"Infrastructural Brutalism explores the necropolitics of infrastructure through the lens of artistic media: "drowned town" literature, road movies, energy landscape photography, and "death train" narratives. How does American "drowned town" literature, from Mud on the Stars to Sugaree Rising, contribute to the social erasure of Indigeneity? How does road movie scholarship ignore the materiality…
Why the traditional "pledge and review" climate agreements have failed, and how carbon pricing, based on trust and reciprocity, could succeed.After twenty-five years of failure, climate negotiations continue to use a "pledge and review" approach: countries pledge (almost anything), subject to (unenforced) review. This approach ignores everything we know about human cooperation. In this book, le…
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, …
An innovative investigation of the inner workings of Spotify that traces the transformation of audio files into streamed experience. Spotify provides a streaming service that has been welcomed as disrupting the world of music. Yet such disruption always comes at a price. Spotify Teardown contests the tired claim that digital culture thrives on disruption. Borrowing the notion of "teardown" from…
Formal ways of representing uncertainty and various logics for reasoning about it; updated with new material on weighted probability measures, complexity-theoretic considerations, and other topics.OCLC-licensed vendor bibliographic record.
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…
OCLC-licensed vendor bibliographic record.
A study of urban nature that draws together different strands of urban ecology as well as insights derived from feminist, posthuman, and postcolonial thought.Postindustrial transitions and changing cultures of nature have produced an unprecedented degree of fascination with urban biodiversity. The other nature that flourishes in marginal urban spaces, at one remove from the controlled contours …
"Questions about the existence and attributes of God form the subject matter of natural theology, which seeks to gain knowledge of the divine by relying on reason and experience of the world. Arguments in natural theology rely largely on intuitions and inferences that seem natural to us, occurring spontaneously--at the sight of a beautiful landscape, perhaps, or in wonderment at the complexity …
An examination of media and technology use by school-aged youth with disabilities, with an emphasis on media use at home.Most research on media use by young people with disabilities focuses on the therapeutic and rehabilitative uses of technology; less attention has been paid to their day-to-day encounters with media and technology--the mundane, sometimes pleasurable and sometimes frustrating e…