and JavaScript

A proposal that we think about digital technologies such as machine learning not in terms of artificial intelligence but as artificial communication.Algorithms that work with deep learning and big data are getting so much better at doing so many things that it makes us uncomfortable. How can a device know what our favorite songs are, or what we should write in an email? Have machines become too smart? In Artificial Communication, Elena Esposito argues that drawing this sort of analogy between algorithms and human intelligence is misleading. If machines contribute to social intelligence, it will not be because they have learned how to think like us but because we have learned how to communicate with them. Esposito proposes that we think of “smart” machines not in terms of artificial intelligence but in terms of artificial communication.To do this, we need a concept of communication that can take into account the possibility that a communication partner may be not a human being but an al

Picture a computer scientist, staring at a screen and clicking away frantically on a keyboard, hacking into a system, or perhaps developing an app. Now delete that picture. In Once Upon an Algorithm,

Many books explain what is known about the universe. This book investigates what cannot be known. Rather than exploring the amazing facts that science, mathematics, and r

A comprehensive overview of OpenMP, the standard application programming interface for shared memory parallel computing—a reference for students and professionals.

A new version of the classic and widely used text adapted for the JavaScript programming language.Since the publication of its first edition in 1984 and its second edition in 1996, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP) has influenced computer science curricula around the world. Widely adopted as a textbook, the book has its origins in a popular entry-level computer science course taught by Harold Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman at MIT. SICP introduces the reader to central ideas of computation by establishing a series of mental models for computation. Earlier editions used the programming language Scheme in their program examples. This new version of the second edition has been adapted for JavaScript. The first three chapters of SICP cover programming concepts that are common to all modern high-level programming languages. Chapters four and five, which used Scheme to formulate language processors for Scheme, required significant revision. Chapter four offers new mat

An investigation of the role of educational privatization and technology in the crises of truth and agency.Today, conspiracy theories run rampant, attacks on facts have become commonplace, and systemic inequities are on the rise as individual and collective agency unravels. The Alienation of Fact explains the educational, technological, and ideological preconditions for these contemporary crises of truth and agency and explores the contradictions and competing visions for the future of education that lie at the center of the problem. Schools are increasingly reimagined as businesses, and high-stakes standardized testing and curricula, for-profit charter schools, and the rise of educational AI put capital and technology at the center of education. Yet even as our society demands measure, data, and facts, politicians and news outlets regularly make unfounded assertions. How should we make sense of the contradictions between the demand for radical data-driven empiricism and the flight fro

The entanglements of people and data, code and space, knowledge and power: how data and algorithms shape the world―and shape us within that world.With the emergence of a post-truth world, we have witnessed the dissolution of the common ground on which truth claims were negotiated, individual agency enacted, and public spheres shaped. What happens when, as Nietzsche claimed, there are no facts, but only interpretations? In this book, Mark Shepard examines the entanglements of people and data, code and space, knowledge and power that have produced an uncommon ground―a disaggregated public sphere where the extraction of behavioral data and their subsequent processing and sale have led to the emergence of micropublics of ever-finer granularity. Shepard explores how these new post-truth territories are propagated through machine learning systems and social networks, which shape the public and private spaces of everyday life. He traces the balkanization and proliferation of online news and t

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

How colleges and universities can live up to their ideals of diversity, and why inclusivity and excellence go hand in hand.Most colleges and universities embrace the ideals of diversity and inclusion, but many fall short, especially in the hiring, retention, and advancement of faculty who would more fully represent our diverse world―in particular women and people of color. In this book, Abigail Stewart and Virginia Valian argue that diversity and excellence go hand in hand and provide guidance for achieving both. Stewart and Valian, themselves senior academics, support their argument with comprehensive data from a range of disciplines. They show why merit is often overlooked; they offer statistics and examples of individual experiences of exclusion, such as being left out of crucial meetings; and they outline institutional practices that keep exclusion invisible, including reliance on proxies for excellence, such as prestige, that disadvantage outstanding candidates who are not members

An examination of the contemporary medicalization of death and dying that calls us to acknowledge instead death's existential and emotional realities.Death is a natural, inevitable, and deeply human process, and yet Western medicine tends to view it as a medical failure. In their zeal to prevent death, physicians and hospitals often set patients and their families on a seemingly unstoppable trajectory toward medical interventions that may actually increase suffering at the end of life. This volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series examines the medicalization of death and dying and proposes a different approach--one that acknowledges death's existential and emotional realities. The authors--one an academic who teaches and studies end-of-life care, and the other a physician trained in hospice and palliative care--offer an account of Western-style death and dying that is informed by both research and personal experience. They examine the medical profession's attitude toward deat

A comprehensive overview of important and contested issues in vaccination ethics and policy by experts from history, science, policy, law, and ethics. Vaccination has long been a familiar, highly effective form of medicine and a triumph of public health. Because vaccination is both an individual medical intervention and a central component of public health efforts, it raises a distinct set of legal and ethical issues--from debates over their risks and benefits to the use of government vaccination requirements--and makes vaccine policymaking uniquely challenging. This volume examines the full range of ethical and policy issues related to the development and use of vaccines in the United States and around the world. Forty essays, articles, and reports by experts in the field look at all aspects of the vaccine life cycle. After an overview of vaccine history, they consider research and development, regulation and safety, vaccination promotion and requirements, pandemics and bioterrorism,

How architecture and urbanism can help to care for and repair a broken planet: essays and illustrated case studies.Today, architecture and urbanism are capital-centric, speculation-driven, and investm

How colleges and universities can live up to their ideals of diversity, and why inclusivity and excellence go hand in hand.Most colleges and universities embrace the ideals of diversity and inclusion,

Insights into war and domestic insecurity, terrorism, and the costs of war and peace from new research that takes the political economy perspective on conflict.Guns and Butter examines the causes and

Describes how water politics, cars and freeways, and immigration and globalization have shaped Los Angeles, and how innovative social movements are working to make a more livable and sustainable city

Describes how water politics, cars and freeways, and immigration and globalization have shaped Los Angeles, and how innovative social movements are working to make a more livable and sustainable city

This analysis of how the ability to participate in society online affects political and economic opportunity and finds that technology use matters in wages and income and civic participation and votin

Assisted reproductive technology (ART) makes babies and parents at once. Drawing on science and technology studies and feminist theory and on historical and ethnographic analyses of ART clinics, Chari

A richly illustrated overview of the work of Neri Oxman whose design redefines computer science, digital fabrication, material science, and synthetic biology. Mediated Matter is the first comprehensive overview of Neri Oxman's groundbreaking design work. Oxman has forged a singular career across design, science, and technology over the past twenty years that includes, notably, founding the field of material ecology. Trained as both a medical doctor and an architect, she brings to design a spirit of inquiry and experimentation that includes a future-forward approach to materials--from silkworm thread to automated microrobots to a water-based fabrication platform that prints structures made from biopolymers. In her work at the MIT Media Lab, she designed products and buildings as interactive entities that are environmentally informed, biologically augmented, computationally grown, and digitally manufactured. Through richly detailed diagrams, explanatory texts, process documents, and brea

How AI will challenge our ideas about personhood. Chatbots like ChatGPT have challenged human exceptionalism: we are no longer the only beings capable of generating language and ideas fluently. But is ChatGPT conscious? Or is it merely engaging in sophisticated mimicry? And what happens in the future if the claims to consciousness are more credible? In The Line, James Boyle explores what these changes might do to our concept of personhood, to "the line" we believe separates our species from the rest of the world, but also separates "persons" with legal rights from objects. The personhood wars--over the rights of corporations, animals, over the question of when life begins and ends--have always been contentious. We've even denied the personhood of members of our own species. How will those old fights affect the new ones, and vice versa? Boyle pursues those questions across a dizzying array of fields. He discusses moral philosophy and science fiction, transgenic species, nonhuman animals

When designing a world trading system for the twenty-first century, “Keep calm and carry on” beats “Move fast and break things.”Global trade is in trouble. Climate change, digital trade, offshoring, the rise of emerging markets led by China: Can the World Trade Organization (WTO), built for trade in the twentieth century, meet the challenges of the twenty-first? The answer is yes, Robert Staiger tells us, arguing that adapting the WTO to the changed economic environment would serve the world better than a radical reset.Governed by the WTO, on the principles of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), global trade rules traditionally focus on “shallow integration”―with an emphasis on reducing tariffs and trade impediments at the border―rather than “deep integration,” or direct negotiations over behind-the-border measures. Staiger charts the economic environment that gave rise to the former approach, explains when and why it worked, and surveys the changing landscape for global

A comprehensive introduction to the field of autonomous robotics aimed at upper-level undergraduates and offering additional online resources.Textbooks that provide a broad algorithmic perspective on the mechanics and dynamics of robots almost unfailingly serve students at the graduate level. Introduction to Autonomous Robots offers a much-needed resource for teaching third- and fourth-year undergraduates the computational fundamentals behind the design and control of autonomous robots. The authors use a class-tested and accessible approach to present progressive, step-by-step development concepts, alongside a wide range of real-world examples and fundamental concepts in mechanisms, sensing and actuation, computation, and uncertainty. Throughout, the authors balance the impact of hardware (mechanism, sensor, actuator) and software (algorithms) in teaching robot autonomy. Features:Rigorous and tested in the classroomWritten for engineering and computer science undergraduates with a soph

Essays on speculative/science fiction explore the futures that feed our most cherished fantasies and terrifying nightmares, while helping diverse communities devise new survival strategies for a tough millennium.The explosion in speculative/science fiction (SF) across different media from the late twentieth century to the present has compelled those in the field of SF studies to rethink the community’s identity, orientation, and stakes. In this edited collection, more than forty writers, critics, game designers, scholars, and activists explore core SF texts, with an eye toward a future in which corporations dominate both the means of production and the means of distribution and governments rely on powerful surveillance and carceral technologies. The essays, international in scope, demonstrate the diversity of SF through a balance of popular mass-market novels, comics, films, games, TV shows, creepypastas, and more niche works. SF works explored range from Riot Baby by Tochi Onyebuchi,

Over the last half century, "smartness"―the drive for ubiquitous computing―has become a mandate: a new mode of managing and governing politics, economics, and the environment.Smart phones. Smart cars. Smart homes. Smart cities. The imperative to make our world ever smarter in the face of increasingly complex challenges raises several questions: What is this "smartness mandate?" How has it emerged, and what does it say about our evolving way of understanding―and managing―reality? How have we come to see the planet and its denizens first and foremost as data-collecting instruments? In The Smartness Mandate, Orit Halpern and Robert Mitchell radically suggest that "smartness" is not primarily a technology, but rather an epistemology. Through this lens, they offer a critical exploration of the practices, technologies, and subjects that such an understanding relies upon―above all, artificial intelligence and machine learning. The authors approach these not simply as techniques for solving pr

The redefinition of the single-family house, the urban landscape, and the American Dream.Sitting squarely at the center of the American Dream, the detached single-family home has long been the basic building block of most US cities. In Remaking the American Dream, Vinit Mukhija considers how this is changing, in both the American psyche and the urban landscape.In defiance of long-held norms and standards, single-family housing is slowly but significantly transforming through incremental additions of second and third units. Drawing on empirical evidence of informal and formal changes, Remaking the American Dream documents homeowners’ quiet unpermitted modifications, conversions, and workarounds, as well as gradual institutional alterations to once-rigid, local land-use regulations. Mukhija’s primary case study is Los Angeles and the role played by the State of California―findings he contrasts with the experience of other cities including Santa Cruz, Seattle, Portland, Minneapolis, and V

A philosopher who has experienced psychosis argues that recovery requires regaining agency and autonomy within a therapeutic relationship based on mutual trust.In Mental Patient, philosopher Abigail Gosselin uses her personal experiences with psychosis and the process of recovery to explore often overlooked psychiatric ethics. For many people who struggle with psychosis, she argues, psychosis impairs agency and autonomy. She shows how clinicians can help psychiatric patients regain agency and autonomy through a positive therapeutic relationship characterized by mutual trust. Patients, she says, need to take an active role in regaining their agency and autonomy―specifically, by giving testimony, constructing a narrative of their experience to instill meaning, making choices about treatment, and deciding to show up and participate in life activities. Gosselin examines how psychotic experience is medicalized and describes what it is like to be a patient receiving mental health care treatm

A techno-cognitive look at how new technologies are shaping the future of musicking. “Musicking” encapsulates both the making of and perception of music, so it includes both active and passive forms of musical engagement. But at its core, it is a relationship between actions and sounds, between human bodies and musical instruments. Viewing musicking through this lens and drawing on music cognition and music technology, Sound Actions proposes a model for understanding differences between traditional acoustic “sound makers” and new electro-acoustic “music makers.” What is a musical instrument? How do new technologies change how we perform and perceive music? What happens when composers build instruments, performers write code, perceivers become producers, and instruments play themselves? The answers to these pivotal questions entail a meeting point between interactive music technology and embodied music cognition, what author Alexander Refsum Jensenius calls “embodied music technology.”

A framework for understanding the totality of costs and benefits of universal access that will foster honest appraisal and guide the development of good policies.Universal access―the idea that certain technologies and services should be extended to all regardless of geography or ability to pay―evokes ideals of democracy and equality that must be reconciled with the realities on the ground. The COVID-19 pandemic raised awareness of the need for access to high-speed internet service in the United States, but this is just the latest in a long history of debates about what should be made available and to whom. Rural mail delivery, electrification, telephone service, public schooling, and library access each raised the same questions as today’s debates about health care and broadband. What types of services should be universally available? Who benefits from extending these services? And who bears the cost? Stepping beyond humanitarian arguments to conduct a clear-eyed, diagnostic analysis,

A new model of urban governance, mapping the route to a more equitable management of a city’s infrastructure and services.The majority of the world’s inhabitants live in cities, but even with the vast wealth and resources these cities generate, their most vulnerable populations live without adequate or affordable housing, safe water, healthy food, and other essentials. And yet, cities also often harbor the solutions to the inequalities they create, as this book makes clear. With examples drawn from cities worldwide, Co-Cities outlines practices, laws, and policies that are presently fostering innovation in the provision of urban services, spurring collaborative economies as a driver of local sustainable development, and promoting inclusive and equitable regeneration of blighted urban areas.Identifying core elements of these diverse efforts, Sheila R. Foster and Christian Iaione develop a framework for understanding how certain initiatives position local communities as key actors in the

Unpublished writings of Colin Rowe―letters, essays, lectures, and a postcard―clarify his thinking on key concepts while revealing his wit and erudition.Colin Rowe (1920–1999) was one of the great architectural theorists of the twentieth century, publishing the influential works The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa and Other Essays (1976) and Collage City (1978). While his written work was rigorous and authoritative, his lectures and letters were more casual, “carefully careless,” both witty and erudite. I Almost Forgot gathers twenty-four such writings―letters, essays, lectures, a postcard, and a eulogy. Both edifying and entertaining, sometimes tongue-in-cheek, occasionally scathing, they fill in personal details and clarify key concepts in Rowe’s work. In these writings, Rowe tells of the “Corbu superstructure upon a beaux-arts base” that refugee Polish architects and their students introduced to his alma mater, the University of Liverpool, in the early 1940s. He characterizes his cont

A comprehensive proposal for reforming copyright law to ensure sustainable public access to research and scholarship.Open access is widely supported by researchers, librarians, scholarly societies, and research funders, as well as large and small publishers. Yet despite this support―and the pandemic’s demonstration of the importance of open access for scientific progress―the scholarly publishing market is failing to deliver open access quickly enough. In Copyright’s Broken Promise, John Willinsky presents the case for reforming copyright law so that it supports, rather than impedes, public access to research and scholarship. He draws on the legal strategy of statutory licensing to set out the terms and structures by which the Copyright Act could ensure that publishers are fairly compensated for providing immediate open access. What sets Willinsky’s analysis apart is its focus on the current state of scholarly publishing. Because copyright offers so little legal support for moving publi

Natural phenomena, including human language, are not just series of events but are organized quasi-periodically; sentences have structure, and that structure matters.Howard Lasnik and Juan Uriagereka “were there” when generative grammar was being developed into the Minimalist Program. In this presentation of the universal aspects of human language as a cognitive phenomenon, they rationally reconstruct syntactic structure. In the process, they touch upon structure dependency and its consequences for learnability, nuanced arguments (including global ones) for structure presupposed in standard linguistic analyses, and a formalism to capture long-range correlations. For practitioners, the authors assess whether “all we need is Merge,” while for outsiders, they summarize what needs to be covered when attempting to have structure “emerge.” Reconstructing the essential history of what is at stake when arguing for sentence scaffolding, the authors cover a range of larger issues, from the tradi

The electric vehicle revival reflects negotiations between public policy, which promotes clean, fuel-efficient vehicles, and the auto industry, which promotes high-performance vehicles.Electric cars were once as numerous as internal combustion engine cars before all but vanishing from American roads around World War I. Now, we are in the midst of an electric vehicle revival and the quest for a sustainable car seems to be within reach. In Age of Auto Electric, Matthew N. Eisler shows that the halting development of the electric car in the intervening decades was a consequence of tensions between environmental, energy, and economic policy imperatives that informed a protracted reappraisal of the automobile system. These factors drove the electric vehicle revival, argues Eisler, hastening automaking’s transformation into a science-based industry in the process. Challenging the common assumption that the electric vehicle revival is due to the development of better batteries, Age of Auto El

A proposal for a new media design to balance the contributions of humans and materials in the world they share.How can media design support a balance between our needs for self-expression and the material needs of the world we are part of? What criteria define a sustainable media ecology? In Vital Media, Michael Nitsche argues that the current human-centric view is not sustainable and that media are best viewed as dynamic networks where cognitive and noncognitive participants co-create. What we need, according to Nitsche, is a media design that balances the needs of all partners involved: vital media. Tracing this ideal through two domains of expression and making, performance and craft, Nitsche calls on us to embrace material co-existence and to design for self-expression as well as material evolution. We must recognize that the living body and its dependencies on the world around it are at the heart of what media are about. Vital media exist to not only help individuals fulfill their

What the Open Government Partnership tells us about how international initiatives can and do shape domestic public sector reform.At the 2011 meeting of the UN General Assembly, the governments of eight nations―Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico, Norway, Philippines, South Africa, United Kingdom, and the United States―launched the Open Government Partnership, a multilateral initiative aimed at promoting transparency, empowering citizens, fighting corruption, and harnessing new technologies to strengthen governance. At the time, many were concerned that the Open Government Partnership would end up toothless, offering only lip service to vague ideals and misguided cyber-optimism. The Power of Partnership in Open Government offers a close look, and a surprising affirmation, of the Open Government Partnership as an example of a successful transnational multi-stakeholder initiative that has indeed impacted policy and helped to produce progressive reform. By 2019 the Open Government Partnership had gr

An introduction to game theory that offers not only theoretical tools but also the intuition and behavioral insights to apply these tools to real-world situations.This introductory text on game theory provides students with both the theoretical tools to analyze situations through the logic of game theory and the intuition and behavioral insights to apply these tools to real-world situations. It is unique among game theory texts in offering a clear, formal introduction to standard game theory while incorporating evidence from experimental data and introducing recent behavioral models. Students will not only learn about incentives, how to represent situations as games, and what agents “should” do in these situations, but they will also be presented with evidence that either confirms the theoretical assumptions or suggests a way in which the theory might be updated.Features:Each chapter begins with a motivating example that can be run as an experiment and ends with a discussion of the beh

Contributions by urban planners, sociologists, anthropologists, architects, and landscape architects on the role and scope of urban design in creating more just and inclusive cities.Scholars who write about justice and the city rarely consider the practices and processes of urban design, while discourses on urban design often neglect concerns about justice. The editors of Just Urban Design take the position that urban design interventions have direct and important implications for justice in the city. The contributions in this volume contextualize the state of knowledge about urban design for justice, stress inclusivity as the key to justice in the city, affirm community participation and organizing as cornerstones of greater equity, and assert that a just urban design must center and privilege our most marginalized individuals and communities. Approaching spatial and social justice in the city through the lens of urban design, the contributors explore the possibility of envisioning an

Selected texts that survey the full range of Kara Walker’s artistic practice, emphasizing the work itself rather than the debates and controversies around it.Kara Walker’s work and its borrowings from an iconography linked to the fantasized and travestied history of American chattel slavery has been theorized and critiqued in countless texts throughout her career. Exegeses of her work have been shaped by the numerous debates on the very debates it generated. How, then, do we approach a work that has been covered by such “thick theoretical layers”? This collection is unique in emphasizing Walker’s work itself rather than the controversies surrounding it. These essays and interviews survey Walker’s artistic practice from her early works in the 1990s through her most recent ones, from her famous silhouette projects to her lesser-known drawings and lantern shows. The texts, by art historians, curators, critics, scholars, and writers engage scrupulously with Walker’s pieces as material work

How hacking cultures drive contemporary capitalism and the future of innovation.In Resistance to the Current, Johan Söderberg and Maxigas examine four historical case studies of hacker movements and their role in shaping the twenty-first-century’s network society. Based on decades of field work and analysis, this intervention into current debates situates an exploding variety of hacking practices within the contradictions of capitalism. Depoliticized accounts of computing cultures and collaborative production miss their core driver, write Söderberg and Maxigas: the articulation of critique and its recuperation into innovations. Drawing on accounts of building, developing, and running community wireless networks, 3D printers, hackerspaces, and chat protocols, the authors develop a theoretical framework of critique and recuperation to examine how hackers―who have long held a reputation for being underground rebels―transform their outputs from communal, underground experiments to commerci

A cognitive ethnography of how bioengineering scientists create innovative modeling methods.In this first full-scale, long-term cognitive ethnography by a philosopher of science, Nancy J. Nersessian offers an account of how scientists at the interdisciplinary frontiers of bioengineering create novel problem-solving methods. Bioengineering scientists model complex dynamical biological systems using concepts, methods, materials, and other resources drawn primarily from engineering. They aim to understand these systems sufficiently to control or intervene in them. What Nersessian examines here is how cutting-edge bioengineering scientists integrate the cognitive, social, material, and cultural dimensions of practice. Her findings and conclusions have broad implications for researchers in philosophy, science studies, cognitive science, and interdisciplinary studies, as well as scientists, educators, policy makers, and funding agencies. In studying the epistemic practices of scientists, Ner