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The story of citizenship as a tale not of liberation, dignity, and nationhood but of complacency, hypocrisy, and domination.The glorification of citizenship is a given in today's world, part of a civic narrative that invokes liberation, dignity, and nationhood. In reality, explains Dimitry Kochenov, citizenship is a story of complacency, hypocrisy, and domination, flattering to citizens and demeaning for noncitizens. In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Kochenov explains the state of citizenship in the modern world. Kochenov offers a critical introduction to a subject most often regarded uncritically, describing what citizenship is, what it entails, how it came about, and how its role in the world has been changing. He examines four key elements of the concept: status, considering how and why the status of citizenship is extended, what function it serves, and who is left behind; rights, particularly the right to live and work in a state; duties, and what it means to be a "good citizen”; and politics, as enacted in the granting and enjoyment of citizenship. Citizenship promises to apply the attractive ideas of dignity, equality, and human worth—but to strictly separated groups of individuals. Those outside the separation aren't citizens as currently understood, and they do not belong. Citizenship, Kochenov warns, is too often a legal tool that justifies violence, humiliation, and exclusion.

The hidden material histories of music.Music is seen as the most immaterial of the arts, and recorded music as a progress of dematerialization—an evolution from physical discs to invisible digits. In Decomposed, Kyle Devine offers another perspective. He shows that recorded music has always been a significant exploiter of both natural and human resources, and that its reliance on these resources is more problematic today than ever before. Devine uncovers the hidden history of recorded music—what recordings are made of and what happens to them when they are disposed of. Devine''s story focuses on three forms of materiality. Before 1950, 78 rpm records were made of shellac, a bug-based resin. Between 1950 and 2000, formats such as LPs, cassettes, and CDs were all made of petroleum-based plastic. Today, recordings exist as data-based audio files. Devine describes the people who harvest and process these materials, from women and children in the Global South to scientists and industrialists in the Global North. He reminds us that vinyl records are oil products, and that the so-called vinyl revival is part of petrocapitalism. The supposed immateriality of music as data is belied by the energy required to power the internet and the devices required to access music online. We tend to think of the recordings we buy as finished products. Devine offers an essential backstory. He reveals how a range of apparently peripheral people and processes are actually central to what music is, how it works, and why it matters.

The growth of the global meat industry and the implications for climate change, food insecurity, workers'' rights, the treatment of animals, and other issues.Global meat production and consumption have risen sharply and steadily over the past five decades, with per capita meat consumption almost doubling since 1960. The expanding global meat industry, meanwhile, driven by new trade policies and fueled by government subsidies, is dominated by just a few corporate giants. Industrial farming—the intensive production of animals and fish—has spread across the globe. Millions of acres of land are now used for pastures, feed crops, and animal waste reservoirs. Drawing on concrete examples, the contributors to Global Meat explore the implications of the rise of a global meat industry for a range of social and environmental issues, including climate change, clean water supplies, hunger, workers'' rights, and the treatment of animals.Three themes emerge from their discussions: the role of government and corporations in shaping the structure of the global meat industry; the paradox of simultaneous rising meat production and greater food insecurity; and the industry''s contribution to social and environmental injustice. Contributors address such specific topics as the dramatic increase in pork production and consumption in China; land management by small-scale cattle farmers in the Amazon; the effect on the climate of rising greenhouse gas emissions from cattle raised for meat; and the tensions between economic development and animal welfare.ContributorsConner Bailey, Robert M. Chiles, Celize Christy, Riva C. H. Denny, Carrie Freshour, Philip H. Howard, Elizabeth Ransom, Tom Rudel, Mindi Schneider, Nhuong Tran, Bill Winders

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.

Cutting through the hype, a practical guide to using artificial intelligence for business benefits and competitive advantage.In The AI Advantage, Thomas Davenport offers a guide to using artificial intelligence in business. He describes what technologies are available and how companies can use them for business benefits and competitive advantage. He cuts through the hype of the AI craze—remember when it seemed plausible that IBM's Watson could cure cancer?—to explain how businesses can put artificial intelligence to work now, in the real world. His key recommendation: don't go for the "moonshot” (curing cancer, or synthesizing all investment knowledge); look for the "low-hanging fruit” to make your company more efficient.Davenport explains that the business value AI offers is solid rather than sexy or splashy. AI will improve products and processes and make decisions better informed—important but largely invisible tasks. AI technologies won't replace human workers but augment their capabilities, with smart machines to work alongside smart people. AI can automate structured and repetitive work; provide extensive analysis of data through machine learning ("analytics on steroids”), and engage with customers and employees via chatbots and intelligent agents. Companies should experiment with these technologies and develop their own expertise.Davenport describes the major AI technologies and explains how they are being used, reports on the AI work done by large commercial enterprises like Amazon and Google, and outlines strategies and steps to becoming a cognitive corporation. This book provides an invaluable guide to the real-world future of business AI.A book in the Management on the Cutting Edge series, published in cooperation with MIT Sloan Management Review.

Everything you've always wanted to know about self-driving cars, Netflix recommendations, IBM's Watson, and video game-playing computer programs.The future is here: Self-driving cars are on the streets, an algorithm gives you movie and TV recommendations, IBM's Watson triumphed on Jeopardy over puny human brains, computer programs can be trained to play Atari games. But how do all these things work? In this book, Sean Gerrish offers an engaging and accessible overview of the breakthroughs in artificial intelligence and machine learning that have made today's machines so smart.Gerrish outlines some of the key ideas that enable intelligent machines to perceive and interact with the world. He describes the software architecture that allows self-driving cars to stay on the road and to navigate crowded urban environments; the million-dollar Netflix competition for a better recommendation engine (which had an unexpected ending); and how programmers trained computers to perform certain behaviors by offering them treats, as if they were training a dog. He explains how artificial neural networks enable computers to perceive the world—and to play Atari video games better than humans. He explains Watson's famous victory on Jeopardy, and he looks at how computers play games, describing AlphaGo and Deep Blue, which beat reigning world champions at the strategy games of Go and chess. Computers have not yet mastered everything, however; Gerrish outlines the difficulties in creating intelligent agents that can successfully play video games like StarCraft that have evaded solution—at least for now. Gerrish weaves the stories behind these breakthroughs into the narrative, introducing readers to many of the researchers involved, and keeping technical details to a minimum. Science and technology buffs will find this book an essential guide to a future in which machines can outsmart people.

Why the news about the global decline of infectious diseases is not all good.Plagues and parasites have played a central role in world affairs, shaping the evolution of the modern state, the growth of cities, and the disparate fortunes of national economies. This book tells that story, but it is not about the resurgence of pestilence. It is the story of its decline. For the first time in recorded history, virus, bacteria, and other infectious diseases are not the leading cause of death or disability in any region of the world. People are living longer, and fewer mothers are giving birth to many children in the hopes that some might survive. And yet, the news is not all good. Recent reductions in infectious disease have not been accompanied by the same improvements in income, job opportunities, and governance that occurred with these changes in wealthier countries decades ago. There have also been unintended consequences. In this book, Thomas Bollyky explores the paradox in our fight against infectious disease: the world is getting healthier in ways that should make us worry. Bollyky interweaves a grand historical narrative about the rise and fall of plagues in human societies with contemporary case studies of the consequences. Bollyky visits Dhaka—one of the most densely populated places on the planet—to show how low-cost health tools helped enable the phenomenon of poor world megacities. He visits China and Kenya to illustrate how dramatic declines in plagues have affected national economies. Bollyky traces the role of infectious disease in the migrations from Ireland before the potato famine and to Europe from Africa and elsewhere today. Historic health achievements are remaking a world that is both worrisome and full of opportunities. Whether the peril or promise of that progress prevails, Bollyky explains, depends on what we do next.A Council on Foreign Relations Book

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

The long-awaited new edition of a groundbreaking work on the impact of alternative concepts of space on modern art.

An introduction to dependent types, demonstrating the most beautiful aspects, one step at a time.A program's type describes its behavior. Dependent types are a first-class part of a language, and are much more powerful than other kinds of types; using just one language for types and programs allows program descriptions to be as powerful as the programs they describe. The Little Typer explains dependent types, beginning with a very small language that looks very much like Scheme and extending it to cover both programming with dependent types and using dependent types for mathematical reasoning. Readers should be familiar with the basics of a Lisp-like programming language, as presented in the first four chapters of The Little Schemer. The first five chapters of The Little Typer provide the needed tools to understand dependent types; the remaining chapters use these tools to build a bridge between mathematics and programming. Readers will learn that tools they know from programming—pairs, lists, functions, and recursion—can also capture patterns of reasoning. The Little Typer does not attempt to teach either practical programming skills or a fully rigorous approach to types. Instead, it demonstrates the most beautiful aspects as simply as possible, one step at a time.

A feminist media history of quantification, uncovering the stories behind the tools and technologies we use to count, measure, and weigh our lives and realities.Anglo-American culture has used media to measure and quantify lives for centuries. Historical journal entries map the details of everyday life, while death registers put numbers to life's endings. Today we count our daily steps with fitness trackers and quantify births and deaths with digitized data. How are these present-day methods for measuring ourselves similar to those used in the past? In this book, Jacqueline Wernimont presents a new media history of western quantification, uncovering the stories behind the tools and technologies we use to count, measure, and weigh our lives and realities.Numbered Lives is the first book of its kind, a feminist media history that maps connections not only between past and present-day "quantum media” but between media tracking and long-standing systemic inequalities. Wernimont explores the history of the pedometer, mortality statistics, and the census in England and the United States to illuminate the entanglement of Anglo-American quantification with religious, imperial, and patriarchal paradigms. In Anglo-American culture, Wernimont argues, counting life and counting death are sides of the same coin—one that has always been used to render statistics of life and death more valuable to corporate and state organizations. Numbered Lives enumerates our shared media history, helping us understand our digital culture and inheritance.

A foundational analysis of the co-evolution of the internet and international relations, examining resultant challenges for individuals, organizations, firms, and states.In our increasingly digital world, data flows define the international landscape as much as the flow of materials and people. How is cyberspace shaping international relations, and how are international relations shaping cyberspace? In this book, Nazli Choucri and David D. Clark offer a foundational analysis of the co-evolution of cyberspace (with the internet as its core) and international relations, examining resultant challenges for individuals, organizations, and states.The authors examine the pervasiveness of power and politics in the digital realm, finding that the internet is evolving much faster than the tools for regulating it. This creates a "co-evolution dilemma”—a new reality in which digital interactions have enabled weaker actors to influence or threaten stronger actors, including the traditional state powers. Choucri and Clark develop a new method for addressing control in the internet age, "control point analysis,” and apply it to a variety of situations, including major actors in the international and digital realms: the United States, China, and Google. In doing so they lay the groundwork for a new international relations theory that reflects the reality in which we live—one in which the international and digital realms are inextricably linked and evolving together.

The first book to present the common mathematical foundations of big data analysis across a range of applications and technologies.Today, the volume, velocity, and variety of data are increasing rapidly across a range of fields, including Internet search, healthcare, finance, social media, wireless devices, and cybersecurity. Indeed, these data are growing at a rate beyond our capacity to analyze them. The tools—including spreadsheets, databases, matrices, and graphs—developed to address this challenge all reflect the need to store and operate on data as whole sets rather than as individual elements. This book presents the common mathematical foundations of these data sets that apply across many applications and technologies. Associative arrays unify and simplify data, allowing readers to look past the differences among the various tools and leverage their mathematical similarities in order to solve the hardest big data challenges.The book first introduces the concept of the associative array in practical terms, presents the associative array manipulation system D4M (Dynamic Distributed Dimensional Data Model), and describes the application of associative arrays to graph analysis and machine learning. It provides a mathematically rigorous definition of associative arrays and describes the properties of associative arrays that arise from this definition. Finally, the book shows how concepts of linearity can be extended to encompass associative arrays. Mathematics of Big Data can be used as a textbook or reference by engineers, scientists, mathematicians, computer scientists, and software engineers who analyze big data.

A political science analysis of the feasibility and sustainability of carbon pricing, drawing from North American, European, and Asian case studies.

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

An argument for retaining the notion of personal property in the products we "buy" in the digital marketplace.

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

What artificial intelligence can tell us about the mind and intelligent behavior.

For more than forty years, the philosopher Martin Heidegger logged ideas and opinions in a series of notebooks, known as the "Black Notebooks¿ after the black oilcloth booklets into which he first transcribed his thoughts. In 2014, the notebooks from 1931 to 1941 were published, sparking immediate controversy. It has long been acknowledged that Heidegger was an enthusiastic supporter of the Nazi Party in the early 1930s. But the notebooks contain a number of anti-Semitic passages¿often referring to the stereotype of "World-Jewry¿¿written even after Heidegger became disenchanted with the Nazis themselves. Reactions from the scholarly community have ranged from dismissal of the significance of these passages to claims that the anti-Semitism in them contaminates all of Heidegger's work. This volume offers the first collection of responses by Heidegger scholars to the publication of the notebooks.

What it means for global sustainability when environmentalism is dominated by the concerns of the affluent-eco-business, eco-consumption, wilderness preservation.

A biologically oriented introduction to synesthesia by the leading authority on the subject.

One of today's most widely read philosophers considers the shift in violence from visible to invisible, from negativity to excess of positivity.Some things never disappear—violence, for example. Violence is ubiquitous and incessant but protean, varying its outward form according to the social constellation at hand. In Topology of Violence, the philosopher Byung-Chul Han considers the shift in violence from the visible to the invisible, from the frontal to the viral to the self-inflicted, from brute force to mediated force, from the real to the virtual. Violence, Han tells us, has gone from the negative—explosive, massive, and martial—to the positive, wielded without enmity or domination. This, he says, creates the false impression that violence has disappeared. Anonymized, desubjectified, systemic, violence conceals itself because it has become one with society. Han first investigates the macro-physical manifestations of violence, which take the form of negativity—developing from the tension between self and other, interior and exterior, friend and enemy. These manifestations include the archaic violence of sacrifice and blood, the mythical violence of jealous and vengeful gods, the deadly violence of the sovereign, the merciless violence of torture, the bloodless violence of the gas chamber, the viral violence of terrorism, and the verbal violence of hurtful language. He then examines the violence of positivity—the expression of an excess of positivity—which manifests itself as over-achievement, over-production, over-communication, hyper-attention, and hyperactivity. The violence of positivity, Han warns, could be even more disastrous than that of negativity. Infection, invasion, and infiltration have given way to infarction.

A comprehensive political analysis of the rapid growth in renewable wind and solar power, mapping an energy transition through theory, case studies, and policy.

An exploration of the interaction of aesthetics and politics in Bertolt Brecht's "photoepigrams."