A source book for state-of-the-art MDL, including an extensive tutorial and recent theoretical advances and practical applications in fields ranging from bioinformatics to psychology.The process of inductive inference--to infer general laws and principles from particular instances--is the basis of statistical modeling, pattern recognition, and machine learning. The Minimum Descriptive Length (M…
This comprehensive and accessible text fills the need for a political economy view of global environmental politics, focusing on the ways key economic processes affect environmental outcomes. It examines the main actors and forces shaping global environmental management, particularly in the developing world. Moving beyond the usual academic emphasis on international agreements and institutions,…
"Musicians begin formal training by acquiring a body of musical concepts commonly known as musicianship. These concepts underlie the musical skills of listening, performance, and composition. Like humans, computer music programs can benefit from a systematic foundation of musical knowledge. This book explores the technology of implementing musical processes such as segmentation, pattern process…
Since the end of World War II, biology and medicine have merged in remarkably productive ways. In this book Peter Keating and Alberto Cambrosio analyze the transformation of medicine into biomedicine and its consequences, ranging from the recasting of hospital architecture to the redefinition of the human body, disease, and therapeutic practices. To describe this new alignment between the norma…
The Digital Diolectic is an interdisciplinary jam session about our visual and intellectual cultures as the computer recodes technologies, media, and art forms. Unlike purely academic texts on new media, the book includes contributions by scholars, artists, and entrepreneurs, who combine theoretical investigations with hands-on analysis of the possibilities (and limitations) of new technology. …
Over the past few decades, a growing body of research has emerged from a variety of disciplines to highlight the importance of cultural evolution in understanding human behavior. Wider application of these insights, however, has been hampered by traditional disciplinary boundaries. To remedy this, in this volume leading researchers from theoretical biology, developmental and cognitive psycholog…
In this study Peter Zachar considers such terms as 'real' and 'reality' - invoked in psychiatry but often obscure and remote from their instances - as abstract philosophical concepts. He then examines the implications of his approach for psychiatric classification and psychopathology. Proposing what he calls a scientifically inspired pragmatism, Zachar considers such topics as the essentialist …
A guide to current approaches to measuring the effective tax rate, with case studies that illustrate the different methods discussed.Today's highly complicated tax codes have led economists and policy makers depend on simplified summary measures in order to understand how taxes affect the economy. Studies of the effective tax rate--that is, a measurement of the net amount of tax levied on certa…
The contributors to this volume view digital libraries (DLs) from a social as well as technological perspective. They see DLs as sociotechnical systems, networks of technology, information artifacts, and people and practices interacting with the larger world of work and society. As Bruce Schatz observes in his foreword, for a digital library to be useful, the users, the documents, and the infor…