Mit press ltd okt 2026 (12 risultati)

Buch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware - The awe-inspiring, little-known story of Nobel laureate Frances Arnold's discovery of directed enzyme evolutionand how it was sparked by reading Jorge Luis Borges.In 1976, a young engineering student from Princeton, Frances Arnold, happened upon Jorge Luis Borges's short story "The Library of Babel" while in Madrid. The tale recounts a vast honeycomb of a library that contains all the answers to the mysteries of humanity. Little did Arnold know that the story would change the course of her lifeand the course of science.In Multiplicity, Telmo Pievani explores her journey and the significanceand scientific potentialof Borges's legendary library and others like it. The famous evolutionist John Maynard Smith, for instance, had fantasized about the existence of a similar enormous library full of proteins rather than books. And in 1995 the philosopher of mind Daniel Dennett would devise a library no less confounding: one that collects all possible genomes, or all possible combinations of the nucleotide bases of DNA. Why Because by comparing all the proteins, genomes, and plants and animals that exist and have existed throughout evolution, what is finally revealed is possibilitywhat doesn't exist but could.For Arnold, the concept of such a library ultimately led to the discovery of the directed evolution of enzymes: a way of using nature's own method to produce new and better enzymes. The revolutionary idea transformed protein chemistry and biotechnology and earned her the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2018. With literary echoes ranging from Borges to Italo Calvino, this slim book tells her brilliant story.…

Buch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware - Busting the myth of "groupthink," a powerful look at how our ability to influence one another can accelerate individual and collective intelligence. A leading expert on social networks and behavior change delivers new principles of social influence to improve collective intelligence.For years, scientists have struggled to discover the formula to produce the world's smartest teams. But the solution has been elusive because they have focused on individual intelligences. In Goodthink, Damon Centola shows how to build teams, design online platforms, and create office spaces that sharpen our thinking individually and align our intelligence collectively. The secret, it turns out, is in the shape of our networks.How did MIT's Building 20, populated with outcasts and eccentrics, become one of the most innovative and productive research hubs in American history Why did increasing the number of online echo chambers unexpectedly reduce political polarization How can popular "herding behavior" make crowds more intelligent This book has the answers. Taking us behind the scenes of the most successful systems of collective intelligence in the modern world, it introduces a new science of what it means to be smart.Every day, each of us faces four critical decision-making challenges: choosing, coordination, cooperation, and creativity. Goodthink describes the tell-tale signs of when effective structures are at work, enabling us to "read the room" and begin to shift the dynamics at play. It also reveals how to know when things are failing and what to do to fix them.Delivering path-breaking insights currently at work within Fortune 500 companies, global philanthropic organizations, and government agencies, the book reveals underlying dynamics of group intelligence that have gone overlooked. Showing us how these principles work to make us feel more confident, more connected, and more engaged, Goodthink leaves us feeling smarterbecause we are.…

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware - A necessary and timely exploration of art activism today, informed by centuries of protest. How contemporary artists and activists are navigating and resisting the collapse of historical time in our uncanny present.The Radical Unpresent examines our disorienting contemporary moment, in which our experience of time has become profoundly disrupted. Building on his earlier work on "dark matter" in the art world, Gregory Sholette introduces the concept of the unpresenta condition in which everything appears the same yet is completely transformed, lacking both a past and a future.The book traces the emergence of this uncanny temporal state through Brexit, Trump's first election, and the COVID pandemic, culminating in the January 6th insurrection and the rise of MAGA 2.0 in 2025. Sholette analyzes how this temporal crisis manifests in both progressive and reactionary cultural responses, arguing that MAGA represents not simply regression but also a new kind of "retro-vanguard" that seeks to escape the unpresent by restoring an imagined past.Never one to be content with the status quo, Sholette reveals the inner workings of a "phantom archive"a surplus repository of activist practices, unrealized possibilities, and spectral histories that artists access through repair, repurposing, and reenactment. Through examples ranging from Dread Scott's slave rebellion reenactment to contemporary Belarus protest art, he demonstrates how artists are creating temporal interventions that acknowledge historical wounds while opening pathways to alternative futures.…

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware - The first English-language publication to focus on the iconic architect-designer Marco Zanuso, revealing his design approach through a narrated tour of his 1960s Milan apartment.An Open Work investigates the celebrated, enigmatic Italian architect-designer Marco Zanuso (19192001). Zanuso's buildings were widely recognized in Italy, and today his object and furniture designs, which won many awards in their time, can be found in prestigious museums worldwide, yet few scholars have addressed the different scales he worked at as parts of a whole. This beautifully written, lavishly illustrated book opens the door to Zanuso's acclaimed work, specifically his dual focus on architecture and industrial design, a form of practice that many architects in Milan pursued as the Italian economy rebounded in a surge of industrialization after World War II.Shantel Blakely takes as the book's principal object of study Zanuso's apartment for his family in midcentury Milan, a work of architecture that was furnished with the architect's own designs. As Blakely takes the reader from one room in the apartment to the next, detailing floorplans chapter by chapter, objects within each room become points of departure for explorations of Zanuso's work in broader terms. This cumulative, descriptive method brings to light analogies, resemblances, and other parallels among Zanuso's objects at the scales of building, furniture, and objectoffering an inspired reading of his work while modeling a new way to write architectural and design history.…

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware - How to develop and sustain research university leadership from the inside out, from a seasoned academic leader at both MIT and Boston University.America's research universities are the bedrock of the US innovation ecosystem, supplying the knowledge and the graduates we need to drive our economy and lead our society. Fighting Fires and Building Flywheels tells the inspiring story of former president Robert Brown's 35-plus years in academic leadership at both MIT and Boston University, where he focused on creating and sustaining private research universities. Rich with true accounts that draw the reader into understanding what a research university is, why America needs great ones, and what it takes to create one, this book addresses critical issues research institutions face today and will continue to face far into the future.Brown's leadership at Boston University began at a moment when few could have imagined the institution would ever be ranked among America's leading research universities. He took over after a long period of tumult under a president who left behind a troubled and under-resourced institution and steered the university successfully through many turbulent times, including the COVID-19 pandemic.The book addresses key challenges in higher education, such as reconceptualizing the role of traditional disciplines; fostering collaboration between faculty and students as well as learning and research; building a supportive and effective board of trustees; and creating an inclusive environment while maintaining the meritocracy at the core of university excellence.…

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware - How and why the current public engagement model has run its courseand how AI-assisted listening at scale can help.We often assume that citizen participation is the biggest barrier to effective representation. In fact, governments are sitting on mountains of civic data that they cannot effectively process.In How Institutions Listen, Eric Gordon shows how we can marshal this wealth of data with human-centered AImaking sense of the available civic data, acting upon it, and, in turn, restoring public trust.Bridging theory and practice, the book introduces the concept of "listening at scale"an institutional capacity to listen, which means to not only gather input, but to discern, respond, and evolve in dialogue with the public. It tracks trends in digital governance, from open data to civic tech dashboards, and critiques how contemporary tools can harm communities by reducing their participation to data extraction.Through richly researched case studiesfrom city governments deploying sentiment analysis to community-centered design effortsthe book shows how listening is being reshaped by digital infrastructures, and how those infrastructures, in turn, reshape the meaning of voice and representation. Rather than promoting more apps or surveys, the author urges a reorientation: designing institutions that can engage with complexity, ambiguity, and dissent without defaulting to control.…

Buch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware - How the history of data visualization holds the key to designing a more just future.From maps of colonial empires to charts of national trade, data visualization has long been used to consolidate knowledge and power. But just as often, it has been used to uncover oppression and bring about change. Data by Design journeys across continents and over centuries to expose the power of visualizationand to show how it can be wielded back. A group of British antislavery activists who created a diagram of captives in the hold of a ship, accelerating support for the abolitionist cause. A Ñudzahui (Mixtec) painter who designed a map for a king, testifying to his people's sovereignty and claims to the land. These are but two stories of many, each expertly analyzed and illustrated in full-color detail, that confirm how visualization can lead to a more liberatory world. A set of new images, created by Lauren Klein and her research teamalso viewable on an interactive websitefurther expands our sense of what visualization, when used with intention and care, can achieve.A book for those who love charts and graphs, and for those who create them, Data by Design offers historical grounding, ethical clarityand the inspiration we needto envision a more just future.…

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware - How art and design can be powerful tools for actively shaping the futures of climate change.The future has been canceled or at least reduced to a perpetual extension of the present, or so we have been told many times by cultural theorists in recent decades. As the unfolding environmental crisis impels us to look ahead with a renewed sense of urgency, many now realize that these futures never went away. In Futures in the Making, Theo Reeves-Evison invites readers to explore the role of contemporary art and creative practice in shaping environmental futures. As well as looking at representations of these futures, he pays particular attention to the tools and techniques used to produce them.Tracing the genealogies of socio-technical practices such as scenario planning, prospecting, and geoengineering, the author argues that the ways pasts, presents, and futures are bridged represent a kind of infrastructure. While many of these infrastructures are readily associated with scientific, corporate, and policy work, they nevertheless sit within an expanded field of speculative and anticipatory activities. Creative practice has the potential to expand this field even further, widening the frame of what constitutes a valid form of future making, and changing how environmental futures are offered up as objects of experience in the process.…

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware - A new paradigm based on quantum probability that can model stock markets and price optionsand also upends classical quantitative finance.In The Quantum Stock Market, David Orrell combines theory and new empirical findings to argue for a new approach to finance based on quantum probability. The main finding, a property called q-variance, may be unique in finance in that it was discovered as the result of a prediction, affects financial markets in general, has no tunable parameter, and has important consequences for a range of topics including the pricing of financial options. The property, which somehow eluded detection for over a century, has been verified by experts in the field. And the fact that it is incompatible with classical financewhich is perhaps why it went undetectedsuggests that the field must be reinvented.Orrell argues for nothing less than a paradigm shift in finance. As with any new work that challenges existing methods the ideas have already received pushback, from leaders in the field of finance to physicists skeptical of applying quantum probability outside its traditional domain. Written in an interdisciplinary style that mixes mathematical equations, data analysis, and informed comments on the field of finance, The Quantum Stock Market should be read by anyone who wants to be on the right side of a paradigm shift.…

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware - The origins of the modern peer review system at both scientific journals and funding bodies--and how young peer review as a practice actually is. In Referees We Trust investigates the origins of the peer review system, a system that is often considered the essential mechanism that protects the trustworthiness of scientific research. Melinda Baldwin traces the first refereeing systems to journals affiliated with scientific societies in the early nineteenth century and follows refereeing as it spread from Britain to the United States. She finds that the refereeing system was not immediately embraced by all scientific journals; many institutions deliberately eschewed refereeing and were not seen as less reliable because of that choice. The book shows that the modern link between peer review and scientific legitimacy was forged during the Cold War, as legislators and other government stakeholders began to question the need for scientists' advice on how to award federal grant money. Scientists argued that if grant money was awarded without their expert opinions--in other words, without review by a grant applicant's scientific peers--the US government would be violating a core principle of science itself. That argument was so successful that the idea of 'peer review' as a cornerstone of science took hold and spread, elevating peer review from an optional process to a system intended to ensure the quality and trustworthiness of all of science.…

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware.

Buch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware - A practical guide to understanding the theory and practice of computational lower bounds.A fundamental question in computer science is: "Given a problem, how hard is it to solve " Usually, the answer to this question lies in determining how long it will take to solve a problem as a function of the length of the input. Yet this question has two different parts, with two different answers: (1) upper bounds, which show that a problem can be solved in time T(n), and (2) lower bounds, which show that a problem cannot be solved in time T(n). In Computational Intractability, Erik Demaine, William Gasarch, and Mohammad Hajiaghayi focus on the latter, providing a guidebook to navigating lower bounds via the study of P, NP, NP-completeness, and other related notions.Computational Intractability covers virtually all aspects of lower bounds, from parallelism to undecidability, and explores this material from the point of view of actual problems rather than classes of problems. The authors show how to prove lower bounds on problems in a wide variety of settings: polynomial time, classes likely above polynomial time (e.g., polynomial space), and classes within polynomial time (e.g., quadratic time).…