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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

How to get more innovation and more equality.Is economic inequality the price we pay for innovation? The amazing technological advances of the last two decades--in such areas as artificial intelligenc

We live in an information society, or so we are often told. But what does that mean? This volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series offers a concise, informal ac

How viruses emerge to cause pandemics, how our immune system combats them, and how diagnostic tests, vaccines, and antiviral therapies work.Throughout history, humans have contended with pandemics. Hi

Exploring the science in George R. R. Martin's fantastical world, from the physics of an ice wall to the genetics of the Targaryens and Lannisters.Game of Thrones is a fantasy that features a lot of m

How humans and technology evolve together in a creative partnership.In this book, Edward Ashford Lee makes a bold claim: that the creators of digital technology have an unsurpassed medium for creativi

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

While we have been preoccupied with the latest i-gadget from Apple and with Google'songoing expansion, we may have missed something: the fundamental transformation of whole firms andindustries into gi

These who condemn the treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo have blamed U.S. military procedures and abuses of executive powers. But in The Story of Cruel and Unusual, Colin Dayan argues

A concise overview of machine learning--computer programs that learn from data--the basis of such applications as voice recognition and driverless cars.Today, machine learning underlies a range of app

Why the news about the global decline of infectious diseases is not all good. Plagues and parasites have played a central role in world affairs, shaping the evolution of the modern state, the growth

Provocative takes on cyberbullshit, smartphone zombies, instant gratification, the traffic school of the information highway, and other philosophical concerns of the Internet age.In The Death Algorith

A new translation of the final work of French philosopher Jean Cavailles. In this short, dense essay, Jean Cavailles evaluates philosophical efforts to determine the origin-logical or ontological-of

A philosopher and a scientist propose that sustainability can be understood as living well together without diminishing opportunity to live well in the future.Most people acknowledge the profound impo

A guided tour of the rapidly evolving networked world of connected devices, objects, and people that is changing the way we live and work.Since the publication of the original edition of this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, the Internet of Things (IoT) has evolved from a novelty (look! my phone connects to my lamp!) to a mainstream technology framework that we rely on every day to accomplish many tasks. This revised and updated edition reports on the latest developments in this rapidly evolving networked world of connected devices, objects, and people that is changing the way we live and work. Business and technology writer Samuel Greengard takes us on a guided tour of the IoT, describing smart lightbulbs, sensors in phones that trigger earthquake warnings, 3D headsets that connect users to business expos through completely immersive virtual reality environments, and more. He offers a clear explanation of the technology that builds and manages the IoT and examines t

The history of the commons -- jointly owned land or other resources such as fisheries or forests set aside for public use -- provides a useful context for current debates over sustainability and how w

Balancing theoretical insights with lessons drawn from the experience of many countries, Lindbeck examines employment and unemployment against the background of developed market economies during the p

Any analysis of the syntax of time is based on a paradox: it must include a syntax-based theory of both tense construal and event construal. Yet while time is undimensional, events have a complex spa

The original contributions in Fair Trade and Harmonization investigate the growing conflict between free trade policies and the domestic environmental, labor, and antitrust policies of individual nati

In the natural world, some agents (investors) employ strategies that provide resources, services, or information, while others (exploiters) gain advantages through these efforts. This behavior coexist

How does time pass? Does time itself move, or is time's passage merely an illusion? Analytic philosophers belong, for the most part, to one of two camps on this question: the tensed camp, which defend

This pioneering study reconceptualizes the impact of social organizations, economic conditions, and human agency on human reproduction in preindustrial communities in Europe and Asia. Unlike previous

"Matthias Gross is in the business of rewriting modernity. Far from being a prescription for paralysis, not knowing becomes, in his telling, a springboard for wider participation, experimentation, and

An exploration of how issues of race and ethnicity play out in a digital medialandscape that includes MySpace, post-9/11 politics, MMOGs, Internet music distribution, and thedigital divide.

In this book, Peter Diamond analyzes social security as a particular example of optimal taxation theory. Assuming a world of incomplete markets and asymmetric information, he uses a variety of simple

These essays all focus on and present new work in areas of research that FrancoModigliani has developed during his career - corporate finance, savings behavior, and macroeconomictheory. They are subst

Throughout much of human history, changes to forest ecosystems have come about through natural climatic changes occurring over long periods of time. But scientists now find changes in forest cover dra