Machine Learning Algorithms for Problem Solving in Computational Applications

A lively, informative, and engaging guide to gender by an author-illustrator who helps readers understand the multiplicity of answers to “What even is gender?”Queer, cisgender, transgender, nonbinary, androgynous, maverique, intergender, genderfluid. Louie and their cat (a.k.a. “Cat”) take you on a journey through the world of gender―without claiming to have it all figured out or knowing the perfect definition for this widely complex subject. Gender is tricky to understand because it’s a social construct intersecting with many other parts of our identity, including class, race, age, religion. For a long time, people thought of gender as binary: male/female, pirate/princess, sports/shopping. Now, we’re starting to understand it’s not that simple. That’s what this book is about: figuring out what gender means, one human being at a time, and giving us new ways to let the world know who we are.Boy, girl, either/or, neither/nor, everything in between: gender is a spectrum, and it’s hard to

An exploration of social media–imposed pressure on new mothers: How the supposed safe havens of online mommy groups have become rife with aggression and groupthink.Many mothers today turn to social media for parenting advice, joining online mothers’ groups on Facebook and elsewhere. But the communities they find in these supposed safe havens can be rife with aggression, peer pressure, and groupthink―insisting that only certain practices are “best,” “healthiest,” “safest” (and mandatory). In this book, Jessica Clements and Kari Nixon debunk the myth of “optimal motherhood”―the idea that there is only one right answer to parenting dilemmas, and that optimal mothers must pursue perfection. In fact, Clements and Nixon write, parenting choices are not binaries, and the scientific findings touted by mommy groups are neither clear cut nor prescriptive. Clements and Nixon trace contemporary ideas of optimal motherhood to the nineteenth-century “Cult of True Womanhood,” which viewed women in te

Technology companies claim to connect people through touchscreens, but by conflating physical contact with emotional sentiments, they displace the constructed aspects of devices and women and other oppressed individuals’ critiques of how such technologies function.Technology companies and device designers correlate touchscreens and online sites with physical contact and emotional sentiments, promising unmediated experiences in which the screen falls away in favor of visceral materiality and connections. While touchscreens are key elements of most people’s everyday lives, critical frameworks for understanding the embodied experiences of using them are wanting. In Touch Screen Theory, Michele White focuses on the relation between physically touching and emotionally feeling to recenter the bodies and identities that are empowered, produced, and displaced by these digital technologies and settings. Drawing on detailed cases and humanities methods, White shows how and why gender, race, and

The story of the British amusement arcade from the 1800s to the present.Amusement arcades are an important part of British culture, yet discussions of them tend to be based on American models. Alan Meades, who spent his childhood happily playing in British seaside arcades, presents the history of the arcade from its origins in traveling fairs of the 1800s to the present. Drawing on firsthand accounts of industry members and archival sources, including rare photographs and trade publications, he tells the story of the first arcades, the people who made the machines, the rise of video games, and the legislative and economic challenges spurred by public fears of moral decline. Arcade Britannia highlights the differences between British and North American arcades, especially in terms of the complex relationship between gambling and amusements. He also underlines Britain’s role in introducing coin-operated technologies into Europe, as well as the industry’s close links to America and, espec

An idiosyncratic guidebook to architectural (and other) wonders of Italy, accompanied by the author’s own witty illustrations.In Some Reasons for Traveling to Italy, architect Peter Wilson offers a Grand Tour of Grand Tours, providing an idiosyncratic guidebook to architectural (and other) wonders of Italy, illustrated by his own witty watercolors and sketches. Wilson chronicles the reasons that people throughout history have traveled to Italy―ranging from “To Be the Subject of an Equestrian Painting by Uccello in Florence Cathedral” to “To Rebuild Herculaneum in Malibu” (the desire of oil tycoon J. Paul Getty in the 1970s)―while giving readers a deeper understanding of Italy’s architectural habitat and cultural mythology. In Wilson’s narratives and anecdotes, place names function as talismans; the events may not tally with recorded history, or with the exact topographies of actual places. Wilson offers historical reworkings, appropriations, and an architect’s scrutiny of certain Itali

The importance of telling new climate stories―stories that center the persistence of life itself, that embrace comedy and radical hope.“How dare you?” asked teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg at the United Nations in 2019. How dare the world’s leaders fiddle around the edges when the world is on fire? Why is society unable to grasp the enormity of climate change? In Beyond Climate Breakdown, Peter Friederici writes that the answer must come in the form of a story, and that our miscomprehension of the climate crisis comes about because we have been telling the wrong stories. These stories are pervasive; they come from long narrative traditions, sanctioned by capitalism, Hollywood, and social media, and they revolve around a myth: that the nation exists primarily as a setting for a certain kind of economic activity. Stories are how we make sense of the world and our place in it. The story that “the economy” takes priority over everything else may seem foreordained, but, Friederici

An analysis of wandering within different game worlds, viewed through the lenses of work, colonialism, gender, and death.Wandering in games can be a theme, a formal mode, an aesthetic metaphor, or a player action. It can mean walking, escaping, traversing, meandering, or returning. In this book, game studies scholar Melissa Kagen introduces the concept of “wandering games,” exploring the uses of wandering in a variety of game worlds. She shows how the much-derided Walking Simulator―a term that began as an insult, a denigration of games that are less violent, less task-oriented, or less difficult to complete―semi-accidentally tapped into something brilliant: the vast heritage and intellectual history of the concept of walking in fiction, philosophy, pilgrimage, performance, and protest. Kagen examines wandering in a series of games that vary widely in terms of genre, mechanics, themes, player base, studio size, and funding, giving close readings to Return of the Obra Dinn, Eastshade, Ri

Drawing as a tool of thought: an investigation of drawing, cognition, and creativity that integrates text and hand-drawn images.Drawing is a way of constructing ideas and observations as much as it is a means of expressing them. When we are not ready or able to put our thoughts into words, we can sometimes put them down in arrangements of lines and marks. Artists, designers, architects, and others draw to generate, explore, and test perceptions and mental models. In Drawing Thought, artist-educator Andrea Kantrowitz invites readers to use drawing to extend and reflect on their own thought processes. She interweaves illuminating hand-drawn images with text, integrating recent findings in cognitive psychology and neuroscience with accounts of her own artistic and teaching practices. The practice of drawing seems to be found across almost all known human cultures, with its past stretching back into the caves of prehistory. It takes advantage of the ways in which human cognition is embodie

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

An in-depth exploration of the experience of playing board games and how game designers shape that experience.In Unboxed, Gordon Calleja explores the experience of playing board games and how game designers shape that experience. Calleja examines key aspects of board game experience―the nature of play, attention, rules, sociality, imagination, narrative, materiality, and immersion―to offer a theory of board game experience and a model for understanding game involvement that is relevant to the analysis, criticism, and design of board games. Drawing on interviews with thirty-two leading board game designers and critics, Calleja―himself a board game designer―provides the set of conceptual tools that board game design has thus far lacked. After considering different conceptions of play, Calleja discusses the nature and role of attention and goes on to outline the key forms of involvement that make up the board game playing experience. In subsequent chapters, Calleja explores each of these

Zigzagging through six locations on the edges of the German-speaking world, exploring them through politics, architecture, literature, film, art, music, food, and history.“Zickzack” is the German word for “zigzag”: hopping around, moving back and forth, never following a straight line, avoiding the monotony of one thing following another. Zickzack is William Firebrace’s zigzagging exploration of six places on the edges of the German-speaking world. Deploying essays, narration, conversations, descriptions, and lists, Firebrace celebrates locations on defined and undefined borders, where cultures, languages, and histories mix. In his nonlinear wandering, he touches on ethnicity, topography, history, film, literature, myth, languages, and gastronomy. These locales are not the famous cities of Berlin, Vienna, and Zurich, but areas that straddle countries, geographies, and influences. Two are within Germany itself, one lies on (and over) the border with Poland, and three were once within th

A journey through the history, cultures, and societies of Marseille.There are many Marseilles, or at least many versions of Marseille: seaside village, haven of gangsters, gateway to the East, city of immigrants and outcasts. It is by turns the dull bourgeois provincial town where nothing ever happens and the mysterious unknowable city of the Mediterranean. In Marseille Mix, William Firebrace explores the many Marseilles, the invented and the actual. Leading readers down narrow streets, through undulating terrain that seems at once, or serially, Italian, Greek, Levantine, and North African, Firebrace traces the history and culture of Marseille through landscapes, buildings, food, films, literature, and criminology. In seven chapters, in writing that is by turns essay, narrative, description, list, recipe, glossary, and conversation, Firebrace investigates the city’s defining mix. He tells stories of famous Marseillais, including Marcel Pagnol and Antonin Artaud, and famous visitors, in

A cultural history of living in the undersea, both fictional and real, from Jules Verne’s Captain Nemo to NASA’s ECC02 project.In Memo for Nemo, William Firebrace investigates human inhabitation of the undersea, both fictional and real. Beginning with Jules Verne’s Captain Nemo―an undersea Renaissance man with a library of 12,000 volumes on his submarine―and proceeding through aquariums, undersea photography, artificial seas on land, nuclear-powered submarines, undersea film epics, giant squid, and NASA satellites, Firebrace examines the undersea as a zone created by exploration and invention. Throughout, the history of undersea life is accompanied by an imagined undersea, envisioned by cultural figures ranging from Verne and Herman Melville to Orson Welles and Jimi Hendrix. Firebrace takes readers though the enormous sequence of rooms (impossible in real life) in Nemo’s submarine, recounts the competition among nineteenth-century cities to build the most spectacular aquatic world, and

Two management and technology experts show that AI is not a job destroyer, exploring worker-AI collaboration in real-world work settings.This book breaks through both the hype and the doom-and-gloom surrounding automation and the deployment of artificial intelligence-enabled―“smart”―systems at work. Management and technology experts Thomas Davenport and Steven Miller show that, contrary to widespread predictions, prescriptions, and denunciations, AI is not primarily a job destroyer. Rather, AI changes the way we work―by taking over some tasks but not entire jobs, freeing people to do other, more important and more challenging work. By offering detailed, real-world case studies of AI-augmented jobs in settings that range from finance to the factory floor, Davenport and Miller also show that AI in the workplace is not the stuff of futuristic speculation. It is happening now to many companies and workers. These cases include a digital system for life insurance underwriting that analyzes

Stories from the future of intelligent machines―from rescue drones to robot spouses―and accounts of cutting-edge research that could make it all possible.Tech prognosticators promised us robots―autonomous humanoids that could carry out any number of tasks. Instead, we have robot vacuum cleaners. But, as Dario Floreano and Nicola Nosengo report, advances in robotics could bring those rosy predictions closer to reality. A new generation of robots, directly inspired by the intelligence and bodies of living organisms, will be able not only to process data but to interact physically with humans and the environment. In this book, Floreano, a roboticist, and Nosengo, a science writer, bring us tales from the future of intelligent machines―from rescue drones to robot spouses―along with accounts of the cutting-edge research that could make it all possible. These stories from the not-so-distant future show us robots that can be used for mitigating effects of climate change, providing healthcare,

A concise and engaging exploration of how we understand happiness.What does it mean to feel happiness? As a state of mind, it’s elusive. As a concept―despite the plethora of pop psychology books on the subject―it’s poorly understood. In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, psychologist Tim Lomas offers a concise and engaging overview of our current understanding of happiness. Lomas explains that although the field of positive psychology, which focuses on happiness, emerged only in the last twenty-five years, interest in the meaning of happiness goes back several millennia. Drawing on a variety of disciplines, from philosophy and sociology to economics and anthropology, Lomas offers an expansive vision of what happiness means, exploring a significant range of experiential territory. After considering such related concepts as wellbeing and flourishing, Lomas traces ideas of happiness from the ancient Buddhist notions of sukha and nirvana through Aristotle’s distinctio

Essays, conversations, selected texts, and a rich collection of thought-provoking artworks celebrate a revolution in bio art.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

A hallucinating, insomniac, and increasingly fragile flaneur wanders the streets of Paris over the long Easter weekend of 1960.Paris, Easter weekend 1960. The French composer Jacques Besse sets out on a marathon stroll through the city that begins on Good Friday, when he leaves his brother’s house on rue de Turbigo, and ends on Easter Monday, when, having declared himself Mars, the god of war, to mystified restaurant-goers, he ambles back toward Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The Great Easter―a memoir in the form of a novella, or perhaps a novella in the form of a memoir―is the first-person account of a hallucinating, insomniac, and increasingly fragile flaneur’s unending ambulation. The Great Easter was first published in French in 1969 and became famous a few years later when in their milestone work Anti-Oedipus Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari referred to Besse’s walk as the quintessential “double stroll of the schizo.” (Besse was a patient at Guattari’s psychiatric clinic La Borde.) Bess

The rise of the platform economy into statelike dominance over the lives of entrepreneurs, users, and workers.The early Internet was a lawless place, populated by scam artists who made buying or selling anything online risky business. Then Amazon, eBay, Upwork, and Apple established secure digital platforms for selling physical goods, crowdsourcing labor, and downloading apps. These tech giants have gone on to rule the Internet like autocrats. How did this happen? How did users and workers become the hapless subjects of online economic empires? The Internet was supposed to liberate us from powerful institutions. In Cloud Empires, digital economy expert Vili Lehdonvirta explores the rise of the platform economy into statelike dominance over our lives and proposes a new way forward. Digital platforms create new marketplaces and prosperity on the Internet, Lehdonvirta explains, but they are ruled by Silicon Valley despots with little or no accountability. Neither workers nor users can “vo

A photographic survey of the robotic face of Tokyo buildings and an argument that robot aesthetics plays a central role in architectural history.In Tokyoids, architect François Blanciak surveys the robotic faces omnipresent in Tokyo buildings, offering an architectural taxonomy based not on the usual variables―size, material, historical style―but on the observable expressions of buildings. Are the eyes (windows) twinkling, the mouth (door) laughing? Is that balcony a howl of distress? Investigating robot aesthetics through his photographs of fifty buildings, Blanciak argues that the robot face originated in architecture―before the birth of robotics―and has played a central role in architectural history. Blanciak first puts the robot face into historical perspective, examining the importance of the face in architectural theory and demonstrating that the construction of architecture’s emblematic portraits triggered the emergence of a robot aesthetics. He then explores the emotions convey

The unfolding influence of music and sound on the fundamental structure of the biomedical sciences, from ancient times to the present.Beginning in ancient Greece, Peter Pesic writes, music and sound significantly affected the development of the biomedical sciences. Physicians used rhythmical ratios to interpret the pulse, which inspired later efforts to record the pulse in musical notation. After 1700, biology and medicine took a “sonic turn,” viewing the body as a musical instrument, the rhythms and vibrations of which could guide therapeutic insight. In Sounding Bodies, Pesic traces the unfolding influence of music and sound on the fundamental structure of the biomedical sciences. Pesic explains that music and sound provided the life sciences important tools for hearing, understanding, and influencing the rhythms of life. As medicine sought to go beyond the visible manifestations of illness, sound offered ways to access the hidden interiority of body and mind. Sonic interventions add

Twelve stories by science fiction master Stanisław Lem, nine of them never before published in English.Of these twelve short stories by science fiction master Stanisław Lem, only three have previously appeared in English, making this the first "new" book of fiction by Lem since the late 1980s. The stories display the full range of Lem's intense curiosity about scientific ideas as well as his sardonic approach to human nature, presenting as multifarious a collection of mad scientists as any reader could wish for. Many of these stories feature artificial intelligences or artificial life forms, long a Lem preoccupation; some feature quite insane theories of cosmology or evolution. All are thought provoking and scathingly funny.Written from 1956 to 1993, the stories are arranged in chronological order. In the title story, "The Truth," a scientist in an insane asylum theorizes that the sun is alive; "The Journal" appears to be an account by an omnipotent being describing the creation of inf

Why, surrounded by screens and smart devices, we feel a deep connection to the analog―vinyl records, fountain pens, Kodak film, and other nondigital tools.We’re surrounded by screens; our music comes in the form of digital files; we tap words into a notes app. Why do we still crave the “realness” of analog, seeking out vinyl records, fountain pens, cameras with film? In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Robert Hassan explores our deep connection to analog technology. Our analog urge, he explains, is about what we’ve lost from our technological past, something that’s not there in our digital present. We’re nostalgic for what we remember indistinctly as somehow more real, more human. Surveying some of the major developments of analog technology, Hassan shows us what’s been lost with the digital. Along the way, he discusses the appeal of the 2011 silent, black-and-white Oscar-winning film The Artist; the revival of the non-e-book book; the early mechanical clocks th

An enactive account of musicality that proposes new ways of thinking about musical experience, musical development in infancy, music and evolution, and more.Musical Bodies, Musical Minds offers an innovative account of human musicality that draws on recent developments in embodied cognitive science. The authors explore musical cognition as a form of sense-making that unfolds across the embodied, environmentally embedded, and sociomaterially extended dimensions that compose the enactment of human worlds of meaning. This perspective enables new ways of understanding musical experience, the development of musicality in infancy and childhood, music’s emergence in human evolution, and the nature of musical emotions, empathy, and creativity. Developing their account, the authors link a diverse array of ideas from fields including neuroscience, theoretical biology, psychology, developmental studies, social cognition, and education. Drawing on these insights, they show how dynamic processes of

An alternative history of art in Berlin, detaching artistic innovation from art world narratives and connecting it instead to collective creativity and social solidarity.In pre- and post-reunification Berlin, socially engaged artists championed collective art making and creativity over individual advancement, transforming urban space and civic life in the process. During the Cold War, the city’s state of exception invited artists on both sides of the Wall to detour from artistic tradition; post-Wall, art became a tool of resistance against the orthodoxy of economic growth. In Free Berlin, Briana Smith explores the everyday peculiarities, collective joys, and grassroots provocations of experimental artists in late Cold War Berlin and their legacy in today’s city.These artists worked intentionally outside the art market, believing that art should be everywhere, freed from its confinement in museums and galleries. They used art as a way to imagine new forms of social and creative life. Sm

Why an organization's response to digital disruption should focus on people and processes and not necessarily on technology.Digital technologies are disrupting organizations of every size and shape, leaving managers scrambling to find a technology fix that will help their organizations compete. This book offers managers and business leaders a guide for surviving digital disruptions--but it is not a book about technology. It is about the organizational changes required to harness the power of technology. The authors argue that digital disruption is primarily about people and that effective digital transformation involves changes to organizational dynamics and how work gets done. A focus only on selecting and implementing the right digital technologies is not likely to lead to success. The best way to respond to digital disruption is by changing the company culture to be more agile, risk tolerant, and experimental.The authors draw on four years of research, conducted in partnership with

Twelve visions of living in a climate-changed world.We are living in the Anthropocene―an era of dramatic and violent climate change featuring warming oceans, melting icecaps, extreme weather events, habitat loss, species extinction, and more. What will life be like in a climate-changed world? In Tomorrow’s Parties, science fiction authors speculate how we might be able to live and even thrive through the advancing Anthropocene. In ten original stories by writers from around the world, an interview with celebrated writer Kim Stanley Robinson, and a series of intricate and elegant artworks by Sean Bodley, Tomorrow’s Parties takes rational optimism as a moral imperative, or at least a pragmatic alternative to despair. In these stories―by writers from the United Kingdom, the United States, Nigeria, China, Bangladesh, and Australia―a young man steals from delivery drones; a political community lives on an island made of ocean-borne plastic waste; and a climate change denier tries to unmask

A devastating, compelling account of the federal government's leading role in bringing about today's climate crisis.In 2015, a group of twenty-one young people sued the federal government in Juliana v. United States for violating their constitutional rights by promoting climate catastrophe and thereby depriving them of life, liberty, and property without due process and equal protection of law. They Knew offers evidence supporting the children's claims, presenting a devastating and compelling account of the federal government's role in bringing about today's climate crisis. James Gustave Speth, tapped by the plaintiffs as one of twenty-one preeminent experts in their climate case, analyzes how administrations from Carter to Trump―despite having information about the impending climate crisis and the connection to fossil fuels―continued aggressive support of a fossil fuel based energy system. What did the federal government know and when did it know it? Speth asks, echoing another famous

Writings on Freud by Italy’s leading psychoanalyst of the twentieth century.Elvio Fachinelli was one of the most original and controversial Italian psychoanalysts of the twentieth century. He viewed psychoanalytic theory as inextricably linked to the concrete experience of everyday reality and as a crucial compass for understanding the social and political turmoil of his era. This compact volume collects Fachinelli’s writing on Freud, offering readers both an accessible and engaging introduction to Freud’s thinking and an overview of Fachinelli’s own main ideas. Written between 1966 and 1989, these essays serve to introduce readers to some of the most provocative aspects of Fachinelli’s critiques of psychoanalysis and society. On Freud includes a long essay on Freud that weaves the theoretical foundations of psychoanalysis together with a surprising number of idiosyncratic observations about Freud the person. In it, Fachinelli offers a series of parallax perspectives: Freud the conquis

How teens navigate a networked world and how adults can support them.What are teens actually doing on their smartphones? Contrary to many adults’ assumptions, they are not simply “addicted” to their screens, oblivious to the afterlife of what they post, or missing out on personal connection. They are just trying to navigate a networked world. In Behind Their Screens, Emily Weinstein and Carrie James, Harvard researchers who are experts on teens and technology, explore the complexities that teens face in their digital lives, and suggest that many adult efforts to help―“Get off your phone!” “Just don’t sext!”―fall short. Weinstein and James warn against a single-minded focus by adults on “screen time.” Teens worry about dependence on their devices, but disconnecting means being out of the loop socially, with absence perceived as rudeness or even a failure to be there for a struggling friend. Drawing on a multiyear project that surveyed more than 3,500 teens, the authors explain that youn

Explaining the science contained in a simple assembly of grains―the most abundant form of matter present on Earth.Granular media―composed of vast amounts of grains, consolidated or not―constitute the most abundant form of solid matter on Earth. Granular materials assemble in disordered configurations scientists often liken to a bag of marbles. Made of macroscopic particles rather than molecules, they defy the standard scheme of classification in terms of solid, liquid, and gas. Granular materials provide a model relevant to various domains of research, including engineering, physics, and biology. William Blake famously wished “To See a World in a Grain of Sand”; in this book, pioneering researchers in granular matter explain the science hidden behind simple grains, shedding light on collective behavior in disordered settings in general. The authors begin by describing the single grain with its different origins, shapes, and sizes, then examine grains in piled or stacked form. They expl

A meticulously created facsimile edition of a classic work on design by the progenitor of today’s information design.Long before the internet and its vast stores of information in digital form, information in analog form needed to be organized so that it was legible and accessible. One designer who revolutionized the presentation of printed information was modernist pioneer Ladislav Sutnar (1897–1976). In 1950, Sutnar and architect K. Lonberg-Holm published Catalog Design Progress, a guide to modernizing the design of printed materials through typographic simplicity, compositional ingenuity, and navigational devices that signal the logical flow of information. This meticulously created facsimile of the original book illustrates and enacts Sutnar’s ideas, making clear their continuing influence on graphic design. In the book, Sutnar contrasts his design style with the conglomeration of text and pictures that characterized earlier printed material. He identifies and illustrates visual fe

A comprehensive review of the scientific literature on the possible benefits of CBD, describing findings from both preclinical and human clinical studies.CBD (cannabidiol), a nonintoxicating compound derived from the cannabis plant, can be found in products ranging from lotion and smoothies to chewable gummies and pet treats. It’s been promoted―but not always scientifically validated―as a treatment for medical conditions including psychosis, anxiety, pain, and even cancer. This book by three leading cannabis researchers looks at the science of CBD. It offers a comprehensive review of the scientific literature on the possible benefits of CBD, describing findings from both preclinical and human clinical studies. The authors report that the current CBD fad has some basis in preclinical animal research that indicates potential beneficial effects. Clinical studies, hampered by regulations governing research with cannabis, have lagged behind the basic animal research. The authors examine wh

Can we change the minds of science deniers? Encounters with flat earthers, anti-vaxxers, coronavirus truthers, and others."Climate change is a hoax--and so is coronavirus." "Vaccines are bad for you." These days, many of our fellow citizens reject scientific expertise and prefer ideology to facts. They are not merely uninformed--they are misinformed. They cite cherry-picked evidence, rely on fake experts, and believe conspiracy theories. How can we convince such people otherwise? How can we get them to change their minds and accept the facts when they don't believe in facts? In this book, Lee McIntyre shows that anyone can fight back against science deniers, and argues that it's important to do so. Science denial can kill.Drawing on his own experience--including a visit to a Flat Earth convention--as well as academic research, McIntyre outlines the common themes of science denialism, present in misinformation campaigns ranging from tobacco companies' denial in the 1950s that smoking ca

As a bacteria threatens to wipe out humankind, a plutocrat sets himself up as the benignant dictator of a survivalist colony.In this novel originally published in 1923, as denitrifying bacteria inimical to plant growth spreads around the world, toppling civilizations and threatening to wipe out humankind, the British plutocrat Nordenholt sets himself up as the benignant dictator of a ruthlessly efficient, entirely undemocratic, survivalist colony established in Scotland’s Clyde Valley. Discovering just how far their employer is willing to go in his effort to spare one million lives, Jack Flint, the colony’s director of operations, and Elsa Huntingtower, Nordenholt’s personal assistant, are forced to grapple with the question of whether a noble end justifies dastardly means.

The first comprehensive history in English of film at the Bauhaus, exploring practices that experimented with film as an adaptable, elastic “polymedium.”With Design in Motion, Laura Frahm proposes an alternate history of the Bauhaus―one in which visual media, and film in particular, are crucial to the Bauhaus’s visionary pursuit of integrating art and technology. In the first comprehensive examination in English of film at the Bauhaus, Frahm shows that experimentation with film spanned a range of Bauhaus practices, from textiles and typography to stage and exhibition design. Indeed, Bauhausler deployed film as an adaptable, elastic “polymedium,” malleable in shape and form, unfolding and refracting into multiple material, aesthetic, and philosophical directions. Frahm shows how the encounter with film imbued the Bauhaus of the 1920s and early 1930s with a flexible notion of design, infusing painting with temporal concepts, sculptures with moving forms, photographs with sequential aes

An argument against the ideology of domesticity that separates work from home; lavishly illustrated, with architectural proposals for alternate approaches to working and living.Despite the increasing numbers of people who now work from home, in the popular imagination the home is still understood as the sanctuary of privacy and intimacy. Living is conceptually and definitively separated from work. This book argues against such a separation, countering the prevailing ideology of domesticity with a series of architectural projects that illustrate alternative approaches. Less a monograph than a treatise, richly illustrated, the book combines historical research and design proposals to reenvision home as a cooperative structure in which it is possible to live and work and in which labor is socialized beyond the family―freeing inhabitants from the sense of property and the burden of domestic labor. The projects aim to move the house beyond the dichotomous logic of male/female, husband/wi

The first full-scale monographic study in English of one of the most important artists of the second half of the twentieth century.In this first full-scale monograph in English on the German painter Gerhard Richter, the distinguished art historian Benjamin H. D. Buchloh maps the unfolding of Richter’s ever more complex and contradictory lifework. A painter in an age that disdains painting, a German confronting the impossibility of representing the historical trauma inflicted by his country upon the world between 1933 and 1945, a European artist in dialogue with his American counterparts, Richter (b. 1932) is shown by Buchloh to be a unique and singular artist, outside and beyond every other formation contemporaneous with his own development and evolution. What emerges from Buchloh’s detailed analysis of Richter’s key works is a far more complex set of painterly strategies than has been previously assumed, strategies that have inverted and relativized all the principles of the moderni

How biodiversity classification, with its ranking of species, has social and political implications as well as implications for the field of information studies. The idea that species live in nature as pure and clear-cut named individuals is a fiction, as scientists well know. According to Robert D. Montoya, classifications are powerful mechanisms and we must better attend to the machinations of power inherent in them, as well as to how the effects of this power proliferate beyond the boundaries of their original intent. We must acknowledge the many ways our classifications are implicated in environmental, ecological, and social justice work―and information specialists must play a role in updating our notions of what it means to classify. In Power of Position, Montoya shows how classifications are systems that relate one entity with other entities, requiring those who construct a system to value an entity’s relative importance―by way of its position―within a system of other entities