Habitat was one of the most intriguing buildings in the world when it opened as the housing exhibit of Expo 67 in Montreal. Seven million visited it; heads of state lived in it; models flew half way around the world to pose in front of it; children played hide-and-seek all over it; and critics heralded it as the breakthrough of twentieth century architecture.As intriguing as the bilding is the …
These essays reveal another side of Horkheimer, focusing on his remarkable contributions to critical theory in the 1930s. Max Horkheimer is well known as the director of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research and as a sometime collaborator with Theodor Adorno, especially on their classic Dialectic of Enlightenment. These essays reveal another side of Horkheimer, focusing on his remarkable …
Beowulf clusters, which exploit mass-market PC hardware and software in conjunction with cost-effective commercial network technology, are becoming the platform for many scientific, engineering, and commercial applications. With growing popularity has come growing complexity. Addressing that complexity, Beowulf Cluster Computing with Linux and Beowulf Cluster Computing with Windows provide syst…
Why isn't the whole world as rich as the United States? Conventional views holds that differences in the share of output invested by countries account for this disparity. Not so, say Stephen Parente and Edward Prescott. In Barriers to Riches, Parente and Prescott argue that differences in Total Factor Productivity (TFP) explain this phenomenon. These differences exist because some countries ere…
Economists use the term "bandwagon effect" to describe the benefit a consumer enjoys as a result of others' using the same product or service. The history of videocassettes offers a striking example of the power of bandwagon effects. Originally there were two technical standards for videocassettes in the United States: Beta and VHS. Beta was widely regarded to have better picture quality, but V…
"Parallel computation will become the norm in the coming decades. Unfortunately, advances in parallel hardware have far outpaced parallel applications of software. There are currently two approaches to applying parallelism to applications. One is to write completely new applications in new languages. But abandoning applications that work is unacceptable to most nonacademic users of high-perform…
"A Bradford book."OCLC-licensed vendor bibliographic record.
"A Bradford book."Based on papers presented at the Sixteenth International Symposium on Attention and Performance held at Kyoto Research Park, Kyoto, Japan, July 11-15, 1994.The contributions to this volume, the sixteenth in the prestigious Attention and Performance series, revisit the issue of modularity, the idea that many functions are independently realized in specialized, autonomous module…
"A Bradford book."Artificial life, a field that seeks to increase the role of synthesis in the study of biological phenomena, has great potential, both for unlocking the secrets of life and for raising a host of disturbing issues -- scientific and technical as well as philosophical and ethical. This book brings together a series of overview articles that appeared in the first three issues of th…
The broad range of material included in these volumes suggests to the newcomer the nature of the field of artificial intelligence, while those with some background in AI will appreciate the detailed coverage of the work being done at MIT. The results presented are related to the underlying methodology. Each chapter is introduced by a short note outlining the scope of the problem begin taken up …