Machine Learning Algorithms for Problem Solving in Computational Applications

The story of the arcane table-top game that became a pop culture phenomenon and the long-running legal battle waged by its cocreators.When Dungeons & Dragons was first released to a small hobby community, it hardly seemed destined for mainstream success--and yet this arcane tabletop role-playing game became an unlikely pop culture phenomenon. In Game Wizards, Jon Peterson chronicles the rise of Dungeons & Dragons from hobbyist pastime to mass market sensation, from the initial collaboration to the later feud of its creators, Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson. As the game's fiftieth anniversary approaches, Peterson--a noted authority on role-playing games--explains how D&D and its creators navigated their successes, setbacks, and controversies. Peterson describes Gygax and Arneson's first meeting and their work toward the 1974 release of the game; the founding of TSR and its growth as a company; and Arneson's acrimonious departure and subsequent challenges to TSR. He recounts the "Satanic Pan

How companies can adapt in an era of continuous disruption: a guide to responding to such acute crises as COVID-19.When COVID-19 hit, businesses had to respond almost instantaneously--shifting employees to remote work, repairing broken supply chains, keeping pace with dramatically fluctuating customer demand. They were forced to adapt to a confluence of multiple disruptions inextricably linked to a longer-term, ongoing digital disruption. This book shows that companies that use disruption as an opportunity for innovation emerge from it stronger. Companies that merely attempt to "weather the storm" until things go back to normal (or the next normal), on the other hand, miss an opportunity to thrive. The authors, all experts on business and technology strategy, show that transformation is not a one-and-done event, but a continuous process of adapting to a volatile and uncertain environment. Drawing on five years of research into digital disruption--including a series of interviews with b

An accessible introduction to a concept often considered impossibly abstruse, demonstrating its power as a conceptual tool in the twenty-first century.This volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series offers a clear and concise introduction to a topic often considered difficult and abstruse: deconstruction. David Gunkel sorts out the concept, terminology, and practices of deconstruction, not to defend academic orthodoxy, or to disseminate the thought of Jacques Derrida--the fabricator of the neologism and progenitor of the concept--but to provide readers with a powerful conceptual tool for the twenty-first century. Gunkel explains that deconstruction is not simply the opposite of construction--the "deconstructed" jacket hanging in your closet is not, strictly speaking, accurately named--or synonymous with destruction. It is a way to think beyond the construction/destruction dichotomy and all other conceptual dichotomies and logical oppositions. After describing what deconstructio

An examination of the contradictions within a form of expression that is both public and private, specific and abstract, conventional and countercultural. Snapshots capture everyday occasions. Taken by amateur photographers with simple point-and-shoot cameras, snapshots often commemorate something that is private and personal; yet they also reflect widely held cultural conventions. The poses may be formulaic, but a photograph of loved ones can evoke a deep affective response. In Snapshot Photography, Catherine Zuromskis examines the development of a form of visual expression that is both public and private. Scholars of art and culture tend to discount snapshot photography; it is too ubiquitous, too unremarkable, too personal. Zuromskis argues for its significance. Snapshot photographers, she contends, are not so much creating spontaneous records of their lives as they are participating in a prescriptive cultural ritual. A snapshot is not only a record of interpersonal intimacy but also

How Brazilian postwar avant-garde artists updated modernism in a way that was radically at odds with European and North American art historical narratives. Brazilian avant-garde artists of the postwar era worked from a fundamental but productive out-of-jointness. They were modernist but distant from modernism. Europeans and North Americans may feel a similar displacement when viewing Brazilian avant-garde art; the unexpected familiarity of the works serves to make them unfamiliar. In Constructing an Avant-Garde, S廨gio Martins seizes on this uncanny obliqueness and uses it as the basis for a reconfigured account of the history of Brazil's avant-garde. His discussion covers not only widely renowned artists and groups--including H幨io Oiticica, Lygia Clark, Cildo Meireles, and neoconcretism--but also important artists and critics who are less well known outside Brazil, including M嫫io Pedrosa, Ferreira Gullar, Am璱car de Castro, Lu疄 Sacilotto, Antonio Dias, and Rubens Gerchman. Martins argue

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 c

A prominent critic and theorist considers the criteria of value for collecting and storing works of art.In the world of contemporary art, serious art is produced primarily with the aim of being collec

The industry bible for communication design and illustration professionals, with updated information, listings, and pricing guidelines.Graphic Artists Guild Handbook is the industry bible for communic

How to understand a media environment in crisis, and how to make things better by approaching information ecologically.Our media environment is in crisis. Polarization is rampant. Polluted information

A key text by a leading figure in Italian socialist feminism that remains relevant today, addressing the exploitation of women in the workplace and at home.Anna Kuliscioff (c. 1854-1925) was a promine

The new edition of a comprehensive, accessible, and hands-on text in historical linguistics, revised and expanded, with new material and a new layout. This accessible, hands-on textbook not only introduces students to the important topics in historical linguistics but also shows them how to apply the methods described and how to think about the issues. Abundant examples from a broad range of languages and exercises allow students to focus on how to do historical linguistics. The book is distinctive for its integration of the standard topics with others now considered important to the field, including syntactic change, grammaticalization, sociolinguistic contributions to linguistic change, distant genetic relationships, areal linguistics, and linguistic prehistory.

The history and controversial roots of the social design movement, explored through the life and work of its leading pioneer, Victor Papanek.In Victor Papanek: Designer for the Real World, Alison Clar

An authoritative and unbiased guide to nuclear technology and the controversies that surround it.Are you for nuclear power or against it? What's the basis of your opinion? Did you know a CT scan gives

A roadmap for how we can rebuild America's working class by transforming workforce education and training.The American dream promised that if you worked hard, you could move up, with well-paying worki

An examination of dating app culture in China, across user demographics--straight women, straight men, queer women, and queer men.In this exploration of dating app culture in China, Lik Sam Chan argue

An examination of the daily grind of living with pollution in rural China and of the varying forms of activism that develop in response.Residents of rapidly industrializing rural areas in China live w

How the communist revolution failed, presented in a series of catastrophes.The communist project in the twentieth century grew out of utopian desires to oppose oppression and abolish class structures,

A human-inspired, linguistically sophisticated model of language understanding for intelligent agent systems.One of the original goals of artificial intelligence research was to endow intelligent agen

A graduate-level textbook that presents a unified mathematical framework for modeling and analyzing cyber-physical systems, with a strong focus on verification.Verification aims to establish whether a

A history of New York subway passengers as they navigated the system's constraints while striving for individuality, or at least a smooth ride.When the subway first opened with much fanfare on October

How science fiction has been a tool for understanding and living through rapid technological change.The world today seems to be slipping into a science fiction future. We have phones that speak to us,

Strategies for building large systems that can be easily adapted for new situations with only minor programming modifications.Time pressures encourage programmers to write code that works well for a n

The neurological and behavioral mechanisms and processes involved in intrusive thinking.On any given day, unintended, recurrent thoughts intrude on our thinking and affect our behavior in ways that ca

Leading economists and policymakers consider what economic tools are most effective in reversing the rise in inequality.Economic inequality is the defining issue of our time. In the United States, the

Rules for building formal models that use fast-and-frugal heuristics, extending the psychological study of classification to the real world of uncertainty.This book focuses on classification--allocati

Episodes in the transformation of our understanding of sound and space, from binaural listening in the nineteenth century to contemporary sound art.The relationship between sound and space has become

An introduction to the technology of contact tracing and its usefulness for public health, considering questions of efficacy, equity, and privacy.Contact tracing is key to containing and controlling t

How to make city cycling--the most sustainable form of urban transportation--safe, practical, and convenient for all cyclists.Cycling is the most sustainable mode of urban transportation, practical fo

Noted novelists, poets, and essayists, including Samuel R. Delany, Min Jin Lee, Joy Harjo, and Zadie Smith, consider how we are shaped by the past.It is rare now for people to stay where they were rai

How the tools and concepts for making games are connected to what games can and do mean; with examples ranging from Papers, Please to Dys4ia.In How Pac-Man Eats, Noah Wardrip-Fruin considers two quest

A gripping crime novel inspired by the Jack the Stripper killings in 1960s London.Bad Penny Blues is the latest gripping crime fiction from Cathi Unsworth, London's undisputed queen of noir. Set in la

How the world―and the world of visual culture in particular―creates itself in a creative act that knows no economic return.How does the world form itself? How does it create itself as a world? And how

The notion of time travel marked by both possibility and loss: making the case for cultural research that is oriented toward the future.Visual Cultures as Time Travel makes a case for cultural, aesthe

An argument that by amplifying alienation in performance, we can shift the emphasis from the sonic to the social.Works in sound studies continue to seek out sound "itself"--but, today, when the aesthe

The second and expanded edition of a comprehensive introduction to machine learning that uses probabilistic models and inference as a unifying approach.This textbook offers a comprehensive and self-co

How to use data as a tool for empowerment rather than oppression. Big data can be used for good--from tracking disease to exposing human rights violations--and for bad--implementing surveillance and c

A diverse group of scholars redefine constructionism--introduced by Seymour Papert in 1980--in light of new technologies and theories.Constructionism, first introduced by Seymour Papert in 1980, is a

Artists, scholars, filmmakers, and writers revisit the films of Danile Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub.Jean-Marie Straub (b. 1933) and Danile Huillet (19362006) met in Paris in 1954. Straub wanted to ma