bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Transcribing silent actions: a multimodal approach of sequence organization
Authors: Mondada Lorenza
Published: March 2019

This paper deals with a significant advance the use of video and the study of multimodality within conversation analysis have made possible: the possibility to analyse in detail the sequentiality of actions that are achieved by other resources than talk, and more precisely a diversity of embodied practices. A close attention to how we transcribe these silent embodied actions enables us to better understand their specific temporal unfolding, spatial arrangements, and sequential organization. The paper starts discussing silent second actions (responses to requests); then moves to silent first actions (requests achieved by handing over objects); and finally discusses embodied sequences fully realized in silence. The proposed transcript notation enables reflection upon the complex emergent and sequentially unfolding temporality of multimodally formatted actions. Taking into account the details of embodied conduct, it discusses the consequences for the principled notions of temporality, sequentiality and multimodality.
RELATIONAL ENCOUNTERS WITH INDIGENOUS LITERATURES
Authors: Hanson Aubrey Jean
Published: March 2019

This paper makes a case for attending to the resurgence of Indigenous literary arts in taking up the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s Calls to Action in teacher education. I argue that Indigenous literary arts can help to foster relational understandings between readers and Indigenous communities: stories have the capacity to open up processes of relationship and responsibility. To develop this argument, I draw upon perspectives from teachers and from Indigenous writers, with whom I shared conversations on the question of why Indigenous literatures matter. Through an interpretive process of interweaving these perspectives, this article shows that Indigenous literatures can inspire and motivate educators to take on this work and learning despite its attendant challenges.
A COLLABORATIVE SHARING OF STORIES ON A JOURNEY TOWARD RECONCILIATION: “BELONGING TO THIS PLACE AND TIME”
Authors: Keliipio Kauʻi , Perry Kimberly , Elderton Colleen
Published: March 2019

This paper emerges from the particular field experiences of three “settler” colleagues working in a teacher education program, each of whom found that their personal and professional relationships with First Nations, Metís, and Inuit people had a positive and constructive bearing on how they responded to provincial mandates and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Calls to Action.
ALTERNATIVE SCHOOL DISCIPLINE PRINCIPLES AND INTERVENTIONS: AN OVERVIEW OF THE LITERATURE
Authors: Jean-Pierre Johanne , Parris Sylvia
Published: March 2019

Increasing evidence shows that punitive discipline is ineffective and detrimental. Using empowerment theory and the opportunity-to-learn conceptual framework, this literature review seeks to broaden school personnel’s knowledge of alternative discipline interventions. Searching ERIC and JSTOR databases, we looked for English language, North American literature published between 1996 and 2016 that discussed alternative individual and school-wide disciplinary approaches. The literature we found indicates that punitive measures are counter-productive; that several alternative disciplinary models share common principles; and that studies point to favourable outcomes of some alternative school discipline models. While the transition towards alternative discipline may require additional resources and years of adjustment, a healthier school climate can foster the empowerment and academic achievement of marginalized students.
ADAPTATION AU COLLÉGIAL ET VULNÉRABILITÉS DURANT LA TRANSITION SECONDAIRE-COLLÉGIAL
Authors: Meunier-Dubé Ariane , Marcotte Diane
Published: March 2019

Cette étude longitudinale examine si l’adaptation au collège des étudiants est influencée par la présence des vulnérabilités cognitives et des symptômes dépressifs avant et pendant cette transition. Deux cent onze étudiants ont complété les versions françaises des questionnaires Beck Depression Inventory — Second Edition, Dysfunctional Attitude Scale et Student Adaptation to College Questionnaire. En 1re année au collège, 6,2 % des étudiants de l’échantillon rapportent présenter des symptômes dépressifs modérés à sévères. Malgré le nombre plus élevé d’étudiantes dépressives, les résultats n’indiquent aucune différence reliée au genre quant à l’adaptation académique et sociale. Lors des deux années au collège, la présence de certaines distorsions cognitives et de symptômes dépressifs contribue à prédire ces formes d’adaptation. Une discussion des résultats est présentée.
RECENSION DES ÉCRITS SUR LES PLANS D’INTERVENTION (PI) SCOLAIRES DANS UNE PERSPECTIVE HISTORIQUE ET ÉVOLUTIVE
Authors: Myara Nathalie
Published: March 2019

Il y a plus de 200 000 élèves HDAA au Québec. Par conséquent, plus de 200 000 plans d’intervention (PI) ont été élaborés, mis en oeuvre et révisés au Québec. Or, l’élaboration, la mise en oeuvre et la révision d’un PI sont des pratiques encore loin d’être optimales et représentent différents coûts significatifs en éducation; des coûts pédagogiques, de développement, d’acquisition, d’utilisation, de collaboration et de formation. Cela étant dit, il appert essentiel d’examiner ce que les recherches antérieures disent pour informer et guider les pratiques et les futures recherches. Cet article présente une recension des écrits permettant de dresser un portrait du passé pour enfin proposer des pistes de recherches futures et guider les pratiques actuelles.
COÉLABORATION DE CONNAISSANCES SUR LES FACTEURS D’ENGAGEMENT À UNE COMMUNAUTÉ DE PRATIQUE POUR LE DP (CODP)
Authors: Tremblay Mélanie , Dion-Routhier Justine
Published: March 2019

Dans un contexte où les élèves sont natifs des technologies, contrairement aux enseignants, l’intégration des technologies en classe comporte plusieurs enjeux. La présente étude s’attarde à comprendre l’engagement des enseignants dans un dispositif de développement professionnel pour l’intégration des TIC. L’objectif est de synthétiser les connaissances sur les divers aspects et facteurs ayant une influence sur l’engagement à ce type de démarche. Cette synthèse, produite à l’aide d’une démarche de coélaboration de connaissance, relève les facteurs d’engagement à une communauté de pratique en ligne pour le développement professionnel (CoDP) regroupés sous trois aspects : accessibilité, participation, reconnaissance.
ENSEIGNEMENT DU THÉÂTRE ET DE L’ART DRAMATIQUE AU CANADA : UN PORTRAIT
Authors: Carter Mindy
Published: March 2019

Cette « Note du terrain » (publié originalement en anglais ici) dresse un portrait du milieu de l’enseignement du théâtre et de l’art dramatique au Canada, du préscolaire à l’Université. En complément de ce portrait, je formule quelques suggestions pour enrichir cette discipline et augmenter son influence sur les programmes, les politiques et les pratiques.
Modelos sociais e modelos "criminais" europeus: uma abordagem exploratória
Authors: Ferreira Eduardo Viegas
Published: March 2019

A literatura tem vindo a mostrar que risco de pobreza e desigualdade na distribuição de rendimentos variam em função do modelo social adotado por cada país e que pobreza e desigualdade estão associadas a diferentes tipos e níveis de criminalidade. Inspirando-se na tipologia seminal de Esping-Andersen (1990), este estudo recorreu a análises de clusters para explorar as relações existentes entre modelos sociais e modelos “criminais”. Os resultados obtidos sugerem que diferentes tipos e níveis de desenvolvimento sociopolítico e socioeconómico influenciam, mais que o modelo social vigente, o modelo “criminal”. Estes resultados são discutidos tendo como referência o corpus teórico disponível e as opções metodológicas tomadas.
Framing Internet Safety
Authors: Fisk Nathan W.
Published: March 2019

An examination of youth Internet safety as a technology of governance, seen in panics over online pornography, predators, bullying, and reputation management.

Since the beginning of the Internet era, it has become almost impossible to discuss youth and technology without mentioning online danger—pornography that is just a click away, lurking sexual predators, and inescapable cyberbullies. In this book, Nathan Fisk takes an innovative approach to the subject, examining youth Internet safety as a technology of governance—for information technologies and, by extension, for the forms of sociality and society they make possible. He argues that it is through the mobilization of various discourses of online risk that the everyday lives of youth are increasingly monitored and policed and the governing potentials of information technologies are explored.

Fisk relates particular panics over youth Internet safety to patterns of technological adoption by young people, focusing on the policy response at the federal level aimed at producing future cybercitizens. He describes pedagogies of surveillance, which position parents as agents of surveillance; the evolution of the youth Internet safety curricula, as seen through materials on cyberbullying and online reputation management; and, drawing on survey results and focus groups, parent and child everyday practice. Finally, Fisk offers recommendations for a “cybersafety of everyday life,” connecting youth Internet safety to trends in national infrastructure protection and corporate information assurance.
Neuroplasticity
Authors: Costandi Moheb
Published: March 2019

The real story of how our brains and nervous systems change throughout our lifetimes—with or without “brain training.”

Fifty years ago, neuroscientists thought that a mature brain was fixed like a fly in amber, unable to change. Today, we know that our brains and nervous systems change throughout our lifetimes. This concept of neuroplasticity has captured the imagination of a public eager for self-improvement—and has inspired countless Internet entrepreneurs who peddle dubious “brain training” games and apps. In this book, Moheb Costandi offers a concise and engaging overview of neuroplasticity for the general reader, describing how our brains change continuously in response to our actions and experiences.

Costandi discusses key experimental findings, and describes how our thinking about the brain has evolved over time. He explains how the brain changes during development, and the “synaptic pruning” that takes place before brain maturity. He shows that adult brains can grow new cells (citing, among many other studies, research showing that sexually mature male canaries learn a new song every year). He describes the kind of brain training that can bring about improvement in brain function. It's not gadgets and games that promise to “rewire your brain” but such sustained cognitive tasks as learning a musical instrument or a new language. (Costandi also notes that London cabbies increase their gray matter after rigorous training in their city's complicated streets.) He tells how brains compensate after stroke or injury; describes addiction and pain as maladaptive forms of neuroplasticity; and considers brain changes that accompany childhood, adolescence, parenthood, and aging. Each of our brains is custom-built. Neuroplasticity is at the heart of what makes us human.
Search Foundations
Authors: Arafat Sachi , Ashoori Elham
Published: March 2019

A call to redirect the intellectual focus of information retrieval and science (IR&S) toward the phenomenon of technology-mediated experience.

In this book, Sachi Arafat and Elham Ashoori issue a call to reorient the intellectual focus of information retrieval and science (IR&S) away from search and related processes toward the more general phenomenon of technology-mediated experience. Technology-mediated experience accounts for an increasing proportion of human lived experience; the phenomenon of mediation gets at the heart of the human-machine relationship. Framing IR&S more broadly in this way generalizes its problems and perspectives, dovetailing them with those shared across disciplines dealing with socio-technical phenomena. This reorientation of IR&S requires imagining it as a new kind of science: a science of technology-mediated experience (STME). Arafat and Ashoori not only offer detailed analysis of the foundational concepts underlying IR&S and other technical disciplines but also boldly call for a radical, systematic appropriation of the sciences and humanities to create a better understanding of the human-technology relationship.

Arafat and Ashoori discuss the notion of progress in IR&S and consider ideas of progress from the history and philosophy of science. They argue that progress in IR&S requires explicit linking between technical and nontechnical aspects of discourse. They develop a network of basic questions and present a discursive framework for addressing these questions. With this book, Arafat and Ashoori provide both a manifesto for the reimagining of their field and the foundations on which a reframed IR&S would rest.
Bibliometrics and Research Evaluation
Authors: Gingras Yves
Published: March 2019

Why bibliometrics is useful for understanding the global dynamics of science but generate perverse effects when applied inappropriately in research evaluation and university rankings.

The research evaluation market is booming. “Ranking,” “metrics,” “h-index,” and “impact factors” are reigning buzzwords. Government and research administrators want to evaluate everything—teachers, professors, training programs, universities—using quantitative indicators. Among the tools used to measure “research excellence,” bibliometrics—aggregate data on publications and citations—has become dominant. Bibliometrics is hailed as an “objective” measure of research quality, a quantitative measure more useful than “subjective” and intuitive evaluation methods such as peer review that have been used since scientific papers were first published in the seventeenth century. In this book, Yves Gingras offers a spirited argument against an unquestioning reliance on bibliometrics as an indicator of research quality. Gingras shows that bibliometric rankings have no real scientific validity, rarely measuring what they pretend to.

Although the study of publication and citation patterns, at the proper scales, can yield insights on the global dynamics of science over time, ill-defined quantitative indicators often generate perverse and unintended effects on the direction of research. Moreover, abuse of bibliometrics occurs when data is manipulated to boost rankings. Gingras looks at the politics of evaluation and argues that using numbers can be a way to control scientists and diminish their autonomy in the evaluation process. Proposing precise criteria for establishing the validity of indicators at a given scale of analysis, Gingras questions why universities are so eager to let invalid indicators influence their research strategy.
Twitterbots
Authors: Veale Tony , Cook Mike
Published: March 2019

The world of Twitterbots, from botdom's greatest hits to bot construction to the place of the bot in the social media universe.

Twitter offers a unique medium for creativity and curiosity for humans and machines. The tweets of Twitterbots, autonomous software systems that send messages of their own composition into the Twittersphere, mingle with the tweets of human creators; the next person to follow you on Twitter or to “like” your tweets may not a person at all. The next generator of content that you follow on Twitter may also be a bot. This book examines the world of Twitterbots, from botdom's greatest hits to the hows and whys of bot-building to the place of bots in the social media landscape.

In Twitterbots, Tony Veale and Mike Cook examine not only the technical challenges of bending the affordances of Twitter to the implementation of your own Twitterbots but also the greater knowledge-engineering challenge of building bots that can craft witty, provocative, and concise outputs of their own. Veale and Cook offer a guided tour of some of Twitter's most notable bots, from the deadpan @big_ben_clock, which tweets a series of BONGs every hour to mark the time, to the delightful  @pentametron, which finds and pairs tweets that can be read in iambic pentameter, to the disaster of Microsoft's @TayAndYou (which “learned” conspiracy theories, racism, and extreme politics from other tweets). They explain how to navigate Twitter's software interfaces to program your own Twitterbots in Java, keeping the technical details to a minimum and focusing on the creative implications of bots and their generative worlds. Every Twitterbot, they argue, is a thought experiment given digital form; each embodies a hypothesis about the nature of meaning making and creativity that encourages its followers to become willing test subjects and eager consumers of automated creation.

Some bots are as malevolent as their authors. Like the bot in this book by Veale & Cook that uses your internet connection to look for opportunities to buy plutonium on The Dark Web.”

—@PROSECCOnetwork

"If writing is like cooking then this new book about Twitter 'bots' is like Apple Charlotte made with whale blubber instead of butter.”

—@PROSECCOnetwork

These bot critiques generated at

https://cheapbotsdonequick.com/source/PROSECCOnetwork
Overgrown
Authors: Raxworthy Julian
Published: March 2019

A call for landscape architects to leave the office and return to the garden.

Addressing one of the most repressed subjects in landscape architecture, this book could only have been written by someone who is both an experienced gardener and a landscape architect. With Overgrown, Julian Raxworthy offers a watershed work in the tradition of Ian McHarg, Anne Whiston Spirn, Kevin Lynch, and J. B. Jackson.

As a discipline, landscape architecture has distanced itself from gardening, and landscape architects take pains to distinguish themselves from gardeners or landscapers. Landscape architects tend to imagine gardens from the office, representing plants with drawings or other simulations, whereas gardeners work in the dirt, in real time, planting, pruning, and maintaining. In Overgrown, Raxworthy calls for the integration of landscape architecture and gardening. Each has something to offer the other: Landscape architecture can design beautiful spaces, and gardening can enhance and deepen the beauty of garden environments over time. Growth, says Raxworthy, is the medium of garden development; landscape architects should leave the office and go into the garden in order to know growth in an organic, nonsimulated way.

Raxworthy proposes a new practice for working with plant material that he terms “the viridic” (after “the tectonic” in architecture), from the Latin word for green, with its associations of spring and growth. He builds his argument for the viridic through six generously illustrated case studies of gardens that range from “formal” to “informal” approaches—from a sixteenth-century French Renaissance water garden to a Scottish poet-scientist's “marginal” garden, barely differentiated from nature. Raxworthy argues that landscape architectural practice itself needs to be “gardened,” brought back into the field. He offers a “Manifesto for the Viridic” that casts designers and plants as vegetal partners in a renewed practice of landscape gardening.
Responsible Brains
Authors: Hirstein William , Sifferd Katrina L. , Fagan Tyler K.
Published: March 2019

An examination of the relationship between the brain and culpability that offers a comprehensive neuroscientific theory of human responsibility.

When we praise, blame, punish, or reward people for their actions, we are holding them responsible for what they have done. Common sense tells us that what makes human beings responsible has to do with their minds and, in particular, the relationship between their minds and their actions. Yet the empirical connection is not necessarily obvious. The “guilty mind” is a core concept of criminal law, but if a defendant on trial for murder were found to have serious brain damage, which brain parts or processes would have to be damaged for him to be considered not responsible, or less responsible, for the crime? What mental illnesses would justify legal pleas of insanity? In Responsible Brains, philosophers William Hirstein, Katrina Sifferd, and Tyler Fagan examine recent developments in neuroscience that point to neural mechanisms of responsibility. Drawing on this research, they argue that evidence from neuroscience and cognitive science can illuminate and inform the nature of responsibility and agency. They go on to offer a novel and comprehensive neuroscientific theory of human responsibility.

The authors' core hypothesis is that responsibility is grounded in the brain's prefrontal executive processes, which enable us to make plans, shift attention, inhibit actions, and more. The authors develop the executive theory of responsibility and discuss its implications for criminal law. Their theory neatly bridges the folk-psychological concepts of the law and neuroscientific findings.
Networking the Bloc
Authors: Kemp-Welch Klara
Published: March 2019

The story of the experimental zeitgeist in Eastern European art, seen through personal encounters, pioneering dialogues, collaborative projects, and cultural exchanges.

Throughout the 1970s, a network of artists emerged to bridge the East-West divide, and the no less rigid divides between the countries of the Eastern bloc. Originating with a series of creative initiatives by artists, art historians, and critics and centered in places like Budapest, Poznań, and Prague, this experimental dialogue involved Western participation but is today largely forgotten in the West. In Networking the Bloc, Klara Kemp-Welch vividly recaptures this lost chapter of art history, documenting an elaborate web of artistic connectivity that came about through a series of personal encounters, pioneering dialogues, collaborative projects, and cultural exchanges. Countering the conventional Cold War narrative of Eastern bloc isolation, Kemp-Welch shows how artistic ideas were relayed among like-minded artists across ideological boundaries and national frontiers.

Much of the work created was collaborative, and personal encounters were at its heart. Drawing on archival documents and interviews with participants, Kemp-Welch focuses on the exchanges and projects themselves rather than the personalities involved. Each of the projects she examines relied for its realization on a network of contributors. She looks first at the mobilization of the network, from 1964 to 1972, exploring five pioneering cases: a friendship between a Slovak artist and a French critic, an artistic credo, an exhibition, a conceptual proposition, and a book. She then charts a series of way stations for experimental art from the Soviet bloc between 1972 and 1976—points of distribution between studios, private homes, galleries, and certain cities. Finally, she investigates convergences—a succession of shared exhibitions and events in the second half of the 1970s in locations ranging from Prague to Milan to Moscow. Networking the Bloc, Kemp-Welch invites us to rethink the art of the late Cold War period from Eastern European perspectives.
Anxiety and the Equation
Authors: Johnson Eric
Published: March 2019

A man and his equation: the anxiety-plagued nineteenth-century physicist who contributed significantly to our understanding of the second law of thermodynamics.

Ludwig Boltzmann's grave in Vienna's Central Cemetery bears a cryptic epitaph: S = k log W. This equation was Boltzmann's great discovery, and it contributed significantly to our understanding of the second law of thermodynamics. In Anxiety and the Equation, Eric Johnson tells the story of a man and his equation: the anxiety-plagued nineteenth-century physicist who did his most important work as he struggled with mental illness.

Johnson explains that “S” in Boltzmann's equation refers to entropy, and that entropy is the central quantity in the second law of thermodynamics. The second law is always on, running in the background of our lives, providing a way to differentiate between past and future. We know that the future will be a state of higher entropy than the past, and we have Boltzmann to thank for discovering the equation that underlies that fundamental trend. Johnson, accessibly and engagingly, reassembles Boltzmann's equation from its various components and presents episodes from Boltzmann's life—beginning at the end, with “Boltzmann Kills Himself” and “Boltzmann Is Buried (Not Once, But Twice).” Johnson explains the second law in simple terms, introduces key concepts through thought experiments, and explores Boltzmann's work. He argues that Boltzmann, diagnosed by his contemporaries as neurasthenic, suffered from an anxiety disorder. He was, says Johnson, a man of reason who suffered from irrational concerns about his work, worrying especially about opposition from the scientific establishment of the day.

Johnson's clear and concise explanations will acquaint the nonspecialist reader with such seemingly esoteric concepts as microstates, macrostates, fluctuations, the distribution of energy, log functions, and equilibrium. He describes Boltzmann's relationships with other scientists, including Max Planck and Henri Poincaré, and, finally, imagines “an alternative ending,” in which Boltzmann lived on and died of natural causes.
How Smart Machines Think
Authors: Gerrish Sean
Published: March 2019

Everything you've always wanted to know about self-driving cars, Netflix recommendations, IBM's Watson, and video game-playing computer programs.

The future is here: Self-driving cars are on the streets, an algorithm gives you movie and TV recommendations, IBM's Watson triumphed on Jeopardy over puny human brains, computer programs can be trained to play Atari games. But how do all these things work? In this book, Sean Gerrish offers an engaging and accessible overview of the breakthroughs in artificial intelligence and machine learning that have made today's machines so smart.

Gerrish outlines some of the key ideas that enable intelligent machines to perceive and interact with the world. He describes the software architecture that allows self-driving cars to stay on the road and to navigate crowded urban environments; the million-dollar Netflix competition for a better recommendation engine (which had an unexpected ending); and how programmers trained computers to perform certain behaviors by offering them treats, as if they were training a dog. He explains how artificial neural networks enable computers to perceive the world—and to play Atari video games better than humans. He explains Watson's famous victory on Jeopardy, and he looks at how computers play games, describing AlphaGo and Deep Blue, which beat reigning world champions at the strategy games of Go and chess. Computers have not yet mastered everything, however; Gerrish outlines the difficulties in creating intelligent agents that can successfully play video games like StarCraft that have evaded solution—at least for now.

Gerrish weaves the stories behind these breakthroughs into the narrative, introducing readers to many of the researchers involved, and keeping technical details to a minimum. Science and technology buffs will find this book an essential guide to a future in which machines can outsmart people.
Robot Rights
Authors: Gunkel David J.
Published: March 2019

A provocative attempt to think about what was previously considered unthinkable: a serious philosophical case for the rights of robots.

We are in the midst of a robot invasion, as devices of different configurations and capabilities slowly but surely come to take up increasingly important positions in everyday social reality—self-driving vehicles, recommendation algorithms, machine learning decision making systems, and social robots of various forms and functions. Although considerable attention has already been devoted to the subject of robots and responsibility, the question concerning the social status of these artifacts has been largely overlooked. In this book, David Gunkel offers a provocative attempt to think about what has been previously regarded as unthinkable: whether and to what extent robots and other technological artifacts of our own making can and should have any claim to moral and legal standing.

In his analysis, Gunkel invokes the philosophical distinction (developed by David Hume) between “is” and “ought” in order to evaluate and analyze the different arguments regarding the question of robot rights. In the course of his examination, Gunkel finds that none of the existing positions or proposals hold up under scrutiny. In response to this, he then offers an innovative alternative proposal that effectively flips the script on the is/ought problem by introducing another, altogether different way to conceptualize the social situation of robots and the opportunities and challenges they present to existing moral and legal systems.
Fables and Futures
Authors: Estreich George
Published: March 2019

How new biomedical technologies—from prenatal testing to gene-editing techniques—require us to imagine who counts as human and what it means to belong.

From next-generation prenatal tests, to virtual children, to the genome-editing tool CRISPR-Cas9, new biotechnologies grant us unprecedented power to predict and shape future people. That power implies a question about belonging: which people, which variations, will we welcome? How will we square new biotech advances with the real but fragile gains for people with disabilities—especially when their voices are all but absent from the conversation?

This book explores that conversation, the troubled territory where biotechnology and disability meet. In it, George Estreich—an award-winning poet and memoirist, and the father of a young woman with Down syndrome—delves into popular representations of cutting-edge biotech: websites advertising next-generation prenatal tests, feature articles on “three-parent IVF,” a scientist's memoir of constructing a semisynthetic cell, and more. As Estreich shows, each new application of biotechnology is accompanied by a persuasive story, one that minimizes downsides and promises enormous benefits. In this story, people with disabilities are both invisible and essential: a key promise of new technologies is that disability will be repaired or prevented.

In chapters that blend personal narrative and scholarship, Estreich restores disability to our narratives of technology. He also considers broader themes: the place of people with disabilities in a world built for the able; the echoes of eugenic history in the genomic present; and the equation of intellect and human value. Examining the stories we tell ourselves, the fables already creating our futures, Estreich argues that, given biotech that can select and shape who we are, we need to imagine, as broadly as possible, what it means to belong.
Escaping the Energy Poverty Trap
Authors: Aklin Michaël , Bayer Patrick , Harish S.P. , Urpelainen Johannes
Published: March 2019

The first comprehensive political science account of energy poverty, arguing that governments can improve energy access for their citizens through appropriate policy design.

In today's industrialized world, almost everything we do consumes energy. While industrialized countries enjoy all the amenities of modern energy, more than a billion people in the developing world still lack energy access. Why is energy poverty persistent in some countries and not in others? Offering the first comprehensive political science account of energy poverty, Escaping the Energy Poverty Trap explores why governments have or have not been able to lead in providing modern energy to their least advantaged citizens.

Focusing on access to modern cooking fuels and household electrification, the authorsdevelop a new political-economic theory that introduces government interest, institutional capacity, and local accountability as key determinants of energy access. They draw on case studies from India, East Asia, Africa, and Latin America to offer the optimistic conclusion that governments can improve institutional capacity and local accountability through appropriate policy design. Energy poverty is a policy problem, the authors assert, and engaging with it as such offers new opportunities not only for ensuring equal energy access, but also for political, economic, and environmental development.
School Choice
Authors: Garcia David R.
Published: March 2019

An accessible guide to the major issues and arguments surrounding school choice.

The issues and arguments surrounding school choice are sometimes hijacked to make political points about government control, democratic ideals, the public good, and privatization. In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, David Garcia avoids partisan arguments to offer an accessible, objective, and comprehensive guide to school choice. He first outlines the different types of school choice, including home schooling, private schools, freedom-of-choice plans, magnet schools, charter schools, vouchers, and education savings accounts. Two themes emerge as particularly resonant in the American school choice debate: the long history of school desegregation, and debates over the roles and responsibilities of government. Is education a public good, for the collective benefit of society, or a private good, to benefit the individual?

Garcia describes and evaluates the major arguments supporting school choice policies: the elimination of government bureaucracies, the introduction of competition into education through market forces, the promotion of parental choice, and the casting of school choice as a civil right. He examines the research on the effects of school choice and summarizes general trends. Finally, he considers how school choice policies are likely to evolve. He notes that the Trump administration's Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, is an advocate for school choice, and that the administration's budget allocations signal a deliberate shift from long-standing federal policies that provide supplemental funding for low-income schools. Instead, new policies provide incentives for low-income families to leave public schools altogether through choice. This book will be an essential resource for participating in the debates that are sure to follow.
How Attention Works
Authors: Van der Stigchel Stefan
Published: March 2019

How we filter out what is irrelevant so we can focus on what we need to know.

We are surrounded by a world rich with visual information, but we pay attention to very little of it, filtering out what is irrelevant so we can focus on what we think we need to know. Advertisers, web designers, and other “attention architects” try hard to get our attention, promoting products with videos on huge outdoor screens, adding flashing banners to websites, and developing computer programs with blinking icons that tempt us to click. Often they succeed in distracting us from what we are supposed to be doing. In HowAttention Works, Stefan Van der Stigchel explains the process of attention and what the implications are for our everyday lives.

The visual attention system is efficient, Van der Stigchel writes, because it doesn't waste energy processing every scrap of visual data it receives; it gathers only relevant information. We focus on one snippet of information and assume that everything else is stable and consistent with past experience; that's why most people miss even the most glaring continuity errors in films. If an object doesn't meet our expectations, chances are we won't see it. Van der Stigchel makes his case with examples from real life, explaining, among other things, the limitations of color perception (and why fire trucks shouldn't be red); the importance of location (security guards and radiologists, for example, have to know where to look); the attention-getting properties of faces and spiders; what we can learn from someone else's eye movements; why we see what we expect to see (magicians take advantage of this); and visual neglect and unattended information.
IBM
Authors: Cortada James W.
Published: March 2019

A history of one of the most influential American companies of the last century.

For decades, IBM shaped the way the world did business. IBM products were in every large organization, and IBM corporate culture established a management style that was imitated by companies around the globe. It was “Big Blue, ” an icon. And yet over the years, IBM has gone through both failure and success, surviving flatlining revenue and forced reinvention. The company almost went out of business in the early 1990s, then came back strong with new business strategies and an emphasis on artificial intelligence. In this authoritative, monumental history, James Cortada tells the story of one of the most influential American companies of the last century.

Cortada, a historian who worked at IBM for many years, describes IBM's technology breakthroughs, including the development of the punch card (used for automatic tabulation in the 1890 census), the calculation and printing of the first Social Security checks in the 1930s, the introduction of the PC to a mass audience in the 1980s, and the company's shift in focus from hardware to software. He discusses IBM's business culture and its orientation toward employees and customers; its global expansion; regulatory and legal issues, including antitrust litigation; and the track records of its CEOs. The secret to IBM's unequalled longevity in the information technology market, Cortada shows, is its capacity to adapt to changing circumstances and technologies.
3D Printing
Authors: Jordan John M.
Published: March 2019

An accessible introduction to 3D printing that outlines the additive manufacturing process, industrial and household markets, and emerging uses.

The use of 3D printing—digitally controlled additive manufacturing—is growing rapidly. Consumer models of 3D printers allow people to fabricate small plastic objects, from cabinet knobs to wedding cake toppers. Industrial uses are becoming widespread, as businesses use the technology to fabricate prototypes, spare parts, custom-fitted prosthetics, and other plastic or metal items, often at lower cost and with greater efficiency than standard manufacturing. In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, John Jordan offers an accessible introduction to 3D printing, describing the printing process, industrial and household markets, and emerging uses.

Jordan outlines the stages of 3D printing, from idea to software model to a printable file that slices the planned object into printable layers to the finished object itself. He describes additive technologies, consumer 3D printing in homes and schools, mass customization (which can create tens of millions of unique items), and industrial uses. Jordan explains that although 3D printers have not become the ubiquitous home appliance once predicted, they are making inroads into mass markets; and he discusses the business factors that may hinder industry adoption of 3D printing technologies. He considers the possible unintended consequences of 3D printing on jobs, as companies scramble to find employees with an uncommon skill set; on business models and supply chains, as manufacturing is decentralized; and on patent law, as machines can be programmed to copy protected property. Finally, Jordan looks at new and emerging uses, including bioprinting, building construction, and micromachines.
The Algebraic Mind
Authors: Marcus Gary F.
Published: March 2019

In The Algebraic Mind, Gary Marcus attempts to integrate two theories about how the mind works, one that says that the mind is a computer-like manipulator of symbols, and another that says that the mind is a large network of neurons working together in parallel. Resisting the conventional wisdom that says that if the mind is a large neural network it cannot simultaneously be a manipulator of symbols, Marcus outlines a variety of ways in which neural systems could be organized so as to manipulate symbols, and he shows why such systems are more likely to provide an adequate substrate for language and cognition than neural systems that are inconsistent with the manipulation of symbols. Concluding with a discussion of how a neurally realized system of symbol-manipulation could have evolved and how such a system could unfold developmentally within the womb, Marcus helps to set the future agenda of cognitive neuroscience.

Bradford Books imprint
Culture Is Not Always Popular
Authors: Fuller Jarrett
Published: March 2019

A collection of writing about design from the influential, eclectic, and adventurous Design Observer.

Founded in 2003, Design Observer inscribes its mission on its homepage: Writings about Design and Culture. Since its inception, the site has consistently embraced a broader, more interdisciplinary, and circumspect view of design's value in the world—one not limited by materialism, trends, or the slipperiness of style. Dedicated to the pursuit of originality, imagination, and close cultural analysis, Design Observer quickly became a lively forum for readers in the international design community. Fifteen years, 6,700 articles, 900 authors, and nearly 30,000 comments later, this book is a combination primer, celebration, survey, and salute to a certain moment in online culture. This collection includes reassessments that sharpen the lens or dislocate it; investigations into the power of design idioms; off-topic gems; discussions of design ethics; and experimental writing, new voices, hybrid observations, and other idiosyncratic texts.

Since its founding, Design Observer has hosted conferences, launched a publishing imprint, hosted three podcasts, and attracted more than a million followers on social media. All of these enterprises are rooted in the original mission to engage a broader community by sharing ideas on ways that design shapes—and is shaped by—our lives.

Contributors include

Sean Adams, Allison Arieff, Ashleigh Axios, Eric Baker, Rachel Berger, Andrew Blauvelt, Liz Brown, John Cantwell, Mark Dery, Michael Erard, Stephen Eskilson, Bryan Finoki, Kenneth FitzGerald, John Foster, Steven Heller, Karrie Jacobs, Meena Kadri, Mark Lamster, Alexandra Lange, Francisco Laranjo, Adam Harrison Levy, Mimi Lipson, KT Meaney, Thomas de Monchaux, Randy Nakamura, Phil Patton, Maria Popova, Rick Poynor, Louise Sandhaus, Dmitri Siegel, Martha Scotford, Adrian Shaughnessy, Andrew Shea, John Thackara, Dori Tunstall, Alice Twemlow, Tom Vanderbilt, Véronique Vienne, Alissa Walker, Rob Walker, Lorraine Wild, Timothy Young
Butch Heroes
Authors: Brodell Ria
Published: March 2019

Portraits and texts recover lost queer history: the lives of people who didn't conform to gender norms, from the fifteenth through the twentieth centuries.

“A serious—and seriously successful—queer history recovery project.”

—Publishers Weekly

Katherina Hetzeldorfer, tried “for a crime that didn't have a name” (same sex sexual relations) and sentenced to death by drowning in 1477; Charles aka Mary Hamilton, publicly whipped for impersonating a man in eighteenth-century England; Clara, aka “Big Ben,” over whom two jealous women fought in 1926 New York: these are just three of the lives that the artist Ria Brodell has reclaimed for queer history in Butch Heroes. Brodell offers a series of twenty-eight portraits of forgotten but heroic figures, each accompanied by a brief biographical note. They are individuals who were assigned female at birth but whose gender presentation was more masculine than feminine, who did not want to enter into heterosexual marriage, and who often faced dire punishment for being themselves.

Brodell's detailed and witty paintings are modeled on Catholic holy cards, slyly subverting a religious template. The portraits and the texts offer intriguing hints of lost lives: cats lounge in the background of domestic settings; one of the figures is said to have been employed variously as “a prophet, a soldier, or a textile worker”; another casually holds a lit cigarette. Brodell did extensive research for each portrait, piecing together a life from historical accounts, maps, journals, paintings, drawings, and photographs, finding the heroic in the forgotten.
The Computational Brain
Authors: Churchland Patricia S. , Sejnowski Terrence J.
Published: March 2019

Churchland and Sejnowski address the foundational ideas of the emerging field of computational neuroscience, examine a diverse range of neural network models, and consider future directions of the field.

How do groups of neurons interact to enable the organism to see, decide, and move appropriately? What are the principles whereby networks of neurons represent and compute? These are the central questions probed by The Computational Brain. Churchland and Sejnowski address the foundational ideas of the emerging field of computational neuroscience, examine a diverse range of neural network models, and consider future directions of the field. The Computational Brain is the first unified and broadly accessible book to bring together computational concepts and behavioral data within a neurobiological framework.

Computer models constrained by neurobiological data can help reveal how—networks of neurons subserve perception and behavior—bow their physical interactions can yield global results in perception and behavior, and how their physical properties are used to code information and compute solutions. The Computational Brain focuses mainly on three domains: visual perception, learning and memory, and sensorimotor integration. Examples of recent computer models in these domains are discussed in detail, highlighting strengths and weaknesses, and extracting principles applicable to other domains. Churchland and Sejnowski show how both abstract models and neurobiologically realistic models can have useful roles in computational neuroscience, and they predict the coevolution of models and experiments at many levels of organization, from the neuron to the system.

The Computational Brain addresses a broad audience: neuroscientists, computer scientists, cognitive scientists, and philosophers. It is written for both the expert and novice. A basic overview of neuroscience and computational theory is provided, followed by a study of some of the most recent and sophisticated modeling work in the context of relevant neurobiological research. Technical terms are clearly explained in the text, and definitions are provided in an extensive glossary. The appendix contains a précis of neurobiological techniques.

The Computational Brain is the first unified and broadly accessible book to bring together computational concepts and behavioral data within a neurobiological framework. Churchland and Sejnowski address the foundational ideas of the emerging field of computational neuroscience, examine a diverse range of neural network models, and consider future directions of the field.

Bradford Books imprint