bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Rogue Archives
Authors: De Kosnik Abigail
Published: March 2019

An examination of how nonprofessional archivists, especially media fans, practice cultural preservation on the Internet and how “digital cultural memory” differs radically from print-era archiving.

The task of archiving was once entrusted only to museums, libraries, and other institutions that acted as repositories of culture in material form. But with the rise of digital networked media, a multitude of self-designated archivists—fans, pirates, hackers—have become practitioners of cultural preservation on the Internet. These nonprofessional archivists have democratized cultural memory, building freely accessible online archives of whatever content they consider suitable for digital preservation. In Rogue Archives, Abigail De Kosnik examines the practice of archiving in the transition from print to digital media, looking in particular at Internet fan fiction archives.

De Kosnik explains that media users today regard all of mass culture as an archive, from which they can redeploy content for their own creations. Hence, “remix culture” and fan fiction are core genres of digital cultural production. De Kosnik explores, among other things, the anticanonical archiving styles of Internet preservationists; the volunteer labor of online archiving; how fan archives serve women and queer users as cultural resources; archivists' efforts to attract racially and sexually diverse content; and how digital archives adhere to the logics of performance more than the logics of print. She also considers the similarities and differences among free culture, free software, and fan communities, and uses digital humanities tools to quantify and visualize the size, user base, and rate of growth of several online fan archives.
Oblivious Network Routing
Authors: Iyengar S. S. , Boroojeni Kianoosh G.
Published: March 2019

Versatile solutions to routing network flows in unpredictable circumstances, presenting both mathematical tools and applications.

Our increasingly integrated world relies on networks both physical and virtual to transfer goods and information. The Internet is a network of networks that connects people around the world in a real-time manner, but it can be disrupted by massive data flows, diverse traffic patterns, inadequate infrastructure, and even natural disasters and political conflict. Similar challenges exist for transportation and energy distribution networks. There is an urgent need for intelligent and adaptable routing of network flows, and a rich literature has evolved that treats “oblivious network design.” This book offers novel computational schemes for efficiently solving routing problems in unpredictable circumstances and proposes some real world applications for them. The versatile routing schemes mathematically guarantee long-term efficiency and are most appropriate for networks with non-deterministic (or oblivious) current and past states.

After an introduction to network design and the importance of routing problems, the book presents mathematical tools needed to construct versatile routing schemes, emphasizing the role of linked hierarchical data structures, both top-down and bottom-up. It then describes two important applications of versatile routing schemes: a secure model for congestion-free content-centric networks (which will play a key role in the future of the Internet) and a novel approach for the distribution of green power resources on a smart electricity grid.
Allocation in Networks
Authors: Hougaard Jens Leth
Published: March 2019

A comprehensive overview of networks and economic design, presenting models and results drawn from economics, operations research, and computer science; with examples and exercises.

This book explores networks and economic design, focusing on the role played by allocation rules (revenue and cost-sharing schemes) in creating and sustaining efficient network solutions. It takes a normative approach, seeking economically efficient network solutions sustained by distributional fairness, and considers how different ways of allocating liability affect incentives for network usage and development. The text presents an up-to-date overview of models and results currently scattered over several strands of literature, drawing on economics, operations research, and computer science.

The book's analysis of allocation problems includes such classic models from combinatorial optimization as the minimum cost spanning tree and the traveling salesman problem. It examines the planner's ability to design mechanisms that will implement efficient network structures, both in large decentralized networks and when there is user-agent information asymmetry. Offering systematic theoretical analyses of various compelling allocation rules in cases of fixed network structures as well as discussions of network design problems, the book covers such topics as tree-structured distribution systems, routing games, organizational hierarchies, the “price of anarchy,” mechanism design, and efficient implementation. Appropriate as a reference for practitioners in network regulation and the network industry or as a text for graduate students, the book offers numerous illustrative examples and end-of-chapter exercises that highlight the concepts and methods presented.
The Blockchain and the New Architecture of Trust
Authors: Werbach Kevin
Published: March 2019

How the blockchain—a system built on foundations of mutual mistrust—can become trustworthy.

The blockchain entered the world on January 3, 2009, introducing an innovative new trust architecture: an environment in which users trust a system—for example, a shared ledger of information—without necessarily trusting any of its components. The cryptocurrency Bitcoin is the most famous implementation of the blockchain, but hundreds of other companies have been founded and billions of dollars invested in similar applications since Bitcoin's launch. Some see the blockchain as offering more opportunities for criminal behavior than benefits to society. In this book, Kevin Werbach shows how a technology resting on foundations of mutual mistrust can become trustworthy.

The blockchain, built on open software and decentralized foundations that allow anyone to participate, seems like a threat to any form of regulation. In fact, Werbach argues, law and the blockchain need each other. Blockchain systems that ignore law and governance are likely to fail, or to become outlaw technologies irrelevant to the mainstream economy. That, Werbach cautions, would be a tragic waste of potential. If, however, we recognize the blockchain as a kind of legal technology that shapes behavior in new ways, it can be harnessed to create tremendous business and social value.
Numbered Lives
Authors: Wernimont Jacqueline
Published: March 2019

A feminist media history of quantification, uncovering the stories behind the tools and technologies we use to count, measure, and weigh our lives and realities.

Anglo-American culture has used media to measure and quantify lives for centuries. Historical journal entries map the details of everyday life, while death registers put numbers to life's endings. Today we count our daily steps with fitness trackers and quantify births and deaths with digitized data. How are these present-day methods for measuring ourselves similar to those used in the past? In this book, Jacqueline Wernimont presents a new media history of western quantification, uncovering the stories behind the tools and technologies we use to count, measure, and weigh our lives and realities.

Numbered Lives is the first book of its kind, a feminist media history that maps connections not only between past and present-day “quantum media” but between media tracking and long-standing systemic inequalities. Wernimont explores the history of the pedometer, mortality statistics, and the census in England and the United States to illuminate the entanglement of Anglo-American quantification with religious, imperial, and patriarchal paradigms. In Anglo-American culture, Wernimont argues, counting life and counting death are sides of the same coin—one that has always been used to render statistics of life and death more valuable to corporate and state organizations. Numbered Lives enumerates our shared media history, helping us understand our digital culture and inheritance.
The Smart Enough City
Authors: Green Ben
Published: March 2019

Why technology is not an end in itself, and how cities can be “smart enough,” using technology to promote democracy and equity.

Smart cities, where technology is used to solve every problem, are hailed as futuristic urban utopias. We are promised that apps, algorithms, and artificial intelligence will relieve congestion, restore democracy, prevent crime, and improve public services. In The Smart Enough City, Ben Green warns against seeing the city only through the lens of technology; taking an exclusively technical view of urban life will lead to cities that appear smart but under the surface are rife with injustice and inequality. He proposes instead that cities strive to be “smart enough”: to embrace technology as a powerful tool when used in conjunction with other forms of social change—but not to value technology as an end in itself.

In a technology-centric smart city, self-driving cars have the run of downtown and force out pedestrians, civic engagement is limited to requesting services through an app, police use algorithms to justify and perpetuate racist practices, and governments and private companies surveil public space to control behavior. Green describes smart city efforts gone wrong but also smart enough alternatives, attainable with the help of technology but not reducible to technology: a livable city, a democratic city, a just city, a responsible city, and an innovative city. By recognizing the complexity of urban life rather than merely seeing the city as something to optimize, these Smart Enough Cities successfully incorporate technology into a holistic vision of justice and equity.

The open access edition of this book was made possible by generous funding from the MIT Libraries.
The Genius Checklist
Authors: Simonton Dean Keith
Published: March 2019

What it takes to be a genius: nine essential and contradictory ingredients.

What does it take to be a genius? A high score on an IQ test? Brilliant physicist Richard Feynman's IQ was too low for membership in Mensa. Suffering from varying degrees of mental illness? Creativity is often considered a marker of mental health. Be a child prodigy like Mozart, or a later bloomer like Beethoven? Die tragically young, like Keats, or live to a ripe old age like Goethe? In The Genius Checklist, Dean Keith Simonton examines the key factors in creative genius and finds that they are more than a little contradictory.

Simonton, who has studied creativity and genius for more than four decades, draws on both scientific research and stories from the lives of famous creative geniuses that range from Isaac Newton to Vincent van Gogh to Virginia Woolf. He explains the origin of IQ tests and the art of estimating the IQ of long-dead historical figures (John Stuart Mill: 200; Charles Darwin: 160). He compares IQ scores with achieved eminence as measures of genius, and he draws a distinction between artistic and scientific genius. He rules out birth order as a determining factor (in the James family alone, three geniuses at three different birth-order positions: William James, firs-tborn; Henry James, second born; Alice James, born fifth and last); considers Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hour rule; and describes how the “lone” genius gets enmeshed in social networks.

Genius, Simonton explains, operates in ways so subtle that they seem contradictory. Genius is born and made, the domain of child prodigies and their elders. Simonton's checklist gives us a new, integrative way to understand geniuses—and perhaps even to nurture your own genius!
Playing Smart
Authors: Togelius Julian
Published: March 2019

A new vision of the future of games and game design, enabled by AI.

Can games measure intelligence? How will artificial intelligence inform games of the future? In Playing Smart, Julian Togelius explores the connections between games and intelligence to offer a new vision of future games and game design. Video games already depend on AI. We use games to test AI algorithms, challenge our thinking, and better understand both natural and artificial intelligence. In the future, Togelius argues, game designers will be able to create smarter games that make us smarter in turn, applying advanced AI to help design games. In this book, he tells us how.

Games are the past, present, and future of artificial intelligence. In 1948, Alan Turing, one of the founding fathers of computer science and artificial intelligence, handwrote a program for chess. Today we have IBM's Deep Blue and DeepMind's AlphaGo, and huge efforts go into developing AI that can play such arcade games as Pac-Man. Programmers continue to use games to test and develop AI, creating new benchmarks for AI while also challenging human assumptions and cognitive abilities. Game design is at heart a cognitive science, Togelius reminds us—when we play or design a game, we plan, think spatially, make predictions, move, and assess ourselves and our performance. By studying how we play and design games, Togelius writes, we can better understand how humans and machines think. AI can do more for game design than providing a skillful opponent. We can harness it to build game-playing and game-designing AI agents, enabling a new generation of AI-augmented games. With AI, we can explore new frontiers in learning and play.
Slab City
Authors: Hailey Charlie , Wylie Donovan
Published: March 2019

An architect and a photographer explore a community of squatters, artists, snowbirds, migrants, and survivalists inhabiting a former military base in the California desert.

Under the unforgiving sun of southern California's Colorado Desert lies Slab City, a community of squatters, artists, snowbirds, migrants, survivalists, and homeless people. Called by some “the last free place” and by others “an enclave of anarchy,” Slab City is also the end of the road for many. Without official electricity, running water, sewers, or trash pickup, Slab City dwellers also live without law enforcement, taxation, or administration. Built on the concrete slabs of Camp Dunlap, an abandoned Marine training base, the settlement maintains its off-grid aspirations within the site's residual military perimeters and gridded street layout; off-grid is really in-grid. In this book, architect Charlie Hailey and photographer Donovan Wylie explore the contradictions of Slab City.

In a series of insightful texts and striking color photographs, Hailey and Wylie capture the texture of life in Slab City. They show us Slab Mart, a conflation of rubbish heap and recycling center; signs that declare Welcome to Slab City, T'ai Chi on the Slabs Every morning, and Don't fuck around; RVs in conditions ranging from luxuriously roadworthy to immobile; shelters cloaked in pallets and palm fronds; and the alarmingly opaque water of the hot springs.

At Camp Dunlap in the 1940s, Marines learned how to fight a war. In Slab City, civilians resort to their own wartime survival tactics. Is the current encampment an outpost of freedom, a new “city on a hill” built by the self-chosen, an inversion of Manifest Destiny, or is it a last vestige of freedom, tended by society's dispossessed? Officially, it is a town that doesn't exist.

Research for this project was supported by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.
Consciousness Demystified
Authors: Feinberg Todd E. , Mallatt Jon M.
Published: March 2019

Demystifying consciousness: how subjective experience can be explained by natural brain and evolutionary processes.

Consciousness is often considered a mystery. How can the seemingly immaterial experience of consciousness be explained by the material neurons of the brain? There seems to be an unbridgeable gap between understanding the brain as an objectively observed biological organ and accounting for the subjective experiences that come from the brain (and life processes). In this book, Todd Feinberg and Jon Mallatt attempt to demystify consciousness—to naturalize it, by explaining that the subjective, experiencing aspects of consciousness are created by natural brain processes that evolved in natural ways. Although subjective experience is unique in nature, they argue, it is not necessarily mysterious. We need not invoke the unknown or unknowable to explain its creation.

Feinberg and Mallatt flesh out their theory of neurobiological naturalism (after John Searle's biological naturalism) that recognizes the many features that brains share with other living things, lists the neural features unique to conscious brains, and explains the subjective–objective barrier naturally. They investigate common neural features among the diverse groups of animals that have primary consciousness—the type of consciousness that experiences both sensations received from the world and affects such as emotions. They map the evolutionary development of consciousness and find an uninterrupted progression over time, without inserting any mysterious forces or exotic physics. Finally, bridging the previously unbridgeable, they show how subjective experience, although different from objective observation, can be naturally explained.
The Evolving Animal Orchestra
Authors: Honing Henkjan
Published: March 2019

A music researcher's quest to discover other musical species.

Even those of us who can't play a musical instrument or lack a sense of rhythm can perceive and enjoy music. Research shows that all humans possess the trait of musicality. We are a musical species—but are we the only musical species? Is our musical predisposition unique, like our linguistic ability? In The Evolving Animal Orchestra, Henkjan Honing embarks upon a quest to discover if humans share the trait of musicality with other animals.

Charles Darwin believed that musicality was a capacity of all animals, human and nonhuman, with a clear biological basis. Taking this as his starting point, Honing—a music cognition researcher—visits a series of biological research centers to observe the ways that animals respond to music. He has studied scientists' accounts of Snowball, the cockatoo who could dance to a musical beat, and of Ronan, the sea lion, who was trained to move her head to a beat. Now Honing will be able to make his own observations.

Honing tests a rhesus monkey for beat perception via an EEG; performs a listening experiment with zebra finches; considers why birds sing, and if they intend their songs to be musical; explains why many animals have perfect pitch; and watches marine mammals respond to sounds. He reports on the unforeseen twists and turns, doubts, and oversights that are a part of any scientific research—and which point to as many questions as answers. But, as he shows us, science is closing in on the biological and evolutionary source of our musicality.
Thermodynamic Weirdness
Authors: Lemons Don S.
Published: March 2019

An account of the concepts and intellectual structure of classical thermodynamics that reveals the subject's simplicity and coherence.

Students of physics, chemistry, and engineering are taught classical thermodynamics through its methods—a “problems first” approach that neglects the subject's concepts and intellectual structure. In Thermodynamic Weirdness, Don Lemons fills this gap, offering a nonmathematical account of the ideas of classical thermodynamics in all its non-Newtonian “weirdness.” By emphasizing the ideas and their relationship to one another, Lemons reveals the simplicity and coherence of classical thermodynamics.

Lemons presents concepts in an order that is both chronological and logical, mapping the rise and fall of ideas in such a way that the ideas that were abandoned illuminate the ideas that took their place. Selections from primary sources, including writings by Daniel Fahrenheit, Antoine Lavoisier, James Joule, and others, appear at the end of most chapters. Lemons covers the invention of temperature; heat as a form of motion or as a material fluid; Carnot's analysis of heat engines; William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin) and his two definitions of absolute temperature; and energy as the mechanical equivalent of heat. He explains early versions of the first and second laws of thermodynamics; entropy and the law of entropy non-decrease; the differing views of Lord Kelvin and Rudolf Clausius on the fate of the universe; the zeroth and third laws of thermodynamics; and Einstein's assessment of classical thermodynamics as “the only physical theory of universal content which I am convinced will never be overthrown.”
Pioneers, Hidden Champions, Changemakers, and Underdogs
Authors: Greeven Mark J. , Yip George S. , Wei Wei
Published: March 2019

An insider's view of China's under-the-radar, globally competitive innovators.

Chinese innovators are making their mark globally. Not only do such giants as Alibaba and Huawei continue to thrive and grow through innovation, thousands of younger Chinese entrepreneurs are poised to enter the global marketplace. In this book, Mark Greeven, George Yip, and Wei Wei offer an insider's view of China's under-the-radar, globally competitive innovators.

The authors, all experts on Chinese innovation, distinguish four types of innovators in China: pioneers, large companies that are globally known; hidden champions, midsize enterprises that are market leaders in their niches; underdogs, technology-driven ventures with significant intellectual property; and changemakers, newer firms characterized by digital disruption, exponential growth, and cross-industry innovations. They investigate what kinds of innovations these companies develop (product, process, or business model), their competitive strategies, and key drivers of innovation. They identify six typical ways Chinese entrepreneurs innovate, including swarm innovation (collectively pursuing opportunities) and rapid centralized decision making. Finally, they look at how Chinese innovators are going global, whether building R&D networks internationally or exporting disruptive business models. The book includes many examples of Chinese innovators and innovations, drawn from a range of companies—from pioneers to changemakers—including Alibaba, Haier, Hikvision, Malong Technology, Weihua Solar, Mobike, and Cheetah Mobile.

Greeven, Yip, and Wei offer an essential guide to what makes China a heavyweight competitor in the global marketplace.
From Logic to Logic Programming
Authors: Doets Kees
Published: March 2019

This mathematically oriented introduction to the theory of logic programming presents a systematic exposition of the resolution method for propositional, first-order, and Horn- clause logics, together with an analysis of the semantic aspects of the method. It is through the inference rule of resolution that both proofs and computations can be manipulated on computers, and this book contains elegant versions and proofs of the fundamental theorems and lemmas in the proof theory of logic programming. Advanced topics such as recursive complexity and negation as failure and its semantics are covered, and streamlined setups for SLD- and SLDNF-resolution are described. No other book treats this material in such detail and with such sophistication. Doets provides a novel approach to resolution that is applied to the first-order case and the case of (positive) logic programs. In contrast to the usual approach, the concept of a resolvent is defined nonconstructively, without recourse to the concept of unification, allowing the soundness and completeness proofs to be carried out in a more economic way. Other new material includes computability results dealing with analytical hierarchy, results on infinite derivations and an exposition on general logic programs using 3-valued logic.
A Guide for the Young Economist
Authors: Thomson William
Published: March 2019

This book is an invaluable guide for young economists working on their dissertations, preparing their first articles for submission to professional journals, getting ready for their first presentations at conferences and job seminars, or facing their first refereeing assignments. In clear, concise language—a model for what he advocates—William Thomson shows how to make written and oral presentations both inviting and efficient. Thomson covers the basics of clear exposition, including such nuts-and-bolts topics as titling papers, writing abstracts, presenting research results, and holding an audience's attention.
The Human Relationship with Nature
Authors: Kahn Peter H.
Published: March 2019

Kahn's empirical and theoretical findings draw on current work in psychology, biology, environmental behavior, education, policy, and moral development.

Urgent environmental problems call for vigorous research and theory on how humans develop a relationship with nature. In a series of original research projects, Peter Kahn answers this call. For the past eight years, Kahn has studied children, young adults, and parents in diverse geographical locations, ranging from an economically impoverished black community in Houston to a remote village in the Brazilian Amazon. In these studies Kahn seeks answers to the following questions: How do people value nature, and how do they reason morally about environmental degradation? Do children have a deep connection to the natural world that gets severed by modern society? Or do such connections emerge, if at all, later in life, with increased cognitive and moral maturity? How does culture affect environmental commitments and sensibilities? Are there universal features in the human relationship with nature? Kahn's empirical and theoretical findings draw on current work in psychology, biology, environmental behavior, education, policy, and moral development.

This scholarly yet accessible book will be of value to practitioners in the social science and environmental fields, as well as to informed generalists interested in environmental issues and children.
Indirect Perception
Authors: Rock Irvin , Rock Sylvia
Published: March 2019

This posthumous volume, the culmination of a long and distinguished career, brings together an original essay by the author together with a careful selection of previously published articles (most by Rock) on the theory that perception is an indirect process in which visual experience is derived by inference, rather than being directly and independently determined by retinal stimulation.

Irvin Rock was a global perceptual theorist in the grand tradition of von Helmoltz, Wertheimer, and Gibson. This posthumous volume, the culmination of a long and distinguished career, brings together an original essay by the author together with a careful selection of previously published articles (most by Rock) on the theory that perception is an indirect process in which visual experience is derived by inference, rather than being directly and independently determined by retinal stimulation.

Rock's reasons for holding that perception is indirect were mainly empirical. Unlike many theorists, he paid close attention to a broad range of experimental evidence in evaluating theoretical claims. His approach, in which theory and experiment go hand in hand, is well represented in this book.

In the first chapter, which is new, Rock lays out the theoretical issues underlying indirect perception. The remaining twenty-two chapters present detailed evidence in support of the indirect view. They are divided into sections covering indirect perception, organization, shape, motion, illusions, lightness, and final considerations. Each section is introduced by the author. Stephen Palmer's introduction to the book places Rock's work within the context of the history of perceptual theory—approaches formulated by Helmholtz (inferential), by the Gestaltist psychologists (organizational), and by Gibson (ecological).

Cognitive Psychology series

Bradford Books imprint
Iterative Arrays of Logical Circuits
Authors: Hennie Frederick C.
Published: March 2019

An exploration of the techniques for analyzing the behavior of one- and two-dimensional iterative networks formed of discrete, or logical elements, showing that most questions about the behavior of iterative systems are recursively undecidable.
Learning in Embedded Systems
Authors: Kaelbling Leslie Pack
Published: March 2019

It is the first detailed exploration of the problem of learning action strategies in the context of designing embedded systems that adapt their behavior to a complex, changing environment; such systems include mobile robots, factory process controllers, and long-term software databases.

Learning to perform complex action strategies is an important problem in the fields of artificial intelligence, robotics, and machine learning. Filled with interesting new experimental results, Learning in Embedded Systems explores algorithms that learn efficiently from trial-and error experience with an external world. It is the first detailed exploration of the problem of learning action strategies in the context of designing embedded systems that adapt their behavior to a complex, changing environment; such systems include mobile robots, factory process controllers, and long-term software databases.Kaelbling investigates a rapidly expanding branch of machine learning known as reinforcement learning, including the important problems of controlled exploration of the environment, learning in highly complex environments, and learning from delayed reward. She reviews past work in this area and presents a number of significant new results. These include the intervalestimation algorithm for exploration, the use of biases to make learning more efficient in complex environments, a generate-and-test algorithm that combines symbolic and statistical processing into a flexible learning method, and some of the first reinforcement-learning experiments with a real robot.

Bradford Books imprint
Machine Translation
Authors: Dorr Bonnie Jean
Published: March 2019

This book describes a novel, cross-linguistic approach to machine translation that solves certain classes of syntactic and lexical divergences by means of a lexical conceptual structure that can be composed and decomposed in language-specific ways. This approach allows the translator to operate uniformly across many languages, while still accounting for knowledge that is specific to each language. The translation model can be used to map a source-language sentence to a target-language sentence in a principled fashion. It is built on the basis of a parametric approach, making it easy to change from one language to another (by setting syntactic switches for each language and providing lexical descriptions for each language) without having to write a whole new processor for each language. Dorr's approach advances the field of machine translation in a number of important ways: it provides a uniform processor in which the same syntactic and lexical-semantic processing modules are used for each language; it is interlingual, able to derive an underlying language-independent form of the source language that allows any of the three target languages—Spanish, English, or German—to be produced from this form; and it describes a systematic mapping between the lexical-semantic level and the syntactic level that allows the appropriate target-language words to be selected and realized, despite the potential for syntactic and lexical divergences.
Mechanics of Robotic Manipulation
Authors: Mason Matthew T.
Published: March 2019

The science and engineering of robotic manipulation.

"Manipulation" refers to a variety of physical changes made to the world around us. Mechanics of Robotic Manipulation addresses one form of robotic manipulation, moving objects, and the various processes involved—grasping, carrying, pushing, dropping, throwing, and so on. Unlike most books on the subject, it focuses on manipulation rather than manipulators. This attention to processes rather than devices allows a more fundamental approach, leading to results that apply to a broad range of devices, not just robotic arms.

The book draws both on classical mechanics and on classical planning, which introduces the element of imperfect information. The book does not propose a specific solution to the problem of manipulation, but rather outlines a path of inquiry.

Bradford Books imprint
The New Political Economy of Russia
Authors: Berglöf Erik , Kunov Andrei , Shvets Julia , Yuaeva Ksenia
Published: March 2019

An analysis of the challenges facing Russia's economy ten years after the transition, based on recent research and data.

Can Russia's recent burst of economic growth be sustained? Taking a comprehensive look at the economic and political regime shift from Yeltsin to Putin, this book explores the key challenges facing the Russian economy: to narrow the productivity gap between Russian and Western firms and industries; to attract more domestic and foreign investment; and, underlying these goals, to implement the judicial, administrative, social, and banking reforms necessary to future growth.

Written by a team of researchers from the Center for Economic and Financial Research—a Moscow-based independent think tank—the book draws on a wealth of new research and data. The authors emphasize the need to strengthen the protection of property rights, restructure the banking sector, and reduce government officials' powers to intervene arbitrarily in private businesses. They also stress the importance of enhancing human capital—through educational reform and by reducing barriers to citizens' geographical and sectoral mobility. Considering political institutions, the authors examine the promise and risks of the centralization of power around President Putin. Finally, they discuss the likely impact of Russia's greater integration into the world economy, notably through its potential membership in the World Trade Organization.
Stability and Robustness of Multivariable Feedback Systems
Authors: Safonov Michael George
Published: March 2019

This book on stability theory and robustness will interest researchers and advanced graduate students in the area of feedback control engineering, circuits, and systems. It will also appeal to mathematicians who are involved in applications of functional analysis to engineering problems. The book provides a methodology for the rigorous treatment of such inherently feedback aspects of dynamical system design as robustness and sensitivity, just as many researchers are beginning to realize that this type of methodology is mandatory if modern systems theory is to be used to design complicated multivariable and large-scale systems. The main objective of the book is to provide a clear mathematical formulation of the issues that arise in designing feedback systems that are robust against the destabilizing effects of unknown-but-bounded uncertainty in component dynamics. It is the first study to identify formal methods for the quantitative analysis of multiloop feedback system robustness. The view that is presents of nonlinear, multiloop feedback system stability theory is unique, lucid, and conceptually appealing. Lyapunov and input-output stability theories are unified in a new and simple geometrical perspective based on the topological separation of spaces. This perspective greatly facilitates visualization of the underlying conceptual issues in stability and robustness theory and serves to motivate specific results concerning the robustness of feedback systems. Potentially, this methodology may be applied to nonlinear feedback design, validation of modeling approximations, hierarchical control system design, and stability margin analysis for multiloop feedback systems. This book is the third publication in The MIT Press Series in Signal Processing, Optimization, and Control, edited by Alan S. Willsky.
Type-Logical Semantics
Authors: Carpenter Bob
Published: March 2019

Based on an introductory course on natural-language semantics, this book provides an introduction to type-logical grammar and the range of linguistic phenomena that can be handled in categorial grammar. It also contains a great deal of original work on categorial grammar and its application to natural-language semantics. The author chose the type-logical categorial grammar as his grammatical basis because of its broad syntactic coverage and its strong linkage of syntax and semantics. Although its basic orientation is linguistic, the book should also be of interest to logicians and computer scientists seeking connections between logical systems and natural language.

The book, which stepwise develops successively more powerful logical and grammatical systems, covers an unusually broad range of material. Topics covered include higher-order logic, applicative categorial grammar, the Lambek calculus, coordination and unbounded dependencies, quantifiers and scope, plurals, pronouns and dependency, modal logic, intensionality, and tense and aspect. The book contains more mathematical development than is usually found in texts on natural language; an appendix includes the basic mathematical concepts used throughout the book.

Bradford Books imprint
Standard Basque
Authors: de Rijk Rudolf P.G.
Published: March 2019

The first modern pedagogically oriented reference to the grammar of standard Basque (Euskara Batua), in two volumes: Part 1 presents detailed grammar lessons, Part 2 glosses and supplementary materials.

A pre-Indo-European language with no known relatives, the Basque language survives in the Basque region of Spain and France, with about half a million native or near-native speakers. The local diversity of the language, with no fewer than eight different dialects, has hindered the development of a supradialectical written tradition. Twentieth-century Basque scholars recognized that the introduction of a standard language for written communication was vital for the continued existence of Basque, and the Euskaltzaindia, the Royal Academy of the Basque Language, has supervised the creation of a new shared form, Euskara Batua (“Unified Basque”), to be used as a written standard. Standard Basque: A Progressive Grammar is the first modern pedagogically oriented reference grammar in English for this new standard language. It guides the reader progressively through 33 chapters covering topics that range from orthography and pronunciation to case endings, verb forms, ergativity, and the antipassive and allocutive forms. In addition to information on the various dialects, the book includes thousands of example sentences drawn from Basque literature and extensive vocabulary listings. Most chapters conclude with exercises. Part 1 covers the grammar and Part 2 contains glosses for the example sentences and indexes.

This book was prepared for publication after the author's death by Virginia de Rijk-Chan with Armand De Coene and Fleur Veraart and the assistance of linguists at Cornell University, Leiden University, and the University of the Basque Country. The glosses and supplementary material in Part 2 were prepared by Armand De Coene.
Learning to Communicate in Science and Engineering
Authors: Poe Mya , Lerner Neal , Craig Jennifer
Published: March 2019

Case studies and pedagogical strategies to help science and engineering students improve their writing and speaking skills while developing professional identities.

To many science and engineering students, the task of writing may seem irrelevant to their future professional careers. At MIT, however, students discover that writing about their technical work is important not only in solving real-world problems but also in developing their professional identities.

MIT puts into practice the belief that “engineers who don't write well end up working for engineers who do write well,” requiring all students to take “communications-intensive” classes in which they learn from MIT faculty and writing instructors how to express their ideas in writing and in presentations. Students are challenged not only to think like professional scientists and engineers but also to communicate like them.

This book offers in-depth case studies and pedagogical strategies from a range of science and engineering communication-intensive classes at MIT. It traces the progress of seventeen students from diverse backgrounds in seven classes that span five departments. Undergraduates in biology attempt to turn scientific findings into a research article; graduate students learn to define their research for scientific grant writing; undergraduates in biomedical engineering learn to use data as evidence; and students in aeronautic and astronautic engineering learn to communicate collaboratively. Each case study is introduced by a description of its theoretical and curricular context and an outline of the objectives for the students' activities. The studies describe the on-the-ground realities of working with faculty, staff, and students to achieve communication and course goals, offering lessons that can be easily applied to a wide variety of settings and institutions.
Patently Contestable
Authors: Arapostathis Stathis , Gooday Graeme
Published: March 2019

An examination of the fierce disputes that arose in Britain in the decades around 1900 concerning patents for electrical power and telecommunications.

Late nineteenth-century Britain saw an extraordinary surge in patent disputes over the new technologies of electrical power, lighting, telephony, and radio. These battles played out in the twin tribunals of the courtroom and the press. In Patently Contestable, Stathis Arapostathis and Graeme Gooday examine how Britain's patent laws and associated cultures changed from the 1870s to the 1920s. They consider how patent rights came to be so widely disputed and how the identification of apparently solo heroic inventors was the contingent outcome of patent litigation. Furthermore, they point out potential parallels between the British experience of allegedly patentee-friendly legislation introduced in 1883 and a similar potentially empowering shift in American patent policy in 2011.

After explaining the trajectory of an invention from laboratory to Patent Office to the court and the key role of patent agents, Arapostathis and Gooday offer four case studies of patent-centered disputes in Britain. These include the mostly unsuccessful claims against the UK alliance of Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison in telephony; publicly disputed patents for technologies for the generation and distribution of electric power; challenges to Marconi's patenting of wireless telegraphy as an appropriation of public knowledge; and the emergence of patent pools to control the market in incandescent light bulbs.
Certified Programming with Dependent Types
Authors: Chlipala Adam
Published: March 2019

A handbook to the Coq software for writing and checking mathematical proofs, with a practical engineering focus.

The technology of mechanized program verification can play a supporting role in many kinds of research projects in computer science, and related tools for formal proof-checking are seeing increasing adoption in mathematics and engineering. This book provides an introduction to the Coq software for writing and checking mathematical proofs. It takes a practical engineering focus throughout, emphasizing techniques that will help users to build, understand, and maintain large Coq developments and minimize the cost of code change over time.

Two topics, rarely discussed elsewhere, are covered in detail: effective dependently typed programming (making productive use of a feature at the heart of the Coq system) and construction of domain-specific proof tactics. Almost every subject covered is also relevant to interactive computer theorem proving in general, not just program verification, demonstrated through examples of verified programs applied in many different sorts of formalizations. The book develops a unique automated proof style and applies it throughout; even experienced Coq users may benefit from reading about basic Coq concepts from this novel perspective. The book also offers a library of tactics, or programs that find proofs, designed for use with examples in the book. Readers will acquire the necessary skills to reimplement these tactics in other settings by the end of the book. All of the code appearing in the book is freely available online.
Finite State Machines in Hardware
Authors: Pedroni Volnei A.
Published: March 2019

A comprehensive guide to the theory and design of hardware-implemented finite state machines, with design examples developed in both VHDL and SystemVerilog languages.

Modern, complex digital systems invariably include hardware-implemented finite state machines. The correct design of such parts is crucial for attaining proper system performance. This book offers detailed, comprehensive coverage of the theory and design for any category of hardware-implemented finite state machines. It describes crucial design problems that lead to incorrect or far from optimal implementation and provides examples of finite state machines developed in both VHDL and SystemVerilog (the successor of Verilog) hardware description languages.

Important features include: extensive review of design practices for sequential digital circuits; a new division of all state machines into three hardware-based categories, encompassing all possible situations, with numerous practical examples provided in all three categories; the presentation of complete designs, with detailed VHDL and SystemVerilog codes, comments, and simulation results, all tested in FPGA devices; and exercise examples, all of which can be synthesized, simulated, and physically implemented in FPGA boards. Additional material is available on the book's Website.

Designing a state machine in hardware is more complex than designing it in software. Although interest in hardware for finite state machines has grown dramatically in recent years, there is no comprehensive treatment of the subject. This book offers the most detailed coverage of finite state machines available. It will be essential for industrial designers of digital systems and for students of electrical engineering and computer science.
Documenting and Assessing Learning in Informal and Media-Rich Environments
Authors: Lemke Jay , Lecusay Robert , Cole Michael , Michalchik Vera
Published: March 2019

An extensive review of the literature on learning assessment in informal settings, expert discussion of key issues, and a new model for good assessment practice.

Today educational activities take place not only in school but also in after-school programs, community centers, museums, and online communities and forums. The success and expansion of these out-of-school initiatives depends on our ability to document and assess what works and what doesn't in informal learning, but learning outcomes in these settings are often unpredictable. Goals are open-ended; participation is voluntary; and relationships, means, and ends are complex. This report charts the state of the art for learning assessment in informal settings, offering an extensive review of the literature, expert discussion on key topics, a suggested model for comprehensive assessment, and recommendations for good assessment practices.

Drawing on analysis of the literature and expert opinion, the proposed model, the Outcomes-by-Levels Model for Documentation and Assessment, identifies at least ten types of valued outcomes, to be assessed in terms of learning at the project, group, and individual levels. The cases described in the literature under review, which range from promoting girls' identification with STEM practices to providing online resources for learning programming and networking, illustrate the usefulness of the assessment model.