centered society and planet"--

A collection that explores how architecture ought to negotiate the future, when the future is anything but certain.Architecture is fundamentally a practice of predicting the future. In designing spaces that will endure for decades, architects must reconcile their visions of future living with predicted economic, political, and environmental futures. Thus, whereas utopian architects of the past each sought to impose a singular future through visionary architectural form, architects of today must reconcile between the multiple futures projected by hired specialists, live modeling software, climate change prognoses, and financial markets. Perspecta 55 aims to undertake this much-needed analysis of contrasting techniques of prediction, investigating architecture’s relationship to these conflicting visions of the future. Perspecta gathers together contributions from the fields of finance, climate, security, and computation to unearth the particular disciplinary histories and social values that underlie future projection. They identify eight futurological modes with direct impact on architectural practice: the hypothetical speculation of scenario planning, the training drills of disaster preparation, the logic of resisting a certain future evident within resiliency, the imaginings of science fiction, the risks and profits of the financial futures market, techniques of building information modeling and simulation, the algorithmic prediction involved in data mining, and the future-reversing logic of repair.In investigating and testing practices of future prediction, Perspecta 55 hopes to empower architecture to address its uncertain, contested futures so that it may successfully reconcile and articulate its own future.Designers:Kyla Arsadjaja and Julia Schäfer are graduates of the Yale School of Art.Contributors:Orit Halpern, Matthew Soules, William Deringer, Gary Zhexi Zhang, Jack Hanly, Zeynep Çelik Alexander, Gökçe Günel, Davy Knittle, Adam Bobbette, Savannah Cox, Stephen Collier, Andrew Lakoff, Lindsay Thomas, Ross Exo Adams, Amelyn Ng, Justin Joque, Peter Polack, and Daniela Fabricius

"âEnigmes mathâematiques corrigâees du lycâee áa Normale Sup'--published by Ellipses-- Copyright 2014, âEdition Marketing S.A."-- title page verso.

A study of the gruesome game characters we love to beat-and what they tell us about ourselves.Since the early days of video games, monsters have played pivotal roles as dangers to be avoided, level bosses to be defeated, or targets to be destroyed for extra points. But why is the figure of the monster so important in gaming, and how have video games come to shape our culture's conceptions of monstrosity? To answer these questions, Player vs. Monster explores the past half-century of monsters in games, from the dragons of early tabletop role-playing games and the pixelated aliens of Space Invaders to the malformed mutants of The Last of Us and the bizarre beasts of Bloodborne, and reveals the common threads among them.Covering examples from aliens to zombies, Jaroslav Švelch explores the art of monster design and traces its influences from mythology, visual arts, popular culture, and tabletop role-playing games. At the same time, he shows that video games follow the Cold War-era notion of clearly defined, calculable enemies, portraying monsters as figures that are irredeemably evil yet invariably vulnerable to defeat. He explains the appeal of such simplistic video game monsters, but also explores how the medium could evolve to present more nuanced depictions of monstrosity.

"Establishes the postsensual turn in visual culture and curatorial work, which embraces research, publishing, and knowledge production as central tenets of the new global aesthetics"--

"An overview of machine learning from data that is easily collectible, but challenging to annotate for learning algorithms"--

"Roberto Battiston traces the intellectual path that has brought us to our current understanding of the universe, intertwining our most recent discoveries with the passion and the ambition of the scientists that made them possible"--

"Collective Wisdom tracks co-creation in media-making, efforts that reach beyond limits of singular authorship, an ancient and under-documented practice"--

"A new edition of a bestselling undergraduate game theory textbook"--

"An exploration of how caring for ER patients is more than blood and mayhem. It is the practice of being attentive to patients' complicated and often broken stories as well as their broken bodies"--

The power of images to represent the unseeable: stunning visualizations of science, from the microscopic to the incredibly vast.We live among patterns of delicate beauty and exquisite chaos that our eyes can't detect; we are surrounded by invisible particles and shifting fields of matter that permeate all of space. Our very cells are intricate molecular machines, and the story of our origins stretches back through an unimaginable amount of time. How can we see the richness of what lies beyond our sensory perception? Scientists have developed visualization tools that can make the invisible visible. This bountifully illustrated book demonstrates the power of images to represent the unseeable, offering stunning visualizations of science that range from the microscopic to the incredibly vast. With more than 200 color images and an engaging text by leading science writer Jack Challoner, Seeing Science explains and illustrates the techniques by which scientists create visualizations of their discoveries. We see the first detection of a black hole as represented by an image from an Xray telescope, get a direct view of DNA through an electron microscope, and much more. Visualizations are also used to make sense of an avalanche of data-concisely presenting information from the 20,000 or so human genes, for example. Scientists represent complex theories in computer models, which take on a curious beauty of their own. And scientists and artists collaborate to create art from science visualizations, with intriguing results.

"Uncommon Sense reinvigorates Herbert Marcuse and places his aesthetic theory into practice in relation to contemporary antiracist, environmental, and anti-capitalism activism"--

An account of Max Planck’s construction of his theory of blackbody radiation, summarizing the established physics on which he drew.In the last year of the nineteenth century, Max Planck constructed a theory of blackbody radiation—the radiation emitted and absorbed by nonreflective bodies in thermal equilibrium with one another—and his work ushered in the quantum revolution in physics. In this book, three physicists trace Planck’s discovery. They follow the trail of Planck’s thinking by constructing a textbook of sorts that summarizes the established physics on which he drew. By offering this account, the authors explore not only how Planck deployed his considerable knowledge of the physics of his era but also how Einstein and others used and interpreted Planck’s work. Planck did not set out to lay the foundation for the quantum revolution but to study a universal phenomenon for which empirical evidence had been accumulating since the late 1850s. The authors explain the nineteenth-century concepts that informed Planck’s discovery, including electromagnetism, thermodynamics, and statistical mechanics. In addition, the book offers the first translations of important papers by Ludwig Boltzmann and Wilhelm Wien on which Planck’s work depended.

"Based on a multi-sited ethnography among schools and activist groups in India and South Africa, this study offers an exploration of education practices in the context of impoverished, marginal communities where environmental crises intersect with colonial and racist histories and unsustainable presents"--

"A scientific analysis of agency in the real world-which animal types have it and which don't-written by the top researcher in the field"--

"An architectural, social, and cultural history of the undersea, using Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and more especially his charasmatic villain Captain Nemo, as his prompt"--

"This book investigates the recurrences of Piranesi in the fields of literature, photography, art, film and architecture in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and argues that Piranesi is not only ingrained in the modern age in a manner hitherto overlooked, but that the formulation of the modern depended on the rediscovery, or rather series of rediscoveries, of Piranesi from 1900 until today"--

"This book teaches various analysis, research, and problem-solving methods in an easy-to-follow, practical manner"--

A comprehensive introduction to the mathematical foundations of movement and actuation that apply equally to animals and machines.This textbook offers a computational framework for the sensorimotor stage of development as applied to robotics. Much work in developmental robotics is based on ad hoc examples, without a full computational basis. This book's comprehensive and complete treatment fills the gap, drawing on the principal mechanisms of development in the first year of life to introduce what is essentially an operating system for developing robots. The goal is to apply principles of development to robot systems that not only achieve new levels of performance but also provide evidence for scientific theories of human development.

"Essays, conversations, selected texts, and a rich collection of thought-provoking artworks celebrate a revolution in bio art. Expertly designed by Omnivore and printed on special papers, including chlorophyll cover and crush citrus and crush cocoa pages...The texts and artworks in Symbionts provoke a necessary conversation about our species and its relation to the planet. Are we merely "mammalian weeds," as evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis put it? Or are we partners in producing and maintaining the biosphere, as she also suggested? Symbionts reflects on a recent revolution in bio art that departs from the late-1990s code-oriented experiments to embrace entanglement and symbiosis ("with-living"). Combining documentation of contemporary artworks with texts by leading thinkers, Symbionts, which accompanies an exhibition at MIT List Visual Arts Center, offers an expansive view of humanity's place on the planet. Color reproductions document works by international artists that respond to the revelation that planetary microbes construct and maintain our biosphere. A central essay by coeditor Caroline Jones sets their work in the context of larger discussions around symbiosis; additional essays, an edited roundtable discussion, and selected excerpts follow. Contributors explore, among other things, the resilient ecological knowledge of indigenous scholars and artists, and "biofiction," a term coined by Jones to describe the work of such theoretical biologists as Jacob von Uexkèull as well as the witty parafictions of artist Anicka Yi. A playful glossary puts scientific terms in conversation with cultural ones." --

"A supplement for graduate-level courses on computational and quantitative macro, economic dynamics"--

"Traces the cyberinsurance industry's history, challenges, and legal disputes to understand why insurance has not helped to strengthen cybersecurity and what governments could do to make it a more effective tool for cyber risk management"--

"The Anthropocene Cookbook is by far the most comprehensive collection of ideas about future food from the perspective of art, design, and science. The book is unique in the way it connects food, art, thinking, and science. It talks to the new generation of aesthetically aware environmentalists. It promotes ecological thinking from a radically different perspective: what happens if we embrace the coming environmental catastrophes as an opportunity and not as doom?"--

"An exploration of the disruptive potential of blockchain and a guide for how enterprise firms can leverage this new technology for success"--