Böcker i The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series-serien

A concise introduction to crowdsourcing that goes beyond social media buzzwords to explain what crowdsourcing really is and how it works.

"An EKS book describing the arguments for and against a universal basic income, drawing on research from around the world, with a particular focus on likelihood of adoption within the United States"--

"Using the non-human construct of the cyborg, this book address the problems inherent in difference and oppression, like gender, race, class, disability, sexuality, human exceptionalism and global borders"--

A concise overview of fertility technology-its history, practical applications, and ethical and social implications around the world.In the late 1850s, a physician in New York City used a syringe and glass tube to inject half a drop of sperm into a woman's uterus, marking the first recorded instance of artificial insemination. From that day forward, doctors and scientists have turned to technology in ever more innovative ways to facilitate conception. Fertility Technology surveys this history in all its medical, practical, and ethical complexity, and offers a look at state-of-the-art fertility technology in various social and political contexts around the world.Donna J. Drucker's concise and eminently readable account introduces the five principal types of fertility technologies used in human reproduction-artificial insemination; ovulation timing; sperm, egg, and embryo freezing; in vitro fertilization; and IVF in uterine transplants-discussing the development, manufacture, dispersion, and use of each. Geographically, it focuses on countries where innovations have emerged and countries where these technologies most profoundly affect individuals and population policies. Drucker's wide-ranging perspective reveals how these technologies, used for birth control as well as conception in many cases, have been critical in shaping the moral, practical, and political meaning of human life, kinship, and family in different nations and cultures since the mid-nineteenth century.

The socially constructed phenomenon of whiteness: how it was created, how it changes, and how it protects and privileges people who are perceived as white.This volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series examines the socially constructed phenomenon of whiteness, tracing its creation, its changing formation, and its power to privilege and protect people who are perceived as white. Whiteness, author Martin Lund explains, is not one single idea but a shifting, overarching category, a flexible cluster of historically, culturally, and geographically contingent ideals and standards that enable systems of hierarchical classification. Lund discusses words used to talk about whiteness, from white privilege to white fragility; the intersections of whiteness with race, class, and gender; whiteness in popular culture; and such ideas as "e;colorblindness"e; and "e;reverse racism,"e; which, he argues, actually uphold whiteness.Lund shows why it is important to keep talking and thinking about whiteness. The word "e;whiteness,"e; he writes, doesn't describe; it conjures something into being. Drawing on decades of critical whiteness studies and citing a range of examples (primarily from the United States and Sweden), Lund argues that whiteness is continually manufactured and sustained through language, laws, policies, science, and representations in media and popular culture. It is often positioned as normative, even universal. And despite its innocuous-seeming manifestations in sitcoms and superheroes, whiteness is always in the service of racial domination.

"A concise history of espionage. Going beyond the traditional accounts of espionage that focus on military and diplomatic intelligence collected by humans, the book also includes chapters on industrial espionage as well as the new techno-spy"--

"How the underlying biology of the "placebo effect" works and how could this change the way we think about modern and future medicine"--

"Short, accessible primer on human memory, written by two leading psychological researchers"--

"Causality is central to the understanding and use of data; without an understanding of cause and effect relationships, we cannot use data to answer important questions in medicine and many other fields"--

"A concise overview of the ethical issues that are likely to emerge as robots become more social and more integrated into human life."--

"A short, reader-friendly treatment of happiness from a leading figure in positive psychology"--

"An introduction and history to the analog as a technology and as a way of understanding the world as distinct from the digital"--

"An updated introduction for generalists to this powerful technology, its applications and possible future directions"--

A compact and accessible history, from punch cards and calculators to UNIVAC and ENIAC, the personal computer, Silicon Valley, and the Internet.

An accessible introduction to the study of language in the brain, covering language processing, language acquisition, literacy, and language disorders.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. 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. 

"Eichhorn's EKS book will unpack the idea of content, whose emergence reflects a major shift in the way cultural products are produced and consumed, with far-reaching implications for society"--

An accessible explanation of the technologies that enable such popular voice-interactive applications as Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant.Have you talked to a machine lately? Asked Alexa to play a song, asked Siri to call a friend, asked Google Assistant to make a shopping list? This volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series offers a nontechnical and accessible explanation of the technologies that enable these popular devices. Roberto Pieraccini, drawing on more than thirty years of experience at companies including Bell Labs, IBM, and Google, describes the developments in such fields as artificial intelligence, machine learning, speech recognition, and natural language understanding that allow us to outsource tasks to our ubiquitous virtual assistants.Pieraccini describes the software components that enable spoken communication between humans and computers, and explains why it's so difficult to build machines that understand humans. He explains speech recognition technology; problems in extracting meaning from utterances in order to execute a request; language and speech generation; the dialog manager module; and interactions with social assistants and robots. Finally, he considers the next big challenge in the development of virtual assistants: building in more intelligence--enabling them to do more than communicate in natural language and endowing them with the capacity to know us better, predict our needs more accurately, and perform complex tasks with ease.

"This book will discuss the principles and ethics of biofabrication, a growing field in which biological tissue is fabricated in for medical, research, technological, and even food applications"--

An accessible guide to cybersecurity for the everyday user, covering cryptography and public key infrastructure, malware, blockchain, and other topics.It seems that everything we touch is connected to the internet, from mobile phones and wearable technology to home appliances and cyber assistants. The more connected our computer systems, the more exposed they are to cyber attacks--attempts to steal data, corrupt software, disrupt operations, and even physically damage hardware and network infrastructures. In this volume of the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, cybersecurity expert Duane Wilson offers an accessible guide to cybersecurity issues for everyday users, describing risks associated with internet use, modern methods of defense against cyber attacks, and general principles for safer internet use.Wilson describes the principles that underlie all cybersecurity defense: confidentiality, integrity, availability, authentication, authorization, and non-repudiation (validating the source of information). He explains that confidentiality is accomplished by cryptography; examines the different layers of defense; analyzes cyber risks, threats, and vulnerabilities; and breaks down the cyber kill chain and the many forms of malware. He reviews some online applications of cybersecurity, including end-to-end security protection, secure ecommerce transactions, smart devices with built-in protections, and blockchain technology. Finally, Wilson considers the future of cybersecurity, discussing the continuing evolution of cyber defenses as well as research that may alter the overall threat landscape.

An accessible introduction to a concept often considered impossibly abstruse, demonstrating its power as a conceptual tool in the twenty-first century.This volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series offers a clear and concise introduction to a topic often considered difficult and abstruse: deconstruction. David Gunkel sorts out the concept, terminology, and practices of deconstruction, not to defend academic orthodoxy, or to disseminate the thought of Jacques Derrida--the fabricator of the neologism and progenitor of the concept--but to provide readers with a powerful conceptual tool for the twenty-first century.Gunkel explains that deconstruction is not simply the opposite of construction--the "deconstructed" jacket hanging in your closet is not, strictly speaking, accurately named--or synonymous with destruction. It is a way to think beyond the construction/destruction dichotomy and all other conceptual dichotomies and logical oppositions. After describing what deconstruction is not, and developing an abstract and schematic characterization derived from Derrida, Gunkel offers examples in (rather than of) deconstruction, including logocentrism (the speech/writing dichotomy) and virtuality (the ruling philosophical binary of real/appearance), remix (the original/copy distinction), and the posthuman figure of the cyborg (the human/machine conceptual pairing). Finally, Gunkel discusses the costs and benefits of deconstruction, considering the many things deconstruction is good for and identifying potential problems, including Eurocentrism, relativism, difficulties in communicating the concept, and reappropriation.

An examination of the contemporary medicalization of death and dying that calls us to acknowledge instead death's existential and emotional realities.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.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.

"An updated version of Greengard's The Internet of Things (2015), which offers a more holistic look at the Internet of Things: tracing the origins of connected devices, examining the current state of research and development, offering examples and case studies of devices, and examining how the IoT will play out in the months and years ahead"--

Why gender is strange, even when it's played straight, and how race and money are two of its most dramatic ingredients.In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Kathryn Bond Stockton explores the fascinating, fraught, intimate, morphing matter of gender. Stockton argues for gender's strangeness, no matter how "normal" the concept seems; gender is queer for everyone, she claims, even when it's played quite straight. And she explains how race and money dramatically shape everybody's gender, even in sometimes surprising ways. Playful but serious, erudite and witty, Stockton marshals an impressive array of exhibits to consider, including dolls and their new gendering, the thrust of Jane Austen and Lil Nas X, gender identities according to women's colleges, gay and transgender ballroom scenes, and much more.Stockton also examines gender in light of biology's own strange ways, its out-of-syncness with "male" and "female," explaining attempts to fortify gender with clothing, language, labor, and hair. She investigates gender as a concept--its concerning history, its bewitching pleasures and falsifications--by meeting the moment of where we are, with its many genders and counters-to-gender. This compelling background propels the question that drives this book and foregrounds race: what is "the opposite sex," after all? If there is no opposite, doesn't the male/female duo undergirding gender come undone?