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Following the trails of Hawai‘i’s snails to explore the simultaneously biological and cultural significance of extinction.In this time of extinctions, the humble snail rarely gets a mention. And yet snails are disappearing faster than any other species. In A World in a Shell, Thom van Dooren offers a collection of snail stories from Hawai‘i―once home to more than 750 species of land snails, almost two-thirds of which are now gone. Following snail trails through forests, laboratories, museums, and even a military training facility, and meeting with scientists and Native Hawaiians, van Dooren explores ongoing processes of ecological and cultural loss as they are woven through with possibilities for hope, care, mourning, and resilience. Van Dooren recounts the fascinating history of snail decline in the Hawaiian Islands: from deforestation for agriculture, timber, and more, through the nineteenth century shell collecting mania of missionary settlers, and on to the contemporary impacts of

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

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

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

A wide-ranging exploration of how music has influenced science through the ages, from fifteenth-century cosmology to twentieth-century string theory.In the natural science of ancient Greece, music formed the meeting place between numbers and perception; for the next two millennia, Pesic tells us in Music and the Making of Modern Science, “liberal education” connected music with arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy within a fourfold study, the quadrivium. Peter Pesic argues provocatively that music has had a formative effect on the development of modern science―that music has been not just a charming accompaniment to thought but a conceptual force in its own right. Pesic explores a series of episodes in which music influenced science, moments in which prior developments in music arguably affected subsequent aspects of natural science. He describes encounters between harmony and fifteenth-century cosmological controversies, between musical initiatives and irrational numbers, between vibr

A leading developmental psychologist proposes an evolutionary pathway to human psychological agency.Nature cannot build organisms biologically prepared for every contingency they might possibly encounter. Instead, Nature builds some organisms to function as feedback control systems that pursue goals, make informed behavioral decisions about how best to pursue those goals in the current situation, and then monitor behavioral execution for effectiveness. Nature builds psychological agents. In a bold new theoretical proposal, Michael Tomasello advances a typology of the main forms of psychological agency that emerged on the evolutionary pathway to human beings. Tomasello outlines four main types of psychological agency and describes them in evolutionary order of emergence. First was the goal-directed agency of ancient vertebrates, then came the intentional agency of ancient mammals, followed by the rational agency of ancient great apes, ending finally in the socially normative agency of a

An account of Max Planck’s construction of his theory of blackbody radiation, summarizing the established physics on which he drew.In the last year of the nineteenth century, Max Planck constructed a theory of blackbody radiation―the radiation emitted and absorbed by nonreflective bodies in thermal equilibrium with one another―and his work ushered in the quantum revolution in physics. In this book, three physicists trace Planck’s discovery. They follow the trail of Planck’s thinking by constructing a textbook of sorts that summarizes the established physics on which he drew. By offering this account, the authors explore not only how Planck deployed his considerable knowledge of the physics of his era but also how Einstein and others used and interpreted Planck’s work. Planck did not set out to lay the foundation for the quantum revolution but to study a universal phenomenon for which empirical evidence had been accumulating since the late 1850s. The authors explain the nineteenth-centu

A guide to the ethical questions that arise from our use of industrial robots, robot companions, self-driving cars, and other robotic devices.Does a robot have moral agency? Can it be held responsible for its actions? Do humans owe robots anything? Will robots take our jobs? These are some of the ethical and moral quandaries that we should address now, as robots and other intelligent devices become more widely used and more technically sophisticated. In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, philosopher Mark Coeckelbergh does just that. He considers a variety of robotics technologies and applications―from robotic companions to military drones―and identifies the ethical implications of their use. Questions of robot ethics, he argues, are not just about robots but, crucially and importantly, are about humans as well. Coeckelbergh examines industrial robots and their potential to take over tasks from humans; “social” robots and possible risks to privacy; and robots in he

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

A comprehensive resource on what lockdown drills are, why they are necessary, and how best to conduct them.The first book to offer a comprehensive examination of lockdown drills in K–12 schools, Lockdown Drills balances research findings with practical applications and implications. Schildkraut and Nickerson, school safety experts with complementary backgrounds in criminology and school psychology, review the historical precedents for lockdown drills, distinguish school lockdowns from other emergency procedures (such as active shooter drills), explain why they are conducted, present evidence-based research on their effectiveness, and describe how to conduct them according to best practices. Proponents of lockdown drills as a life-saving necessity, the authors help to bring much-needed standardization to how these drills are studied and conducted. The authors present common arguments for and against the inclusion of lockdown drills in emergency preparedness efforts, balancing their disc

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

Stories from the ER: a doctor shows how empathy, creativity, and imagination are the cornerstones of clinical care.To be an emergency room doctor is to be a professional listener to stories. Each patient presents a story; finding the heart of that story is the doctor’s most critical task. More technology, more tests, and more data won’t work if doctors get the story wrong. Empathy, creativity, and imagination are the cornerstones of clinical care. In Tornado of Life, ER physician Jay Baruch offers a series of short, powerful, and affecting essays that capture the stories of ER patients in all their complexity and messiness. Patients come to the ER with lives troubled by scales of misfortune that have little to do with disease or injury. ER doctors must be problem-finders before they are problem-solvers. Cheryl, for example, whose story is a chaos narrative of “and this happened, and then that happened, and then, and then and then and then,” tells Baruch she is "stuck in a tornado of li

A series of photographic diptychs that investigate the behavior of images and offer an account of American precarity.Ambulance Chasers offers a series of photographic diptychs by the artist Abraham Adams: on the left, the faces of personal injury lawyers photographed from roadside billboards; on the right, the landscapes they survey. The gesture is a double rotation: each photograph is imagined as the spectator of the other, and in each pairing, the exorbitant promises of the animated lawyers are deflated by their juxtaposition with an often featureless roadside landscape. The ambulance chasers smile, grin, grimace, scowl; their hair is neatly coiffed, slicked back, unnaturally dark. They gaze at country roads, busy highways, empty intersections, blue skies, building sites, and parking lots. They offer assistance―at a price. Adams’s conceptual performance and art historian David Joselit’s text tell a story of American precarity. Joselit’s text unrolls alongside the photographs like a l

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

How the cerebral cortex operates near a critical phase transition point for optimum performance.Individual neurons have limited computational powers, but when they work together, it is almost like magic. Firing synchronously and then breaking off to improvise by themselves, they can be paradoxically both independent and interdependent. This happens near the critical point: when neurons are poised between a phase where activity is damped and a phase where it is amplified, where information processing is optimized, and complex emergent activity patterns arise. The claim that neurons in the cortex work best when they operate near the critical point is known as the criticality hypothesis. In this book John Beggs―one of the pioneers of this hypothesis―offers an introduction to the critical point and its relevance to the brain.Drawing on recent experimental evidence, Beggs first explains the main ideas underlying the criticality hypotheses and emergent phenomena. He then discusses the critic

Why cyberinsurance has not improved cybersecurity and what governments can do to make it a more effective tool for cyber risk management.As cybersecurity incidents―ranging from data breaches and denial-of-service attacks to computer fraud and ransomware―become more common, a cyberinsurance industry has emerged to provide coverage for any resulting liability, business interruption, extortion payments, regulatory fines, or repairs. In this book, Josephine Wolff offers the first comprehensive history of cyberinsurance, from the early “Internet Security Liability” policies in the late 1990s to the expansive coverage offered today. Drawing on legal records, government reports, cyberinsurance policies, and interviews with regulators and insurers, Wolff finds that cyberinsurance has not improved cybersecurity or reduced cyber risks. Wolff examines the development of cyberinsurance, comparing it to other insurance sectors, including car and flood insurance; explores legal disputes between ins

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

Fundamental theory and practical algorithms of weakly supervised classification, emphasizing an approach based on empirical risk minimization.Standard machine learning techniques require large amounts of labeled data to work well. When we apply machine learning to problems in the physical world, however, it is extremely difficult to collect such quantities of labeled data. This book presents theory and algorithms for weakly supervised learning, a paradigm of machine learning from weakly labeled data. Emphasizing an approach based on empirical risk minimization and drawing on state-of-the-art research in weakly supervised learning, the book provides both the fundamentals of the field and the advanced mathematical theories underlying them. It can be used as a reference for practitioners and researchers and in the classroom.The book first mathematically formulates classification problems, defines common notations, and reviews various algorithms for supervised binary and multiclass classif

From the very first moments of the universe to the birth of the first star, our solar system, and our planet: a physicist traces the known and the unknown.Since the beginning of the twentieth century, the horizon of our knowledge about the universe has expanded to encompass the infinitesimally small―and the infinitely vast. In First Dawn, physicist Roberto Battiston takes readers on a journey through space and time, to the boundaries of our knowledge and beyond. From the violence of the Big Bang and the birth of the first star, hundreds of millions of years later, to the emergence of our solar system, the dawn of life on Earth, and the possibility of life on other planets, Battiston maps what we know about the universe and how we came to know it―cautioning us, however, that what we know is a minuscule fraction of what there is to know. Battiston outlines discoveries by some of the greatest theoretical physicists of the twentieth century, including Einstein, Bohr, Schrödinger, Heisenber

An account of the life and work of a once-famous self-taught American artist of the 1940s, and a study of how artists go missing from public memory.A garment worker and slipper manufacturer with no training in art, Morris Hirshfield was never expected to make history. Against all odds, his wildly stylized paintings became internationally known in the 1940s. Admired by Pablo Picasso, Piet Mondrian, and the French surrealists, his peak moment of visibility occurred in 1943, when the Museum of Modern Art mounted a one-man show of his work. The exhibition was widely reviewed―though mostly reviled―by the press, who jeeringly crowned Hirshfield “Master of the Two Left Feet” for his tendency to display the female body in that unorthodox fashion. After the artist’s death in 1946, his work was largely forgotten. In Master of the Two Left Feet, Richard Meyer rediscovers Hirshfield for twenty-first-century viewers, offering full-color reproductions that capture the eye-popping palette, vibrant pa

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

How legacy firms can combine their traditional strengths with the power of data and digital ecosystems to forge a new competitive strategy for the digital era.How can legacy firms remain relevant in the digital era? In The Future of Competitive Strategy, strategic management expert Mohan Subramaniam explains how firms can leverage both their traditional strengths and the modern-day power of data and digital ecosystems to forge a new competitive strategy. Drawing on the experiences of a range of companies, including Caterpillar, Sleep Number, and Whirlpool, he explains how firms can benefit from data’s enlarged role in modern business, develop digital ecosystems tailored to their unique business needs, and use new frameworks to harness the power of data for competitive advantage. Subramaniam presents digital ecosystems as a combination of production and consumption ecosystems, which can be used by legacy firms to unlock the value of data at various levels―from improving operational effi

Stories of long-lived animal species―from thousand-year-old tubeworms to 400-year-old sharks―and what they might teach us about human health and longevity.Opossums in the wild don’t make it to the age of three; our pet cats can live for a decade and a half; cicadas live for seventeen years (spending most of them underground). Whales, however, can live for two centuries and tubeworms for several millennia. Meanwhile, human life expectancy tops out around the mid-eighties, with some outliers living past 100 or even 110. Is there anything humans can learn from the exceptional longevity of some animals in the wild? In Methusaleh’s Zoo, Steven Austad tells the stories of some extraordinary animals, considering why, for example, animal species that fly live longer than earthbound species and why animals found in the ocean live longest of all. Austad―the leading authority on longevity in animals―argues that the best way we will learn from these long-lived animals is by studying them in the wi

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

The second edition of a rigorous and example-driven introduction to topics in economic dynamics that emphasizes techniques for modeling dynamic systems.This text provides an introduction to the modern theory of economic dynamics, with emphasis on mathematical and computational techniques for modeling dynamic systems. Written to be both rigorous and engaging, the book shows how sound understanding of the underlying theory leads to effective algorithms for solving real-world problems. The material makes extensive use of programming examples to illustrate ideas, bringing to life the abstract concepts in the text. Key topics include algorithms and scientific computing, simulation, Markov models, and dynamic programming. Part I introduces fundamentals and part II covers more advanced material. This second edition has been thoroughly updated, drawing on recent research in the field.New for the second edition:“Programming-language agnostic” presentation using pseudocode.New chapter 1 covering

The new edition of a widely used introduction to game theory and its applications, with a focus on economics, business, and politics.This widely used introduction to game theory is rigorous but accessible, unique in its balance between the theoretical and the practical, with examples and applications following almost every theory-driven chapter. In recent years, game theory has become an important methodological tool for all fields of social sciences, biology and computer science. This second edition of Strategies and Games not only takes into account new game theoretical concepts and applications such as bargaining and matching, it also provides an array of chapters on game theory applied to the political arena. New examples, case studies, and applications relevant to a wide range of behavioral disciplines are now included. The authors map out alternate pathways through the book for instructors in economics, business, and political science. The book contains four parts: strategic form

How parenting became a verb, from Dr. Spock and June Cleaver to baby whispering and free-range kids.When did “parenting” become a verb? Why is it so hard to parent, and so rife with the possibility of failure? Sitcom families of the past―the Cleavers, the Bradys, the Conners―didn’t seem to lose any sleep about their parenting methods. Today, parents are likely to be up late, doomscrolling on parenting websites. In Long Days, Short Years, Andrew Bomback―physician, writer, and father of three young children―looks at why it can be so much fun to be a parent but, at the same time, so frustrating and difficult to parent. It’s not a “how to” book (although Bomback has read plenty of these) but a “how come” book, investigating the emergence of an immersive, all-in approach to raising children that has made parenting a competitive (and often not very enjoyable) sport. Drawing on parenting books, mommy blogs, and historical accounts of parental duties as well as novels, films, podcasts, televi

How Hansel and Gretel, Sherlock Holmes, the movie Groundhog Day, Harry Potter, and other familiar stories illustrate the concepts of computing.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, Martin Erwig explains computation as something that takes place beyond electronic computers, and computer science as the study of systematic problem solving. Erwig points out that many daily activities involve problem solving. Getting up in the morning, for example: You get up, take a shower, get dressed, eat breakfast. This simple daily routine solves a recurring problem through a series of well-defined steps. In computer science, such a routine is called an algorithm. Erwig illustrates a series of concepts in computing with examples from daily life and familiar stories. Hansel and Gretel, for example, execute an algorithm to get home from the fore

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

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 control. Data inevitably represents the ideologies of those who control its use; data analytics and algorithms too often exclude women, the poor, and ethnic groups. In Data Action, Sarah Williams provides a guide for working with data in more ethical and responsible ways. Williams outlines a method that emphasizes collaboration among data scientists, policy experts, data designers, and the public. The approach generates policy debates, influences civic decisions, and informs design to help ensure that the voices of people represented in the data are neither marginalized nor left unheard.

Why human skills and expertise, not technical tools, are what make projects succeed.The project is the basic unit of work in many industries. Software applications, antiviral vaccines, launch-ready spacecraft: all were produced by a team and managed as a project. Project management emphasizes control, processes, and tools―but, according to The Smart Mission, that is not the right way to run a project. Human skills and expertise, not technical tools, are what make projects successful. Projects run on knowledge. This paradigm-shifting book―by three project management experts, all of whom have decades of experience at NASA and elsewhere―challenges the conventional wisdom on project management, focusing on the human dimension: learning, collaboration, teaming, communication, and culture. The authors emphasize three themes: projects are fundamentally about how teams work and learn together to get things done; the local level―not an organization’s upper levels―is where the action happens; an

A broad introduction to algorithms for decision making under uncertainty, introducing the underlying mathematical problem formulations and the algorithms for solving them.Automated decision-making systems or decision-support systems―used in applications that range from aircraft collision avoidance to breast cancer screening―must be designed to account for various sources of uncertainty while carefully balancing multiple objectives. This textbook provides a broad introduction to algorithms for decision making under uncertainty, covering the underlying mathematical problem formulations and the algorithms for solving them. The book first addresses the problem of reasoning about uncertainty and objectives in simple decisions at a single point in time, and then turns to sequential decision problems in stochastic environments where the outcomes of our actions are uncertain. It goes on to address model uncertainty, when we do not start with a known model and must learn how to act through inte

An expert in cybersecurity lays out an evidence-based approach for assessing user cyber risk and achieving organizational cyber resilience.Phishing is the single biggest threat to cybersecurity, persuading even experienced users to click on hyperlinks and attachments in emails that conceal malware. Phishing has been responsible for every major cyber breach, from the infamous Sony hack in 2014 to the 2017 hack of the Democratic National Committee and the more recent Colonial Pipleline breach. The cybersecurity community’s response has been intensive user training (often followed by user blaming), which has proven completely ineffective: the hacks keep coming. In The Weakest Link, cybersecurity expert Arun Vishwanath offers a new, evidence-based approach for detecting and defending against phishing―an approach that doesn’t rely on continual training and retraining but provides a way to diagnose user vulnerability. Vishwanath explains how organizations can build a culture of cyber safety.

Techniques for applying mathematical concepts in the real world: six rarely taught but crucial tools for analysis, research, and problem-solving.Many young graduates leave school with a solid knowledge of mathematical concepts but struggle to apply these concepts in practice. Real scientific and engineering problems are different from those found in textbooks: they are messier, take longer to solve, and standard solution recipes might not apply. This book fills the gap between what is taught in the typical college curriculum and what a practicing engineer or scientist needs to know. It presents six powerful tools for analysis, research, and problem-solving in the real world: dimensional analysis, limiting cases, symmetry, scaling, making order of magnitude estimates, and the method of successive approximations. The book does not focus on formulaic manipulations of equations, but emphasizes analysis and explores connections between the equations and the application. Each chapter introdu

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