Search and Classification Using Multiple Autonomous Vehicles

What makes WiFi faster at home than at a coffee shop? How does Google order search results? Why do Amazon, Netflix, and YouTube use fundamentally different rating and recommendation methods--and why d

In Roman Eyes, Jas Elsner seeks to understand the multiple ways that art in ancient Rome formulated the very conditions for its own viewing, and as a result was complicit in the construction of subjec

In Stranger in the Mirror, Robert Levine offers a provocative, wide-ranging, and entertaining scientific exploration of the most personal and important of all landscapes: the physical and psychologica

The P-NP problem is the most important open problem in computer science, if not all of mathematics. "The Golden Ticket" provides a nontechnical introduction to P-NP, its rich history, and its algorith

The Fourth Pig, originally published in 1936, is a wide-ranging and fascinating collection of fairy tales, poems, and ballads. Droll and sad, spirited and apprehensive, The Fourth Pig reflects the hop

A #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted. Most people are rather confident of their ability to recognize bullshit and to avoid being taken in by it. So the phenomenon has not aroused much deliberate concern. We have no clear understanding of what bullshit is, why there is so much of it, or what functions it serves. And we lack a conscientiously developed appreciation of what it means to us. In other words, as Harry Frankfurt writes, we have no theory. Frankfurt, one of the world's most influential moral philosophers, attempts to build such a theory here. With his characteristic combination of philosophical acuity, psychological insight, and wry humor, Frankfurt proceeds by exploring how bullshit and the related concept of humbug are distinct from lying. He argues that bullshitters misrepresent themselves to their a

A brand-new look at the life and music of renowned composer Erich Wolfgang KorngoldErich Wolfgang Korngold (1897-1957) was the last compositional prodigy to emerge from the Austro-German tradition of

A groundbreaking new theory of religionReligion remains an important influence in the world today, yet the social sciences are still not adequately equipped to understand and explain it. This book bui

Corruption corrodes all facets of the world's political and corporate life, yet until now there was no one book that explained how best to battle it. The Corruption Cure provides many of the required

The empires of the past were far-flung experiments in multinationalism and multiculturalism, and have much to teach us about navigating our own increasingly globalized and interconnected world. Until

The description for this book, City of Dreams: Dodger Stadium and the Birth of Modern Los Angeles, will be forthcoming.

The description for this book, The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century, will be forthcoming.

Marx's Inferno reconstructs the major arguments of Karl Marx's Capital and inaugurates a completely new reading of a seminal classic. Rather than simply a critique of classical political economy, Will

Until very recently, historians have looked at the past with the tools of the nineteenth century. But globalization has fundamentally altered our ways of knowing, and it is no longer possible to study

The Chinese invented gunpowder and began exploring its military uses as early as the 900s, four centuries before the technology passed to the West. But by the early 1800s, China had fallen so far behind the West in gunpowder warfare that it was easily defeated by Britain in the Opium War of 1839-42. What happened? In The Gunpowder Age, Tonio Andrade offers a compelling new answer, opening a fresh perspective on a key question of world history: why did the countries of western Europe surge to global importance starting in the 1500s while China slipped behind?Historians have long argued that gunpowder weapons helped Europeans establish global hegemony. Yet the inhabitants of what is today China not only invented guns and bombs but also, Andrade shows, continued to innovate in gunpowder technology through the early 1700s--much longer than previously thought. Why, then, did China become so vulnerable? Andrade argues that one significant reason is that it was out of practice fighting wars,

How has America's most expensive and progressive city helped its residents to live? Since the nineteenth century, the need for high-quality affordable housing has been one of New York City's most urge

This comprehensive field guide to the birds of South America covers all 1,952 passerine species to be found south of Panama, including offshore islands such as Trinidad, the Galapagos, and the Falklands, and the islands of the Scotia Arc leading to the Antarctic mainland. It features 197 stunning color plates and detailed species accounts that describe key identification features, habitat, songs, and calls. All plumages for each species are illustrated, including males, females, and juveniles. This easy-to-use guide is the essential travel companion for experienced birdwatchers and novice birders alike.Combines a clear format with a wealth of detailed informationFeatures 197 color plates that aid identificationCovers key identification features with information on habitat, songs, and callsIncludes a distribution map for each species

This is the first volume of a groundbreaking commentary on one of the most important works of ancient philosophy, the Enneads of Plotinus--a text that formed the basis of Neoplatonism and had a deep i

This concise book tells the story of the most important theological work of the Middle Ages, the vast Summa theologiae of Thomas Aquinas, which holds a unique place in Western religion and philosophy.

The ordinary atoms that make up the known universe--from our bodies and the air we breathe to the planets and stars--constitute only 5 percent of all matter and energy in the cosmos. The rest is known

Erich Auerbach (1892-1957), best known for his classic literary study Mimesis, is celebrated today as a founder of comparative literature, a forerunner of secular criticism, and a prophet of global li

This concise photographic field guide will help you identify any of the 100 or so day-flying moths found in Britain and Ireland. Combining stunning photographs, authoritative text, and an easy-to-use

This volume of Reiner Stach's acclaimed and definitive biography of Franz Kafka tells the story of the final years of the writer's life, from 1916 to 1924--a period during which the world Kafka had kn

One of the most important books of the twentieth century, Karl Popper's The Open Society and Its Enemies is an uncompromising defense of liberal democracy and a powerful attack on the intellectual ori

Leonhard Euler's polyhedron formula describes the structure of many objects--from soccer balls and gemstones to Buckminster Fuller's buildings and giant all-carbon molecules. Yet Euler's formula is so

Petrels, albatrosses, and storm-petrels are among the most beautiful yet least known of all the world's birds, living their lives at sea far from the sight of most people. Largely colored in shades of

The life of Nikos Kazantzakis--the author of Zorba the Greek and The Last Temptation of Christ--was as colorful and eventful as his fiction. And nowhere is his life revealed more fully or surprisingly

Agent-based modeling is a new technique for understanding how the dynamics of biological, social, and other complex systems arise from the characteristics and behaviors of the agents making up these s

Strategically located high above the Euphrates River between Syria and Mesopotamia, the city of Dura-Europos was founded around 300 BCE by one of the Macedonian generals who succeeded Alexander the Gr

Today complex numbers have such widespread practical use--from electrical engineering to aeronautics--that few people would expect the story behind their derivation to be filled with adventure and eni

In this sumptuously illustrated book, Joan Breton Connelly gives us the first comprehensive cultural history of priestesses in the ancient Greek world. Connelly presents the fullest and most vivid pic

Throughout history, rich and poor countries alike have been lending, borrowing, crashing--and recovering--their way through an extraordinary range of financial crises. Each time, the experts have chim

The Epicureans, Skeptics, and Stoics practiced philosophy not as a detached intellectual discipline, but as a worldly art of grappling with issues of daily and urgent human significance: the fear of d

If classical Lie groups preserve bilinear vector norms, what Lie groups preserve trilinear, quadrilinear, and higher order invariants? Answering this question from a fresh and original perspective, Pr

In the four centuries since its invention, the telescope has transformed how humans view the universe and their place in it. But what do most of us know about telescopes themselves--their history, how

For centuries, medicine aimed to treat abnormalities. But today normality itself is open to medical modification. Equipped with a new molecular understanding of bodies and minds, and new techniques fo

In Infinity and the Mind, Rudy Rucker leads an excursion to that stretch of the universe he calls the "Mindscape," where he explores infinity in all its forms: potential and actual, mathematical and p

Chuck Close--a man who describes himself as "an artist looking for trouble"--has for three decades consistently but variously challenged the accepted boundaries of the printmaking tradition. Published to accompany a retrospective of his prints opening at Blaffer Gallery and traveling to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and several additional museums around the country, this is the first comprehensive survey of Close's revolutionary prints. Featuring exquisite reproductions of the prints together with essays on Close's career and in-depth interviews with the artist and his master printmakers, the volume blends words and images to give readers unique insight into the creative process. The text highlights the intensely collaborative nature of Close's project and looks into the challenges posed by the unprecedented huge scale he prefers. Close may labor on a single print for as long as two years, working out aesthetic problems that might involve the retrieval of a centuries-old European meth

"W. H. Auden, poet and critic, will conduct a course on Shakespeare at the New School for Social Research beginning Wednesday. Mr. Auden has announced that in his course . . . he proposes to read all

One summer day in 1941, half of the Polish town of Jedwabne murdered the other half, 1,600 men, women, and children, all but seven of the town's Jews. Neighbors tells their story. This is a shocking,