Why the United States has developed an economy divided between rich and poor and how racism helped bring this about.
Questions about the physical world, the mind, and technology in conversations that reveal a rich seam of interacting ideas.
An argument for retaining the notion of personal property in the products we "buy" in the digital marketplace.
How developments in science and technology may enable the emergence of purely digital minds-intelligent machines equal to or greater in power than the human brain.
How memetic media-aggregate texts that are collectively created, circulated, and transformed-become a part of public conversations that shape broader cultural debates.
Stories about objects left in the wake of transactions, from cryptocurrencies to leaf-imprinted banknotes to records kept with knotted string.Museums are full of the coins, notes, beads, shells, stones, and other objects people have exchanged for millennia. But what about the debris, the things that allow a transaction to take place and are left in its wake? How would a museum go about curating our scrawls on electronic keypads, the receipts wadded in our wallets, that vast information infrastructure that runs the card networks? This book is a catalog for a museum exhibition that never happened. It offers a series of short essays, paired with striking images, on these often ephemeral, invisible, or unnoticed transactional objects—money stuff.Although we've been told for years that we're heading toward total cashlessness, payment is increasingly dependent on things. Consider, for example, the dongle, a clever gizmo that processes card payments by turning information from a card's magnetic stripe into audio information that can be read by a smart phone's headphone jack. Or dogecoin, a meme of a smiling, bewildered dog's interior monologue that fueled a virtual currency similar to Bitcoin. Or go further back and contemplate the paper currency printed with leaves by Benjamin Franklin to foil counterfeiters, or khipu, Incan records kept in knotted string.Paid's authors describe these payment-adjacent objects so engagingly that for a moment, financial leftovers seem more interesting than finance. Paid encourages us to take a moment to look at the nuts and bolts of our everyday transactions by looking at the stuff that surrounds them.ContributorsBernardo Bátiz-Lazo, Maria Bezaitis, Finn Brunton, Lynn H. Gamble, David Graeber, Jane I. Guyer, Keith Hart, Sarah Jeong, Alexandra Lippman, Julien Mailland, Scott Mainwaring, Bill Maurer, Taylor C. Nelms, Rachel O'Dwyer, Michael Palm, Lisa Servon, David L. Stearns, Bruce Sterling, Lana Swartz, Whitney Anne Trettien, Gary Urton
What artificial intelligence can tell us about the mind and intelligent behavior.
The history of the first programmable electronic computer, from its conception, construction, and use to its afterlife as a part of computing folklore.
For more than forty years, the philosopher Martin Heidegger logged ideas and opinions in a series of notebooks, known as the "Black Notebooks¿ after the black oilcloth booklets into which he first transcribed his thoughts. In 2014, the notebooks from 1931 to 1941 were published, sparking immediate controversy. It has long been acknowledged that Heidegger was an enthusiastic supporter of the Nazi Party in the early 1930s. But the notebooks contain a number of anti-Semitic passages¿often referring to the stereotype of "World-Jewry¿¿written even after Heidegger became disenchanted with the Nazis themselves. Reactions from the scholarly community have ranged from dismissal of the significance of these passages to claims that the anti-Semitism in them contaminates all of Heidegger's work. This volume offers the first collection of responses by Heidegger scholars to the publication of the notebooks.
What it means for global sustainability when environmentalism is dominated by the concerns of the affluent-eco-business, eco-consumption, wilderness preservation.
A philosopher and a scientist propose that sustainability can be understood as living well together without diminishing opportunity to live well in the future.
A fascinating account, written in real time, of the unfolding of a scientific discovery: the first detection of gravitational waves.
A work that reveals the profound links between the evolution, acquisition, and processing of language, and proposes a new integrative framework for the language sciences.
A biologically oriented introduction to synesthesia by the leading authority on the subject.
The relationship between management and digital technology: experts present a new agenda for the practice of management.Digital technology has profoundly affected the ways that businesses design and produce goods, manage internal communication, and connect with customers. But the next phase of the digital revolution raises a new set of questions about the relationship between technology and the practice of management. Managers in the digital era must consider how big data can inform hiring decisions, whether new communication technologies are empowering workers or unleashing organizational chaos, what role algorithms will play in corporate strategy, and even how to give performance feedback to a robot. This collection of short, pithy essays from MIT Sloan Management Review, written by both practitioners and academic experts, explores technology's foundational impact on management.Much of the conversation around these topics centers on the evolving relationship between humans and cognitive technologies, and the essays reflect this—considering, for example, not only how to manage a bot but how cognitive systems will enhance business decision making, how AI delivers value, and the ethics of algorithms.ContributorsAjay Agrawal, Robert D. Austin, David H. Autor, Andrew Burgert, Paul R. Daugherty, Thomas H. Davenport, R. Edward Freeman, Joshua S. Gans, Avi Goldfarb, Lynda Gratton, Reid Hoffman, Bala Iyer, Gerald C. Kane, Frieda Klotz, Rita Gunther McGrath, Paul Michelman, Andrew W. Moore, Nicola Morini-Bianzino, Tim O'Reilly, Bidhan L. Parmar, Ginni Rometty, Bernd Schmitt, Alex Tapscott, Don Tapscott, Monideepa Tarafdar, Catherine J. Turco, George Westerman, H. James Wilson, Andrew S. Winston
Advice on how companies can succeed in the new digital business environment.The most important skills a leader needs to succeed in a digital environment are not technical in nature but managerial—strategic vision, forward-looking perspective, change-oriented mindset. A company's digital transformation does not involve abandoning widget-making for app developing or pursuing "disruption” at the cost of stability. Rather, it is about adopting business processes and practices that position organizations to compete effectively in the digital environment. More important than technology implementation are strategy, talent management, organizational structure, and leadership aligned for the digital world. How to Go Digital offers advice from management experts on how to steer your company into the digital future.The book will put you on the right strategic path, with articles from MIT Sloan Management Review on developing a digital strategy, reframing growth for a digital world, monetizing data, and generating sustainable value from social media. Talent acquisition and retention are addressed, with articles on HR analytics, data translators, and enabling employees to become brand ambassadors outside of the office. Operational makeovers are discussed in terms of sales, services, new technologies, and innovation.ContributorsAllan Alter, Stephen J. Andriole, Bart Baesens, Gloria Barczak, Cynthia M. Beath, Alpheus Bingham, Didier Bonnet, Chris Brady, Joseph Byrum, Marina Candi, Manuel Cebrian, Marie-Cécile Cervellon, Simon Chadwick, Sophie De Winne, Mike Forde, Gerald C. Kane, Rahul Kapoor, David Kiron, Thomas Klueter, Mary C. Lacity, Rikard Lindgren, Pamela Lirio, Tucker J. Marion, Lars Mathiassen, Pete Maulik, Paul Michelman, Narendra Mulani, Pierre Nanterme, Doug Palmer, Alex "Sandy” Pentland, Anh Nguyen Phillips, Frank T. Piller, Iyad Rahwan, Deborah L. Roberts, Jeanne W. Ross, Ina M. Sebastian, Luc Sels, James E. Short, Fredrik Svahn, Steve Todd, Leslie P. Willcocks, H. James Wilson, Barbara H. Wixom
One of today's most widely read philosophers considers the shift in violence from visible to invisible, from negativity to excess of positivity.Some things never disappear—violence, for example. Violence is ubiquitous and incessant but protean, varying its outward form according to the social constellation at hand. In Topology of Violence, the philosopher Byung-Chul Han considers the shift in violence from the visible to the invisible, from the frontal to the viral to the self-inflicted, from brute force to mediated force, from the real to the virtual. Violence, Han tells us, has gone from the negative—explosive, massive, and martial—to the positive, wielded without enmity or domination. This, he says, creates the false impression that violence has disappeared. Anonymized, desubjectified, systemic, violence conceals itself because it has become one with society. Han first investigates the macro-physical manifestations of violence, which take the form of negativity—developing from the tension between self and other, interior and exterior, friend and enemy. These manifestations include the archaic violence of sacrifice and blood, the mythical violence of jealous and vengeful gods, the deadly violence of the sovereign, the merciless violence of torture, the bloodless violence of the gas chamber, the viral violence of terrorism, and the verbal violence of hurtful language. He then examines the violence of positivity—the expression of an excess of positivity—which manifests itself as over-achievement, over-production, over-communication, hyper-attention, and hyperactivity. The violence of positivity, Han warns, could be even more disastrous than that of negativity. Infection, invasion, and infiltration have given way to infarction.
A comprehensive political analysis of the rapid growth in renewable wind and solar power, mapping an energy transition through theory, case studies, and policy.
A novel contribution to the age-old debate about free will versus determinism.
This introduction to programming places computer science in the core of a liberal arts education. Unlike other introductory books, it focuses on the program design process.
The first English-language monograph devoted to the full oeuvre of Alexander Kluge, the prolific German filmmaker, television producer, digital entrepreneur, author, thinker, and public intellectual.Alexander Kluge (born 1932) is a German filmmaker, author, television producer, theorist, and digital entrepreneur. Since 1960, he has made fourteen feature films and twenty short films and has written more than thirty books—including three with Marxist philosopher Oskar Negt. His television production company has released more than 3,000 features, in which Kluge converses with real or fictional experts or creates thematic montages. He also maintains a website on which he reassembles segments from his film and television work. To call Kluge "prolific” would be an understatement. This is the first English-language monograph devoted to the full scope of Kluge's work, from his appearance on the cultural scene in the 1960s to his contributions to New German Cinema in the 1970s and early 1980s to his recent collaborations with such artists as Gerhard Richter. In Toward Fewer Images, Philipp Ekardt offers both close analyses of Kluge's individual works and sustained investigations of his overarching (and perpetual) production. Ekardt discusses Kluge's image theory and practice as developed across different media, and considers how, in relation to this theory, Kluge returns to, varies, expands, and modifies the practice of montage, including its recent manifestations in digital media—noting Kluge's counterintuitive claim that creating montages results in fewer images. Kluge's production, Ekardt argues, allows us to imagine a model of authorship and artistic production that does not rely on an accumulation of individual works over time but rather on a permanent activity of (temporalized) reworking and redifferentiation.
An exploration of the interaction of aesthetics and politics in Bertolt Brecht's "photoepigrams."
The enormous task of preserving the world's heritage in the face of war, natural disaster, vandalism, neglect, and technical obsolescence.The monuments—movable, immovable, tangible, and intangible—of the world's shared cultural heritage are at risk. War, terrorism, natural disaster, vandalism, and neglect make the work of preservation a greater challenge than it has been since World War II. In The Monumental Challenge of Preservation Michèle Cloonan makes the case that, at this critical juncture, we must consider preservation in the broadest possible contexts. Preservation requires the efforts of an increasing number of stakeholders.In order to explore the cultural, political, technological, economic, and ethical dimensions of preservation, Cloonan examines particular monuments and their preservation dilemmas. The massive Bamiyan Buddhas, blown up by the Taliban in 2001, are still the subject of debates over how, or whether, to preserve what remains, and the U. S. National Park Service has undertaken the complex task of preserving the symbolic and often ephemeral objects that visitors leave at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial—to take just two of the many examples described in the book. Cloonan also considers the ongoing genocide and cultural genocide in Syria; the challenges of preserving our digital heritage; the dynamic between original and copy; efforts to preserve the papers and architectural fragments of the architect Louis Sullivan; and the possibility of sustainable preservation. In the end, Cloonan suggests, we are what we preserve—and don't preserve. Every day we make preservation decisions, individually and collectively, that have longer-term ramifications than we might expect.
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