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…
An explanation of the mathematics needed as a foundation for a deep understanding of general relativity or quantum field theory. Physics is naturally expressed in mathematical language. Students new to the subject must simultaneously learn an idiomatic mathematical language and the content that is expressed in that language. It is as if they were asked to read Les Misérables while struggling w…
How emergent practices and developments in young people's digital media can result in technological innovation or lead to unintended learning experiences and unanticipated social encounters. Young people's use of digital media may result in various innovations and unexpected outcomes, from the use of videogame technologies to create films to the effect of home digital media on family life. This…
Tools to make hard problems easier to solve. In this book, Sanjoy Mahajan shows us that the way to master complexity is through insight rather than precision. Precision can overwhelm us with information, whereas insight connects seemingly disparate pieces of information into a simple picture. Unlike computers, humans depend on insight. Based on the author's fifteen years of teaching at MIT, Cam…
The scientific discovery and mastery of electricity created as many important changes in modern society as did the invention of alphabetical writing in antiquity and movable type in the fifteenth century. It is more than a natural phenomenon that science has harnessed for human use; it is a central feature of the modern episteme. It has inspired writers and artists, propelled industry and innov…
While binaural technology applications gained in popularity in recent years, the majority of applications still use non-individual Head-Related Transfer Functions (HRTFs) from artificial heads. However, certain applications, for example research of spatial hearing or hearing attention, require an physically exact and realistic binaural signal. The limiting factor that prohibits the widespread u…
The debate on Facebook raises questions about the use and users of this information service. This collected volume gathers a broad spectrum of social science and information science articles about Facebook. Facebook has many facets, and we just look forward above all to the use and users. The facet of users has sub-facets, such as different age, sex, and culture. The facet of use consists of…
Although there is considerable historical literature describing the social and economic impact of drought on the prairies in the 1930s, little has been written about the challenges presented by drought in more contemporary times. The drought of 2001-02 was, for example, the most recent large-area, intense, and prolonged drought in Canada and one of Canada’s most costly natural disasters in a …