bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Pushes and pulls from below: Anatomical variation, articulation and sound change
Authors: Dediu Dan , Moisik Scott R.
Published: January 2019

This paper argues that inter-individual and inter-group variation in language acquisition, perception, processing and production, rooted in our biology, may play a largely neglected role in sound change. We begin by discussing the patterning of these differences, highlighting those related to vocal tract anatomy with a foundation in genetics and development. We use our ArtiVarK database, a large multi-ethnic sample comprising 3D intraoral optical scans, as well as structural, static and real-time MRI scans of vocal tract anatomy and speech articulation, to quantify the articulatory strategies used to produce the North American English /r/ and to statistically show that anatomical factors seem to influence these articulatory strategies. Building on work showing that these alternative articulatory strategies may have indirect coarticulatory effects, we propose two models for how biases due to variation in vocal tract anatomy may affect sound change. The first involves direct overt acoustic effects of such biases that are then reinterpreted by the hearers, while the second is based on indirect coarticulatory phenomena generated by acoustically covert biases that produce overt “at-a-distance” acoustic effects. This view implies that speaker communities might be “poised” for change because they always contain pools of “standing variation” of such biased speakers, and when factors such as the frequency of the biased speakers in the community, their positions in the communicative network or the topology of the network itself change, sound change may rapidly follow as a self-reinforcing network-level phenomenon, akin to a phase transition. Thus, inter-speaker variation in structured and dynamic communicative networks may couple the initiation and actuation of sound change.
Civil society and adult education provision
Authors: Bogossian Thiago
Published: January 2019

Pelo artigo busca-se discutir em que medida organizações da sociedade civil impactaram na natureza do fornecimento de educação de adultos. Argumenta-se que a sociedade civil é uma mistura de instituições com ideologias distintas, ora empurrando educação de adultos para as necessidades do mercado de trabalho, ora para uma agenda de emancipação e liberdade. Com base em exemplos de três países distintos - Suécia, África do Sul e Estados Unidos - conclui-se que a sociedade civil moldou boa parte do paradigma da educação de adultos ao longo da história e continua sendo um locus privilegiado de luta por uma educação contra-hegemônica que busca mais democracia e igualdade.Palavras-chave: sociedade civil, educação de adultos, aprendizagem ao longo da vida.
Processo avaliativo utilizado pelos professores do ensino médio nas aulas de educação física da rede estadual de ensino de Santa Rosa do Sul/SC
Authors: Santana Leonan Peres , Ferreira Robinalva
Published: January 2019

Neste texto tem-se como objetivo analisar o processo avaliativo utilizado pelos professores de Educação Física com os estudantes do ensino médio da rede estadual de ensino de Santa Rosa do Sul/SC. O estudo foi desenvolvido por meio de pesquisa de campo com abordagem qualitativa. Os principais resultados acerca do processo de avaliação foram: dentre os capítulos do PPP da instituição apenas três instrumentos avaliativos são citados; quanto ao conhecimento dos estudantes acerca da avaliação percebemos que há um entendimento básico; aa auto-avaliação é utilizada apenas por um dos professores; quanto aos critérios avaliativos identificamos que são definidos a partir de documentos como PCNs e Base Nacional Curricular.Palavras-chave: sistema avaliativo; Avaliação; auto-avaliação; ensino médio.
A gestão estratégica do conhecimento como instrumento de geração de valor: um estudo de caso em instituição privada de ensino básico
Authors: Bandeira Júnior Chateaubriand Pinto , Rodriguez Alejandro Martins , Bandeira Catarina Medeiros , Bandeira Lucas Borchartt , Rodrigues Lucinaldo Dos Santos
Published: January 2019

As instituições de ensino básico no Brasil têm enfrentado constantes desafios provocados por mudanças no ambiente organizacional. Desse modo, o objetivo deste trabalho foi estudar a gestão estratégica do conhecimento como instrumento de valor em uma instituição privada de ensino. O universo do estudo foi constituído por uma escola de ensino básico da cidade de Campina Grande no Estado da Paraíba. A abordagem desenvolvida foi quanti-qualitativa e o enfoque utilizado foi exploratório-descritivo. Para a coleta de dados foi realizada uma entrevista semi-estruturada com os colaboradores e feitas observações de campo. Os resultados encontrados na pesquisa destacaram a necessidade de valorização da subjetividade dos colaboradores no contexto organizacional, cujas atitudes é resultado dos seus processos cognitivos, tais como: inteligência, competência, experiência, capacidade, motivação, socialização e liderança, que vão emergindo no seu cotidiano e são disponibilizados à organização. Pelas nossas observações e conclusões, o comportamento do colaborador, enquanto agente ativo da organização, faz com que ambos - colaborador e organização - tenham benefícios intrínsecos.Palavras-chave: capital intelectual, organização, educação.
Now the Chips Are Down
Authors: Gazzard Alison
Published: January 2019

The story of a pioneering microcomputer: its beginnings as part of a national Computer Literary Project, its innovative hardware, and its creative uses.

In 1982, the British Broadcasting Corporation launched its Computer Literacy Project, intended “to introduce interested adults to the world of computers and computing.” The BBC accompanied this initiative with television programs, courses, books, and software—an early experiment in multi-platform education. The BBC, along with Acorn Computers, also introduced the BBC Microcomputer, which would be at the forefront of the campaign. The BBC Micro was designed to meet the needs of users in homes and schools, to demystify computing, and to counter the general pessimism among the media in Britain about technology. In this book, Alison Gazzard looks at the BBC Micro, examining the early capabilities of multi-platform content generation and consumption and the multiple literacies this approach enabled—not only in programming and software creation, but also in accessing information across a range of media, and in “do-it-yourself” computing. She links many of these early developments to current new-media practices.

Gazzard looks at games developed for the BBC Micro, including Granny's Garden, an educational game for primary schools, and Elite, the seminal space-trading game. She considers the shift in focus from hardware to peripherals, describing the Teletext Adapter as an early model for software distribution and the Domesday Project (which combined texts, video, and still photographs) as a hypermedia-like experience.

Gazzard's account shows the BBC Micro not only as a vehicle for various literacies but also as a user-oriented machine that pushed the boundaries of what could be achieved in order to produce something completely new.
MOOCs
Authors: Haber Jonathan
Published: January 2019

Everything you always wanted to know about MOOCs: an account of massive open online courses and what they might mean for the future of higher education.

The New York Times declared 2012 to be “The Year of the MOOC” as millions of students enrolled in massive open online courses (known as MOOCs), millions of investment dollars flowed to the companies making them, and the media declared MOOCs to be earth-shaking game-changers in higher education. During the inevitable backlash that followed, critics highlighted MOOCs' high dropout rate, the low chance of earning back initial investments, and the potential for any earth-shaking game change to make things worse instead of better. In this volume in the Essential Knowledge series, Jonathan Haber offers an account of MOOCs that avoids both hype and doomsaying. Instead, he provides an engaging, straightforward explanation of a rare phenomenon: an education innovation that captures the imagination of the public while moving at the speed of an Internet startup.

Haber explains the origins of MOOCs, what they consist of, the controversies surrounding them, and their possible future role in education. He proposes a new definition of MOOCs based on the culture of experimentation from which they emerged, and adds a student perspective—missing in most MOOC discussion. Haber's unique Degree of Freedom experiment, during which he attempted to learn the equivalent of a four-year liberal arts degree in one year using only MOOCs and other forms of free education, informs his discussion.

Haber urges us to avoid the fallacy of thinking that because MOOCs cannot solve all educational challenges they are not worth pursuing, and he helps us understand what MOOCs—despite their limitations—still offer the world. His book is required reading for anyone trying to sort out the competing claims, aspirations, and accusations that color the MOOC debate.
Machine Learners
Authors: Mackenzie Adrian
Published: January 2019

If machine learning transforms the nature of knowledge, does it also transform the practice of critical thought?

Machine learning—programming computers to learn from data—has spread across scientific disciplines, media, entertainment, and government. Medical research, autonomous vehicles, credit transaction processing, computer gaming, recommendation systems, finance, surveillance, and robotics use machine learning. Machine learning devices (sometimes understood as scientific models, sometimes as operational algorithms) anchor the field of data science. They have also become mundane mechanisms deeply embedded in a variety of systems and gadgets. In contexts from the everyday to the esoteric, machine learning is said to transform the nature of knowledge. In this book, Adrian Mackenzie investigates whether machine learning also transforms the practice of critical thinking.

Mackenzie focuses on machine learners—either humans and machines or human-machine relations—situated among settings, data, and devices. The settings range from fMRI to Facebook; the data anything from cat images to DNA sequences; the devices include neural networks, support vector machines, and decision trees. He examines specific learning algorithms—writing code and writing about code—and develops an archaeology of operations that, following Foucault, views machine learning as a form of knowledge production and a strategy of power. Exploring layers of abstraction, data infrastructures, coding practices, diagrams, mathematical formalisms, and the social organization of machine learning, Mackenzie traces the mostly invisible architecture of one of the central zones of contemporary technological cultures.

Mackenzie's account of machine learning locates places in which a sense of agency can take root. His archaeology of the operational formation of machine learning does not unearth the footprint of a strategic monolith but reveals the local tributaries of force that feed into the generalization and plurality of the field.
Sequel to Suburbia
Authors: Phelps Nicholas A.
Published: January 2019

How the decentralized, automobile-oriented, and fuel-consuming model of American suburban development might change.

In the years after World War II, a distinctly American model for suburban development emerged. The expansive rings of outer suburbs that formed around major cities were decentralized and automobile oriented, an embodiment of America's postwar mass-production, mass-consumption economy. But alternate models for suburbia, including “transit-oriented development,” “smart growth,” and “New Urbanism,” have inspired critiques of suburbanization and experiments in post-suburban ways of living. In Sequel to Suburbia, Nicholas Phelps considers the possible post-suburban future, offering historical and theoretical context as well as case studies of transforming communities.

Phelps first locates these outer suburban rings within wider metropolitan spaces, describes the suburbs as a “spatial fix” for the postwar capitalist economy, and examines the political and governmental obstacles to reworking suburban space. He then presents three glimpses of post-suburban America, looking at Kendall-Dadeland (in Miami-Dade County, Florida), Tysons Corner (in Fairfax County, Virginia), and Schaumburg, Illinois (near Chicago). He shows Kendall-Dadeland to be an isolated New Urbanism success; describes the re-planning of Tysons Corner to include a retrofitted central downtown area; and examines Schaumburg's position as a regional capital for Chicago's northwest suburbs. As these cases show, the reworking of suburban space and the accompanying political process will not be left to a small group of architects, planners, and politicians. Post-suburban politics will have to command the approval of the residents of suburbia.
Self-Tracking
Authors: Neff Gina , Nafus Dawn
Published: January 2019

What happens when people turn their everyday experience into data: an introduction to the essential ideas and key challenges of self-tracking.

People keep track. In the eighteenth century, Benjamin Franklin kept charts of time spent and virtues lived up to. Today, people use technology to self-track: hours slept, steps taken, calories consumed, medications administered. Ninety million wearable sensors were shipped in 2014 to help us gather data about our lives. This book examines how people record, analyze, and reflect on this data, looking at the tools they use and the communities they become part of. Gina Neff and Dawn Nafus describe what happens when people turn their everyday experience—in particular, health and wellness-related experience—into data, and offer an introduction to the essential ideas and key challenges of using these technologies. They consider self-tracking as a social and cultural phenomenon, describing not only the use of data as a kind of mirror of the self but also how this enables people to connect to, and learn from, others.

Neff and Nafus consider what's at stake: who wants our data and why; the practices of serious self-tracking enthusiasts; the design of commercial self-tracking technology; and how self-tracking can fill gaps in the healthcare system. Today, no one can lead an entirely untracked life. Neff and Nafus show us how to use data in a way that empowers and educates.
When I Was a Photographer
Authors: Nadar Félix
Published: January 2019

The first complete English translation of Nadar's intelligent and witty memoir, a series of vignettes that capture his experiences in the early days of photography.

Celebrated nineteenth-century photographer—and writer, actor, caricaturist, inventor, and balloonist—Félix Nadar published this memoir of his photographic life in 1900 at the age of eighty. Composed as a series of vignettes (we might view them as a series of “written photographs”), this intelligent and witty book offers stories of Nadar's experiences in the early years of photography, memorable character sketches, and meditations on history. It is a classic work, cited by writers from Walter Benjamin to Rosalind Krauss. This is its first and only complete English translation.

In When I Was a Photographer (Quand j'étais photographe), Nadar tells us about his descent into the sewers and catacombs of Paris, where he experimented with the use of artificial lighting, and his ascent into the skies over Paris in a hot air balloon, from which he took the first aerial photographs. He recounts his “postal photography” during the 1870-1871 Siege of Paris—an amazing scheme involving micrographic images and carrier pigeons. He describes technical innovations and important figures in photography, and offers a thoughtful consideration of society and culture; but he also writes entertainingly about such matters as Balzac's terror of being photographed, the impact of a photograph on a celebrated murder case, and the difference between male and female clients. Nadar's memoir captures, as surely as his photographs, traces of a vanished era.
Technologies of Vision
Authors: Anderson Steve F
Published: January 2019

An investigation of the computational turn in visual culture, centered on the entangled politics and pleasures of data and images.

If the twentieth century was tyrannized by images, then the twenty-first is ruled by data. In Technologies of Vision, Steve Anderson argues that visual culture and the methods developed to study it have much to teach us about today's digital culture; but first we must examine the historically entangled relationship between data and images. Anderson starts from the supposition that there is no great divide separating pre- and post-digital culture. Rather than creating an insular field of new and inaccessible discourse, he argues, it is more productive to imagine that studying “the digital” is coextensive with critical models—especially the politics of seeing and knowing—developed for understanding “the visual.”

Anderson's investigation takes on an eclectic array of examples ranging from virtual reality, culture analytics, and software art to technologies for computer vision, face recognition, and photogrammetry. Mixing media archaeology with software studies, Anderson mines the history of technology for insight into both the politics of data and the pleasures of algorithms. He proposes a taxonomy of modes that describe the functional relationship between data and images in the domains of space, surveillance and data visualization. At stake in all three are tensions between the totalizing logic of data and the unruly chaos of images.
What the Body Commands
Authors: Klein Colin
Published: January 2019

A novel theory of pain, according to which pains are imperatives—commands issued by the body, ordering you to protect the injured part.

In What the Body Commands, Colin Klein proposes and defends a novel theory of pain. Klein argues that pains are imperative; they are sensations with a content, and that content is a command to protect the injured part of the body. He terms this view “imperativism about pain,” and argues that imperativism can account for two puzzling features of pain: its strong motivating power and its uninformative nature. Klein argues that the biological purpose of pain is homeostatic; like hunger and thirst, pain helps solve a challenge to bodily integrity. It does so by motivating you to act in ways that help the body recover. If you obey pain's command, you get better (in ordinary circumstances). He develops his account to handle a variety of pain phenomena and applies it to solve a number of historically puzzling cases. Klein's intent is to defend the imperativist view in a pure form—without requiring pain to represent facts about the world.

Klein presents a model of imperative content showing that intrinsically motivating sensations are best understood as imperatives, and argues that pain belongs to this class. He considers the distinction between pain and suffering; explains how pain motivates; addresses variations among pains; and offers an imperativist account of maladaptive pains, pains that don't appear to hurt, masochism, and why pain feels bad.
The Long Arm of Moore's Law
Authors: Mody Cyrus C. M.
Published: January 2019

How, beginning in the mid 1960s, the US semiconductor industry helped shape changes in American science, including a new orientation to the short-term and the commercial.

Since the mid 1960s, American science has undergone significant changes in the way it is organized, funded, and practiced. These changes include the decline of basic research by corporations; a new orientation toward the short-term and the commercial, with pressure on universities and government labs to participate in the market; and the promotion of interdisciplinarity. In this book, Cyrus Mody argues that the changes in American science that began in the 1960s co-evolved with and were shaped by the needs of the “civilianized” US semiconductor industry.

In 1965, Gordon Moore declared that the most profitable number of circuit components that can be crammed on a single silicon chip doubles every year. Mody views “Moore's Law” less as prediction than as self-fulfilling prophecy, pointing to the enormous investments of capital, people, and institutions the semiconductor industry required—the “long arm” of Moore's Law that helped shape all of science.

Mody offers a series of case studies in microelectronics that illustrate the reach of Moore's Law. He describes the pressures on Stanford University's electrical engineers during the Vietnam era, IBM's exploration of alternatives to semiconductor technology, the emergence of consortia to integrate research across disciplines and universities, and the interwoven development of the the molecular electronics community and associated academic institutions as the vision of a molecular computer informed the restructuring of research programs.
The Ancient Origins of Consciousness
Authors: Feinberg Todd E. , Mallatt Jon M.
Published: January 2019

How consciousness appeared much earlier in evolutionary history than is commonly assumed, and why all vertebrates and perhaps even some invertebrates are conscious.

How is consciousness created? When did it first appear on Earth, and how did it evolve? What constitutes consciousness, and which animals can be said to be sentient? In this book, Todd Feinberg and Jon Mallatt draw on recent scientific findings to answer these questions—and to tackle the most fundamental question about the nature of consciousness: how does the material brain create subjective experience?

After assembling a list of the biological and neurobiological features that seem responsible for consciousness, and considering the fossil record of evolution, Feinberg and Mallatt argue that consciousness appeared much earlier in evolutionary history than is commonly assumed. About 520 to 560 million years ago, they explain, the great “Cambrian explosion” of animal diversity produced the first complex brains, which were accompanied by the first appearance of consciousness; simple reflexive behaviors evolved into a unified inner world of subjective experiences. From this they deduce that all vertebrates are and have always been conscious—not just humans and other mammals, but also every fish, reptile, amphibian, and bird. Considering invertebrates, they find that arthropods (including insects and probably crustaceans) and cephalopods (including the octopus) meet many of the criteria for consciousness. The obvious and conventional wisdom–shattering implication is that consciousness evolved simultaneously but independently in the first vertebrates and possibly arthropods more than half a billion years ago. Combining evolutionary, neurobiological, and philosophical approaches allows Feinberg and Mallatt to offer an original solution to the “hard problem” of consciousness.
Common Sense, the Turing Test, and the Quest for Real AI
Authors: Levesque Hector J.
Published: January 2019

What artificial intelligence can tell us about the mind and intelligent behavior.

What can artificial intelligence teach us about the mind? If AI's underlying concept is that thinking is a computational process, then how can computation illuminate thinking? It's a timely question. AI is all the rage, and the buzziest AI buzz surrounds adaptive machine learning: computer systems that learn intelligent behavior from massive amounts of data. This is what powers a driverless car, for example. In this book, Hector Levesque shifts the conversation to “good old fashioned artificial intelligence,” which is based not on heaps of data but on understanding commonsense intelligence. This kind of artificial intelligence is equipped to handle situations that depart from previous patterns—as we do in real life, when, for example, we encounter a washed-out bridge or when the barista informs us there's no more soy milk.

Levesque considers the role of language in learning. He argues that a computer program that passes the famous Turing Test could be a mindless zombie, and he proposes another way to test for intelligence—the Winograd Schema Test, developed by Levesque and his colleagues. “If our goal is to understand intelligent behavior, we had better understand the difference between making it and faking it,” he observes. He identifies a possible mechanism behind common sense and the capacity to call on background knowledge: the ability to represent objects of thought symbolically. As AI migrates more and more into everyday life, we should worry if systems without common sense are making decisions where common sense is needed.
Robot-Proof
Authors: Aoun Joseph E.
Published: January 2019

How to educate the next generation of college students to invent, to create, and to discover—filling needs that even the most sophisticated robot cannot.

Driverless cars are hitting the road, powered by artificial intelligence. Robots can climb stairs, open doors, win Jeopardy, analyze stocks, work in factories, find parking spaces, advise oncologists. In the past, automation was considered a threat to low-skilled labor. Now, many high-skilled functions, including interpreting medical images, doing legal research, and analyzing data, are within the skill sets of machines. How can higher education prepare students for their professional lives when professions themselves are disappearing? In Robot-Proof, Northeastern University president Joseph Aoun proposes a way to educate the next generation of college students to invent, to create, and to discover—to fill needs in society that even the most sophisticated artificial intelligence agent cannot.

A “robot-proof” education, Aoun argues, is not concerned solely with topping up students' minds with high-octane facts. Rather, it calibrates them with a creative mindset and the mental elasticity to invent, discover, or create something valuable to society—a scientific proof, a hip-hop recording, a web comic, a cure for cancer. Aoun lays out the framework for a new discipline, humanics, which builds on our innate strengths and prepares students to compete in a labor market in which smart machines work alongside human professionals. The new literacies of Aoun's humanics are data literacy, technological literacy, and human literacy. Students will need data literacy to manage the flow of big data, and technological literacy to know how their machines work, but human literacy—the humanities, communication, and design—to function as a human being. Life-long learning opportunities will support their ability to adapt to change.

The only certainty about the future is change. Higher education based on the new literacies of humanics can equip students for living and working through change.
Beyond Our Control?
Authors: Biegler Stuart
Published: January 2019

An examination of current and emerging issues in cyberlaw.

This book provides a framework for thinking about the law and cyberspace, examining the extent to which the Internet is currently under control and the extent to which it can or should be controlled. It focuses in part on the proliferation of MP3 file sharing, a practice made possible by the development of a file format that enables users to store large audio files with near-CD sound quality on a computer. By 1998, software available for free on the Web enabled users to copy existing digital files from CDs. Later technologies such as Napster and Gnutella allowed users to exchange MP3 files in cyberspace without having to post anything online. This ability of online users to download free music caused an uproar among music executives and many musicians, as well as a range of much-discussed legal action.

Regulation strategies identified and discussed include legislation, policy changes, administrative agency activity, international cooperation, architectural changes, private ordering, and self-regulation. The book also applies major regulatory models to some of the most volatile Internet issues, including cyber-security, consumer fraud, free speech rights, intellectual property rights, and file-sharing programs.
Designing with Blends
Authors: Imaz Manuel , Benyon David
Published: January 2019

How recent research in cognitive science offers new ways to understand the interaction of people and computers and develops a new literacy for well-informed, sensitive software design.

The evolution of the concept of mind in cognitive science over the past 25 years creates new ways to think about the interaction of people and computers. New ideas about embodiment, metaphor as a fundamental cognitive process, and conceptual integration—a blending of older concepts that gives rise to new, emergent properties—have become increasingly important in software engineering (SE) and human-computer interaction (HCI). If once computing was based on algorithms, mathematical theories, and formal notations, now the use of stories, metaphors, and blends can contribute to well-informed, sensitive software design. In Designing with Blends, Manuel Imaz and David Benyon show how these new metaphors and concepts of mind allow us to discover new aspects of HCI-SE.

After 60 years, digital technology has come of age, but software design has not kept pace with technological sophistication; people struggle to understand and use their computers, cameras, phones, and other devices. Imaz and Benyon argue that the dominance of digital media in our lives demands changes in HCI-SE based on advances in cognitive science. The idea of embodied cognition, they contend, can change the way we approach design by emphasizing the figurative nature of interaction. Imaz and Benyon offer both theoretical grounding and practical examples that illustrate the advantages of applying cognitive concepts to software design. A new view of cognition, they argue, will develop a cognitive literacy in software and interaction design that helps designers understand the opportunities of digital technology and provides people with a more satisfying interactive experience.
Global Environmental Diplomacy
Authors: Tolba Mostafa K. , Rummel-Bulska Iwona
Published: January 2019

Foreword by Mario Molina As Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) from 1976 to 1992, Mostafa K.

Tolba had as much insight into, and influence on, the development of international environmental policy as anyone. In this book, he tells the story of the negotiations that led to a number of landmark agreements, such as the Vienna Convention on Ozone and its Montreal Protocol, the Basel Convention on Hazardous Wastes, and the Biodiversity Convention. The book stands as the legacy of an important and charismatic figure who played a pivotal role during the first phase of global environmental diplomacy. Tolba concentrates on the context in which governments conclude that particular issues are ripe for binding international cooperation and on the factors that influence them during negotiations—such as science, the media, nongovernmental organizations, politicians, business and industry, and the public. The areas he discusses include the evolution of environmental law, environmental soft laws (principles and guidelines rather than treaties), binding regional regimes such as the Regional Seas Program and the Shared Freshwater Resources Program, the ozone layer, global warming, hazardous wastes, the loss of biological diversity, and ways to make international agreements work.
Inattentional Blindness
Authors: Mack Arien , Rock Irvin
Published: January 2019

Arien Mack and Irvin Rock make the radical claim that there is no conscious perception of the visual world without attention to it.

Many people believe that merely by opening their eyes, they see everything in their field of view; in fact, a line of psychological research has been taken as evidence of the existence of so-called preattentional perception. In Inattentional Blindness, Arien Mack and Irvin Rock make the radical claim that there is no such thing—that there is no conscious perception of the visual world without attention to it.

The authors present a narrative chronicle of their research. Thus, the reader follows the trail that led to the final conclusions, learning why initial hypotheses and explanations were discarded or revised, and how new questions arose along the way. The phenomenon of inattentional blindness has theoretical importance for cognitive psychologists studying perception, attention, and consciousness, as well as for philosophers and neuroscientists interested in the problem of consciousness.

Bradford Books imprint
Microsound
Authors: Roads Curtis
Published: January 2019

Below the level of the musical note lies the realm of microsound, of sound particles lasting less than one-tenth of a second. Recent technological advances allow us to probe and manipulate these pinpoints of sound, dissolving the traditional building blocks of music—notes and their intervals—into a more fluid and supple medium. The sensations of point, pulse (series of points), line (tone), and surface (texture) emerge as particle density increases. Sounds coalesce, evaporate, and mutate into other sounds. Composers have used theories of microsound in computer music since the 1950s. Distinguished practitioners include Karlheinz Stockhausen and Iannis Xenakis. Today, with the increased interest in computer and electronic music, many young composers and software synthesis developers are exploring its advantages. Covering all aspects of composition with sound particles, Microsound offers composition theory, historical accounts, technical overviews, acoustical experiments, descriptions of musical works, and aesthetic reflections.
The Minimum Description Length Principle
Authors: Grünwald Peter D.
Published: January 2019

A comprehensive introduction and reference guide to the minimum description length (MDL) Principle that is accessible to researchers dealing with inductive reference in diverse areas including statistics, pattern classification, machine learning, data mining, biology, econometrics, and experimental psychology, as well as philosophers interested in the foundations of statistics.

The minimum description length (MDL) principle is a powerful method of inductive inference, the basis of statistical modeling, pattern recognition, and machine learning. It holds that the best explanation, given a limited set of observed data, is the one that permits the greatest compression of the data. MDL methods are particularly well-suited for dealing with model selection, prediction, and estimation problems in situations where the models under consideration can be arbitrarily complex, and overfitting the data is a serious concern. This extensive, step-by-step introduction to the MDL Principle provides a comprehensive reference (with an emphasis on conceptual issues) that is accessible to graduate students and researchers in statistics, pattern classification, machine learning, and data mining, to philosophers interested in the foundations of statistics, and to researchers in other applied sciences that involve model selection, including biology, econometrics, and experimental psychology.

Part I provides a basic introduction to MDL and an overview of the concepts in statistics and information theory needed to understand MDL. Part II treats universal coding, the information-theoretic notion on which MDL is built, and part III gives a formal treatment of MDL theory as a theory of inductive inference based on universal coding. Part IV provides a comprehensive overview of the statistical theory of exponential families with an emphasis on their information-theoretic properties. The text includes a number of summaries, paragraphs offering the reader a "fast track" through the material, and boxes highlighting the most important concepts.
Virtual Music
Authors: Cope David
Published: January 2019

Virtual Music is about artificial creativity. Focusing on the author's Experiments in Musical Intelligence computer music composing program, the author and a distinguished group of experts discuss many of the issues surrounding the program, including artificial intelligence, music cognition, and aesthetics.

The book is divided into four parts. The first part provides a historical background to Experiments in Musical Intelligence, including examples of historical antecedents, followed by an overview of the program by Douglas Hofstadter. The second part follows the composition of an Experiments in Musical Intelligence work, from the creation of a database to the completion of a new work in the style of Mozart. It includes, in sophisticated lay terms, relatively detailed explanations of how each step in the process contributes to the final composition. The third part consists of perspectives and analyses by Jonathan Berger, Daniel Dennett, Bernard Greenberg, Douglas R. Hofstadter, Steve Larson, and Eleanor Selfridge-Field. The fourth part presents the author's responses to these commentaries, as well as his thoughts on the implications of artificial creativity.

The book (and corresponding Web site) includes an appendix providing extended musical examples referred to and discussed in the book, including composers such as Scarlatti, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, Puccini, Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev, Debussy, Bartok, and others. It is also accompanied by a CD containing performances of the music in the text.
Mechanisms
Authors: Kirschenbaum Matthew G.
Published: January 2019

A new “textual studies” and archival approach to the investigation of works of new media and electronic literature that applies techniques of computer forensics to conduct media-specific readings of William Gibson's electronic poem “Agrippa,” Michael Joyce's Afternoon, and the interactive game Mystery House.

In Mechanisms, Matthew Kirschenbaum examines new media and electronic writing against the textual and technological primitives that govern writing, inscription, and textual transmission in all media: erasure, variability, repeatability, and survivability. Mechanisms is the first book in its field to devote significant attention to storage—the hard drive in particular—arguing that understanding the affordances of storage devices is essential to understanding new media. Drawing a distinction between “forensic materiality” and “formal materiality,” Kirschenbaum uses applied computer forensics techniques in his study of new media works. Just as the humanities discipline of textual studies examines books as physical objects and traces different variants of texts, computer forensics encourage us to perceive new media in terms of specific versions, platforms, systems, and devices. Kirschenbaum demonstrates these techniques in media-specific readings of three landmark works of new media and electronic literature, all from the formative era of personal computing: the interactive fiction game Mystery House, Michael Joyce's Afternoon: A Story, and William Gibson's electronic poem “Agrippa.”
Gödel, Putnam, and Functionalism
Authors: Buechner Jeff
Published: January 2019

The first systematic examination of Hilary Putnam's arguments against computational functionalism challenges each of Putnam's main arguments.

With mind-brain identity theories no longer dominant in philosophy of mind in the late 1950s, scientific materialists turned to functionalism, the view that the identity of any mental state depends on its function in the cognitive system of which it is a part. The philosopher Hilary Putnam was one of the primary architects of functionalism and was the first to propose computational functionalism, which views the human mind as a computer or an information processor. But, in the early 1970s, Putnam began to have doubts about functionalism, and in his masterwork Representation and Reality (MIT Press, 1988), he advanced four powerful arguments against his own doctrine of computational functionalism.

In Gödel, Putnam, and Functionalism, Jeff Buechner systematically examines Putnam's arguments against functionalism and contends that they are unsuccessful. Putnam's first argument uses Gödel's incompleteness theorem to refute the view that there is a computational description of human reasoning and rationality; his second, the “triviality argument,” demonstrates that any computational description can be attributed to any physical system; his third, the multirealization argument, shows that there are infinitely many computational realizations of an arbitrary intentional state; his fourth argument buttresses this assertion by showing that there cannot be local computational reductions because there is no computable partitioning of the infinity of computational realizations of an arbitrary intentional state into a single package or small set of packages (equivalence classes). Buechner analyzes these arguments and the important inferential connections among them—for example, the use of both the Gödel and triviality arguments in the argument against local computational reductions—and argues that none of Putnam's four arguments succeeds in refuting functionalism. Gödel, Putnam, and Functionalism will inspire renewed discussion of Putnam's influential book and will confirm Representation and Reality as a major work by a major philosopher.

Bradford Books imprint
Predicative Minds
Authors: Bogdan Radu J.
Published: January 2019

An exploration of why and how the human competence for predication came to be.

The predicative mind singles out and represents an item in order to attribute to it a property, a relation, an action, an evaluation; it thinks, and says, of a house that it is big, of a car that it is to the left of the house, of a cat that it is about to jump, of a hypothesis that it is plausible. The capacity to predicate appears to be neither innate nor learned, yet it is universal among humans. Puzzling in evolutionary, developmental, and philosophical terms, the mental competence for predication still awaits a coherent and plausible explanation. In this exploration of the predicative roots of human thinking, Radu Bogdan takes up the challenge. Bogdan argues that predication is not only an outcome of development but also a by-product of uniquely human features of development, many of them social in nature and unrelated to representation, cognition, and thinking. Humans develop predicative minds for disparate reasons, which bear initially on physiological coregulation, affective and manipulative communication, and the socially shared acquisition of words. Once developed, the competence for predication in turn redesigns human thinking and communication. Predication is at the heart of conscious, deliberate, explicit, and language-based human thinking, and it is the fuel of higher mental activities. Understanding the uniqueness and representational power of the human mind, Bogdan contends, requires an explanation of why and how predication came to be.

Bradford Books imprint
A Single Sky
Authors: Munns David P.D.
Published: January 2019

How radio astronomers challenged national borders, disciplinary boundaries, and the constraints of vision to create an international scientific community.

For more than three thousand years, the science of astronomy depended on visible light. In just the last sixty years, radio technology has fundamentally altered how astronomers see the universe. Combining the wartime innovation of radar and the established standards of traditional optical telescopes, the “radio telescope” offered humanity a new vision of the universe. In A Single Sky, the historian David Munns explains how the idea of the radio telescope emerged from a new scientific community uniting the power of radio with the international aspirations of the discipline of astronomy. The radio astronomers challenged Cold War era rivalries by forging a united scientific community looking at a single sky.

Munns tells the interconnecting stories of Australian, British, Dutch, and American radio astronomers, all seeking to learn how to see the universe by means of radio. Jointly, this international array of radio astronomers built a new “community” style of science opposing the “glamour” of nuclear physics. A Single Sky describes a communitarian style of science, a culture of interdisciplinary and international integration and cooperation, and counters the notion that recent science has been driven by competition. Collaboration, or what a prominent radio astronomer called “a blending of radio invention and astronomical insight,” produced a science as revolutionary as Galileo's first observations with a telescope. Working together, the community of radio astronomers revealed the structure of the galaxy.
Why America Is Not a New Rome
Authors: Smil Vaclav
Published: January 2019

An investigation of the America-Rome analogy that goes deeper than the facile comparisons made on talk shows and in glossy magazine articles.

America's post–Cold War strategic dominance and its pre-recession affluence inspired pundits to make celebratory comparisons to ancient Rome at its most powerful. Now, with America no longer perceived as invulnerable, engaged in protracted fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, and suffering the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, comparisons are to the bloated, decadent, ineffectual later Empire. In Why America Is Not a New Rome, Vaclav Smil looks at these comparisons in detail, going deeper than the facile analogy-making of talk shows and glossy magazine articles. He finds profound differences.

Smil, a scientist and a lifelong student of Roman history, focuses on several fundamental concerns: the very meaning of empire; the actual extent and nature of Roman and American power; the role of knowledge and innovation; and demographic and economic basics—population dynamics, illness, death, wealth, and misery. America is not a latter-day Rome, Smil finds, and we need to understand this in order to look ahead without the burden of counterproductive analogies. Superficial similarities do not imply long-term political, demographic, or economic outcomes identical to Rome's.
Mindshaping
Authors: Zawidzki Tadeusz Wiesław
Published: January 2019

A proposal that human social cognition would not have evolved without mechanisms and practices that shape minds in ways that make them easier to interpret.

In this novel account of distinctively human social cognition, Tadeusz Zawidzki argues that the key distinction between human and nonhuman social cognition consists in our complex, diverse, and flexible capacities to shape each other's minds in ways that make them easier to interpret. Zawidzki proposes that such "mindshaping"—which takes the form of capacities and practices such as sophisticated imitation, pedagogy, conformity to norms, and narrative self-constitution—is the most important component of human social cognition. Without it, he argues, none of the other components of what he terms the "human sociocognitive syndrome," including sophisticated language, cooperation, and sophisticated "mindreading," would be possible.

Challenging the dominant view that sophisticated mindreading—especially propositional attitude attribution—is the key evolutionary innovation behind distinctively human social cognition, Zawidzki contends that the capacity to attribute such mental states depends on the evolution of mindshaping practices. Propositional attitude attribution, he argues, is likely to be unreliable unless most of us are shaped to have similar kinds of propositional attitudes in similar circumstances. Motivations to mindshape, selected to make sophisticated cooperation possible, combine with low-level mindreading abilities that we share with nonhuman species to make it easier for humans to interpret and anticipate each other's behavior. Eventually, this led, in human prehistory, to the capacity to attribute full-blown propositional attitudes accurately—a capacity that is parasitic, in phylogeny and today, on prior capacities to shape minds.

Bringing together findings from developmental psychology, comparative psychology, evolutionary psychology, and philosophy of psychology, Zawidzki offers a strikingly original framework for understanding human social cognition.

Bradford Books imprint