Bøger i The MIT Press serien

An examination of the ways cyberspace is changing both the theory and the practice of international relations.

An interdisciplinary and quantitative account of human claims on the biosphere's stores of living matter, from prehistoric hunting to modern energy production.

These photographs of grain elevators in America, Germany, Belgium, and France are a major addition to the Bechers' ongoing documentation of the vanishing buildings that once defined the industrial landscape of Europe and America.

How the rise of globalization over the past two centuries helps explain the income gap between rich and poor countries today.

How, in the name of greater security, our current electronic surveillance policies are creating major security risks.

Polemics and reflections on how to bridge the gap between what architecture actually is and what architects want it to be.

The first full-scale attempt to analyze the relationship between science and society throughout history, from the perfection of the first flint hand ax to the construction of the hydrogen bomb.

An examination of collusive behavior: what it is, why it is profitable, how it is implemented, and how it might be detected.

A historical study of Chile's twin experiments with cybernetics and socialism, and what they tell us about the relationship of technology and politics.In Cybernetic Revolutionaries, Eden Medina tells the history of two intersecting utopian visions, one political and one technological. The first was Chile's experiment with peaceful socialist change under Salvador Allende; the second was the simultaneous attempt to build a computer system that would manage Chile's economy. Neither vision was fully realized—Allende's government ended with a violent military coup; the system, known as Project Cybersyn, was never completely implemented—but they hold lessons for today about the relationship between technology and politics.Drawing on extensive archival material and interviews, Medina examines the cybernetic system envisioned by the Chilean government—which was to feature holistic system design, decentralized management, human-computer interaction, a national telex network, near real-time control of the growing industrial sector, and modeling the behavior of dynamic systems. She also describes, and documents with photographs, the network's Star Trek-like operations room, which featured swivel chairs with armrest control panels, a wall of screens displaying data, and flashing red lights to indicate economic emergencies.Studying project Cybersyn today helps us understand not only the technological ambitions of a government in the midst of political change but also the limitations of the Chilean revolution. This history further shows how human attempts to combine the political and the technological with the goal of creating a more just society can open new technological, intellectual, and political possibilities. Technologies, Medina writes, are historical texts; when we read them we are reading history.

Bernard Salanie studies situations where competitive markets fail to achieve a collective optimum and the interventions used to remedy these so-called market failures.

The life and work of a scientist who spent his career crossing disciplinary boundaries-from experimental neurology to psychiatry to cybernetics to engineering.

How do media find an audience when there is an endless supply of content but a limited supply of public attention?

The social, political, and cultural consequences of attempts to cheat death by freezing life.

The first book on active matter, an emerging field focused on programming physical materials to assemble themselves, transform autonomously, and react to information.The past few decades brought a revolution in computer software and hardware; today we are on the cusp of a materials revolution. If yesterday we programmed computers and other machines, today we program matter itself. This has created new capabilities in design, computing, and fabrication, which allow us to program proteins and bacteria, to generate self-transforming wood products and architectural details, and to create clothing from "intelligent textiles” that grow themselves. This book offers essays and sample projects from the front lines of the emerging field of active matter.Active matter and programmable materials are at the intersection of science, art, design, and engineering, with applications in fields from biology and computer science to architecture and fashion. These essays contextualize current work and explore recent research. Sample projects, generously illustrated in color, show the range of possibilities envisioned by their makers. Contributors explore the design of active material at scales from nano to micro, kilo, and even planetary. They investigate processes of self-assembly at a microscopic level; test new materials that can sense and actuate themselves; and examine the potential of active matter in the built environment and in living and artificial systems. Active Matter is an essential guide to a field that could shape the future of design.

Why small business is not the basis of American prosperity, not the foundation of American democracy, and not the champion of job creation.

Ancient history, midcentury modernism, Cinemascope, humanism and monumentality, totalitarianism and democracy: transformations in American culture and architecture.In Flintstone Modernism, Jeffrey Lieber investigates transformations in postwar American architecture and culture. He considers sword-and-sandal films of the 1950s and 1960s—including forgotten gems such as Land of the Pharaohs, Helen of Troy, and The Egyptian—and their protean, ideologically charged representations of totalitarianism and democracy. He connects Cinemascope and other widescreen technologies to the architectural "glass curtain wall,” arguing that both represented the all-encompassing eye of American Enterprise. Lieber reminds us that until recently midcentury modern American architecture was reviled by architectural historians but celebrated by design enthusiasts, just as sword-and-sandal epics are alternately hailed as cult classics or derided as camp.Lieber's argument is absorbing, exuberant, and comprehensive. Following Hannah Arendt, who looked for analogies in the classical past in order to understand midcentury's cultural crisis, Lieber terms the postwar reckoning of ancient civilizations and modern ideals "Flintstone modernism.” In new assessments of the major architects of the period, Lieber uncovers the cultural and political fantasies that animated or impinged on their work, offering surprising insights into Gordon Bunshaft's commonsense classicism; Eero Saarinen's architectural narratives of ersatz empire and Marcel Breuer's mania for Egyptian monoliths; and Edward Durell Stone's romantic "flights of fancy” and Philip Johnson's wicked brand of cynical cultural and sociopolitical critique.Deftly moving among architecture, film, philosophy, and politics, Lieber illuminates the artifice that resulted from the conjunction of high style and mass-cultural values in postwar America.

A comprehensive introduction to optimization with a focus on practical algorithms for the design of engineering systems.This book offers a comprehensive introduction to optimization with a focus on practical algorithms. The book approaches optimization from an engineering perspective, where the objective is to design a system that optimizes a set of metrics subject to constraints. Readers will learn about computational approaches for a range of challenges, including searching high-dimensional spaces, handling problems where there are multiple competing objectives, and accommodating uncertainty in the metrics. Figures, examples, and exercises convey the intuition behind the mathematical approaches. The text provides concrete implementations in the Julia programming language. Topics covered include derivatives and their generalization to multiple dimensions; local descent and first- and second-order methods that inform local descent; stochastic methods, which introduce randomness into the optimization process; linear constrained optimization, when both the objective function and the constraints are linear; surrogate models, probabilistic surrogate models, and using probabilistic surrogate models to guide optimization; optimization under uncertainty; uncertainty propagation; expression optimization; and multidisciplinary design optimization. Appendixes offer an introduction to the Julia language, test functions for evaluating algorithm performance, and mathematical concepts used in the derivation and analysis of the optimization methods discussed in the text. The book can be used by advanced undergraduates and graduate students in mathematics, statistics, computer science, any engineering field, (including electrical engineering and aerospace engineering), and operations research, and as a reference for professionals.

An argument that—despite dramatic advances in the field—artificial intelligence is nowhere near developing systems that are genuinely intelligent.In this provocative book, Brian Cantwell Smith argues that artificial intelligence is nowhere near developing systems that are genuinely intelligent. Second wave AI, machine learning, even visions of third-wave AI: none will lead to human-level intelligence and judgment, which have been honed over millennia. Recent advances in AI may be of epochal significance, but human intelligence is of a different order than even the most powerful calculative ability enabled by new computational capacities. Smith calls this AI ability "reckoning,” and argues that it does not lead to full human judgment—dispassionate, deliberative thought grounded in ethical commitment and responsible action.Taking judgment as the ultimate goal of intelligence, Smith examines the history of AI from its first-wave origins ("good old-fashioned AI,” or GOFAI) to such celebrated second-wave approaches as machine learning, paying particular attention to recent advances that have led to excitement, anxiety, and debate. He considers each AI technology's underlying assumptions, the conceptions of intelligence targeted at each stage, and the successes achieved so far. Smith unpacks the notion of intelligence itself—what sort humans have, and what sort AI aims at. Smith worries that, impressed by AI's reckoning prowess, we will shift our expectations of human intelligence. What we should do, he argues, is learn to use AI for the reckoning tasks at which it excels while we strengthen our commitment to judgment, ethics, and the world.

Explorations of the many ways of being material in the digital age.In his oracular 1995 book Being Digital, Nicholas Negroponte predicted that social relations, media, and commerce would move from the realm of "atoms to bits”—that human affairs would be increasingly untethered from the material world. And yet in 2019, an age dominated by the digital, we have not quite left the material world behind. In Being Material, artists and technologists explore the relationship of the digital to the material, demonstrating that processes that seem wholly immaterial function within material constraints. Digital technologies themselves, they remind us, are material things—constituted by atoms of gold, silver, silicon, copper, tin, tungsten, and more. The contributors explore five modes of being material: programmable, wearable, livable, invisible, and audible. Their contributions take the form of reports, manifestos, philosophical essays, and artist portfolios, among other configurations. The book's cover merges the possibilities of paper with those of the digital, featuring a bookmark-like card that, when "seen” by a smartphone, generates graphic arrangements that unlock films, music, and other dynamic content on the book's website. At once artist's book, digitally activated object, and collection of scholarship, this book both demonstrates and chronicles the many ways of being material.ContributorsChristina Agapakis, Azra Aksamija, Sandy Alexandre, Dewa Alit, George Barbastathis, Maya Beiser, Marie-Pier Boucher, Benjamin H. Bratton, Hussein Chalayan, Jim Cybulski, Tal Danino, Deborah G. Douglas, Arnold Dreyblatt, M. Amah Edoh, Michelle Tolini Finamore, Team Foldscope and Global Foldscope community, Ben Fry, Victor Gama, Stefan Helmreich, Hyphen-Labs, Leila Kinney, Rebecca Konte, Winona LaDuke, Brendan Landis, Grace Leslie, Bill Maurer, Lucy McRae, Tom Özden-Schilling, Trevor Paglen, Lisa Parks, Nadya Peek, Claire Pentecost, Manu Prakash,Casey Reas, Pawel Romanczuk, Natasha D. Schüll, Nick Shapiro, Skylar Tibbits, Rebecca Uchill, Evan ZiporynBook Design: E Roon KangElectronics, interactions, and product designer: Marcelo Coelho

A self-contained introduction to abstract interpretation-based static analysis, an essential resource for students, developers, and users.Static program analysis, or static analysis, aims to discover semantic properties of programs without running them. It plays an important role in all phases of development, including verification of specifications and programs, the synthesis of optimized code, and the refactoring and maintenance of software applications. This book offers a self-contained introduction to static analysis, covering the basics of both theoretical foundations and practical considerations in the use of static analysis tools. By offering a quick and comprehensive introduction for nonspecialists, the book fills a notable gap in the literature, which until now has consisted largely of scientific articles on advanced topics.The text covers the mathematical foundations of static analysis, including semantics, semantic abstraction, and computation of program invariants; more advanced notions and techniques, including techniques for enhancing the cost-accuracy balance of analysis and abstractions for advanced programming features and answering a wide range of semantic questions; and techniques for implementing and using static analysis tools. It begins with background information and an intuitive and informal introduction to the main static analysis principles and techniques. It then formalizes the scientific foundations of program analysis techniques, considers practical aspects of implementation, and presents more advanced applications. The book can be used as a textbook in advanced undergraduate and graduate courses in static analysis and program verification, and as a reference for users, developers, and experts.

A cultural history of gigantism in architecture and digital culture, from the Eiffel Tower to the World Trade Center.

This advanced text introduces the principles of noncooperative game theory in a direct and uncomplicated style that will acquaint students with the broad spectrum of the field while highlighting and explaining what they need to know at any given point.This advanced text introduces the principles of noncooperative game theory—including strategic form games, Nash equilibria, subgame perfection, repeated games, and games of incomplete information—in a direct and uncomplicated style that will acquaint students with the broad spectrum of the field while highlighting and explaining what they need to know at any given point. The analytic material is accompanied by many applications, examples, and exercises. The theory of noncooperative games studies the behavior of agents in any situation where each agent's optimal choice may depend on a forecast of the opponents' choices. "Noncooperative" refers to choices that are based on the participant's perceived selfinterest. Although game theory has been applied to many fields, Fudenberg and Tirole focus on the kinds of game theory that have been most useful in the study of economic problems. They also include some applications to political science. The fourteen chapters are grouped in parts that cover static games of complete information, dynamic games of complete information, static games of incomplete information, dynamic games of incomplete information, and advanced topics.

The Theory of Industrial Organization is the first primary text to treat the new industrial organization at the advanced-undergraduate and graduate level. Rigorously analytical and filled with exercises coded to indicate level of difficulty, it provides a unified and modern treatment of the field with accessible models that are simplified to highlight robust economic ideas while working at an intuitive level. To aid students at different levels, each chapter is divided into a main text and supplementary section containing more advanced material. Each chapter opens with elementary models and builds on this base to incorporate current research in a coherent synthesis. Tirole begins with a background discussion of the theory of the firm.In Part I he develops the modern theory of monopoly, addressing single product and multi product pricing, static and intertemporal price discrimination, quality choice, reputation, and vertical restraints. In Part II, Tirole takes up strategic interaction between firms, starting with a novel treatment of the Bertrand-Cournot interdependent pricing problem. He studies how capacity constraints, repeated interaction, product positioning, advertising, and asymmetric information affect competition or tacit collusion. He then develops topics having to do with long term competition, including barriers to entry, contestability, exit, and research and development. He concludes with a "game theory user's manual" and a section of review exercises.Important Notice: The digital edition of this book is missing some of the images found in the physical edition.