GPS mapping is standard equipment in many new cars and geolocation services are embedded in smart phones. GPS makes Uber and Lyft possible; driverless cars won't be able to drive without it. In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Paul Ceruzzi offers a concise history of GPS, explaining how a once-obscure space technology became an invisible piece of our infrastructure, as e…
"A new theory about the origins of consciousness that finds learning to be the driving force in the evolutionary transition to basic consciousness. What marked the evolutionary transition from organisms that lacked consciousness to those with consciousness--to minimal subjective experiencing, or, as Aristotle described it, "the sensitive soul" In this book, Simona Ginsburg and Eva Jablonka prop…
In ' Liquidation World', Alexi Kukuljevic examines a distinctive form of subjectivity animating the avant-garde: that of the darkly humorous and utterly disoriented subject of modernity, a dissolute figure that makes an art of its own vacancy, an object of its absence. Shorn of the truly rotten illusion that the world is a fulfilling and meaningful place, these subjects identify themselves by a…
This book rethinks the politics of the Middle East through a study of the British-controlled oil industry in Iran between 1901 and 1954. Based on research in governmental and business archives in Iran, the United Kingdom, and the United States, it examines a series of disputes concerning petroleum exploration, property rights, the organization of labor, geological knowledge, accounting methods,…
An examination of metaphor in poetry as a microcosm of the human imagination--a way to understand the mechanisms of creativity. In The Spider's Thread , Keith Holyoak looks at metaphor as a microcosm of the creative imagination. Holyoak, a psychologist and poet, draws on the perspectives of thinkers from the humanities--poets, philosophers, and critics--and from the sciences--psychologists, neu…
"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 …
Translated from the German.Why 1 = presence and 0 = absence and the digital world formula is x = xn: an exploration of meaning in a universe of infinite replication.OCLC-licensed vendor bibliographic record.
"At the end of the nineteenth century, acoustics was a science of musical sounds; the musically trained ear was the ultimate reference. Just a few decades into the twentieth century, acoustics had undergone a transformation from a scientific field based on the understanding of classical music to one guided by electrical engineering, with industrial and military applications. In this book, Rolan…
Architects who engaged with cybernetics, artificial intelligence, and other technologies poured the foundation for digital interactivity.In Architectural Intelligence, Molly Wright Steenson explores the work of four architects in the 1960s and 1970s who incorporated elements of interactivity into their work. Christopher Alexander, Richard Saul Wurman, Cedric Price, and Nicholas Negroponte and t…
We live in an information society, or so we are often told. But what does that mean? This volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series offers a concise, informal account of the ways in which information and society are related and of our ever-increasing dependence on a complex multiplicity of messages, records, documents, and data. Using information in its everyday, nonspecialized sense, …