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This first book-length analysis of Amazon’s Kindle explores the platform’s technological, bibliographical, and social impact on publishing.Four Shades of Gray offers the first book-length analysis of Amazon’s Kindle and its impact on publishing. Simon Rowberry recounts how Amazon built the infrastructure for a new generation of digital publications, then considers the consequences of having a single company control the direction of the publishing industry. Exploring the platform from the perspectives of technology, texts, and uses, he shows how the Kindle challenges traditional notions of platforms as discrete entities. He argues that Amazon’s influence extends beyond “disruptive technology” to embed itself in all aspects of the publishing trade; yet despite industry pushback, he says, the Kindle has had a positive influence on publishing. Rowberry documents the first decade of the Kindle with case studies of Kindle Popular Highlights, an account of the digitization of books publishe

How East German artists made their country’s experimental art scene a form of (counter) public life.Experimental artists in the final years of the German Democratic Republic did not practice their art in the shadows, on the margins, hiding away from the Stasi’s prying eyes. In fact, as Sara Blaylock shows, many cultivated a critical influence over the very bureaucracies meant to keep them in line, undermining state authority through forthright rather than covert projects. In Parallel Public, Blaylock describes how some East German artists made their country’s experimental art scene a form of (counter) public life, creating an alternative to the crumbling collective underpinnings of the state. Blaylock examines the work of artists who used body-based practices―including performance, film, and photography―to create new vocabularies of representation, sharing their projects through independent networks of dissemination and display. From the collective films and fashion shows

The proposal of a semantics for quotations using explanatory notions drawn from philosophical theories of pictures. In Quotations as Pictures, Josef Stern develops a semantics for quotations using explanatory notions drawn from philosophical theories of pictures. He offers the first sustained analysis of the practice of quotation proper, as opposed to mentioning. Unlike other accounts that treat quotation as mentioning, Quotations as Pictures argues that the two practices have independent histories, that they behave differently semantically, that the inverted commas employed in both mentioning and quotation are homonymous, that so-called mixed quotation is nothing but subsentential quotation, and that the major problem of quotation is to explain its dual reference or meaning―its ordinary meaning and its metalinguistic reference to the quoted phrase attributed to the quoted subject. Stern argues that the key to understanding quotation is the idea that quotations are pictures or have

The author's purpose is to set out as simply and vividly as possible the exact grammatical workings of an architectural language.

As neural data becomes increasingly complex, neuroscientists now require skills in computer programming, statistics, and data analysis. This book teaches practical neural

Feature films, television shows, homemade videos, tweets, blogs, and breaking news: digital media offer an always-accessible, apparently inexhaustible supply of entertain

Autobiographical accounts by twenty-three Nobel laureates give a picture of therichness of contemporary economic thought and insights into the creative process.

The most comprehensive collection to date of the artist Bruce Nauman's writings and all of his major interviews from 1965 to 2001.

Psychologists, economists, historians, computer scientists, sociologists, philosophers, and legal scholars explore the conscious choice not to seek information.The history of intellectual thought abou

The first introductory textbook in the emerging, fast-developing field of computational psychiatry.Computational psychiatry applies computational modeling and theoretical approaches to psychiatric que

Machine learning -- programming computers to learn from data -- has spread across scientific disciplines, media, entertainment, and government. Medical research, autonomous vehicles, credit transactio

Robots are entering the mainstream. Technologies have advanced to the point of mass commercialization -- Roomba, for example -- and adoption by governments -- most notabl

This landmark anthology collects for the first time the key historical documents that helped give definition and purpose to the conceptual art movement.

How meaning works―from monkey calls to human language, from spoken language to sign language, from gestures to music―and how meaning is connected to truth.We communicate through language, connecting what we mean to the words we say. But humans convey meaning in other ways as well, with facial expressions, hand gestures, and other methods. Animals, too, can get their meanings across without words. In What It All Means, linguist Philippe Schlenker explains how meaning works, from monkey calls to human language, from spoken language to sign language, from gestures to music. He shows that these extraordinarily diverse types of meaning can be studied and compared within a unified approach―one in which the notion of truth plays a central role. “It’s just semantics” is often said dismissively. But Schlenker shows that semantics―the study of meaning―is an unsung success of modern linguistics, a way to investigate some of the deepest questions about human nature using tools from the empirical a

Discover the hidden electrical world inside your nervous system using DIY, hands-on experiments, for all ages. No MD or PhD required!The workings of the brain are mysterious: What are neural signals? What do they mean? How do our senses really sense? How does our brain control our movements? What happens when we meditate? Techniques to record signals from living brains were once thought to be the realm of advanced university labs . . . but not anymore! This book allows anyone to participate in the discovery of neuroscience through hands-on experiments that record the hidden electrical world beneath our skin and skulls. In How Your Brain Works, neuroscientists Greg Gage and Tim Marzullo offer a practical guide―accessible and useful to readers from middle schoolers to college undergraduates to curious adults―for learning about the brain through hands-on experiments. Armed with some DIY electrodes, readers will get to see what brain activity really looks like through simple neuroscience e

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

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

A mixed-race Harvard medical student stumbles upon a hidden Ethiopian city, the inhabitants of which possess both advanced technologies and mystical powers.Long before Marvel Comics gave us Wakanda, a high-tech African country that has never been colonized, this 1903 novel gave readers Reuel Brigg ―a mixed-race Harvard medical student, passing as white, who stumbles upon Telassar. In this long-hidden Ethiopian city, the wise, peaceful inhabitants of which possess both advanced technologies and mystical powers, Reuel discovers the incredible secret of his own birth. Now, he must decide whether to return to the life he’s built, and the woman he loves, back in America―or play a role in helping Telassar take its rightful place on the world stage. Considered one of the earliest articulations of Black internationalism, Of One Blood takes as its theme the notion that race is a social construct perpetuated by racists. Minister Faust is best known as author of The Coyote Kings of the Space-Age

A proposal that syntax extends to the domain of discourse in making core syntax link to the conversational context.In Syntax in the Treetops, Shigeru Miyagawa proposes that syntax extends into the domain of discourse by making linkages between core syntax and the conversational participants. Miyagawa draws on evidence for this extended syntactic structure from a wide variety of languages, including Basque, Japanese, Italian, Magahi, Newari, Romanian, and Spanish, as well as the language of children with autism. His proposal for what happens at the highest level of the tree structure used by linguists to represent the hierarchical relationships within sentences―“in the treetops”―offers a unique contribution to the new area of study sometimes known as “syntacticization of discourse.” Miyagawa’s main point is that syntax provides the basic framework that makes possible the performance of a speech act and the conveyance of meaning; although the role that syntax plays for speech acts is m

How to analyze data settings rather than data sets, acknowledging the meaning-making power of the local. In our data-driven society, it is too easy to assume the transparency of data. Instead, Yanni Loukissas argues in All Data Are Local, we should approach data sets with an awareness that data are created by humans and their dutiful machines, at a time, in a place, with the instruments at hand, for audiences that are conditioned to receive them. The term data set implies something discrete, complete, and portable, but it is none of those things. Examining a series of data sources important for understanding the state of public life in the United States--Harvard's Arnold Arboretum, the Digital Public Library of America, UCLA's Television News Archive, and the real estate marketplace Zillow--Loukissas shows us how to analyze data settings rather than data sets.Loukissas sets out six principles: all data are local; data have complex attachments to place; data are collected from heterogen

Why it takes more than microloans to empower women and promote sustainable, inclusive economic growth.Nearly one billion women have been completely excluded from the formal financial system. Without even a bank account in their own names, they lack the basic services most of us take for granted―secure ways to save money, pay bills, and get credit. Exclusion from the formal financial system means they are economic outsiders, unable to benefit from, or contribute to, economic growth. Microfinance has been hailed as an economic lifeline for women in developing countries―but, as Mary Ellen Iskenderian shows in this book, it takes more than microloans to empower women and promote sustainable, inclusive economic growth. Iskenderian, who leads a nonprofit that works to give women access to the financial system, argues that the banking industry should view these one billion “unbanked” women not as charity cases but as a business opportunity: a lucrative new market of small business owners, h

When a plague wipes out most of the world’s male population and civilization crumbles, women struggle to build an agrarian community in the English countryside.Imagine a plague that brings society to a standstill by killing off most of the men on Earth. The few men who survive descend into lechery and atavism. Meanwhile, a group of women (accompanied by one virtuous male survivor) leave the wreckage of London to start fresh, establishing a communally run agrarian outpost. But their sexist society hasn’t permitted most of them to learn any useful skills―will the commune survive their first winter? This is the bleak world imagined in 1913 by English writer J. D. Beresford―one that has particular resonance for the planet’s residents in the 2020s. This edition of A World of Women offers twenty-first century readers a new look at a neglected classic. Beresford introduces us to the solidly bourgeois, prim and proper, Gosling family. As once-bustling London shuts down―Parliament closes, fa

What happened before the primordial fire of the Big Bang: a theory about the ultimate origin of the universe.In the beginning was the Big Bang: an unimaginably hot fire almost fourteen billion years ago in which the first elements were forged. The physical theory of the hot nascent universe―the Big Bang―was one of the most consequential developments in twentieth-century science. And yet it leaves many questions unanswered: Why is the universe so big? Why is it so old? What is the origin of structure in the cosmos? In An Infinity of Worlds, physicist Will Kinney explains a more recent theory that may hold the answers to these questions and even explain the ultimate origins of the universe: cosmic inflation, before the primordial fire of the Big Bang. Kinney argues that cosmic inflation is a transformational idea in cosmology, changing our picture of the basic structure of the cosmos and raising unavoidable questions about what we mean by a scientific theory. He explains that inflation

The first English translation of a nonfiction work by Stanisław Lem, which was "conceived under the spell of cybernetics" in 1957 and updated in 1971.In 1957, Stanisław Lem published Dialogues, a book "conceived under the spell of cybernetics," as he wrote in the preface to the second edition. Mimicking the form of Berkeley's Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, Lem's original dialogue was an attempt to unravel the then-novel field of cybernetics. It was a testimony, Lem wrote later, to "the almost limitless cognitive optimism" he felt upon his discovery of cybernetics. This is the first English translation of Lem's Dialogues, including the text of the first edition and the later essays added to the second edition in 1971. For the second edition, Lem chose not to revise the original. Recognizing the naivete of his hopes for cybernetics, he constructed a supplement to the first dialogue, which consists of two critical essays, the first a summary of the evolution of cybernetics,

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 the artificial intelligence technology that enables computer vision, speech recognition, machine translation, and driverless cars.Deep learning is an artificial intellige

The “formidably brilliant” Žižek considers sexuality, ontology, subjectivity, and Marxian critiques of political economy by way of Lacanian psychoanalysis.If the most interesting theoretical intervent

An authoritative treatment of urban computing, offering an overview of the field, fundamental techniques, advanced models, and novel applications.Urban computing brings powerful computational techniqu

An integrated, holistic model for infrastructure planning and design in developing countries. Many emerging nations, particularly those least developed, lack basic critical infrastructural services-

Without boredom, arguably there is no modernity: the current sense of the word emerged simultaneously with industrialization, mass politics, and consumerism. From Manet o

Innovation is rapidly becoming democratized. Users, aided by improvements in computerand communications technology, increasingly can develop their own new products and services. Theseinnovating users

The Culture of Technology examines our often conflicting attitudes toward nuclear weapons, biological technologies, pollution, Third World development, automation, social medicine, and industrial dec

An analysis of stream mitigation banking and the challenges of implementing market-based approaches to environmental conservation.Market-based approaches to environmental conservation have been increa

How historical, social, and cultural forces shaped the psychedelic experience in midcentury America, from CIA LSD experiments the Harvard Psilocybin Project.Are psychedelics invaluable therapeutic med

An introduction to dimensional analysis, a method of scientific analysis used to investigate and simplify complex physical phenomena, demonstrated through a series of engaging examples.

The first comprehensive and detailed presentation of techniques for authenticating digital images.Photographs have been doctored since photography was invented. Dictators have erased people from photo

How solar could spark a clean-energy transition through transformative innovation—creative financing, revolutionary technologies, and flexible energy systems.Solar energy, once a niche application for

The story of the experimental zeitgeist in Eastern European art, seen through personal encounters, pioneering dialogues, collaborative projects, and cultural exchanges.Throughout the 1970s, a network

Quanta Magazine's stories of mathematical explorations show that “inspiration strikes willy-nilly,” revealing surprising solutions and exciting discoveries.These stories from Quanta Magazine map the r

Demystifying consciousness: how subjective experience can be explained by natural brain and evolutionary processes.Consciousness is often considered a mystery. How can the seemingly immaterial experie