bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Adaptive Dynamics
Authors: Staddon John E. R.
Published: December 2018

In this book J.E.R. Staddon proposes an explanation of behavior that lies between cognitive psychology, which seeks to explain it in terms of mentalistic constructs, and cognitive neuroscience, which tries to explain it in terms of the brain. Staddon suggests a new way to understand the laws and causes of learning, based on the invention, comparison, testing, and modification or rejection of parsimonious real-time models for behavior. The models are neither physiological nor cognitive: they are behavioristic. Staddon shows how simple dynamic models can explain a surprising variety of animal and human behavior, ranging from simple orientation, reflexes, and habituation through feeding regulation, operant conditioning, spatial navigation, stimulus generalization, and interval timing.

Bradford Books imprint
Reasoning about Uncertainty
Authors: Halpern Joseph Y.
Published: December 2018

Formal ways of representing uncertainty and various logics for reasoning about it; updated with new material on weighted probability measures, complexity-theoretic considerations, and other topics.

In order to deal with uncertainty intelligently, we need to be able to represent it and reason about it. In this book, Joseph Halpern examines formal ways of representing uncertainty and considers various logics for reasoning about it. While the ideas presented are formalized in terms of definitions and theorems, the emphasis is on the philosophy of representing and reasoning about uncertainty. Halpern surveys possible formal systems for representing uncertainty, including probability measures, possibility measures, and plausibility measures; considers the updating of beliefs based on changing information and the relation to Bayes' theorem; and discusses qualitative, quantitative, and plausibilistic Bayesian networks.

This second edition has been updated to reflect Halpern's recent research. New material includes a consideration of weighted probability measures and how they can be used in decision making; analyses of the Doomsday argument and the Sleeping Beauty problem; modeling games with imperfect recall using the runs-and-systems approach; a discussion of complexity-theoretic considerations; the application of first-order conditional logic to security.

Reasoning about Uncertainty is accessible and relevant to researchers and students in many fields, including computer science, artificial intelligence, economics (particularly game theory), mathematics, philosophy, and statistics.
Our Selfish Tax Laws
Authors: Infanti Anthony C.
Published: December 2018

Why tax law is not just a pocketbook issue but a reflection of what and whom we, as a society, value.

Most of us think of tax as a pocketbook issue: how much we owe, how much we'll get back, how much we can deduct. In Our Selfish Tax Laws, Anthony Infanti takes a broader view, considering not just how taxes affect us individually but how the tax system reflects our culture and society. He finds that American tax laws validate and benefit those who already possess power and privilege while starkly reflecting the lines of difference and discrimination in American society based on race, ethnicity, socioeconomic class, gender, sexual orientation and gender identity, immigration status, and disability. Infanti argues that instead of focusing our tax reform discussions on which loopholes to close or which deductions to allow, we should consider how to make our tax system reflect American ideals of inclusivity rather than institutionalizing exclusion.

After describing the theoretical and intellectual underpinnings of his argument, Infanti offers two comparative case studies, examining the treatment of housing tax expenditures and the unit of taxation in the United States, Canada, France, and Spain to show how tax law reflects its social and cultural context. Then, drawing on his own work and that of other critical tax scholars, Infanti explains how the discourse surrounding tax reform masks the many ways that the American tax system rewards and reifies privilege. To counter this, Infanti urges us to work together to create a society with a tax system that respects and values all Americans.
Machine Translation
Authors: Poibeau Thierry
Published: December 2018

A concise, nontechnical overview of the development of machine translation, including the different approaches, evaluation issues, and major players in the industry.

The dream of a universal translation device goes back many decades, long before Douglas Adams's fictional Babel fish provided this service in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Since the advent of computers, research has focused on the design of digital machine translation tools—computer programs capable of automatically translating a text from a source language to a target language. This has become one of the most fundamental tasks of artificial intelligence. This volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series offers a concise, nontechnical overview of the development of machine translation, including the different approaches, evaluation issues, and market potential. The main approaches are presented from a largely historical perspective and in an intuitive manner, allowing the reader to understand the main principles without knowing the mathematical details.

The book begins by discussing problems that must be solved during the development of a machine translation system and offering a brief overview of the evolution of the field. It then takes up the history of machine translation in more detail, describing its pre-digital beginnings, rule-based approaches, the 1966 ALPAC (Automatic Language Processing Advisory Committee) report and its consequences, the advent of parallel corpora, the example-based paradigm, the statistical paradigm, the segment-based approach, the introduction of more linguistic knowledge into the systems, and the latest approaches based on deep learning. Finally, it considers evaluation challenges and the commercial status of the field, including activities by such major players as Google and Systran.
America's Water
Authors: Rogers Peter ,   Twentieth Century Fund
Published: December 2018

Were water considered an industry, it would be one of the largest in the United States, surely the most capital-intensive, and the most closely regulated by Congress. Yet as Peter Rogers argues in this readable, pragmatic, and scientifically grounded assessment of national water issues, it would also be one of the most fragmented and least coherent areas of public policy. Rogers brings together all aspects of water (and water use) to look at policy formation from technical, economic, and political points of view. He shows why these separate perspectives must be considered simultaneously if intelligent policies are to be developed to protect this indispensable resource for present and future generations.

Although water use has declined since 1980, the U.S. still consumes more than twice as much water per capita as any other country in the world. Weighing current resources against future demand, Rogers covers a host of complex water issues facing a thirsty, affluent nation. He explains why the federal role needs to be developed and clarified in a number of areas - from changing the unrealistic expectations of the American public for clean water at any cost to financing the rebuilding of infrastructure that is nearly a century old, from reforming intergovernmental relations and the committee structure in Congress to preserving and restoring wetlands and developing a national drought management policy.Of the two basic approaches to policy formation - spelling out desirable norms and attempting to achieve them, or building pragmatically on what has been feasible in the past - Rogers advocates the feasibility approach. The challenge, he asserts, is to develop a federal policy that will reform the historical patchwork of state-state and state-federal agreements and allow them to work together without abrupt dislocations.
Anti-Individualism and Knowledge
Authors: Brown Jessica
Published: December 2018

Contemporary philosophy of mind is dominated by anti-individualism, which holds that a subject's thoughts are determined not only by what is inside her head but also by aspects of her environment. Despite its dominance, anti-individualism is subject to a daunting array of epistemological objections: that it is incompatible with the privileged access each subject has to her thoughts, that it undermines rationality, and, absurdly, that it provides a new route to a priori knowledge of the world. In this rigorous and persuasive study, Jessica Brown defends anti-individualism from these epistemological objections. The discussion has important consequences for key epistemological issues such as skepticism, closure, transmission, and the nature of knowledge and warrant.

According to Brown's analysis, one main reason for thinking that anti-individualism is incompatible with privileged access is that it undermines a subject's introspective ability to distinguish types of thoughts. So diagnosed, the standard focus on a subject's reliability about her thoughts provides no adequate reply. Brown defuses the objection by appeal to the epistemological notion of a relevant alternative. Further, she argues that, given a proper understanding of rationality, anti-individualism is compatible with the notion that we are rational subjects. However, the discussion of rationality provides a new argument that anti-individualism is in tension with Fregean sense. Finally, Brown shows that anti-individualism does not create a new route to a priori knowledge of the world. While rejecting solutions that restrict the transmission of warrant, she argues that anti-individualists should deny that we have the type of knowledge that would be required to use a priori knowledge of thought content to gain a priori knowledge of the world.

Bradford Books imprint
The Big Book of Concepts
Authors: Murphy Gregory L.
Published: December 2018

Concepts embody our knowledge of the kinds of things there are in the world. Tying our past experiences to our present interactions with the environment, they enable us to recognize and understand new objects and events. Concepts are also relevant to understanding domains such as social situations, personality types, and even artistic styles. Yet like other phenomenologically simple cognitive processes such as walking or understanding speech, concept formation and use are maddeningly complex.

Research since the 1970s and the decline of the "classical view" of concepts have greatly illuminated the psychology of concepts. But persistent theoretical disputes have sometimes obscured this progress. The Big Book of Concepts goes beyond those disputes to reveal the advances that have been made, focusing on the major empirical discoveries. By reviewing and evaluating research on diverse topics such as category learning, word meaning, conceptual development in infants and children, and the basic level of categorization, the book develops a much broader range of criteria than is usual for evaluating theories of concepts.

Bradford Books imprint
Brain Fiction
Authors: Hirstein William
Published: December 2018

Some neurological patients exhibit a striking tendency to confabulate—to construct false answers to a question while genuinely believing that they are telling the truth. A stroke victim, for example, will describe in detail a conference he attended over the weekend when in fact he has not left the hospital. Normal people, too, sometimes have a tendency to confabulate; rather than admitting "I don't know," some people will make up an answer or an explanation and express it with complete conviction. In Brain Fiction, William Hirstein examines confabulation and argues that its causes are not merely technical issues in neurology or cognitive science but deeply revealing about the structure of the human intellect.

Hirstein describes confabulation as the failure of a normal checking or censoring process in the brain—the failure to recognize that a false answer is fantasy, not reality. Thus, he argues, the creative ability to construct a plausible-sounding response and some ability to check that response are separate in the human brain. Hirstein sees the dialectic between the creative and checking processes—"the inner dialogue"—as an important part of our mental life. In constructing a theory of confabulation, Hirstein integrates perspectives from different fields, including philosophy, neuroscience, and psychology to achieve a natural mix of conceptual issues usually treated by philosophers with purely empirical issues; information about the distribution of certain blood vessels in the prefrontal lobes of the brain, for example, or the behavior of split-brain patients can shed light on the classic questions of philosophy of mind, including questions about the function of consciousness. This first book-length study of confabulation breaks ground in both philosophy and cognitive science.

Bradford Books imprint
Causation, Prediction, and Search
Authors: Spirtes Peter , Glymour Clark , Scheines Richard
Published: December 2018

The authors address the assumptions and methods that allow us to turn observations into causal knowledge, and use even incomplete causal knowledge in planning and prediction to influence and control our environment.

What assumptions and methods allow us to turn observations into causal knowledge, and how can even incomplete causal knowledge be used in planning and prediction to influence and control our environment? In this book Peter Spirtes, Clark Glymour, and Richard Scheines address these questions using the formalism of Bayes networks, with results that have been applied in diverse areas of research in the social, behavioral, and physical sciences.

The authors show that although experimental and observational study designs may not always permit the same inferences, they are subject to uniform principles. They axiomatize the connection between causal structure and probabilistic independence, explore several varieties of causal indistinguishability, formulate a theory of manipulation, and develop asymptotically reliable procedures for searching over equivalence classes of causal models, including models of categorical data and structural equation models with and without latent variables.

The authors show that the relationship between causality and probability can also help to clarify such diverse topics in statistics as the comparative power of experimentation versus observation, Simpson's paradox, errors in regression models, retrospective versus prospective sampling, and variable selection.

The second edition contains a new introduction and an extensive survey of advances and applications that have appeared since the first edition was published in 1993.

Bradford Books imprint
Choices in Healing
Authors: Lerner Michael A. , Harvey Harriet
Published: December 2018

Written by one of the country's leading authorities on alternative and complementary cancer treatments, Choices in Healing is designed for the cancer patient or health professional who seeks a comprehensive overview of the available choices, both in treatments and in living with cancer.

Choices in Healing offers valuable information and guidance for the whole life cycle of cancer—from the initial shock of diagnosis to decisions about choosing a physician and conventional therapies, selecting complementary therapies, coping with treatment, and the art of living fully with the possibility of recurrence.

There are detailed explanations and evaluations of a wide range of complementary therapy programs, including spiritual and psychological approaches, nutritional therapies, physical therapies, pharmacological therapies, and traditional medicines from around the world. There are sections on prayer and other forms of spiritual healing; psychotherapy, support groups, visual imagery and hypnosis; massage, therapeutic touch, yoga, and Qi Gong; macrobiotic diet and other cancer diets; acupuncture and Chinese herbal medicines; and numerous other unconventional therapies used by American cancer patients.

With an unusual combination of compassion and objectivity, Michael Lerner describes his conclusions following more than a decade of study of unconventional cancer treatments in North America, Europe, India, and Japan. He also draws extensively on his work with hundreds of cancer patients who have participated in the Commonweal Cancer Help Programs, the residential support program depicted by Bill Moyers in his 1993 PBS documentary Healing and the Mind.
Comrades No More
Authors: de Nevers Renée
Published: December 2018

In 1989, Soviet control over Eastern Europe ended when the communist regimes of the Warsaw Pact collapsed. These momentous and largely bloodless events set the stage for the end of the Cold War and ushered in a new era in international politics. Why did communism collapse relatively peacefully in Eastern Europe? Why did these changes occur in 1989, after more than four decades of communist rule? Why did this upheaval happen almost simultaneously in most of the Warsaw Pact? In Comrades No More, Renee de Nevers examines how internal and external factors interacted in the collapse of East European communism. She argues that Gorbachev's reforms in the Soviet Union were necessary to start the process of political change in Eastern Europe, but domestic factors in each communist state determined when and how each country abandoned communism. A "demonstration effect" emerged as Hungary and Poland introduced reforms and showed that Moscow would not intervene to prevent political and economic changes.De Nevers analyzes the process of change in Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, the German Democratic Republic, Czechoslovakia, and Romania. She traces the pattern of reform in each country and shows how these patterns influenced their postcommunist political evolution.
Conditionals
Authors: Rescher Nicholas
Published: December 2018

A unified treatment of conditionals based on epistemological principles rather than the semantical principles in vogue over recent decades.

This book by distinguished philosopher Nicholas Rescher seeks to clarify the idea of what a conditional says by elucidating the information that is normally transmitted by its utterance. The result is a unified treatment of conditionals based on epistemological principles rather than the semantical principles in vogue over recent decades. This approach, argues Rescher, makes it easier to understand how conditionals actually function in our thought and discourse. In its concern with what language theorists call pragmatics—the study of the norms and principles governing our use of language in conveying information—Conditionals steps beyond the limits of logic as traditionally understood and moves into the realm claimed by theorists of artificial intelligence as they try to simulate our actual information-processing practices. The book's treatment of counterfactuals essentially revives an epistemological approach proposed by F. P. Ramsey in the 1920s and developed by Rescher himself in the 1960s but since overshadowed by the now-dominant possible-worlds approach. Rescher argues that the increasingly evident liabilities of the possible-worlds strategy make a reappraisal of the older style of analysis both timely and desirable. As the book makes clear, an epistemological approach demonstrates that counterfactual reasoning, unlike inductive inference, is not a matter of abstract reasoning alone but one of good judgment and common sense.

Bradford Books imprint
Constraint-Based Grammar Formalisms
Authors: Shieber Stuart M.
Published: December 2018

Constraint-Based Grammar Formalisms provides the first rigorous mathematical and computational basis for this important area.

Constraint-based theories of grammar and grammar formalisms are becoming an increasingly widespread area of research in computational linguistics. Constraint-Based Grammar Formalisms provides the first rigorous mathematical and computational basis for this important area. It introduces new applications to both natural and computer languages and brings together Stuart Shieber's many contributions that have been at the core of developments ranging from the discovery of improved explanations of linguistic phenomena such as binding and coordination to the detailed mathematical analysis of constraint-solving and parsing in a variety of grammar formalisms. This thorough examination of the theoretical and computational foundations of constraint-based grammars and applications to natural-language analysis is unique in several respects. Shieber's theoretical framework may be applied to a whole class of formalisms with properties that make it possible to define a general parsing algorithm for all members of the class, with results that provide essential guidance to the implementer of constraint-based language processing systems. Shieber also brings out new connections between grammatical categories and data types, and between constraint-based natural-language analysis and type inference in computer languages. These connections should be of increasing interest both to computational and theoretical linguists and to computer scientists.

Bradford Books imprint
Domestic Sources of International Environmental Policy
Authors: DeSombre Elizabeth R.
Published: December 2018

How do international environmental standards come into being? One important way, as Elizabeth DeSombre shows in this book, is through the internationalization of regulations that one or more countries have undertaken domestically. Domestic environmental regulation, DeSombre argues, can create an incentive for environmentalists and industry—previously at odds with each other—to work together to shape international environmental policy. For environmentalists, international regulation offers greater protection of a resource. For industry, internationalization prevents unregulated foreign industries from operating at a competitive advantage. Domestic forces acting together often push for the threat or imposition of economic restrictions on countries resisting regulation. DeSombre examines this dynamic primarily from the perspective of United States environmental policy. Looking at major regulations on endangered species, air pollution, and fisheries conservation, she determines which ones the United States has attempted to internationalize and how successful the attempts have been. She underlines the importance of regulated industries in the creation of international environmental policy and presents evidence that power and threat play a significant role in the adoption of international regulations, despite the perception of international environmental politics as an arena of friendly interaction over mutual interests. She also discusses the origins of international cooperation, the regulatory effects of free trade, the usefulness of economic sanctions, and the interaction between domestic and international politics. Thus the book has theoretical implications for the fields of environmental politics and policy, international diplomacy, and international political economy.
The Economic Effects of Constitutions
Authors: Persson Torsten , Tabellini Guido
Published: December 2018

The authors of The Economic Effects of Constitutions use econometric tools to study what they call the "missing link" between constitutional systems and economic policy; the book is an uncompromisingly empirical sequel to their previous theoretical analysis of economic policy. Taking recent theoretical work as a point of departure, they ask which theoretical findings are supported and which are contradicted by the facts. The results are based on comparisons of political institutions across countries or time, in a large sample of contemporary democracies. They find that presidential/parliamentary and majoritarian/proportional dichotomies influence several economic variables: presidential regimes induce smaller public sectors, and proportional elections lead to greater and less targeted government spending and larger budget deficits. Moreover, the details of the electoral system (such as district magnitude and ballot structure) influence corruption and structural policies toward economic growth.Persson and Tabellini's goal is to draw conclusions about the causal effects of constitutions on policy outcomes. But since constitutions are not randomly assigned to countries, how the constitutional system was selected in the first place must be taken into account. This raises challenging methodological problems, which are addressed in the book. The study is therefore important not only in its findings but also in establishing a methodology for empirical analysis in the field of comparative politics.
Electric Words
Authors: Wilks Yorick A. , Slator Brian M. , Guthrie Louise
Published: December 2018

Electric Words delves first into the philosophical background of the study of meaning, specifically word meaning, then into the early work on treating dictionaries as texts, the first serious efforts at extracting information from machine-readable dictionaries (MRDs), and the conversion of MRDs into usable lexical knowledge bases.

The use of computers to understand words continues to be an area of burgeoning research. Electric Words is the first general survey of and introduction to the entire range of work in lexical linguistics and corpora—the study of such on-line resources as dictionaries and other texts—in the broader fields of natural-language processing and artificial intelligence. The authors integrate and synthesize the goals and methods of computational lexicons in relation to AI's sister disciplines of philosophy, linguistics, and psychology. One of the underlying messages of the book is that current research should be guided by both computational and theoretical tools and not only by statistical techniques—that matters have gone far beyond counting to encompass the difficult province of meaning itself and how it can be formally expressed.

Electric Words delves first into the philosophical background of the study of meaning, specifically word meaning, then into the early work on treating dictionaries as texts, the first serious efforts at extracting information from machine-readable dictionaries (MRDs), and the conversion of MRDs into usable lexical knowledge bases. The authors provide a comparative survey of worldwide work on extracting usable structures from dictionaries for computational-linguistic purposes and a discussion of how those structures differ from or interact with structures derived from standard texts (or corpora). Also covered are automatic techniques for analyzing MRDs, genus hierarchies and networks, numerical methods of language processing related to dictionaries, automatic processing of bilingual dictionaries, and consumer projects using MRDs.

Bradford Books imprint
Empirical Methods for Exploiting Parallel Texts
Authors: Melamed I. Dan
Published: December 2018

This book lays out the theory and the practical techniques for discovering and applying translational equivalence at the lexical level.

Parallel texts (bitexts) are a goldmine of linguistic knowledge, because the translation of a text into another language can be viewed as a detailed annotation of what that text means. Knowledge about translational equivalence, which can be gleaned from bitexts, is of central importance for applications such as manual and machine translation, cross-language information retrieval, and corpus linguistics. The availability of bitexts has increased dramatically since the advent of the Web, making their study an exciting new area of research in natural language processing. This book lays out the theory and the practical techniques for discovering and applying translational equivalence at the lexical level. It is a start-to-finish guide to designing and evaluating many translingual applications.
Essays on the Representational and Derivational Nature of Grammar
Authors: Aoun Joseph E. , Li Yen-hui Audrey
Published: December 2018

This book can be read on two levels: as a novel empirical study of wh- interrogatives and relative constructions in a variety of languages and as a theoretical investigation of chain formation in grammar.The book is divided into two parts. Part I investigates the distribution and interpretation of multiple wh- interrogative constructions, focusing on the workings of Superiority. Part II investigates the structure and derivation of relative constructions. The main languages discussed are Lebanese, Arabic, Chinese, and English. The theoretical materials are in the generative grammar tradition.
Evolutionary Dynamics and Extensive Form Games
Authors: Cressman Ross
Published: December 2018

An analysis of standard evolutionary dynamics adapted to extensive form games.

Evolutionary game theory attempts to predict individual behavior (whether of humans or other species) when interactions between individuals are modeled as a noncooperative game. Most dynamic analyses of evolutionary games are based on their normal forms, despite the fact that many interesting games are specified more naturally through their extensive forms. Because every extensive form game has a normal form representation, some theorists hold that the best way to analyze an extensive form game is simply to ignore the extensive form structure and study the game in its normal form representation. This book rejects that suggestion, arguing that a game's normal form representation often omits essential information from the perspective of dynamic evolutionary game theory.

The book offers a synthesis of current knowledge about extensive form games from an evolutionary perspective, emphasizing connections between the extensive form representation and dynamic models that traditionally have been applied to biological and economic phenomena. It develops a general theory to analyze dynamically arbitrary extensive form games and applies this theory to a range of examples. It lays the foundation for the analysis of specific extensive form models of behavior and for the further theoretical study of extensive form evolutionary games.
Global Institutions and Social Knowledge
Authors: Walsh Virginia M.
Published: December 2018

This theoretical and empirical study examines the influence of global institutions on the generation of scientific knowledge. Virginia Walsh's approach reverses the traditional focus of international relations literature—which most often deals with how scientific knowledge influences institutions—and offers an original way to look at international environmental governance. After proposing a theory of institutional mechanisms by which global institutions shape the generation of knowledge, the book turns to detailed case studies of two institutions in the under- studied but vital area of marine science, the Scripps Institute of Oceanography and the Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission, to illustrate these mechanisms.

In part 1, "Theory," the book identifies three specific mechanisms or "fixes" that provide the means by which institutions shape the generation and use of knowledge. With the positional fix, key individuals use their social roles or positions in an institution to influence the beliefs of members or fix the direction of research. The statutory fix occurs when beliefs gain acceptance as a consequence of being embedded in rules or treaties. The committee fix is illustrated in the regularized practices through which social groups accept statements as group beliefs. Part 2, "Evidence," shows these mechanisms at work in the two case studies. The Scripps Institution, for example, illustrates the positional fix, as successive directors used their position to frame research. The Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission, on the other hand, exemplifies both the statutory fix and the committee fix in its regulatory actions.
The Green State
Authors: Eckersley Robyn
Published: December 2018

What would constitute a definitively "green" state? In this important new book, Robyn Eckersley explores what it might take to create a green democratic state as an alternative to the classical liberal democratic state, the indiscriminate growth-dependent welfare state, and the neoliberal market-focused state—seeking, she writes, "to navigate between undisciplined political imagination and pessimistic resignation to the status quo." In recent years, most environmental scholars and environmentalists have characterized the sovereign state as ineffectual and have criticized nations for perpetuating ecological destruction. Going consciously against the grain of much current thinking, this book argues that the state is still the preeminent political institution for addressing environmental problems. States remain the gatekeepers of the global order, and greening the state is a necessary step, Eckersley argues, toward greening domestic and international policy and law.

The Green State seeks to connect the moral and practical concerns of the environmental movement with contemporary theories about the state, democracy, and justice. Eckersley's proposed "critical political ecology" expands the boundaries of the moral community to include the natural environment in which the human community is embedded. This is the first book to make the vision of a "good" green state explicit, to explore the obstacles to its achievement, and to suggest practical constitutional and multilateral arrangements that could help transform the liberal democratic state into a postliberal green democratic state. Rethinking the state in light of the principles of ecological democracy ultimately casts it in a new role: that of an ecological steward and facilitator of transboundary democracy rather than a selfish actor jealously protecting its territory.
Immunological Bioinformatics
Authors: Lund Ole , Nielsen Morten , Lundegaard Claus , Kesmir Can , Brunak Søren
Published: December 2018

Using bioinformatics methods to generate a systems-level view of the immune system; description of the main biological concepts and the new data-driven algorithms.

Despite the fact that advanced bioinformatics methodologies have not been used as extensively in immunology as in other subdisciplines within biology, research in immunological bioinformatics has already developed models of components of the immune system that can be combined and that may help develop therapies, vaccines, and diagnostic tools for such diseases as AIDS, malaria, and cancer. In a broader perspective, specialized bioinformatics methods in immunology make possible for the first time a systems-level understanding of the immune system. The traditional approaches to immunology are reductionist, avoiding complexity but providing detailed knowledge of a single event, cell, or molecular entity. Today, a variety of experimental bioinformatics techniques connected to the sequencing of the human genome provides a sound scientific basis for a comprehensive description of the complex immunological processes. This book offers a description of bioinformatics techniques as they are applied to immunology, including a succinct account of the main biological concepts for students and researchers with backgrounds in mathematics, statistics, and computer science as well as explanations of the new data-driven algorithms in the context of biological data that will be useful for immunologists, biologists, and biochemists working on vaccine design. In each chapter the authors show interesting biological insights gained from the bioinformatics approach. The book concludes by explaining how all the methods presented in the book can be integrated to identify immunogenic regions in microorganisms and host genomes.
Labor and the Environmental Movement
Authors: Obach Brian K.
Published: December 2018

Relations between organized labor and environmental groups are typically characterized as adversarial, most often because of the specter of job loss invoked by industries facing environmental regulation. But, as Brian Obach shows, the two largest and most powerful social movements in the United States actually share a great deal of common ground. Unions and environmentalists have worked together on a number of issues, including workplace health and safety, environmental restoration, and globalization (as in the surprising solidarity of "Teamsters and Turtles" in the anti-WTO demonstrations in Seattle).

Labor and the Environmental Movement examines why, when, and how labor unions and environmental organizations either cooperate or come into conflict. By exploring the interorganizational dynamics that are crucial to cooperative efforts and presenting detailed studies of labor-environmental group coalition building from around the country (examining in detail examples from Maine, New Jersey, New York, Washington, and Wisconsin), it provides insight into how these movements can be brought together to promote a just and sustainable society.

Obach gives a brief history of relations between organized labor and environmental groups in the United States, explores how organizational learning can increase organizations' ability to work with others, and examines the crucial role played by "coalition brokers" who maintain links to both movements. He challenges research that attempts to explain inter-movement conflict on the basis of cultural distinctions between blue-collar workers and middle-class environmentalists, providing evidence of legal and structural constraints that better explain the organizational differences class-culture and new-social-movement theorists identify. The final chapter includes a model of the crucial determinants of cooperation and conflict that can serve as the basis for further study of inter-movement relations.
Lectures on Antitrust Economics
Authors: Whinston Michael D.
Published: December 2018

Antitrust law regulates economic activity but differs in its operation from what is traditionally considered "regulation." Where regulation is often industry-specific and involves the direct setting of prices, product characteristics, or entry, antitrust law focuses more broadly on maintaining certain basic rules of competition. In these lectures Michael Whinston offers an accessible and lucid account of the economics behind antitrust law, looking at some of the most recent developments in antitrust economics and highlighting areas that require further research. He focuses on three areas: price fixing, in which competitors agree to restrict output or raise price; horizontal mergers, in which competitors agree to merge their operations; and exclusionary vertical contracts, in which a competitor seeks to exclude a rival.

Antitrust commentators widely regard the prohibition on price fixing as the most settled and economically sound area of antitrust. Whinston's discussion seeks to unsettle this view, suggesting that some fundamental issues in this area are, in fact, not well understood. In his discussion of horizontal mergers, Whinston describes the substantial advances in recent theoretical and empirical work and suggests fruitful directions for further research. The complex area of exclusionary vertical contracts is perhaps the most controversial in antitrust. The influential "Chicago School" cast doubt on arguments that vertical contracts could be profitably used to exclude rivals. Recent theoretical work, to which Whinston has made important contributions, instead shows that such contracts can be profitable tools for exclusion. Whinston's discussion sheds light on the controversy in this area and the nature of those recent theoretical contributions.

Sponsored by the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella
Making Space
Authors: Newcombe Nora S. , Huttenlocher Janellen
Published: December 2018

Spatial competence is a central aspect of human adaptation. To understand human cognitive functioning, we must understand how people code the locations of things, how they navigate in the world, and how they represent and mentally manipulate spatial information. Until recently three approaches have dominated thinking about spatial development. Followers of Piaget claim that infants are born without knowledge of space or a conception of permanent objects that occupy space. They develop such knowledge through experience and manipulation of their environment. Nativists suggest that the essential aspects of spatial understanding are innate and that biological maturation of specific brain areas can account for whatever aspects of spatial development are not accounted for at birth. The Vygotskan approach emphasizes the cultural transmission of spatial skills.

Nora Newcombe and Janellen Huttenlocher argue for an interactionist approach to spatial development that incorporates and integrates essential insights of the classic three approaches. They show how biological preparedness interacts with the spatial environment that infants encounter after birth to create spatial development and mature spatial competence. Topics covered include spatial coding during infancy and childhood; the early origins of coding distance in continuous space, of coding location with respect to distal external landmarks, and of hierarchical combination of information; the mental processes that operate on stored spatial information; spatial information as encoded in models and maps; and spatial information as encoded in language. In conclusion, the authors discuss their account of spatial development in relation to various approaches to cognitive development in other domains, including quantitative development, theory of mind, and language acquisition.

Bradford Books imprint
Metaphor in Context
Authors: Stern Josef
Published: December 2018

Josef Stern addresses the question: Given the received conception of the form and goals of semantic theory, does metaphorical interpretation, in whole or part, fall within its scope?

The many philosophers, linguists, and cognitive scientists writing on metaphor over the past two decades have generally taken for granted that metaphor lies outside, if not in opposition to, received conceptions of semantics and grammar. Assuming that metaphor cannot be explained by or within semantics, they claim that metaphor has little, if anything, to teach us about semantic theory. In this book Josef Stern challenges these assumptions. He is concerned primarily with the question: Given the received conception of the form and goals of semantic theory, does metaphorical interpretation, in whole or part, fall within its scope? Specifically, he asks, what (if anything) does a speaker-hearer know as part of her semantic competence when she knows the interpretation of a metaphor?

According to Stern, the answer to these questions lies in the systematic context-dependence of metaphorical interpretation. Drawing on a deep analogy between demonstratives, indexicals, and metaphors, Stern develops a formal theory of metaphorical meaning that underlies a speaker's ability to interpret a metaphor. With his semantics, he also addresses a variety of philosophical and linguistic issues raised by metaphor. These include the interpretive structure of complex extended metaphors, the cognitive significance of metaphors and their literal paraphrasability, the pictorial character of metaphors, the role of similarity and exemplification in metaphorical interpretation, metaphor-networks, dead metaphors, the relation of metaphors to other figures, and the dependence of metaphors on literal meanings. Unlike most metaphor theorists, however, who take these problems to be sui generis to metaphor, Stern subsumes them under the same rubric as other semantic facts that hold for nonmetaphorical language.

Bradford Books imprint
The Microstructure Approach to Exchange Rates
Authors: Lyons Richard K.
Published: December 2018

Historically, the fields of exchange-rate economics and microstructure finance have progressed independently of each other. Recent interaction, however, has given rise to a microstructure approach to exchange rates. This book focuses on the economics of financial information and how microstructure tools help to clarify the types of information most relevant to exchange rates.

The microstructure approach views exchange rates from the perspective of the trading room, the place where exchange rates are actually determined. Emphasizing information economics over institutional issues, the approach departs from three unrealistic assumptions common to previous approaches: that all information relevant to exchange rates is publicly available, that all market participants are alike in their goals or in how they view information, and that how trading is organized is inconsequential for exchange rates. The book shows how exchange-rate behavior previously thought to be particularly puzzling can be explained using the microstructure approach. It contains a combination of theoretical and empirical work.
Misfortunes of Prosperity
Authors: Cohen Daniel
Published: December 2018

Elucidates the current debates on these and other questions in a fast-paced and incisive tour of the dominant ideas in political economy, summarizing historical and theoretical perspectives on the causes of economic growth in the United States, Western Europe, Japan and elsewhere as the twentieth-century draws to a close.

Translated by Jacqueline Lindenfeld Are robust economic growth and tight social cohesion something of the past, or is contemporary stagnation simply part of a long economic cycle that is bound to bring brighter days? Should government step in to boost productivity and income, or does economic globalization necessitate a new laissez-faire model for the twenty-first century? The Misfortunes of Prosperity elucidates the current debates on these and other questions in a fast-paced and incisive tour of the dominant ideas in political economy, summarizing historical and theoretical perspectives on the causes of economic growth in the United States, Western Europe, Japan and elsewhere as the twentieth-century draws to a close. Daniel Cohen discusses the effects of the showdown of productivity in Europe and the United States and explains the origin of the apparent tradeoff between unemployment in Europe and wage inequalities in the United States. On questions of economic policy and the competing academic views (new classical and Keynesian) of the efficacy of government intervention, Cohen inverts the Keynesian belief that government intervention causes growth, and explains why waves of government interventions (including wars) usually follow upward economic trends (rather than create it). But he also advocates government discretion rather than government neutrality by showing the disastrous consequences of hands off approach to debt, inflation, and social security.
Neural Transplantation
Authors: Freed William J.
Published: December 2018

Although there are many scientific and philosophical reasons to study the brain, for William J. Freed, "the most compelling reason to study the brain is to be able to repair the brains of individuals with nervous system injury or disease." Advances in repairing the nervous system, as well as new data on brain development, growth, and plasticity, have revolutionized the field of brain research and given rise to the technology of brain tissue transplantation. In this book Freed discusses both what may and what may not be possible.

The book covers two aspects of neural tissue transplantation research. One involves the transplantation of particular cells to repair or augment specific neuronal systems. This technique could be useful for such conditions as Parkinson's disease, Huntington's disease, chronic pain, and epilepsy. The other line of research concerns regeneration from injury, especially of the spinal cord.

After providing basic background on transplantation, brain structure, and development, the book discusses Parkinson's disease, the use of transplants to influence localized brain functions, circuit reconstruction, and genetic engineering and other future technologies.

Bradford Books imprint