Learn IT - MIT Press

Virtualpolitik: An Electronic History of Government Media-Making in a Time of War, Scandal, Disaster, Miscommunication, and Mistakes

MIT Press, 2009

Today government agencies not only have official Web sites but also sponsor moderated chats, blogs, digital video clips, online tutorials, videogames, and virtual tours of national landmarks. Sophisticated online marketing campaigns target citizens with messages from the government—even as officials make news with digital gaffes involving...

At War with the Weather: Managing Large-Scale Risks in a New Era of Catastrophes

MIT Press, 2009

The United States and other nations are facing large-scale risks at an accelerating pace. In 2005, three major hurricanes—Katrina, Rita, and Wilma—made landfall along the U.S. Gulf Coast within an eight-week period. The damage caused by these storms led to insurance reimbursements and federal disaster relief of more than $180...

Knowledge, Possibility, and Consciousness (Jean Nicod Lectures)

MIT Press, 2001

Physicalism is the idea that if everything that goes on in the universe is physical, our consciousness and feelings must also be physical. Ever since Descartes formulated the mind-body problem, a long line of philosophers has found the physicalist view to be preposterous. According to John Perry, the history of the mind-body problem is, in part,...

Picturing Machines 1400-1700 (Transformations: Studies in the History of Science and Technology)

MIT Press, 2004

Technical drawings by the architects and engineers of the Renaissance made use of a range of new methods of graphic representation. These drawingsÐ²Ð”among them Leonardo da Vinci's famous drawings of mechanical devicesÐ²Ð”have long been studied for their aesthetic qualities and technological ingenuity, but their significance...

Designing Interactions

MIT Press, 2007

Digital technology has changed the way we interact with everything from the games we play to the tools we use at work. Designers of digital technology products no longer regard their job as designing a physical objectÐ²Ð”beautiful or utilitarianÐ²Ð”but as designing our interactions with it. In Designing Interactions,...

Critical Play: Radical Game Design

MIT Press, 2009

For many players, games are entertainment, diversion, relaxation, fantasy. But what if certain games were something more than this, providing not only outlets for entertainment but a means for creative expression, instruments for conceptual thinking, or tools for social change? In Critical Play, artist and game designer Mary Flanagan...

Wired for Innovation: How Information Technology is Reshaping the Economy

MIT Press, 2009

A wave of business innovation is driving the productivity resurgence in the U.S. economy. In Wired for Innovation, Erik Brynjolfsson and Adam Saunders describe how information technology directly or indirectly created this productivity explosion, reversing decades of slow growth. They argue that the companies with the highest level of...

Famous First Bubbles: The Fundamentals of Early Manias

MIT Press, 2000

The jargon of economics and finance contains numerous colorful terms for market-asset prices at odds with any reasonable economic explanation. Examples include "bubble," "tulipmania," "chain letter," "Ponzi scheme," "panic," "crash," "herding," and "irrational...

Disjunctivism: Contemporary Readings (MIT Readers in Contemporary Philosophy)

MIT Press, 2009

Winning entry, Professional Cover/Jacket Category, in the 2009 New England Book Show sponsored by Bookbuilders of Boston.

A central debate in contemporary philosophy of perception concerns the disjunctive theory of perceptual experience. Until the 1960s, philosophers of perception generally assumed that a veridical...

The Art of Agent-Oriented Modeling (Intelligent Robotics and Autonomous Agents)

MIT Press, 2009

Today, when computing is pervasive and deployed over a range of devices by a multiplicity of users, we need to develop computer software to interact with both the ever-increasing complexity of the technical world and the growing fluidity of social organizations. The Art of Agent-Oriented Modeling presents a new conceptual model for...

Acting in an Uncertain World: An Essay on Technical Democracy (Inside Technology)

MIT Press, 2009

Controversies over such issues as nuclear waste, genetically modified organisms, asbestos, tobacco, gene therapy, avian flu, and cell phone towers arise almost daily as rapid scientific and technological advances create uncertainty and bring about unforeseen concerns. The authors of Acting in an Uncertain World argue that political...

Radical Embodied Cognitive Science (Bradford Books)

MIT Press, 2009

While philosophers of mind have been arguing over the status of mental representations in cognitive science, cognitive scientists have been quietly engaged in studying perception, action, and cognition without explaining them in terms of mental representation. In this book, Anthony Chemero describes this nonrepresentational approach (which he terms...

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