"Richard Sproat is Member of the Technical Staff at the AT & T Bell Laboratories.""A Bradford book.""This book provides the first broad yet thorough coverage of issues in morphological theory. It includes a wide array of techniques and systems in computational morphology (including discussion of their limitations), and describes some unusual applications. Sproat motivates the study of computati…
"For two decades now I've been awaiting a book explaining computers and their social consequences to literate readers without using any unnecessary jargon or pedantry—or math. I wanted such a book to lend to all those friends who've pestered me about computers and to all the computer science students who've asked me about computers over the years. I particularly wanted a book that I could buy…
"A Bradford book."Motion perception lies at the heart of the scientific study of vision. The motion aftereffect (MAE), probably the best-known phenomenon in the study of visual illusions, is the appearance of directional movement of a stationary object or scene after the viewer has been exposed to visual motion in the opposite direction. For example, after one has looked at a waterfall for a pe…
"A Bradford book."In Natural Ethical Facts William Casebeer argues that we can articulate a fully naturalized ethical theory using concepts from evolutionary biology and cognitive science, and that we can study moral cognition just as we study other forms of cognition. His goal is to show that we have "softly fixed" human natures, that these natures are evolved, and that our lives go well or ba…
"In this sure-to-be-controversial book, Randy Thornhill and Craig Palmer use evolutionary biology to explain the causes of rape and to recommend new approaches to its prevention. According to Thornhill and Palmer, evolved adaptation of some sort gives rise to rape; the main evolutionary question is whether rape is an adaptation itself or a by-product of other adaptations." "The book includes a …
"A Bradford book."""Arguments against radical enhancement have too often in the past been characterized by irrationalism and mysticism. Nicholas Agar presents the first cogent case for the rationality of opposing radical enhancement. Moving easily between science and philosophy, he argues for a species-relative conception of valuable experiences, according to which we have a strong reason to re…
"A Bradford book."The Nature of Insight brings together diverse perspectives, including recent theories and discoveries, to examine the nature and origins of insightful thinking, as well as the history of theory and research on the topic and the methods used to study it. There are chapters by the leading experts in this field, including Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Ronald A. Finke, Howard E. Gruber…
How we can invent--but not predict--the future of cities. We cannot predict future cities, but we can invent them. Cities are largely unpredictable because they are complex systems that are more like organisms than machines. Neither the laws of economics nor the laws of mechanics apply; cities are the product of countless individual and collective decisions that do not conform to any grand plan…
Drop something in front of a two-year-old, and she's likely to pick it up for you. This is not a learned behavior, psychologist Michael Tomasello argues. Through observations of young children in experiments he himself has designed, Tomasello shows that children are naturally—and uniquely—cooperative. Put through similar experiments, for example, apes demonstrate the ability to work togethe…
An argument that there are three kinds of English grammatical objects, each with different syntactic properties. In Edge-Based Clausal Syntax, Paul Postal rejects the notion that an English phrase of the form [V + DP] invariably involves a grammatical relation properly characterized as a direct object. He argues instead that at least three distinct relations occur in such a structure. The di…