A concise introduction to the history and methods of espionage, illustrated by spy stories from antiquity to todays high-tech world.
Espionage is one of the most secret of human activities. It is also, as the popularity of spy stories suggests, one of the most intriguing. This book pulls the veil back on the real world of espionage, revealing how spying actually works. In a refreshingly clear, concise manner, Kristie Macrakis guides readers through the shadowy world of espionage, from the language and practice of spycraft to its role in international politics, its bureaucratic underpinnings, and its transformation in light of modern technology. Espionage is a mirror of society and human foibles with the added cloak of secrecy and deception. Accordingly,
A field-defining work that demonstrates how architects are breaking with professional conventions to advance spatial justice and design more equitable buildings and cities.
As state violence, the pandemic, and environmental collapse have exposed systemic inequities, architects and urbanists have been pushed to confront how their actions contribute to racism and climate crisis--and how they can effect change. Establishing an ethics of spatial justice to lead architecture forward, Dana Cuff shows why the discipline requires critical examination--in relation to not only buildings and the capital required to realize them but privilege, power, aesthetics, and sociality. That is, it requires a reevaluation of architecture's fundamental tenets.
Organized around projects and topics, Architectures of Spatial Justice is a compelling blend of theory, history, and applied practice that focuses on two foundational conditions of architecture: its relation to the public and its dependence on capital. The book draws on studies of architectural projects from around the world, with instructive case studies from Chile, Mexico, Japan, and the United States that focus in particular on urban centers, where architecture is most directly engaged with social justice issues.
Emerging from more than two decades of the author's own project-based research, Architectures of Spatial Justice examines ethically driven practices that break with professional conventions to correct long-standing inequities in the built environment, uncovering architecture's limits--and its potential.
Here is the world's most famous master plan for seizing and holding power. Astonishing in its candor The Prince even today remains a disturbingly realistic and prophetic work on what it takes to be a prince . . . a king . . . a president. When, in 1512, Machiavelli was removed from his post in his beloved Florence, he resolved to set down a treatise on leadership that was practical, not idealistic. In The Prince he envisioned would be unencumbered by ordinary ethical and moral values; his prince would be man and beast, fox and lion. Today, this small sixteenth-century masterpiece has become essential reading for every student of government, and is the ultimate book on power politics.
B>An argument against the ideology of domesticity that separates work from home; lavishly illustrated, with architectural proposals for alternate approaches to working and living.br>;/b>br>br>Despite the increasing numbers of people who now work from home, in the popular imagination the home is still understood as the sanctuary of privacy and intimacy. Living is conceptually and definitively separated from work. This book argues against such a separation, countering the prevailing ideology of domesticity with a series of architectural projects that illustrate alternative approaches. Less a monograph than a treatise, richly illustrated, the book combines historical research and design proposals to reenvision home as a cooperative structure in which it is possible to live and work and in which labor is socialized beyond the family--freeing inhabitants from the sense of property and the burden of domestic labor.;br>;br>The projects aim to move the house beyond the dichotomous logic of male/female, husband/wife, breadwinner/housewife, and private/public. They include the reinvention of single-room occupancy as a new model for affordable housing; the reimagining of the simple tower-and-plinth prototype as host to a multiplicity of work activities and enlivening street life; and a plan for a modular, adaptable structure meant to house a temporary dweller. All of these design projects conceive of the house not as a commodity, the form of which is determined by its exchange value, but as an infrastructure defined by its use value.br>;br>br>br>;
B>A philosophical guide to passengerhood, with reflections on time, space, existence, boredom, our sense of self, and our sense of senses./b>br>br>While there are entire bookstore sections--and even entire bookstores--devoted to travel, there have been few books on the universal experience of being a passenger. With this book, philosopher Michael Marder fills the gap, offering a philosophical guide to passengerhood. He takes readers from ticketing and preboarding (preface and introduction) through a series of stops and detours (reflections on topics including time, space, existence, boredom, our sense of self, and our sense of senses) to destination and disembarking (conclusion).;br>;br>Marder finds that the experience of passengers in the twenty-first century is experience itself, stretching well beyond railroad tracks and airplane flight patterns. On his journey through passengerhood, he considers, among many other things, passenger togetherness, which goes hand in hand with passenger loneliness; flyover country and the idea of placeness; and Descartes in an airplane seat. He tells us that the word metaphor means transport in Greek and discusses the gray area between literalness and metaphoricity; explains the connection between reading and riding; and ponders the difference between destination and destiny. Finally, a Beckettian disembarking: you might not be able to disembark, yet you must disembark. After the voyage in the world ends, the journey of understanding begins.
B>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./b>br>br>Were 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 weve lost from our technological past, something thats not there in our digital present. Were nostalgic for what we remember indistinctly as somehow more real, more human. Surveying some of the major developments of analog technology, Hassan shows us whats been lost with the digital.br>;br>Along the way, he discusses the appeal of the 2011 silent, black-and-white Oscar-winning film The Artisu>t/u>; the revival of the non-e-book book; the early mechanical clocks that enforced prayer and worship times; and the programmable loom. He describes the effect of the typewriter on Nietzsches productivity, the pivotal invention of the telegraph, and the popularity of the first televisions despite their iffy picture quality.br>The transition to digital is marked by the downgrading of human participation in the human-technology relationship. We have unwittingly unmoored ourselves, Hassan warns, from the anchors of analog technology and the natural world. Our analog nostalgia is for those ancient aspects of who and what we are.
A short, accessible primer on human memory, its workings, feats, and flaws, by two leading psychological researchers.
Why do we vividly recall a traumatic childhood event but forget where we left our keys five minutes ago? How can a scent take us back fifty years while a colleagues name eludes us? In this compact introduction, two leading psychological researchers describe memory--how it works and why it sometimes doesnt; how it can be tricked, trained, or improved; and what changes with time.
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In a manner as engaging as it is informative, Fergus Craik and Larry Jacoby explain the strengths and weaknesses of memory. They trace evolving ideas about memorys function and present a down-to-earth account of modern views. Citing the latest research, they outline the processes for acquiring and retrieving memories and explore the distinction between conscious and unconscious processes. With insights into the workings of the brain, Craik and Jacoby also provide a succinct account of feats and failures of memory, emotion and false memories, and the effects of aging. Their book draws a clear picture, at once broad and concise, of current and classical views of memory, that most essential and often mysterious feature of human life. ;
Cutting through the hype, a practical guide to using artificial intelligence for business benefits and competitive advantage. In The AI Advantage , Thomas Davenport offers a guide to using artificial intelligence in business. He describes what technologies are available and how companies can use them for business benefits and competitive advantage. He cuts through the hype of the AI craze--remember when it seemed plausible that IBM''s Watson could cure cancer?--to explain how businesses can put artificial intelligence to work now, in the real world. His key recommendation: don''t go for the "moonshot" (curing cancer, or synthesizing all investment knowledge); look for the "low-hanging fruit" to make your company more efficient. Davenport explains that the business value AI offers is solid rather than sexy or splashy. AI will improve products and processes and make decisions better informed--important but largely invisible tasks. AI technologies won''t replace human workers but augment their capabilities, with smart machines to work alongside smart people. AI can automate structured and repetitive work; provide extensive analysis of data through machine learning ("analytics on steroids"), and engage with customers and employees via chatbots and intelligent agents. Companies should experiment with these technologies and develop their own expertise. Davenport describes the major AI technologies and explains how they are being used, reports on the AI work done by large commercial enterprises like Amazon and Google, and outlines strategies and steps to becoming a cognitive corporation. This book provides an invaluable guide to the real-world future of business AI. A book in the Management on the Cutting Edge series, published in cooperation with MIT Sloan Management Review .
B>An examination of the contemporary medicalization of death and dying that calls us to acknowledge instead death''s existential and emotional realities./b>br>br>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.br>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 death as a biological dysfunction that needs fixing; describe the hospice movement, as well as movements for palliative care and aid in dying, and why they failed to influence mainstream medicine; consider our reluctance to have end-of-life conversations; and investigate the commodification of medicine and the business of dying. To help patients die in accordance with their values, they say, those who care for the dying should focus less on delaying death by any means possible and more on being present with the dying on their journey.
B>A collection that tracks the astonishing impact of one vernacular aesthetic category--the cute--on postwar and contemporary art./b>br>br>The Cute tracks the astonishing impact of a single aesthetic category on post-war and contemporary art, and on the vast range of cultural practices and discourses on which artists draw. From robots and cat videos to ice cream socials, The Cute explores the ramifications of an aesthetic of or about minorness--or what is perceived to be diminutive, subordinate, and above all, unthreatening--on the shifting forms and contents of art today. This anthology is the first of its kind to show how contemporary artists have worked on and transformed the cute, in ways that not only complexify its meaning, but also reshape their own artistic practices.br>;br>Artists surveyed includebr>Peggy Ahwesh, Cosima Von Bonin, Nayland Blake, Paul Chan, Adrian Howells, Juliana Huxtable, Larry Johnson, Mike Kelley, Dean Kenning, Wyndham Lewis, Jeff Koons, Sean-Kierre Lyons, Mammalian Diving Reflex, Alake Shilling, Annette Messager, Mariko Mori, Takashi Murakami, Charlemagne Palestine, David Robbins, Mika Rottenberg, Allen Ruppersberg, Jack Smith, Kara Walker, Andy Warhol, Yoshitomo Narabr>;br>Writers includebr>Sasha Archibald, Roland Barthes, Leigh Claire La Berge, Lauren Berlant, Ian Bogost, Jennifer Doyle, Lee Edelman, Adrienne Edwards, Rosalind Galt, E.H. Gombrich, Lewis Gordon, Rosmarie Garland Thompson, Stephen Jay Gould, Wayne Koestenbaum, Angelik Vizcarrondo-Laboy, Lori Merish, John Morreall, Juliane Rebentisch, Frances Richard, Carrie Rickey, Friedrich Schiller, Peter Schjeldahl, Kanako Shiokawa, Susan Stewart, Angelik Vizcarrondo-Laboy, Kevin Young
Aldo Rossi, a practicing architect and leader of the Italian architectural movement La Tendenza , is also one of the most influential theorists writing today. The Architecture of the City is his major work of architectural and urban theory. In part a protest against functionalism and the Modern Movement, in part an attempt to restore the craft of architecture to its position as the only valid object of architectural study, and in part an analysis of the rules and forms of the city''s construction, the book has become immensely popular among architects and design students.
B>A comprehensive update of a widely used textbook, with new material on matchings in bipartite graphs, online algorithms, machine learning, and other topics.br>;/b>br>br>Some books on algorithms are rigorous but incomplete; others cover masses of material but lack rigor. u>Introduction to Algorithms/u> uniquely combines rigor and comprehensiveness. It covers a broad range of algorithms in depth, yet makes their design and analysis accessible to all levels of readers. Since the publication of the first edition, Introduction to Algorithms has become a widely used text in universities worldwide as well as the standard reference for professionals. This fourth edition has been updated throughout, with new chapters on matchings in bipartite graphs, online algorithms, and machine learning, and new material on such topics as solving recurrence equations, hash tables, potential functions, and suffix arrays.br>;br>Each chapter is relatively self-contained, presenting an algorithm, a design technique, an application area, or a related topic, and can be used as a unit of study. The algorithms are described in English and in a pseudocode designed to be readable by anyone who has done a little programming. The explanations have been kept elementary without sacrificing depth of coverage or mathematical rigor. The fourth edition has 140 new exercises and 22 new problems, and color has been added to improve visual presentations. The writing has been revised throughout, and made clearer, more personal, and gender neutral. The books website offers supplemental material.;
B>An accessible introduction to the study of language in the brain, covering language processing, language acquisition, literacy, and language disorders./b>br>br>Neurolinguistics, the study of language in the brain,;describes the anatomical structures (networks of neurons in the brain) and physiological processes (ways for these networks to be active) that allow humans to learn and use one or more languages. It draws on neuroscience, linguistics--particularly theoretical linguistics--and other disciplines. In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series,;Giosuè Baggio;offers an accessible introduction to the fundamentals of neurolinguistics, covering;language processing, language acquisition, literacy, and speech and language disorders.br>;br>Baggio first surveys the evolution of the field, describing discoveries by Paul Broca, Carl Wernicke, Noam Chomsky, and others. He discusses mapping language in brain time and brain space and the constraints of neurolinguistic models. Considering language acquisition, he explains that a child is never a blank slate: infants and young children are only able to acquire specific aspects of language in specific stages of cognitive development. He addresses the neural consequences of bilingualism; literacy, discussing how forms of visual language in the brain differ from forms of auditory language; aphasia and the need to understand language disorders in behavioral, functional, and neuroanatomical terms;;neurogenetics of language; and the neuroethology of language, tracing the origins of the neural and behavioral building blocks of human linguistic communication to;the evolution of avian, mammalian, and primate brains.br>;
B>How we can create artificial intelligence with broad, robust common sense rather than narrow, specialized expertise./b>br>br>It’s sometime in the not-so-distant future, and you send your fully autonomous self-driving car to the store to pick up your grocery order. The car is endowed with as much capability as an artificial intelligence agent can have, programmed to drive better than you do. But when the car encounters a traffic light stuck on red, it just sits there—indefinitely. Its obstacle-avoidance, lane-following, and route-calculation capacities are all irrelevant; it fails to act because it lacks the common sense of a human driver, who would quickly figure out what’s happening and find a workaround. In Machines like Us, Ron Brachman and Hector Levesque—both leading experts in AI—consider what it would take to create machines with common sense rather than just the specialized expertise of today’s AI systems. br> br>Using the stuck traffic light and other relatable examples, Brachman and Levesque offer an accessible account of how common sense might be built into a machine. They analyze common sense in humans, explain how AI over the years has focused mainly on expertise, and suggest ways to endow an AI system with both common sense and effective reasoning. Finally, they consider the critical issue of how we can trust an autonomous machine to make decisions, identifying two fundamental requirements for trustworthy autonomous AI systems: having reasons for doing what they do, and being able to accept advice. Both in the end are dependent on having common sense.
B>A new version of the classic and widely used text with implementations in JavaScript./b>br>br>Ever since the publication of its first edition in 1984, 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 edition has been adapted for JavaScript.br> br>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 revision. Chapter four offers substantial new material, in particular an introduction to the notion of program parsing. The JavaScript subset used this edition is designed to be just expressive enough for presenting the ideas of SICP with a conciseness and precision that matches the original. A JavaScript sublanguage and function library has been designed for each chapter, and a web-based programming environment, Source Academy, has been developed to strengthen the students’ adherence to the chosen sublanguage.
B>A guide for research economists: how to write papers, give talks, navigate the peer-review process, advise students, and more.br>;/b>br>br>Newly minted research economists are equipped with a PhDs worth of technical and scientific expertise but often lack some of the practical tools necessary for doing economics. With this book, economics professor Marc Bellemare breaks down the components of doing research economics and examines each in turn: communicating your research findings in a paper; presenting your findings to other researchers by giving a talk; submitting your paper to a peer-reviewed journal; funding your research program through grants (necessary more often than not for all social scientists); knowing what kind of professional service opportunities to pursue; and advising PhD, masters, and undergraduate students.;br>;br>With the increasing data availability and decreasing computational costs, economics has taken an empirical turn in recent decades. Academic economics is no longer the domain only of the theoretical; many young economists choose applied fields when the time comes to specialize. Yet there is no manual for surviving and thriving as a professional research economist. Doing Economics fills that gap, offering an essential guide for research economists at any stage of their careers.br>;
B>An analysis of wandering within different game worlds, viewed through the lenses of work, colonialism, gender, and death./b>br>br>Wandering in games can be a theme, a formal mode, an aesthetic metaphor, or a player action. It can mean walking, escaping, traversing, meandering, or returning. In this book, game studies scholar Melissa Kagen introduces the concept of wandering games, exploring the uses of wandering in a variety of game worlds. She shows how the much-derided Walking Simulator--a term that began as an insult, a denigration of games that are less violent, less task-oriented, or less difficult to complete--semi-accidentally tapped into something brilliant: the vast heritage and intellectual history of the concept of walking in fiction, philosophy, pilgrimage, performance, and protest.br>;br>Kagen examines wandering in a series of games that vary widely in terms of genre, mechanics, themes, player base, studio size, and funding, giving close readings to Return of the Obra Dinn, Eastshade, Ritual of the Moon, 80 Days, Heavens Vault, Death Stranding, and The Last of Us Part II. Exploring the connotations of wandering within these different game worlds, she considers how ideologies of work, gender, colonialism, and death inflect the ways we wander through digital spaces. Overlapping and intersecting, each provides a multifaceted lens through which to understand what wandering does, lacks, implies, and offers. Kagens account will attune game designers, players, and scholars to the myriad possibilities of the wandering ludic body.
B>A guide to the ethical questions that arise from our use of industrial robots, robot companions, self-driving cars, and other robotic devices./b>br>br>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.br>;br>Coeckelbergh examines industrial robots and their potential to take over tasks from humans; social robots and possible risks to privacy; and robots in health care and their effect on quality of care. He considers whether a machine can be moral, or have morality built in; how we ascribe moral status; and if machines should be allowed to make decisions about life and death. When we discuss robot ethics from a philosophical angle, Coeckelbergh argues, robots can function as mirrors for reflecting on the human. Robot ethics is more than applied ethics; it is a way of doing philosophy.
An argument that love requires the courage to accept self-negation for the sake of discovering the Other. Byung-Chul Han is one of the most widely read philosophers in Europe today, a member of the new generation of German thinkers that includes Markus Gabriel and Armen Avanessian. In The Agony of Eros, a bestseller in Germany, Han considers the threat to love and desire in today''s society. For Han, love requires the courage to accept self-negation for the sake of discovering the Other. In a world of fetishized individualism and technologically mediated social interaction, it is the Other that is eradicated, not the self. In today''s increasingly narcissistic society, we have come to look for love and desire within the "inferno of the same." Han offers a survey of the threats to Eros, drawing on a wide range of sources--Lars von Trier''s film Melancholia, Wagner''s Tristan und Isolde, Fifty Shades of Grey , Michel Foucault (providing a scathing critique of Foucault''s valorization of power), Martin Buber, Hegel, Baudrillard, Flaubert, Barthes, Plato, and others. Han considers the "pornographication" of society, and shows how pornography profanes eros; addresses capitalism''s leveling of essential differences; and discusses the politics of eros in today''s "burnout society." To be dead to love, Han argues, is to be dead to thought itself. Concise in its expression but unsparing in its insight, The Agony of Eros is an important and provocative entry in Han''s ongoing analysis of contemporary society. This remarkable essay, an intellectual experience of the first order, affords one of the best ways to gain full awareness of and join in one of the most pressing struggles of the day: the defense, that is to say--as Rimbaud desired it--the "reinvention" of love. --from the foreword by Alain Badiou
An overview of recycling as an activity and a process, following different materials through the waste stream. Is there a point to recycling? Is recycling even good for the environment? In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Finn Arne Jørgensen answers (drumroll, please): it depends. From a technical point of view, recycling is a series of processes--collecting, sorting, processing, manufacturing. Recycling also has a cultural component; at its core, recycling is about transformation and value, turning material waste into something useful--plastic bags into patio furniture, plastic bottles into T-shirts. Jørgensen offers an accessible and engaging overview of recycling as an activity and as a process at the intersection of the material and the ideological. Jørgensen follows a series of materials as they move back and forth between producer and consumer, continually transforming in form and value, in a never-ceasing journey toward becoming waste. He considers organic waste and cultural contamination; the history of recyclable writing surfaces from papyrus to newsprint; discarded clothing as it moves from the the Global North to the Global South; the shifting fate of glass bottles; the efficiency of aluminum recycling; the many types of plastic and the difficulties of informed consumer choice; e-waste and technological obsolescence; and industrial waste. Finally, re-asking the question posed by John Tierney in an infamous 1996 New York Times article, "is recycling garbage?" Jørgensen argues that recycling is necessary--as both symbolic action and physical activity that has a tangible effect on the real world.
B>The history of hunting, from Stone Age hunter-gatherers to todays sport hunters./b>br>br>Hunting has a long history, beginning with our hominid ancestors. The invention of the spear allowed early humans to graduate from scavenging to actual hunting. The famous cave paintings at Lascaux show a meticulous knowledge of animal behavior and anatomy that only a hunter would have. This volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series traces the evolution of hunting, from Stone Age hunting and gathering to todays regulated sport hunting.;br>;br>Humans have been hunting since we became human--but did hunting make us human? The authors consider and question the hunting hypothesis of human origins, noting that according to this theory, hunting meant hunting by men. They explore hunting in the Stone Age and how, beginning some ten thousand years ago, the spread of agriculture led to the emergence of empires and attempts by elites to monopolize hunting. They examine the democratization of hunting in the American colonies and how hunters decimated, but then, in the twentieth century, rallied to save game animals from extinction. They describe how some European and postcolonial societies have managed wildlife and hunting, consider the difficulties of living with abundant wildlife--even as many nongame species are disappearing--and trace the implications of the increasing participation of women in hunting for the future of hunting.;