Books in The MIT Press series

Leading thinkers from a range of disciplines discuss the compatibility of power and care, in conversation with the Dalai Lama.For more than thirty years, the Dalai Lama has been in dialogue with thinkers from a range of disciplines, helping to support pathways for knowledge to increase human wellbeing and compassion. These conversations, which began as private meetings, are now part of the Mind & Life Institute and Mind & Life Europe. This book documents a recent Mind & Life Institute dialogue with the Dalai Lama and others on two fundamental forces: power and care―power over and care for others in human societies.The notion of power is essentially neutral; power can be used to benefit others or to harm them, to build or to destroy. Care, on the other hand, is not a neutral force; it aims at increasing the wellbeing of others. Power and care are not incompatible: power, imbued with care, can achieve more than a powerless motivation to care; power, without the intention to benefit others, can be ruthless. The contributors―who include such celebrated figures as Frans B. M. de Waal, Olafur Eliasson, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, and Jody Williams―discuss topics including the interaction of power and care among our closest relatives, the chimpanzees; the effect of meditation and mental training practices on the brain; the role of religion in promoting peace and compassion; and the new field of Caring Economics.ContributorsPaul Collier, Brother Thierry-Marie Courau, Frans B. M. de Waal, Olafur Eliasson, Scilla Elworthy, Alexandra M. Freund, Tenzin Gyatso (His Holiness the Dalai Lama), Markus Heinrichs, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Frédéric Laloux, Alaa Murabit, Matthieu Ricard, Johan Rockström, Richard Schwartz, Tania Singer, Dennis J. Snower, Rabbi Awraham Soetendorp, Theo Sowa, Pauline Tangiora, Jody Williams

Investigating the concepts and material realities of energy coursing through the arts: a foundational text.This book investigates energies―in the plural, the energies embedded and embodied in everything under the sun― as they are expressed in the arts. With contributions from scholars and critics from the visual arts, art history, anthropology, music, literature, and the history of science, it offers the first multidisciplinary investigation of the concepts and material realities of energy coursing through the arts. Just as Douglas Kahn's earlier books helped introduce sound as a category for study in the arts, this new volume will be a foundational volume for future explorers in a largely uncharted domain. The modern concept of energy is only two hundred years old―an abstraction grounded in extraction―but this book takes a more expansive view. It opens with a clap: the sonic energies in a ceremony of the indigenous Goolarabooloo people of Australia. Other chapters explore the energies of photography; responses of artists in the early twentieth century―including Marcel Duchamp―to scientific discoveries in electricity and electromagnetism; the aestheticization of entropy in works by Hans Haacke and Robert Smithson; free-jazz musician Milford Graves's cross-cultural engagement with music, science, and spiritualism; energy field performance; and the self-generating energy of rumor and gossip as artwork. Contributors include such leading scholars as Linda Dalrymple Henderson, John Tresch, and Caroline A. Jones. Practicing artists and students of art history will find Energies in the Arts an essential work.ContributorsSusan Ballard, Jennifer Biddle, Marcus Boon, Joan Brassil, Steven Connor, Milford Graves, Daniel Hackbarth, Linda Dalrymple Henderson, Caroline A. Jones, Douglas Kahn, David Mather, Stephen Muecke, James Nisbet, Daniela Silvestrin, Michael Taussig, John Tresch, Melissa Warak

Contrary to the assumptions of economists, consumers are not always rational actors who make decisions in their own best interests. The new field of behavioral economics draws on the insights of psychology to study non-rational decision making. The newer field of consumer neuroscience draws on the findings, tools, and techniques of neuroscience to understand how consumers make judgments and decisions. This book is the first comprehensive treatment of consumer neuroscience, suitable for classroom use or as a reference for business and marketing practitioners. After an overview of the field, the text offers the background on the brain and physiological systems necessary for understanding how they work in the context of decision making and reviews the sensory and perceptual mechanisms that govern our perception and experience. Chapters by experts in the field investigate tools for studying the brain, including fMRI, EEG, eye-tracking, and biometrics, and their possible use in marketing. The book examines the relation of attention, memory, and emotion to consumer behavior; cognitive factors in decision making; and the brain's reward system. It describes how consumers develop implicit associations with a brand, perceptions of pricing, and how consumer neuroscience can encourage healthy behaviors. Finally, the book considers ethical issues raised by the application of neuroscience tools to marketing.ContributorsFabio Babiloni, Davide Baldo, David Brandt, Moran Cerf, Yuping Chen, Patrizia Cherubino, Kimberly Rose Clark, William A. Cunningham, Maria C. Cordero, Manuel Garcia-Garcia, Ming Hsu, Ana Iorga, Philip Kotler, Carl Marci, Kai-Markus Müller, Ingrid L. C. Nieuwenhuis, Hirak Parikh, Dante M. Pirouz, Neal J. Roese, Irit Shapira-Lichter, Daniela Somarriba, Brendan Murray, Julia Trabulsi, Arianna Trettel, Giovanni Vecchiato, Sarah Walker

Key concepts, frameworks, examples, and lessons learned in designing and implementing health information and communication technology systems in the developing world.The widespread usage of mobile phones that bring computational power and data to our fingertips has enabled new models for tracking and battling disease. The developing world in particular has become a proving ground for innovation in eHealth (using communication and technology tools in healthcare) and mHealth (using the affordances of mobile technology in eHealth systems). In this book, experts from a variety of disciplines―among them computer science, medicine, public health, policy, and business―discuss key concepts, frameworks, examples, and lessons learned in designing and implementing digital health systems in the developing world. The contributors consider such topics as global health disparities and quality of care; aligning eHealth strategies with government policy; the role of monitoring and evaluation in improving care; databases, patient registries, and electronic health records; the lifecycle of a digital health system project; software project management; privacy and security; and evaluating health technology systems.

An introduction to the concepts and tools of natural resource economics, including dynamic models, market failures, and institutional remedies.This introduction to natural resource economics treats resources as a type of capital; their management is an investment problem requiring forward-looking behavior within a dynamic setting. Market failures are widespread, often associated with incomplete or nonexistent property rights, complicated by policy failures. The book covers standard resource economics topics, including both the Hotelling model for nonrenewable resources and models for renewable resources. The book also includes some topics in environmental economics that overlap with natural resource economics, including climate change.The text emphasizes skills and intuition needed to think about dynamic models and institutional remedies in the presence of both market and policy failures. It presents the nuts and bolts of resource economics as applied to nonrenewable resources, including the two-period model, stock-dependent costs, and resource scarcity. The chapters on renewable resources cover such topics as property rights as an alternative to regulation, the growth function, steady states, and maximum sustainable yield, using fisheries as a concrete setting. Other, less standard, topics covered include microeconomic issues such as arbitrage and the use of discounting; policy problems including the “Green Paradox”; foundations for policy analysis when market failures are important; and taxation. Appendixes offer reviews of the relevant mathematics. The book is suitable for use by upper-level undergraduates or, with the appendixes, masters-level courses.

The first biography in English of Tristan Tzara, a founder of Dada and one of the most important figures in the European avant-garde.Tristan Tzara, one of the most important figures in the twentieth century's most famous avant-garde movements, was born Samuel Rosenstock (or Samueli Rosen?tok) in a provincial Romanian town, on April 16 (or 17, or 14, or 28) in 1896. Tzara became Tzara twenty years later at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, when he and others (including Marcel Janco, Hugo Ball, Richard Huelsenbeck, and Hans Arp) invented Dada with a series of chaotic performances including multilingual (and nonlingual) shouting, music, drumming, and calisthenics. Within a few years, Dada (largely driven by Tzara) became an international artistic movement, a rallying point for young artists in Paris, New York, Barcelona, Berlin, and Buenos Aires. With TaTa Dada, Marius Hentea offers the first English-language biography of this influential artist. As the leader of Dada, Tzara created “the moment art changed forever.” But, Hentea shows, Tzara and Dada were not coterminous. Tzara went on to publish more than fifty books; he wrote one of the great poems of surrealism; he became a recognized expert on primitive art; he was an active antifascist, a communist, and (after the Soviet repression of the Hungarian Revolution) a former communist. Hentea offers a detailed exploration of Tzara's early life in Romania, neglected by other scholars; a scrupulous assessment of the Dada years; and an original examination of Tzara's life and works after Dada. The one thing that remained constant through all of Tzara's artistic and political metamorphoses, Hentea tells us, was a desire to unlock the secrets and mysteries of language.

A foundational text offering a unified design vocabulary and a common methodology for maximizing the expressive power of digital artifacts.Digital artifacts from iPads to databases pervade our lives, and the design decisions that shape them affect how we think, act, communicate, and understand the world. But the pace of change has been so rapid that technical innovation is outstripping design. Interactors are often mystified and frustrated by their enticing but confusing new devices; meanwhile, product design teams struggle to articulate shared and enduring design goals. With Inventing the Medium, Janet Murray provides a unified vocabulary and a common methodology for the design of digital objects and environments. It will be an essential guide for both students and practitioners in this evolving field.Murray explains that innovative interaction designers should think of all objects made with bits―whether games or Web pages, robots or the latest killer apps―as belonging to a single new medium: the digital medium. Designers can speed the process of useful and lasting innovation by focusing on the collective cultural task of inventing this new medium. Exploring strategies for maximizing the expressive power of digital artifacts, Murray identifies and examines four representational affordances of digital environments that provide the core palette for designers across applications: computational procedures, user participation, navigable space, and encyclopedic capacity. Each chapter includes a set of Design Explorations―creative exercises for students and thought experiments for practitioners―that allow readers to apply the ideas in the chapter to particular design problems. Inventing the Medium also provides more than 200 illustrations of specific design strategies drawn from multiple genres and platforms and a glossary of design concepts.

A coloring book that invites readers to explore symmetry and the beauty of math visually.Beautiful Symmetry is a coloring book about math, inviting us to engage with mathematical concepts visually through coloring challenges and visual puzzles. We can explore symmetry and the beauty of mathematics playfully, coloring through ideas usually reserved for advanced courses. The book is for children and adults, for math nerds and math avoiders, for educators, students, and coloring enthusiasts. Through illustration, language that is visual, and words that are jargon-free, the book introduces group theory as the mathematical foundation for discussions of symmetry, covering symmetry groups that include the cyclic groups, frieze groups, and wallpaper groups. The illustrations are drawn by algorithms, following the symmetry rules for each given group. The coloring challenges can be completed and fully realized only on the page; solutions are provided. Online, in a complementary digital edition, the illustrations come to life with animated interactions that show the symmetries that generated them.Traditional math curricula focus on arithmetic and the manipulation of numbers, and may make some learners feel that math is not for them. By offering a more visual and tactile approach, this book shows how math can be for everyone. Combining the playful and the pedagogical, Beautiful Symmetry offers both relaxing entertainment for recreational colorers and a resource for math-curious readers, students, and educators.

The story of how a chain of failures, missteps, and bad decisions led to America's biggest environmental disaster.On April 20, 2010, the gigantic drilling rig Deepwater Horizon blew up in the Gulf of Mexico, killing eleven crew members and causing a massive eruption of oil from BP's Macondo well. For months, oil gushed into the Gulf, spreading death and destruction. Americans watched real-time video of the huge column of oil and gas spewing from the obviously failed “blowout preventer.” What was missing, though, was the larger story of this disaster. In Blowout in the Gulf, energy experts William Freudenburg and Robert Gramling explain both the disaster and the decisions that led up to it. Blowout in the Gulf weaves a fascinating narrative of failures, missteps, and bad decisions, explaining why this oil spill was a disaster waiting to happen―and how making better energy choices will help prevent others like it.

Scholars from a range of disciplines offer an expansive vision of the intersections between new information technologies and the humanities.Between Humanities and the Digital offers an expansive vision of how the humanities engage with digital and information technology, providing a range of perspectives on a quickly evolving, contested, and exciting field. It documents the multiplicity of ways that humanities scholars have turned increasingly to digital and information technology as both a scholarly tool and a cultural object in need of analysis.The contributors explore the state of the art in digital humanities from varied disciplinary perspectives, offer a sample of digitally inflected work that ranges from an analysis of computational literature to the collaborative development of a “Global Middle Ages” humanities platform, and examine new models for knowledge production and infrastructure. Their contributions show not only that the digital has prompted the humanities to move beyond traditional scholarly horizons, but also that the humanities have pushed the digital to become more than a narrowly technical application. ContributorsIan Bogost, Anne Cong-Huyen, Mats Dahlström, Cathy N. Davidson, Johanna Drucker, Amy E. Earhart, Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Maurizio Forte, Zephyr Frank, David Theo Goldberg, Jennifer González, Jo Guldi, N. Katherine Hayles, Geraldine Heng, Larissa Hjorth, Tim Hutchings, Henry Jenkins, Matthew Kirschenbaum, Cecilia Lindhé, Alan Liu, Elizabeth Losh, Tara McPherson, Chandra Mukerji, Nick Montfort, Jenna Ng, Bethany Nowviskie, Jennie Olofsson, Lisa Parks, Natalie Phillips, Todd Presner, Stephen Rachman, Patricia Seed, Nishant Shah, Ray Siemens, Jentery Sayers, Jonathan Sterne, Patrik Svensson, William G. Thomas III, Whitney Anne Trettien, Michael Widner

In these Messenger Lectures, originally delivered at Cornell University and recorded for television by the BBC, Richard Feynman offers an overview of selected physical laws and gathers their common features into one broad principle of invariance. He maintains at the outset that the importance of a physical law is not "how clever we are to have found it out, but... how clever nature is to pay attention to it," and tends his discussions toward a final exposition of the elegance and simplicity of all scientific laws. Rather than an essay on the most significant achievements in modern science, The Character of Physical Law is a statement of what is most remarkable in nature. Feynman's enlightened approach, his wit, and his enthusiasm make this a memorable exposition of the scientist's craft. The Law of Gravitation is the author's principal example. Relating the details of its discovery and stressing its mathematical character, he uses it to demonstrate the essential interaction of mathematics and physics. He views mathematics as the key to any system of scientific laws, suggesting that if it were possible to fill out the structure of scientific theory completely, the result would be an integrated set of mathematical axioms. The principles of conservation, symmetry, and time-irreversibility are then considered in relation to developments in classical and modern physics, and in his final lecture Feynman develops his own analysis of the process and future of scientific discovery. Like any set of oral reflections, The Character of Physical Law has special value as a demonstration of the mind in action.

The stories of the remarkable women who have bravely met two challenges: the risk of space travel and the struggle to succeed in a man's world.Almost Heaven tells the stories of the remarkable women who have bravely met two challenges: the risk of space travel and the struggle to succeed in a man's world. From Valentina Tereshkova in 1963 and Sally Ride in 1983 to Kalpana Chawla and Lauren Clark on the last flight of the Columbia, these women made history. Bettyann Holtzmann Kevles brings the women of space to life in this fascinating book, describing what motivates them, the pioneers who paved the way for them, and how their presence in the astronaut corps changed NASA. Setting her story against the background of the Cold War and the women's movement of the 1960s and 1970s, Kevles takes us from Cape Canaveral to Star City in Russia and back. She describes the years of rejection before women were allowed to train as astronauts in the U.S. space program and the problems that female cosmonauts encountered in the U.S.S.R. Kevles talks to the first women chosen by NASA to be astronauts in 1978 and to many women who have followed them. These women, she shows, have not only broken down barriers to join the most exclusive men's club in the world―the space program―they have become players in the greatest adventure of our time, the human exploration of space. This paperback edition includes Kevles's thoughts on the 2005 Discovery mission and other recent developments in the space program as well as her reflections on the role of female astronauts today, and perhaps tomorrow.