bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
First confirmation of the shell-boring oyster parasite Polydora websteri (Polychaeta: Spionidae) in Washington State, USA
Authors: Lopes Heather , Martinelli Julieta , Hauser Lorenz , Jimenez-Hidalgo Isadora , King Teri L , Padilla-Gamino Jacqueline , Rawson Paul , Spencer Laura , Williams Jason , Wood Chelsea
Published: March 2019

Invasions by the spionid polychaete Polydora websteri have resulted in the collapse of oyster aquaculture industries in Australia, New Zealand, and Hawaii. These worms burrow into the shells of bivalves, creating unsightly mud blisters that are unappealing to consumers and, when nicked during shucking, release mud and detritus that can foul oyster meats. Recent sightings of mud blisters on the shells of Pacific oysters (Crassostrea gigas) in Puget Sound, Washington, suggest a new spionid polychaete invasion. To determine the identity of the polychaete causing these mud blisters, we obtained Pacific oysters from two locations in Puget Sound and examined them for blisters and burrows associated with spionid infection. We then extracted polychaetes and sequenced mitochondrial (cytochrome c oxidase I [COI]) and nuclear (18S rRNA) genes to obtain species-level identifications for a subset of these worms. Our data confirm that P. websteri is present in mud blisters of Puget Sound oysters, constituting the first confirmed record of this species in Washington State. The presence of non-native P. websteri could threaten the sustainability of oyster aquaculture in Washington, which currently produces more shellfish than any other US state.
The gender(ed) division of labour in Europe: patterns of practices in 18 EU countries
Authors: Cunha Vanessa , Atalaia Susana
Published: March 2019

Drawing on cross-national data from ISSP 2012, this paper aims to identify and characterize the patterns of gender division of labour in European families with children. Analysis focuses on gender role practices at country level, assuming that welfare regimes frame the gendered allocation of time to paid work, care work and household work. From a cluster analysis based on time-use (weekly hours and sex asymmetries) in 18 EU countries, six patterns are identified. Findings disclose the relevance of disentangling care work from household work in order to understand in more detail the diversity of patterns across Europe.
The Technological Singularity
Authors: Shanahan Murray
Published: March 2019

The idea of technological singularity, and what it would mean if ordinary human intelligence were enhanced or overtaken by artificial intelligence.

The idea that human history is approaching a “singularity”—that ordinary humans will someday be overtaken by artificially intelligent machines or cognitively enhanced biological intelligence, or both—has moved from the realm of science fiction to serious debate. Some singularity theorists predict that if the field of artificial intelligence (AI) continues to develop at its current dizzying rate, the singularity could come about in the middle of the present century. Murray Shanahan offers an introduction to the idea of the singularity and considers the ramifications of such a potentially seismic event.

Shanahan's aim is not to make predictions but rather to investigate a range of scenarios. Whether we believe that singularity is near or far, likely or impossible, apocalypse or utopia, the very idea raises crucial philosophical and pragmatic questions, forcing us to think seriously about what we want as a species.

Shanahan describes technological advances in AI, both biologically inspired and engineered from scratch. Once human-level AI—theoretically possible, but difficult to accomplish—has been achieved, he explains, the transition to superintelligent AI could be very rapid. Shanahan considers what the existence of superintelligent machines could mean for such matters as personhood, responsibility, rights, and identity. Some superhuman AI agents might be created to benefit humankind; some might go rogue. (Is Siri the template, or HAL?) The singularity presents both an existential threat to humanity and an existential opportunity for humanity to transcend its limitations. Shanahan makes it clear that we need to imagine both possibilities if we want to bring about the better outcome.
Visual Cortex and Deep Networks
Authors: Poggio Tomaso A. , Anselmi Fabio
Published: March 2019

A mathematical framework that describes learning of invariant representations in the ventral stream, offering both theoretical development and applications.

The ventral visual stream is believed to underlie object recognition in primates. Over the past fifty years, researchers have developed a series of quantitative models that are increasingly faithful to the biological architecture. Recently, deep learning convolution networks—which do not reflect several important features of the ventral stream architecture and physiology—have been trained with extremely large datasets, resulting in model neurons that mimic object recognition but do not explain the nature of the computations carried out in the ventral stream. This book develops a mathematical framework that describes learning of invariant representations of the ventral stream and is particularly relevant to deep convolutional learning networks.

The authors propose a theory based on the hypothesis that the main computational goal of the ventral stream is to compute neural representations of images that are invariant to transformations commonly encountered in the visual environment and are learned from unsupervised experience. They describe a general theoretical framework of a computational theory of invariance (with details and proofs offered in appendixes) and then review the application of the theory to the feedforward path of the ventral stream in the primate visual cortex.
Titans of the Climate
Authors: Gallagher Kelly Sims , Xuan Xiaowei
Published: March 2019

How the planet's two largest greenhouse gas emitters navigate climate policy.

The United States and China together account for a disproportionate 45 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions. In 2014, then-President Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping announced complementary efforts to limit emissions, paving the way for the Paris Agreement. And yet, with President Trump's planned withdrawal from the Paris accords and Xi's consolidation of power—as well as mutual mistrust fueled by misunderstanding—the climate future is uncertain. In Titans of the Climate, Kelly Sims Gallagher and Xiaowei Xuan examine how the planet's two largest greenhouse gas emitters develop and implement climate policy. Through dispassionate analysis, the authors aim to help readers understand the challenges, constraints, and opportunities in each country.

Gallagher—a former U.S. climate policymaker—and Xuan—a member of a Chinese policy think tank—describe the specific drivers—political, economic, and social—of climate policies in both countries and map the differences between policy outcomes. They characterize the U.S. approach as “deliberative incrementalism”; the Chinese, meanwhile, engage in “strategic pragmatism.” Comparing the policy processes of the two countries, Gallagher and Xuan make the case that if each country understands more about the other's goals and constraints, climate policy cooperation is more likely to succeed.
Trees of the Brain, Roots of the Mind
Authors: Ascoli Giorgio A.
Published: March 2019

An examination of the stunning beauty of the brain's cellular form, with many color illustrations, and a provocative claim about the mind-brain relationship.

The human brain is often described as the most complex object in the universe. Tens of billions of nerve cells-tiny tree-like structures—make up a massive network with enormous computational power. In this book, Giorgio Ascoli reveals another aspect of the human brain: the stunning beauty of its cellular form. Doing so, he makes a provocative claim about the mind-brain relationship.

If each nerve cell enlarged a thousandfold looks like a tree, then a small region of the nervous system at the same magnified scale resembles a gigantic, fantastic forest. This structural majesty—illustrated throughout the book with extraordinary color images—hides the secrets behind the genesis of our mental states. Ascoli proposes that some of the most intriguing mysteries of the mind can be solved using the basic architectural principles of the brain. After an overview of the scientific and philosophical foundations of his argument, Ascoli links mental states with patterns of electrical activity in nerve cells, presents an emerging minority opinion of how the brain learns from experience, and unveils a radically new hypothesis of the mechanism determining what is learned, what isn't, and why. Finally, considering these notions in the context of the cosmic diversity within and among brains, Ascoli offers a new perspective on the roots of individuality and humanity.
Neural Control of Speech
Authors: Guenther Frank H.
Published: March 2019

A comprehensive and unified account of the neural computations underlying speech production, offering a theoretical framework bridging the behavioral and the neurological literatures.

In this book, Frank Guenther offers a comprehensive, unified account of the neural computations underlying speech production, with an emphasis on speech motor control rather than linguistic content. Guenther focuses on the brain mechanisms responsible for commanding the musculature of the vocal tract to produce articulations that result in an acoustic signal conveying a desired string of syllables. Guenther provides neuroanatomical and neurophysiological descriptions of the primary brain structures involved in speech production, looking particularly at the cerebral cortex and its interactions with the cerebellum and basal ganglia, using basic concepts of control theory (accompanied by nontechnical explanations) to explore the computations performed by these brain regions.

Guenther offers a detailed theoretical framework to account for a broad range of both behavioral and neurological data on the production of speech. He discusses such topics as the goals of the neural controller of speech; neural mechanisms involved in producing both short and long utterances; and disorders of the speech system, including apraxia of speech and stuttering. Offering a bridge between the neurological and behavioral literatures on speech production, the book will be a valuable resource for researchers in both fields.
Software Design Decoded
Authors: Petre Marian , van der Hoek André , Quach Yen
Published: March 2019

An engaging, illustrated collection of insights revealing the practices and principles that expert software designers use to create great software.

What makes an expert software designer? It is more than experience or innate ability. Expert software designers have specific habits, learned practices, and observed principles that they apply deliberately during their design work. This book offers sixty-six insights, distilled from years of studying experts at work, that capture what successful software designers actually do to create great software.

The book presents these insights in a series of two-page illustrated spreads, with the principle and a short explanatory text on one page, and a drawing on the facing page. For example, “Experts generate alternatives” is illustrated by the same few balloons turned into a set of very different balloon animals. The text is engaging and accessible; the drawings are thought-provoking and often playful.

Organized into such categories as “Experts reflect,” “Experts are not afraid,” and “Experts break the rules,” the insights range from “Experts prefer simple solutions” to “Experts see error as opportunity.” Readers learn that “Experts involve the user”; “Experts take inspiration from wherever they can”; “Experts design throughout the creation of software”; and “Experts draw the problem as much as they draw the solution.”

One habit for an aspiring expert software designer to develop would be to read and reread this entertaining but essential little book. The insights described offer a guide for the novice or a reference for the veteran—in software design or any design profession.

A companion web site provides an annotated bibliography that compiles key underpinning literature, the opportunity to suggest additional insights, and more.
Composing Questions
Authors: Kotek Hadas
Published: March 2019

An investigation of the syntax and semantics of wh-questions through the lens of intervention effects, offering a new proposal on overt and covert wh-movement.

In this book, Hadas Kotek investigates the syntax and semantics of wh-questions, offering a new solution to a central question in the study of interrogatives: given that overt wh-movement is cross-linguistically common, is syntactic movement a prerequisite for the interpretation of wh-phrases? Some linguists argue that all wh-phrases undergo movement to interrogative C, even if covertly; others propose mechanisms of in-situ interpretation that do not require any movement. Kotek moves beyond these positions to argue that wh-in-situ does move covertly, but not necessarily to C. Instead, she contends, wh-in-situ undergoes a short movement step akin to covert scrambling. This makes the LF behavior of English parallel to the overt behavior of German.

Kotek presents a series of self-paced reading experiments, alongside judgment data from German, to substantiate the idea of covert scrambling. She introduces new diagnostics for the underlying structure of questions, using as a principal tool the distribution of intervention effects. This system allows her to offer the first unified account for a range of phenomena of interrogative syntax-semantics as pied-piping, superiority effects, the cross-linguistically varied syntax of questions, and intervention effects.

Kotek develops a theory of interrogative syntax-semantics; studies the phenomena of intervention effects in wh-questions, proposing that the nature of intervention is crucially tied to the availability of wh-movement in a question; and shows that covert wh-movement should be modeled as a short scrambling operation rather than an unbounded, successive-cyclic, and potentially long-distance movement operation.
The Mind–Body Problem
Authors: Westphal Jonathan
Published: March 2019

An introduction to the mind–body problem, covering all the proposed solutions and offering a powerful new one.

Philosophers from Descartes to Kripke have struggled with the glittering prize of modern and contemporary philosophy: the mind-body problem. The brain is physical. If the mind is physical, we cannot see how. If we cannot see how the mind is physical, we cannot see how it can interact with the body. And if the mind is not physical, it cannot interact with the body. Or so it seems.

In this book the philosopher Jonathan Westphal examines the mind-body problem in detail, laying out the reasoning behind the solutions that have been offered in the past and presenting his own proposal. The sharp focus on the mind-body problem, a problem that is not about the self, or consciousness, or the soul, or anything other than the mind and the body, helps clarify both problem and solutions.

Westphal outlines the history of the mind-body problem, beginning with Descartes. He describes mind-body dualism, which claims that the mind and the body are two different and separate things, nonphysical and physical, and he also examines physicalist theories of mind; antimaterialism, which proposes limits to physicalism and introduces the idea of qualia; and scientific theories of consciousness.

Finally, Westphal examines the largely forgotten neutral monist theories of mind and body, held by Ernst Mach, William James, and Bertrand Russell, which attempt neither to extract mind from matter nor to dissolve matter into mind. Westphal proposes his own version of neutral monism. This version is unique among neutral monist theories in offering an account of mind-body interaction.
Spotify Teardown
Authors: Eriksson Maria , Fleischer Rasmus , Johansson Anna , Snickars Pelle , Vonderau Patrick
Published: March 2019

An innovative investigation of the inner workings of Spotify that traces the transformation of audio files into streamed experience.

Spotify provides a streaming service that has been welcomed as disrupting the world of music. Yet such disruption always comes at a price. Spotify Teardown contests the tired claim that digital culture thrives on disruption. Borrowing the notion of “teardown” from reverse-engineering processes, in this book a team of five researchers have playfully disassembled Spotify's product and the way it is commonly understood.

Spotify has been hailed as the solution to illicit downloading, but it began as a partly illicit enterprise that grew out of the Swedish file-sharing community. Spotify was originally praised as an innovative digital platform but increasingly resembles a media company in need of regulation, raising questions about the ways in which such cultural content as songs, books, and films are now typically made available online.

Spotify Teardown combines interviews, participant observations, and other analyses of Spotify's “front end” with experimental, covert investigations of its “back end.” The authors engaged in a series of interventions, which include establishing a record label for research purposes, intercepting network traffic with packet sniffers, and web-scraping corporate materials. The authors' innovative digital methods earned them a stern letter from Spotify accusing them of violating its terms of use; the company later threatened their research funding. Thus, the book itself became an intervention into the ethics and legal frameworks of corporate behavior.
Haptics
Authors: Jones Lynette
Published: March 2019

An accessible, nontechnical overview of active touch sensing, from sensory receptors in the skin to tactile surfaces on flat screen displays.

Haptics, or haptic sensing, refers to the ability to identify and perceive objects through touch. This is active touch, involving exploration of an object with the hand rather than the passive sensing of a vibration or force on the skin. The development of new technologies, including prosthetic hands and tactile surfaces for flat screen displays, depends on our knowledge of haptics. In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Lynette Jones offers an accessible overview of haptics, or active touch sensing, and its applications.

Jones explains that haptics involves integrating information from touch and kinesthesia—that is, information both from sensors in the skin and from sensors in muscles, tendons, and joints. The challenge for technology is to reproduce in a virtual world some of the sensations associated with physical interactions with the environment.

Jones maps the building blocks of the tactile system, the receptors in the skin and the skin itself, and how information is processed at this interface with the external world. She describes haptic perception, the processing of haptic information in the brain; haptic illusions, or distorted perceptions of objects and the body itself; tactile and haptic displays, from braille to robotic systems; tactile compensation for other sensory impairments; surface haptics, which creates virtual haptic effects on physical surfaces such as touch screens; and the development of robotic and prosthetic hands that mimic the properties of human hands.
Features of Person
Authors: Ackema Peter , Neeleman Ad
Published: March 2019

A proposal that person features do not have inherent content but are used to navigate a “person space” at the heart of every pronominal expression.

This book offers a significant reconceptualization of the person system in natural language. The authors, leading scholars in syntax and its interfaces, propose that person features do not have inherent content but are used to navigate a “person space” at the heart of every pronominal expression. They map the journey of person features in grammar, from semantics through syntax to the system of morphological realization. Such an in-depth cross-modular study allows the development of a theory in which assumptions made about the behavior of a given feature in one module bear on possible assumptions about its behavior in other modules.

The authors' new theory of person, built on a sparse set of two privative person features, delivers a typologically adequate inventory of persons; captures the semantics of personal pronouns, impersonal pronouns, and R-expressions; accounts for aspects of their syntactic behavior; and explains patterns of person-related syncretism in the realization of pronouns and inflectional endings. The authors discuss numerous observations from the literature, defend a number of theoretical choices that are either new or not generally accepted, and present novel empirical findings regarding phenomena as different as honorifics, number marking, and unagreement.
Experiencing the Impossible
Authors: Kuhn Gustav
Published: March 2019

How the scientific study of magic reveals intriguing—and often unsettling—insights into the mysteries of the human mind.

What do we see when we watch a magician pull a rabbit out of a hat or read a person's mind? We are captivated by an illusion; we applaud the fact that we have been fooled. Why do we enjoy experiencing what seems clearly impossible, or at least beyond our powers of explanation? In Experiencing the Impossible, Gustav Kuhn examines the psychological processes that underpin our experience of magic. Kuhn, a psychologist and a magician, reveals the intriguing—and often unsettling—insights into the human mind that the scientific study of magic provides.

Magic, Kuhn explains, creates a cognitive conflict between what we believe to be true (for example, a rabbit could not be in that hat) and what we experience (a rabbit has just come out of that hat!). Drawing on the latest psychological, neurological, and philosophical research, he suggests that misdirection is at the heart of all magic tricks, and he offers a scientific theory of misdirection. He explores, among other topics, our propensity for magical thinking, the malleability of our perceptual experiences, forgetting and misremembering, free will and mind control, and how magic is applied outside entertaiment—the use of illusion in human-computer interaction, politics, warfare, and elsewhere.

We may be surprised to learn how little of the world we actually perceive, how little we can trust what we see and remember, and how little we are in charge of our thoughts and actions. Exploring magic, Kuhn illuminates the complex—and almost magical—mechanisms underlying our daily activities.
Spaceflight
Authors: Neufeld Michael J.
Published: March 2019

A concise history of spaceflight, from military rocketry through Sputnik, Apollo, robots in space, space culture, and human spaceflight today.

Spaceflight is one of the greatest human achievements of the twentieth century. The Soviets launched Sputnik, the first satellite, in 1957; less than twelve years later, the American Apollo astronauts landed on the Moon. In this volume of the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Michael Neufeld offers a concise history of spaceflight, mapping the full spectrum of activities that humans have developed in space.

Neufeld explains that “the space program” should not be equated only with human spaceflight. Since the 1960s, unmanned military and commercial spacecraft have been orbiting near the Earth, and robotic deep-space explorers have sent back stunning images of faraway planets. Neufeld begins with the origins of space ideas and the discovery that rocketry could be used for spaceflight. He then discusses the Soviet-U.S. Cold War space race and reminds us that NASA resisted adding female astronauts even after the Soviets sent the first female cosmonaut into orbit. He analyzes the two rationales for the Apollo program: prestige and scientific discovery (this last something of an afterthought). He describes the internationalization and privatization of human spaceflight after the Cold War, the cultural influence of space science fiction, including Star Trek and Star Wars, space tourism for the ultra-rich, and the popular desire to go into space. Whether we become a multiplanet species, as some predict, or continue to call Earth home, this book offers a useful primer.
Evolving Households
Authors: Greenwood Jeremy
Published: March 2019

The transformative effect of technological change on households and culture, seen from a macroeconomic perspective through simple economic models.

In Evolving Households, Jeremy Greenwood argues that technological progress has had as significant an effect on households as it had on industry. Taking a macroeconomic perspective, Greenwood develops simple economic models to study such phenomena as the rise in married female labor force participation, changes in fertility rates, the decline in marriage, and increased longevity. These trends represent a dramatic transformation in everyday life, and they were made possible by advancements in technology. Greenwood also addresses how technological progress can cause social change.

Greenwood shows, for example, how electricity and labor-saving appliances freed women from full-time household drudgery and enabled them to enter the labor market. He explains that fertility dropped when higher wages increased the opportunity cost of having children; he attributes the post–World War II baby boom to a combination of labor-saving household technology and advances in obstetrics and pediatrics. Marriage rates declined when single households became more economically feasible; people could be more discriminating in their choice of a mate. Technological progress also affects social and cultural norms. Innovation in contraception ushered in a sexual revolution. Labor-saving technological progress at home, together with mechanization in industry that led to an increase in the value of brain relative to brawn for jobs, fostered the advancement of women's rights in the workplace. Finally, Greenwood attributes increased longevity to advances in medical technology and rising living standards, and he examines healthcare spending, the development of new drugs, and the growing portion of life now spent in retirement.
Enlivenment
Authors: Weber Andreas
Published: March 2019

A new understanding of the Anthropocene that is based on mutual transformation with nature rather than control over nature.

We have been told that we are living in the Anthropocene, a geological era shaped by humans rather than by nature. In Enlivenment, German philosopher Andreas Weber presents an alternative understanding of our relationship with nature, arguing not that humans control nature but that humans and nature exist in a commons of mutual transformation. There is no nature–human dualism, he contends, because the fundamental dimension of existence is shared in what he calls "aliveness." All subjectivity is intersubjectivity. Self is self-through-other. Seeing all beings in a common household of matter, desire, and imagination, an economy of metabolic and economic transformation, is “enlivenment.” This perspective allows us to move beyond Enlightenment-style thinking that strips material reality of any subjectivity.

To take this step, Weber argues, we need to supplant the concept of techné with the concept of poiesis as the element that brings forth reality. In a world not divided into things and ideas, culture and nature, reality arises from the creation of relationships and continuous fertile transformations; any thinking in terms of relationships comes about as a poetics. The self is always a function of the whole; the whole is equally a function of the individual. Only this integrated freedom allows humanity to reconcile with the natural world.

This first English edition of Enlivenment has been expanded and updated from the German edition.
The Cost-Benefit Revolution
Authors: Sunstein Cass R.
Published: March 2019

Why policies should be based on careful consideration of their costs and benefits rather than on intuition, popular opinion, interest groups, and anecdotes.

Opinions on government policies vary widely. Some people feel passionately about the child obesity epidemic and support government regulation of sugary drinks. Others argue that people should be able to eat and drink whatever they like. Some people are alarmed about climate change and favor aggressive government intervention. Others don't feel the need for any sort of climate regulation. In The Cost-Benefit Revolution, Cass Sunstein argues our major disagreements really involve facts, not values. It follows that government policy should not be based on public opinion, intuitions, or pressure from interest groups, but on numbers—meaning careful consideration of costs and benefits. Will a policy save one life, or one thousand lives? Will it impose costs on consumers, and if so, will the costs be high or negligible? Will it hurt workers and small businesses, and, if so, precisely how much?

As the Obama administration's “regulatory czar,” Sunstein knows his subject in both theory and practice. Drawing on behavioral economics and his well-known emphasis on “nudging,” he celebrates the cost-benefit revolution in policy making, tracing its defining moments in the Reagan, Clinton, and Obama administrations (and pondering its uncertain future in the Trump administration). He acknowledges that public officials often lack information about costs and benefits, and outlines state-of-the-art techniques for acquiring that information. Policies should make people's lives better. Quantitative cost-benefit analysis, Sunstein argues, is the best available method for making this happen—even if, in the future, new measures of human well-being, also explored in this book, may be better still.
Feeding the Other
Authors: de Souza Rebecca T.
Published: March 2019

How food pantries stigmatize their clients through a discourse that emphasizes hard work, self help, and economic productivity rather than food justice and equity.

The United States has one of the highest rates of hunger and food insecurity in the industrialized world, with poor households, single parents, and communities of color disproportionately affected. Food pantries—run by charitable and faith-based organizations—rather than legal entitlements have become a cornerstone of the government's efforts to end hunger. In Feeding the Other, Rebecca de Souza argues that food pantries stigmatize their clients through a discourse that emphasizes hard work, self help, and economic productivity rather than food justice and equity. De Souza describes this “framing, blaming, and shaming” as “neoliberal stigma” that recasts the structural issue of hunger as a problem for the individual hungry person.

De Souza shows how neoliberal stigma plays out in practice through a comparative case analysis of two food pantries in Duluth, Minnesota. Doing so, she documents the seldom-acknowledged voices, experiences, and realities of people living with hunger. She describes the failure of public institutions to protect citizens from poverty and hunger; the white privilege of pantry volunteers caught between neoliberal narratives and social justice concerns; the evangelical conviction that food assistance should be “a hand up, not a handout”; the culture of suspicion in food pantry spaces; and the constraints on food choice. It is only by rejecting the neoliberal narrative and giving voice to the hungry rather than the privileged, de Souza argues, that food pantries can become agents of food justice.

The open access edition of this book was made possible by generous funding from the MIT Libraries.
What We Know about Climate Change
Authors: Emanuel Kerry
Published: March 2019

An updated edition of a guide to the basic science of climate change, and a call to action.

The vast majority of scientists agree that human activity has significantly increased greenhouse gases in the atmosphere—most dramatically since the 1970s. Yet global warming skeptics and ill-informed elected officials continue to dismiss this broad scientific consensus. 

In this updated edition of his authoritative book, MIT atmospheric scientist Kerry Emanuel outlines the basic science of global warming and how the current consensus has emerged. Although it is impossible to predict exactly when the most dramatic effects of global warming will be felt, he argues, we can be confident that we face real dangers. Emanuel warns that global warming will contribute to an increase in the intensity and power of hurricanes and flooding and more rapidly advancing deserts. But just as our actions have created the looming crisis, so too might they avert it. Emanuel calls for urgent action to reduce greenhouse gases and criticizes the media for downplaying the dangers of global warming (and, in search of “balance,” quoting extremists who deny its existence). 

This edition has been updated to include the latest climate data, a discussion of the earth's carbon cycle, the warming hiatus of the first decade of this century, the 2017 hurricanes, advanced energy options, the withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement, and more. It offers a new foreword by former U.S. Representative Bob Inglis (R-SC), who now works on climate action through his organization RepublicEN.
Plagues and the Paradox of Progress
Authors: Bollyky Thomas J.
Published: March 2019

Why the news about the global decline of infectious diseases is not all good.

Plagues and parasites have played a central role in world affairs, shaping the evolution of the modern state, the growth of cities, and the disparate fortunes of national economies. This book tells that story, but it is not about the resurgence of pestilence. It is the story of its decline. For the first time in recorded history, virus, bacteria, and other infectious diseases are not the leading cause of death or disability in any region of the world. People are living longer, and fewer mothers are giving birth to many children in the hopes that some might survive. And yet, the news is not all good. Recent reductions in infectious disease have not been accompanied by the same improvements in income, job opportunities, and governance that occurred with these changes in wealthier countries decades ago. There have also been unintended consequences. In this book, Thomas Bollyky explores the paradox in our fight against infectious disease: the world is getting healthier in ways that should make us worry.

Bollyky interweaves a grand historical narrative about the rise and fall of plagues in human societies with contemporary case studies of the consequences. Bollyky visits Dhaka—one of the most densely populated places on the planet—to show how low-cost health tools helped enable the phenomenon of poor world megacities. He visits China and Kenya to illustrate how dramatic declines in plagues have affected national economies. Bollyky traces the role of infectious disease in the migrations from Ireland before the potato famine and to Europe from Africa and elsewhere today.

Historic health achievements are remaking a world that is both worrisome and full of opportunities. Whether the peril or promise of that progress prevails, Bollyky explains, depends on what we do next.

A Council on Foreign Relations Book
Dissidence
Authors: Leduc Marie
Published: March 2019

How the valorization of artistic and political dissidence has contributed to the rise of Chinese contemporary art in the West.

Interest in Chinese contemporary art increased dramatically in the West shortly after the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. Sparked by political sympathy and the mediatized response to the event, Western curators, critics, and art historians were quick to view the new art as an expression of dissident resistance to the Chinese regime.  In this book, Marie Leduc proposes that this attribution of political dissidence is not only the result of latent Cold War perceptions about China, but also indicative of the art world's demand for artistically and politically provocative work—a demand that mirrors the valorization of free expression in liberal democracies.

Focusing on nine Chinese artists—Wang Du, Wang Keping, Huang Yong Ping, Yang Jiechang, Chen Zhen, Yan Pei-Ming, Shen Yuan, Ru Xiaofan, and Du Zhenjun—who migrated to Paris in and around 1989, Leduc explores how their work was recognized before and after the Tiananmen Square incident. Drawing on personal interviews with the artists and curators, and through an analysis of important exhibitions, events, reviews, and curatorial texts, she demonstrates how these and other Chinese artists have been celebrated both for their artistic dissidence—their formal innovations and introduction of new media and concepts—and for their political dissidence—how their work challenges political values in both China and the West.  As Leduc concludes, the rise of Chinese contemporary art in the West highlights the significance of artistic and political dissidence in the production of contemporary art, and the often-unrecognized relationship between contemporary art and liberal democracy.
The Autobiography of a Transgender Scientist
Authors: Barres Ben
Published: March 2019

A leading scientist describes his life, his gender transition, his scientific work, and his advocacy for gender equality in science.

Ben Barres was known for his groundbreaking scientific work and for his groundbreaking advocacy for gender equality in science. In this book, completed shortly before his death from pancreatic cancer in December 2017, Barres (born in 1954) describes a life full of remarkable accomplishments—from his childhood as a precocious math and science whiz to his experiences as a female student at MIT in the 1970s to his female-to-male transition in his forties, to his scientific work and role as teacher and mentor at Stanford.

Barres recounts his early life—his interest in science, first manifested as a fascination with the mad scientist in Superman; his academic successes; and his gender confusion. Barres felt even as a very young child that he was assigned the wrong gender. After years of being acutely uncomfortable in his own skin, Barres transitioned from female to male. He reports he felt nothing but relief on becoming his true self. He was proud to be a role model for transgender scientists.

As an undergraduate at MIT, Barres experienced discrimination, but it was after transitioning that he realized how differently male and female scientists are treated. He became an advocate for gender equality in science, and later in life responded pointedly to Larry Summers's speculation that women were innately unsuited to be scientists. Privileged white men, Barres writes, “miss the basic point that in the face of negative stereotyping, talented women will not be recognized.” At Stanford, Barres made important discoveries about glia, the most numerous cells in the brain, and he describes some of his work. “The most rewarding part of his job,” however, was mentoring young scientists. That, and his advocacy for women and transgender scientists, ensures his legacy.
Auditory Scene Analysis
Authors: Bregman Albert S.
Published: March 2019

Auditory Scene Analysis addresses the problem of hearing complex auditory environments, using a series of creative analogies to describe the process required of the human auditory system as it analyzes mixtures of sounds to recover descriptions of individual sounds. In a unified and comprehensive way, Bregman establishes a theoretical framework that integrates his findings with an unusually wide range of previous research in psychoacoustics, speech perception, music theory and composition, and computer modeling.

Bradford Books imprint
Disappearing Acts
Authors: Fletcher Joyce K.
Published: March 2019

Joyce Fletcher's research shows that emotional intelligence and relational behavior are often viewed as inappropriate because they collide with powerful, gender-linked images.

This study of female design engineers has profound implications for attempts to change organizational culture. Joyce Fletcher's research shows that emotional intelligence and relational behavior are often viewed as inappropriate because they collide with powerful, gender-linked images. Fletcher describes how organizations say they need such behavior and yet ignore it, thus undermining the possibility of radical change. She shows why the "female advantage" does not seem to be benefit women employees or organizations. She offers ways that individuals and organizations can make visible the invisible work.
Logic Testing and Design for Testability
Authors: Fujiwara Hideo
Published: March 2019

Design for testability techniques offer one approach toward alleviating this situation by adding enough extra circuitry to a circuit or chip to reduce the complexity of testing.

Today's computers must perform with increasing reliability, which in turn depends on the problem of determining whether a circuit has been manufactured properly or behaves correctly. However, the greater circuit density of VLSI circuits and systems has made testing more difficult and costly. This book notes that one solution is to develop faster and more efficient algorithms to generate test patterns or use design techniques to enhance testability - that is, "design for testability." Design for testability techniques offer one approach toward alleviating this situation by adding enough extra circuitry to a circuit or chip to reduce the complexity of testing. Because the cost of hardware is decreasing as the cost of testing rises, there is now a growing interest in these techniques for VLSI circuits.The first half of the book focuses on the problem of testing: test generation, fault simulation, and complexity of testing. The second half takes up the problem of design for testability: design techniques to minimize test application and/or test generation cost, scan design for sequential logic circuits, compact testing, built-in testing, and various design techniques for testable systems.

Logic Testing and Design for Testability is included in the Computer Systems Series, edited by Herb Schwetman.
Low-Density Parity-Check Codes
Authors: Gallager Robert G.
Published: March 2019

This is a complete presentation of all important theoretical and experimental work done on low-density codes. Low-density coding is one of the three techniques thus far developed for efficient communication over noisy channels with an arbitrarily low probability of error. A principal result of information theory is that if properly coded information is transmitted over a noisy channel at a rate below channel capacity, the probability of error can be made to approach zero exponentially with the code length. Any practical use of this theorem, however, requires a coding scheme in which the cost of storage and computation equipment grows slowly with code length. The present book analyzes a class of coding schemes for which costs grow approximately linearly with code length. It demonstrates that error probability approaches zero exponentially with a root of the block length and cites experimental evidence that this coding scheme has profitable aplicability in many communications situations.
Markets for Technology
Authors: Arora Ashish , Fosfuri Andrea , Gambardella Alfonso
Published: March 2019

The past two decades have seen a gradual but noticeable change in the economic organization of innovative activity. Most firms used to integrate research and development with activities such as production, marketing, and distribution. Today firms are forming joint ventures, research and development alliances, licensing deals, and a variety of other outsourcing arrangements with universities, technology-based start-ups, and other established firms. In many industries, a division of innovative labor is emerging, with a substantial increase in the licensing of existing and prospective technologies. In short, technology and knowledge are becoming definable and tradable commodities.

Although researchers have made significant advances in understanding the determinants and consequences of innovation, until recently they have paid little attention to how innovation functions as an economic process. This book examines the nature and workings of markets for intermediate technological inputs. It looks first at how industry structure, the nature of knowledge, and intellectual property rights facilitate the development of technology markets. It then examines the impacts of these markets on firm boundaries, the division of labor within the economy, industry structure, and economic growth. Finally, it examines the implications of this framework for public policy and corporate strategy. Combining theoretical perspectives from economics and management with empirical analysis, the book also draws on historical evidence and case studies to flesh out its research results.
Mindblindness
Authors: Baron-Cohen Simon
Published: March 2019

In Mindblindness, Simon Baron-Cohen presents a model of the evolution and development of "mindreading." He argues that we mindread all the time, effortlessly, automatically, and mostly unconsciously. It is the natural way in which we interpret, predict, and participate in social behavior and communication. We ascribe mental states to people: states such as thoughts, desires, knowledge, and intentions.

Building on many years of research, Baron-Cohen concludes that children with autism, suffer from "mindblindness" as a result of a selective impairment in mindreading. For these children, the world is essentially devoid of mental things.

Baron-Cohen develops a theory that draws on data from comparative psychology, from developmental, and from neuropsychology. He argues that specific neurocognitive mechanisms have evolved that allow us to mindread, to make sense of actions, to interpret gazes as meaningful, and to decode "the language of the eyes."

Bradford Books imprint
The Political Economy of Japanese Monetary Policy
Authors: Cargill Thomas F. , Hutchison Michael M. , Ito Takatoshi
Published: March 2019

The contributions in this book provide a unique view of its emergence and growth in a number of different national settings in an area of the Third World where the industry is most advanced.

In The Political Economy of Japanese Monetary Policy, Cargill, Hutchison, and Ito investigate the formulation and execution of monetary and financial policies in Japan within a broad technical, political, and institutional context.Their emphasis is on the period since the collapse of the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates in the early 1970s, and on the effects of policies and institutions in shaping the modern Japanese economy. The authors present basic themes and recent developments, as well as their own research findings.They also review and integrate the large literature in the area. They consider theoretical arguments and empirical evidence for each topic discussed.

Topics covered include Japan's low inflation record (despite the central bank's lack of formal independence from the government); politically motivated business cycles and the timing of elections; exchange rate policy and international policy coordination; the historical development of central banking; Japan's "bubble economy" of the 1980s; and the causes, magnitude, and regulatory responses to Japan's banking and financial crisis of the 1990s.