"What links conscious experience of pain, joy, color, and smell to bioelectrical activity in the brain? How can anything physical give rise to nonphysical, subjective, conscious states? Christof Koch has devoted much of his career to bridging the seemingly unbridgeable gap between the physics of the brain and phenomenal experience. This engaging book--part scientific overview, part memoir, part…
Philosophical reflections on the environment began with early philosophers' invocation of a cosmology that mixed natural and supernatural phenomena. Today, the central philosophical problem posed by the environment involves not what it can teach us about ourselves and our place in the cosmic order but rather how we can understand its workings in order to make better decisions about our own cond…
Susan Leigh Star (1954--2010) was one of the most influential science studies scholars of the last several decades. In her work, Star highlighted the messy practices of discovering science, asking hard questions about the marginalizing as well as the liberating powers of science and technology. In the landmark work Sorting Things Out, Star and Geoffrey Bowker revealed the social and ethical his…
An argument that environmental challenges will only resonate with citizens of affluent postindustrial countries if sustainability concerns emerge from everyday practices.OCLC-licensed vendor bibliographic record.
"In Alien Agency, Chris Salter tells three stories of art in the making. Salter examines three works in which the materials of art - the 'stuff of the world' - behave and perform in ways beyond the creator's intent, becoming unknown, surprising, alien. Studying thse works - all three deeply embroiled in and enabled by science and technology - allows him to focus on practice through the experien…
The global economic crisis of 2008-2009 seemed a crisis not just of economic performance but also of the system's underlying political ideology and economic theory. But a second Great Depression was averted, and the radical shift to New Deal-like economic policies predicted by some never took place. Perhaps the correct response to the crisis is simply careful management of the macroeconomic cha…
"Tournikiotis argues that the history of modern architecture tends to be written from the present, projecting back onto the past our current concerns, so that the "beginning" of the story really functions as a "representation" of its end. In this book the buildings are the quotations, while the texts are the structure." "Tournikiotis focuses on a group of books by major historians of the twenti…
Every field of history has a basic need for a detailed chronology of what happened: who did what when. In the absence of such a resource, fanciful accounts flourish. This book provides a rich narrative of the early development of online information retrieval systems and services, from 1963 to 1976--a period important to anyone who uses a search engine, online catalog, or large database. Drawing…
The book traces the story of the brain throughout evolution and shows how the control of body temperature as a survival mechanism was achieved. From the first unicellular life on Earth, living things have had the capacity to sense heat and cold and to avoid extreme temperatures. With the development of a bigger brain and a constant body temperature, mammals were able to change their habitats…
"This volume contributes to a current debate within the psychology of thought that has wide implications for our ideas about creativity, decision making, and economic behavior. The essays focus on the role of implicit, unconscious thinking in creativity and problem solving, the interaction of intuition and analytic thinking, and the relationship between communicative heuristics and thought. The…