An exploration of the way videogames mount arguments and make expressive statements about the world that analyzes their unique persuasive power in terms of their computational properties.Videogames are an expressive medium, and a persuasive medium; they represent how real and imagined systems work, and they invite players to interact with those systems and form judgments about them. In this inn…
How social and economic conditions have precipitated advances in engineering. A Social History of Engineering shows how social and economic conditions in each age have precipitated advances in engineering. There are, in short, economic, political, and philosophical implications in changing technologies. While the book begins with the Stone Age, the Greeks, and the Romans, the bulk of the vol…
Political scientists have long been concerned about the tension between institutional fragmentation and policy coordination in the U.S. bureaucracy. The literature is rife with examples of agencies competing with each other or asserting their independence, while cooperation is relatively rare. This is of particular importance in policy areas such as biodiversity, where species, habitats, and ec…
This study investigates the types of movement and movement-like relations that link positions in syntactic structure. David Pesetsky argues that there are three such relations. Besides overt phasal movement, there are two distinct types of movement without phonological effect: covert phrasal movement and feature movement. Focusing on wh-questions, he shows how his classification of movement-lik…
"A Bradford Book."In Phrase Structure Composition and Syntactic Dependencies, Robert Frank explores an approach to syntactic theory that weds the Tree Adjoining Grammar (TAG) formalism with the minimalist framework. TAG has been extensively studied both for its mathematical properties and for its usefulness in computational linguistics applications. Frank shows that incorporating TAG's formally…
Clapperton Mavhunga's collection of essays about science, technology, and innovation (STI) from an African perspective opens with the idea, "Things do not (always) mean the same from everywhere; when we insist that only?our? meaning is the meaning, we silence other people?s meanings." Mavhunga and his contributors argue that our contemporary definitions of STI are those of countries and culture…
Revised papers presented at a series of lectures, during the 1986-87 academic year. Organized by the Program for Developmental Research, University of Maryland, College Park."A Bradford book."Errata slip inserted.OCLC-licensed vendor bibliographic record.
Extensively updated and expanded edition of the author's Energy in world history (Boulder : Westview Press, 1994).Energy is the only universal currency; it is necessary for getting anything done. The conversion of energy on Earth ranges from terra-forming forces of plate tectonics to cumulative erosive effects of raindrops. Life on Earth depends on the photosynthetic conversion of solar energy …
How free-market fundamentalists have shifted the focus of higher education to competition, metrics, consumer demand, and return on investment, and why we should change this.A new philosophy of higher education has taken hold in institutions around the world. Its supporters disavow the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake and argue that the only knowledge worth pursuing is that with more or les…
How lessons from kindergarten can help everyone develop the creative thinking skills needed to thrive in today's society. In kindergartens these days, children spend more time with math worksheets and phonics flashcards than building blocks and finger paint. Kindergarten is becoming more like the rest of school. In Lifelong Kindergarten , learning expert Mitchel Resnick argues for exactly the …