Bøger udgivet af MIT Press Ltd

"Through a social history of the Tor network (often known as the "Dark Web"), this book develops a rich and novel approach to understanding privacy technologies and their implication in crime, harm, control, and resistance"--

"A nuanced, science-based understanding of the creative mind, one that punctures many (but not all) of the standard myths that obscure this perennial topic"--

Exploring architecture as a form of concealment and obfuscation in engendering new ways of understanding, conceptualizing, and reshaping the world.Architecture is the perfect form of camouflage. As buildings recede into the background of everyday life, the myriad forces that shape our natural, social, and political landscapes hide in plain sight. Embedded within the spatial and material organizations of the built environment are ideas of value, hierarchy, and control that tilt the ground and influence perception in the name of endless competing interests.Operating across multiple scales and mediums, architectural camouflage gives familiar form to obscure objectives. Design transforms and encodes our shared environments, from domestic domains to digital territories, through its material practices, aesthetics, and discourses. Immanent in the periphery, architecture’s images are internalized as forms for understanding and reshaping the world. Camouflage, in turn, dwells in the architecture of our collective subconscious.Latent within architecture’s deceptions is a profound capacity to reflect the elusive intentions and surreal ambiguities of our ecological entanglements. In masking hierarchies and shifting sensitivities to what escapes perception, architecture can engender vital questions around the agency and significance of its world-making practices. Mediating with and within the background, architecture can awaken new modes of attention to material and social layers previously unimagined or hidden and engage directly with the mirrored frameworks that define reality.This issue of Perspecta considers the complexities and potentialities of architectural concealment, obfuscation, and mimicry; of the power inherent in architecture’s expanding capacity as media. In the veiled extents of our physical and digital worlds, what is still not found?ContributorsAPRDELESP and Xavier Nueno Guitart, Ashley Bigham and Erik Herrmann, Esther M. Choi, feminist architecture collaborative, Marianela D’Aprile and Douglas Spencer, Theo Deutinger and Christopher Clarkson, DESIGN EARTH, David Freeland and Brennan Buck, Linda Gordon, Noah Kalina, Dana Karwas, Andrew Economos Miller, M.C. Overholt and Alex Whee Kim, Trevor Paglen, Lukas Pauer, Nina Rappaport, David Sadighian, Matthew Soules, Jerome Tryon, Michael Young

"Critical analysis of the convergence of global crises facing humanity and their implications for our planetary future"--

On the fiftieth anniversary of Dungeons & Dragons, a collection of essays that explores and celebrates the game’s legacy and its tremendous impact on gaming and popular culture.In 2024, the enormously influential tabletop role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons—also known as D&D—celebrates its fiftieth anniversary. To mark the occasion, editors Premeet Sidhu, Marcus Carter, and José Zagal have assembled an edited collection that celebrates and reflects on important parts of the game’s past, present, and future. Each chapter in Fifty Years of Dungeons & Dragons explores why the nondigital game is more popular than ever—with sales increasing 33 percent during the COVID-19 pandemic, despite worldwide lockdowns—and offers readers the opportunity to critically reflect on their own experiences, perceptions, and play of D&D.Fifty Years of Dungeons & Dragons draws on fascinating research and insight from expert scholars in the field, including: Gary Alan Fine, whose 1983 book Shared Fantasy remains a canonical text in game studies; Jon Peterson, celebrated D&D historian; Daniel Justice, Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Literature and Expressive Culture; and numerous leading and emerging scholars from the growing discipline of game studies, including Amanda Cote, Esther MacCallum-Stewart, and Aaron Trammell. The chapters cover a diverse range of topics—from D&D’s adoption in local contexts and classrooms and by queer communities to speculative interpretations of what D&D might look like in one hundred years—that aim to deepen readers’ understanding of the game.

"This book argues that bibliography is the foundation of information science, an infrastructure with the power to address many of the most challenging issues in the field. Bibliographers establish what has been presented to us as records of what has been known, experienced, and desired, and they are responsible for assessing and safeguarding what has arrived in the present and for reproducing what has been deemed worthy to be made available elsewhere: the data of science, the expressions of culture, and the records of personal witness"--

"A critique of how data is used in educational settings, and a demonstration of how data can play a more just role in research and practice when approached through a broader spectrum of anonymity"--

"With satirical wit and philosophical rigor, Higgins critiques the empty rhetoric of the contemporary university, and articulates a vision of what substantive formative education could be"--

"A deep dive into a masterwork, Building SimCity analyzes the history, reception, and design of Will Wright's seminal simulation game, and locates SimCity-alongside Maxis, its developer/publisher-within the larger history of simulation, computing, and games"--

"A collection of essays from the Center for Science and the Imagination that combines theory and practice for a critical assesment of the transmedia landscape"--

"Rosenbaum explains at an advanced undergrad level, the core mathematical and computational models of neurons and networks of neurons, focusing primarily on neurons in the cerebral cortex"--

"An opinionated history of neuroscience, which argues that--due to the brain's complexity--neuroscientific theories have only captured partial truths, and therefore "neurophilosophy" is unlikely to be achieved"--

"This book addresses the need for scientists to understand the framework and approach in large science projects, both from the technical project management side as well as the sociology and governance of large science collaborations"--

A novel, interdisciplinary exploration of the relative contributions of rigidity and flexibility in the adoption, maintenance, and evolution of technical traditions.Techniques can either be used in rigid, stereotypical ways or in flexibly adaptive ways, or in some combination of the two. The Evolution of Techniques, edited by Mathieu Charbonneau, addresses the impacts of both flexibility and rigidity on how techniques are used, transformed, and reconstructed, at varying social and temporal scales. The multidisciplinary contributors demonstrate the important role of the varied learning contexts and social configurations involved in the transmission, use, and evolution of techniques. They explore the diversity of cognitive, behavioral, sociocultural, and ecological mechanisms that promote and constrain technical flexibility and rigidity, proposing a deeper picture of the enablers of, and obstacles to, technical transmission and change.In line with the extended evolutionary synthesis, the book proposes a more inclusive and materially grounded conception of technical evolution in terms of promiscuous, dynamic, and multidirectional causal processes. Offering new evidence and novel theoretical perspectives, the contributors deploy a diversity of methods, including ethnographies, field and laboratory experiments, cladistics and phylogenetic tree building, historiography, and philosophical analysis. Examples of the wide range of topics covered include field experiments with potters from five cultures, stability and change in Paleolithic toolmaking, why children lack flexibility when making tools, and cultural techniques in nonhuman animals.The volume’s three thematic sections are:·      Timescales of technical rigidity and flexibility·      Rigid copying to flexible reconstruction·      Exogenous factors of technical rigidity and flexibilityThe volume closes with a discussion by philosopher Kim Sterelny.ContributorsRita Astuti, Adam Howell Boyette, Blandine Bril, Josep Call, Mathieu Charbonneau, Arianna Curioni, Nicola Cutting, Bert De Munck, György Gergely, Anne-Lise Goujon, Ildikó Király, Catherine Lara, Sébastien Manem, Luke McEllin, Helena Miton, Giulio Ongaro, Sarah Pope-Caldwell, Valentine Roux, Manon Schweinfurth, Dan Sperber, Kim Sterelny, Dietrich Stout, James W. A. Strachan, Sadie Tenpas

"An argument for the moral right of democratically elected governments to impose vaccine mandates on citizens, even those who are "vaccine hesitant.""--

"A thoughtful account of how optimization (also known as theorycrafting or the "moneyballing effect") has changed the way we play games from World of Warcraft to soccer"--

How computers simulate cities and how they are also being embedded in cities, changing our behavior and the way in which cities evolve.At every stage in the history of computers and communications, it is safe to say we have been unable to predict what happens next. When computers first appeared nearly 75 years ago, primitive computer models were used to help understand and plan cities, but as computers became faster, smaller, more powerful, and ever more ubiquitous, cities themselves began to embrace them. As a result, the smart city emerged. In The Computable City, Michael Batty investigates the circularity of this peculiar evolution: how computers and communications changed the very nature of our city models, which, in turn, are used to simulate systems composed of those same computers.Batty first charts the origins of computers and examines how our computational urban models have developed and how they have been enriched by computer graphics. He then explores the sequence of digital revolutions and how they are converging, focusing on continual changes in new technologies, as well as the twenty-first-century surge in social media, platform economies, and the planning of the smart city. He concludes by revisiting the digital transformation as it continues to confound us, with the understanding that the city, now a high-frequency twenty-four-hour version of itself, changes our understanding of what is possible.

"A joyful look at understanding the rules of games, from Magic The Gathering to ski jumping. The authors discuss five broad categories of rules: formal rules, internal rules, social norms, external regulation, and materially embodied rules"--

"A quantitative look at labor market outcomes for women in STEM along multiple dimension of identity, including race, disability, immigrant status, etc"--

A fascinating interdisciplinary approach to how everyday Western music works, and why the tones, melodies, and chords combine as they do.Despite the cultural diversity of our globalized world, most Western music is still structured around major and minor scales and chords. Countless thinkers and scientists of the past have struggled to explain the nature and origin of musical structures. In Psychoacoustic Foundations of Major-Minor Tonality, music psychologist Richard Parncutt offers a fresh take, combining music theory—Rameau’s fundamental bass, Riemann’s harmonic function, Schenker’s hierarchic analysis, Forte’s pitch-class set theory—with psychology—Bregman’s auditory scene, Terhardt’s virtual pitch, Krumhansl’s tonal hierarchy. Drawing on statistical analyses of notated music corpora, Parncutt charts a middle path between cultural relativism and scientific positivism to bring music theory into meaningful discourse with empirical research.Our musical subjectivity, Parncutt explains, depends on our past musical experience and hence on music history and its social contexts. It also depends on physical sound properties, as investigated in psychoacoustics with auditory experiments and mathematical models. Parncutt’s evidence-based theory of major-minor tonality draws on his interdisciplinary background to present a theory that is comprehensive, creative, and critical. Examining concepts of interval, consonance, chord root, leading tone, harmonic progression, and modulation, he asks:Why are some scale tones and chord progressions more common than others?What aspects of major-minor tonality are based on human biology or general perceptual principles? What aspects are culturally arbitrary? And what about colonial history?Original and provocative, Psychoacoustic Foundations of Major-Minor Tonality promises to become a foundational text in both music theory and music cognition.

An insightful and evidence-based assessment of our urgent need to enact labor law reform—and how to achieve it.Millions of non-union workers want unionization, but our current labor-management relations law conspires to deny them meaningful opportunities to secure collective workplace representation. The resulting low rates of collective bargaining impose economic, political, and social costs on us all. In Fulfilling the Pledge, Roger Hartley addresses the plight of American workers, who face a grim, uncertain future, as the digital workplace reshapes the hierarchical post–World War II industrial relations system that once gave workers a voice. Through empirical evidence and the lens of law and policy, Hartley examines what industrial sociologists call the chronic “representation gap” and clarifies how a wide-ranging movement could build a vocal constituency for the congressional enactment of labor law reform.The pledge made in the 1935 National Labor Relations Act to encourage establishment of industrial democracy—where workers possess a voice in their places of work—remains unfulfilled. Speaking to policymakers, scholars, historians, and the average citizen, Fulfilling the Pledge makes a compelling case for collective workplace representation that serves the greater good, even as American labor relations law continues to undermine collective bargaining by workers and becomes an increasingly significant political and social issue.

An unflinching look at the unique challenges posed by complex technologies we cannot afford to let fail—and why the remarkable achievements of civil aviation can help us understand those challenges.Nuclear reactors, deep-sea drilling platforms, deterrence infrastructures—these are all complex and formidable technologies with the potential to fail catastrophically. In Rational Accidents, John Downer outlines a new perspective on technological failure, arguing that undetectable errors can lurk in even the most rigorous and “rational” assessments of these systems due to the inherent limits of engineering tests and models. Downer finds that it should be impossible, from an epistemological viewpoint, to achieve the near-perfect reliability that we require of our most safety-critical technologies. There is, however, one such technology that demonstrably appears to achieve these “impossible” reliabilities: jetliners.Downer looks closely at civil aviation and how it has reckoned with the problem of failure. He finds that the way we conceive of jetliner reliability hides the real practices by which it is achieved. And he shows us why those practices are much less transferrable across technological domains than we are led to believe. Fully understanding why jetliners don't crash, he concludes, should lead us to doubt the safety of other “ultra-reliable” technologies.A unique and sobering exploration of technological reliability from an STS perspective, Rational Accidents is essential reading for understanding why our most safety-critical technologies are even more dangerous than we believe.

A landmark art historical study of German Notgeld, the emergency money produced during World War I, and the hyperinflation that followed.Emergency Money is the first art historical study of Germany’s emergency money, Notgeld. Issued during World War I and the tumultuous interwar period, these wildly artful banknotes featured landscapes, folk figures, scenes of violence and humor, and even inflation itself in the form of figures staring into empty purses or animals defecating coins. Until now, art historians have paid Notgeld scant attention, but Wilkinson looks closely at these amusing, often disturbing, artifacts and their grim associations to cast new light on the Weimar Republic’s visual culture, as well as the larger relationship between art and money.As Wilkinson shows, Germany’s early twentieth-century economic crisis was also a crisis of culture. Retelling the period’s gripping story through thematic investigations into prevalent Notgeld motifs, Wilkinson illuminates how the vexed relationship between aesthetic value and exchange value was an inextricable part of everyday life.A landmark contribution to our understanding of twentieth-century Germany, Emergency Money brings together art, economics, critical theory, and media theory to create a book for our own inflationary moment, as the world’s new materialisms confront the specter of this older, more fundamental materialism.

An exploration of science and technology studies in eight different places, and the possibilities that arise for observation, intervention, and collaboration.Where does science and technology studies (STS) belong? In A Place for Science and Technology Studies, Jane Calvert takes readers through eight different rooms—the laboratory, the conference room, the classroom, the coffee room, the art studio, the bioethics building, the policy room, and the ivory tower—investigating the possibilities and limitations of each for STS research.Drawing from over a decade of work in synthetic biology, Calvert explores three different orientations for STS—observation, intervention, and collaboration—to ask whether there is a place for STS, which, as an undisciplined field, often finds itself on the periphery of traditional institutions or dependent on more generously funded STEM disciplines. Using examples of failures and successes and tackling enduring concerns about the relations between social scientific researchers and their fields of study, Calvert argues for an approach to STS that is collaborative yet allows for autonomy.

Why the privatization of British Telecom signaled a pivotal moment in the rise of neoliberalism, and how it was shaped by the longer development and digitalization of Britain’s telecommunications infrastructure.When Margaret Thatcher sold British Telecom for £3.6 billion in 1984, it became not only, at the time, the largest stock flotation in history, but also a watershed moment in the rise of neoliberalism and deregulation. In Visions of a Digital Nation, Jacob Ward offers an incisive interdisciplinary perspective on how technology prefigured this pivot. Giving due consideration to the politicians, engineers, and managers who paved the way for this historic moment, Ward illustrates how the decision validated the privatization of public utilities and tied digital technology to free market rationales.In this examination of the national and, at times, global history of technology, Ward’s approach is sweeping. Utilizing infrastructure studies, environmental history, and urban and local history, Ward explores Britain’s nationalist and welfarist plans for a digital information utility and shows how these projects contested and adapted to the “market turn” under Margaret Thatcher. Ultimately, Visions of a Digital Nation compellingly argues that politicians did not impose neoliberalism top-down, but that technology, engineers, and managers shaped these politics from the bottom up.

An accessible, authoritative, and up-to-date computer vision textbook offering a comprehensive introduction to the foundations of the field that incorporates the latest deep learning advances.Machine learning has revolutionized computer vision, but the methods of today have deep roots in the history of the field. Providing a much-needed modern treatment, this accessible and up-to-date textbook comprehensively introduces the foundations of computer vision while incorporating the latest deep learning advances. Taking a holistic approach that goes beyond machine learning, it addresses fundamental issues in the task of vision and the relationship of machine vision to human perception. Foundations of Computer Vision covers topics not standard in other texts, including transformers, diffusion models, statistical image models, issues of fairness and ethics, and the research process. To emphasize intuitive learning, concepts are presented in short, lucid chapters alongside extensive illustrations, questions, and examples. Written by leaders in the field and honed by a decade of classroom experience, this engaging and highly teachable book offers an essential next-generation view of computer vision.  Up-to-date treatment integrates classic computer vision and deep learning Accessible approach emphasizes fundamentals and assumes little background knowledgeStudent-friendly presentation features extensive examples and imagesProven in the classroomInstructor resources include slides, solutions, and source code

An edited collection that looks deeply at how humans transform their environments and how these environments, in turn, shape humans.Countless permutations of physical, built, and social environments surround us in space and time, influencing the air we breathe, how hot or cold we are, how many steps we take, and with whom we interact as we go about our daily lives. Assessing the dynamic processes that play out between humans and the environment is challenging. Digital Ethology, edited by Tomáš Paus and Hye-Chung Kum, explores how aggregate area-level data, produced at multiple locations and points in time, can reveal bidirectional—and iterative—relationships between human behavior and the environment through their digital footprints.Experts from geospatial and data science, behavioral and brain science, epidemiology and public health, ethics, and law, as well as urban planning consider how humans transform their environments and how environments shape human behavior.Contributors José Balsa-Barreiro, Kim A. Bard, Steven Bedrick, Michael Brauer, Thomas Brinkhoff, Nitesh V. Chawla, Ciro Cattuto, Tamas Dávid-Barrett, Megan Doerr, Guillaume Dumas, Peter Ejbye-Ernst, Sophia Frangou, Camilla Bank Friis, Jason Gilliland, Kimmo Kaski, Heidi Keller, Fabio Kon, Hye-Chung Kum, Lasse Suonperä Liebst, Gina S. Lovasi, Daniel P. Lupp, Claudia Bauzer Medeiros, Maria Melchior, Mónica Menendez, Virginia Pallante, Tomáš Paus, Beate Ritz, Marie Rosenkrantz Lindegaard, Sven Sandin, Abeed Sarker, Cason D. Schmit, Lindsey Smith, Kimberly M. Thompson, Henning Tiemeier, Michele C. Weigle

How withdrawal distress and cravings can haunt current and former addicts, and what they can teach us about addiction and its treatments.“The dead drug leaves a ghost behind. At certain hours it haunts the house,” Jean Cocteau once wrote. In The Ghost in the Addict, Shepard Siegel offers a Pavlovian analysis of drug use. Chronic drug use, he explains, conditions users to have an anticipatory homeostatic correction, which protects the addict from overdose. This drug-preparatory response, elicited by drug-paired cues, is often mislabeled a “withdrawal response.” The withdrawal response, however, is not due to the baneful effects of previous drug administrations; rather, it is due to the body’s preparation for the next drug administration—a preparatory response that can haunt addicts like a ghost long after they have conquered their usage.Examining the failure of legislation, the circumstances of overdose, and the cues that promote drug use, Siegel seeks to counter the widespread belief that addiction is evidence of a pathology. Instead, he proposes that the addict has an adaptive, learned response to the physiological changes wrought by drug use. It is only through understanding so-called withdrawal symptoms as a Pavlovian response, he explains, that we can begin to understand why addicts experience cravings long after their last drug use.

How global workers, influencers, and activists develop tactics of algorithmic resistance by appropriating and repurposing the same algorithms that control our lives.Algorithms are all around us, permeating more and more aspects of our daily lives. While accounts of platform power tend to come across as bleak and monolithic, Algorithms of Resistance shows how people can resist algorithms across a variety of domains. Drawing from rich ethnographic materials and perspectives from both the Global North and South, authors Tiziano Bonini and Emiliano Treré explore how people appropriate and reconfigure algorithms to pursue their objectives in three domains of everyday life: gig work, cultural industries, and politics. They reveal how forms of algorithmic agency and resistance are endemic and mundane and how the platform society is a contested battleground of contrasting forces. Bonini and Treré begin by outlining their key theoretical framework of moral economies. This framework argues that algorithms exist on a continuum. At its two extremes are two competing moral economies: the user moral economy and the platform moral economy. From here, Algorithms of Resistance chronicles the various inventive ways that individuals can work to achieve agency and resist the ubiquitous power of algorithms. Casting a wide net with a diverse range of case studies, Bonini and Treré reveal the moral imperative for all of us—from delivery drivers to artists to social movements—to resist algorithms.

How abstract design decisions in 2D platform games create rich worlds of meaning for players.Since the 1980s, 2D platform games have captivated their audiences. Whether the player scrambles up the ladders in Donkey Kong or leaps atop an impossibly tall pipe in Super Mario Bros., this deceptively simple visual language has persisted in our cultural imagination of video games. In Run and Jump, Peter McDonald surveys the legacy of 2D platform games and examines how abstract and formal design choices have kept players playing. McDonald argues that there is a rich layer of meaning underneath, say, the quality of an avatar’s movement, the pacing and rhythm of level design, the personalities expressed by different enemies, and the emotion elicited by collecting a coin.To understand these games, McDonald draws on technical discussions by game designers as well as theoretical work about the nature of signs from structuralist semiotics. Interspersed throughout are design exercises that show how critical interpretation can become a tool for game designers to communicate with their players. With examples drawn from over forty years of game history, and from games made by artists, hobbyists, iconic designers, and industry studios, Run and Jump presents a comprehensive—and engaging—vision of this slice of game history.