Bøker utgitt av MIT Press Ltd

For anyone who has ever wondered how computers solve problems, an engagingly written guide for nonexperts to the basics of computer algorithms.

How environmentalism can reinvent itself in a postnature age: a proposal for navigating between naive naturalism and technological arrogance.

Two top economists outline distinctive approaches to post-crisis financial reform.

The story of how the emerging food justice movement is seeking to transform the American food system from seed to table.In today's food system, farm workers face difficult and hazardous conditions, low-income neighborhoods lack supermarkets but abound in fast-food restaurants and liquor stores, food products emphasize convenience rather than wholesomeness, and the international reach of American fast-food franchises has been a major contributor to an epidemic of "globesity.” To combat these inequities and excesses, a movement for food justice has emerged in recent years seeking to transform the food system from seed to table. In Food Justice, Robert Gottlieb and Anupama Joshi tell the story of this emerging movement.A food justice framework ensures that the benefits and risks of how food is grown and processed, transported, distributed, and consumed are shared equitably. Gottlieb and Joshi recount the history of food injustices and describe current efforts to change the system, including community gardens and farmer training in Holyoke, Massachusetts, youth empowerment through the Rethinkers in New Orleans, farm-to-school programs across the country, and the Los Angeles school system's elimination of sugary soft drinks from its cafeterias. And they tell how food activism has succeeded at the highest level: advocates waged a grassroots campaign that convinced the Obama White House to plant a vegetable garden. The first comprehensive inquiry into this emerging movement, Food Justice addresses the increasing disconnect between food and culture that has resulted from our highly industrialized food system.

How tiny variations in our personal DNA can determine how we look, how we behave, how we get sick, and how we get well.

Two experts on the information economy explore the true economic value of technology and innovation.

An investigation into the conceptual foundations of a new way of thinking about the mind that does not locate all cognition "in the head."

How eliminating "risk illiteracy" among doctors and patients will lead to better health care decision making.

A theoretical examination of the surprising emergence of software as a guiding metaphor for our neoliberal world.New media thrives on cycles of obsolescence and renewal: from celebrations of cyber-everything to Y2K, from the dot-com bust to the next big things—mobile mobs, Web 3.0, cloud computing. In Programmed Visions, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun argues that these cycles result in part from the ways in which new media encapsulates a logic of programmability. New media proliferates "programmed visions,” which seek to shape and predict—even embody—a future based on past data. These programmed visions have also made computers, based on metaphor, metaphors for metaphor itself, for a general logic of substitutability. Chun argues that the clarity offered by software as metaphor should make us pause, because software also engenders a profound sense of ignorance: who knows what lurks behind our smiling interfaces, behind the objects we click and manipulate? The combination of what can be seen and not seen, known (knowable) and not known—its separation of interface from algorithm and software from hardware—makes it a powerful metaphor for everything we believe is invisible yet generates visible, logical effects, from genetics to the invisible hand of the market, from ideology to culture.

A framework for the theory and practice of organizing that integrates the concepts and methods of information organization and information retrieval.Organizing is such a common activity that we often do it without thinking much about it. In our daily lives we organize physical things—books on shelves, cutlery in kitchen drawers—and digital things—Web pages, MP3 files, scientific datasets. Millions of people create and browse Web sites, blog, tag, tweet, and upload and download content of all media types without thinking "I'm organizing now” or "I'm retrieving now.”This book offers a framework for the theory and practice of organizing that integrates information organization (IO) and information retrieval (IR), bridging the disciplinary chasms between Library and Information Science and Computer Science, each of which views and teaches IO and IR as separate topics and in substantially different ways. It introduces the unifying concept of an Organizing System—an intentionally arranged collection of resources and the interactions they support—and then explains the key concepts and challenges in the design and deployment of Organizing Systems in many domains, including libraries, museums, business information systems, personal information management, and social computing.Intended for classroom use or as a professional reference, the book covers the activities common to all organizing systems: identifying resources to be organized; organizing resources by describing and classifying them; designing resource-based interactions; and maintaining resources and organization over time. The book is extensively annotated with disciplinary-specific notes to ground it with relevant concepts and references of library science, computing, cognitive science, law, and business.

A solutions manual for all 582 exercises in the second edition of Intermediate Public Economics.

Mapping the new geography of the visual arts, from the explosion of biennials to the emerging art markets in Asia and the Middle East.

In The Creation of Value, the first volume of his Meaning in Life trilogy, Singer studies the nature of imagination, idealization, and love in the context of humanity's attempt to define itself through the pursuit of meanings and values that it creates. Singer confronts life's most troubling problems: the meaning of death, the place of anxiety in daily existence, the conditions needed for us to have a life worth living, and the possibility of a love of life in others as well as in ourselves.

A study of the pragmatic roots of American environmentalism-as seen in the work of Liberty Hyde Bailey, Lewis Mumford, Benton MacKaye, and Aldo Leopold-and how it can inform a new, civic-minded environmentalism today.

By systematically confronting theoretical models with econometric data, a leading macroeconomist and microeconomist present a unified and coherent view how and when productivity gains and economic growth are aided or hindered by competition policy.

A comprehensive anthology of real-life cases, integrating diverse perspectives on moral problems in medicine.

In this "blue-sky" effort to rethink humanity's basic challenges, Philip Morrison and Kosta Tsipis - both scientists with expertise in arms control issues - sketch the broad outlines for a global approach to the problems of security and development.

Essays explore the world of Michael of Rhodes, examining the historical context, the discovery of his manuscript, and Michael's knowledge of mathematics, shipbuilding, navigation, and other topics.In the fifteenth century, a Venetian mariner, Michael of Rhodes, wrote and illustrated a text describing his experiences in the Venetian merchant and military fleets. He included a treatise on commercial mathematics and treatments of contemporary shipbuilding practices, navigation, calendrical systems, and astrological ideas. This manuscript, “lost,” or at least in unknown hands for over 400 years, has never been published or translated in its entirety until now. In volume 3, nine experts, including the editors, discuss the manuscript, its historical context, and its scholarly importance. Their essays examine the Venetian maritime world of the fifteenth century, Michael's life, the discovery of the manuscript, the mathematics in the book, the use of illustration, the navigational directions, Michael's knowledge of shipbuilding in the Venetian context, and the manuscript's extensive calendrical material.

Using bioinformatics methods to generate a systems-level view of the immune system; description of the main biological concepts and the new data-driven algorithms.

A new edition of a comprehensive text, updated throughout, with new material on behavioral economics, international taxation, cost-benefit analysis, and the economics of climate policy.Public economics studies how government taxing and spending activities affect the economy—economic efficiency and the distribution of income and wealth. This comprehensive text on public economics covers the core topics of market failure and taxation as well as recent developments in both policy and the academic literature. It is unique not only in its broad scope but in its balance between public finance and public choice and its combination of theory and relevant empirical evidence.The book covers the theory and methodology of public economics; presents a historical and theoretical overview of the public sector; and discusses such topics as departures from efficiency (including imperfect competition and asymmetric information), issues in political economy, equity, taxation, fiscal federalism, and tax competition among independent jurisdictions. Suggestions for further reading, from classic papers to recent research, appear in each chapter, as do exercises. The mathematics has been kept to a minimum without sacrificing intellectual rigor; the book remains analytical rather than discursive. This second edition has been thoroughly updated throughout. It offers new chapters on behavioral economics, limits to redistribution, international taxation, cost-benefit analysis, and the economics of climate policy. Additional exercises have been added and many sections revised in response to advice from readers of the first edition.

An overview of neurotechnology, the engineering of robots based on animals and animal behavior.

An integrated overview of hearing and the interplay of physical, biological, and psychological processes underlying it.Every time we listen—to speech, to music, to footsteps approaching or retreating—our auditory perception is the result of a long chain of diverse and intricate processes that unfold within the source of the sound itself, in the air, in our ears, and, most of all, in our brains. Hearing is an "everyday miracle" that, despite its staggering complexity, seems effortless. This book offers an integrated account of hearing in terms of the neural processes that take place in different parts of the auditory system.Because hearing results from the interplay of so many physical, biological, and psychological processes, the book pulls together the different aspects of hearing—including acoustics, the mathematics of signal processing, the physiology of the ear and central auditory pathways, psychoacoustics, speech, and music—into a coherent whole.

A new philosophy of movement that explores the active relation between sensation and thought through the prisms of dance, cinema, art, and new media.

A comprehensive introduction to machine learning that uses probabilistic models and inference as a unifying approach.Today's Web-enabled deluge of electronic data calls for automated methods of data analysis. Machine learning provides these, developing methods that can automatically detect patterns in data and then use the uncovered patterns to predict future data. This textbook offers a comprehensive and self-contained introduction to the field of machine learning, based on a unified, probabilistic approach.The coverage combines breadth and depth, offering necessary background material on such topics as probability, optimization, and linear algebra as well as discussion of recent developments in the field, including conditional random fields, L1 regularization, and deep learning. The book is written in an informal, accessible style, complete with pseudo-code for the most important algorithms. All topics are copiously illustrated with color images and worked examples drawn from such application domains as biology, text processing, computer vision, and robotics. Rather than providing a cookbook of different heuristic methods, the book stresses a principled model-based approach, often using the language of graphical models to specify models in a concise and intuitive way. Almost all the models described have been implemented in a MATLAB software package—PMTK (probabilistic modeling toolkit)—that is freely available online. The book is suitable for upper-level undergraduates with an introductory-level college math background and beginning graduate students.

A history of color and commerce from haute couture to automobile showrooms to interior design.When the fashion industry declares that lime green is the new black, or instructs us to "think pink!,” it is not the result of a backroom deal forged by a secretive cabal of fashion journalists, designers, manufacturers, and the editor of Vogue. It is the latest development of a color revolution that has been unfolding for more than a century. In this book, the award-winning historian Regina Lee Blaszczyk traces the relationship of color and commerce, from haute couture to automobile showrooms to interior design, describing the often unrecognized role of the color profession in consumer culture.Blaszczyk examines the evolution of the color profession from 1850 to 1970, telling the stories of innovators who managed the color cornucopia that modern artificial dyes and pigments made possible. These "color stylists,” "color forecasters,” and "color engineers” helped corporations understand the art of illusion and the psychology of color. Blaszczyk describes the strategic burst of color that took place in the 1920s, when General Motors introduced a bright blue sedan to compete with Ford's all-black Model T and when housewares became available in a range of brilliant hues. She explains the process of color forecasting—not a conspiracy to manipulate hapless consumers but a careful reading of cultural trends and consumer taste. And she shows how color information flowed from the fashion houses of Paris to textile mills in New Jersey.Today professional colorists are part of design management teams at such global corporations as Hilton, Disney, and Toyota. The Color Revolution tells the history of how colorists help industry capture the hearts and dollars of consumers.

An empirically supported proposal for synthesizing multiple approaches to the study of the mind in the past.