"This is the first historical work that situates the Strategic Defense Initiative within a new phase in the militarization of space, uncovering a largely secret history of the role of military space technologies in late-Cold War U.S. defense strategy and foreign relations"--
"Prior Art offers the first ever history of the use of patents in architecture, spanning the period 1830 - 1996"--
"This book sets out to investigate the political, technological, and environmental dimensions of architecture at a moment when buildings began to interact with the emergent medium of radio. More especially it explores Cold War Berlin, through the Haus des Rundfunks, occupied by the Soviet forces on the Eastern side of the city"--
A high-level text that synthesizes diverse research areas for characterizing objects (targets) from radar data and establishes a novel analysis framework for a class of signal processing techniques useful for high-resolution radar signature modeling.The only text to integrate a diverse body of work on characterizing objects (targets) from radar data into a common analysis framework, this book brings together the results of research papers and technical reports providing improved resolution and precision in radar target signature modeling and target motion solutions. It offers comprehensive coverage related to basic radar concepts, signal representation, and radar measurements; the development of advanced analysis tools essential for high-resolution signature modeling; the development of novel wideband and narrowband radar imaging techniques; the application of 2D spectral estimation theory to wideband signal processing; ultra-wideband scattering phenomenology and sparse-band sensor data fusion; and the integration of field measurements into the radar signature modeling process. The analysis techniques developed in the text provide the framework for a novel approach, called measurements-based modeling (MBM), to model target signatures by incorporating measurement data into the signature model of the target. Extensive examples throughout compare the performance of the new techniques with that of conventional analysis techniques.The first systematic, comprehensive synthesis of wide-ranging research areas for characterizing targets from radar data A deeply researched, lucid presentation enriched by extensive illustrations and examples An essential reference for experts in radar and signal processing, professional engineers in related fields, and graduate students
"An exploration of the world's first stand-alone stereoscopic 3D videogame platform: how it worked, how it was perceived, and how it built on a rich tradition of entertainment media created to trick our eyes"--
"Broussard argues that the structural inequalities reproduced in algorithmic systems are no glitch. They are part of the system design. This book shows how everyday technologies embody racist, sexist, and ableist ideas; how they produce discriminatory and harmful outcomes; and how this can be challenged and changed."--
"One economist's reflections on the professional culture of economic theory"--
"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.
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