The notion that neurons in the living brain can change in response to experience—a phenomenon known as "plasticity"—has become a major conceptual issue in neuroscience research as well as a practical focus for the fields of neural rehabilitation and neurodegenerative disease. Early work dealt with the plasticity of the developing brain and demonstrated the critical role played by sensory ex…
In Cybernetic Revolutionaries, Eden Medina tells the history of two intersecting utopian visions, one political and one technological. The first was Chile's experiment with peaceful socialist change under Salvador Allende; the second was the simultaneous attempt to build a computer system that would manage Chile's economy. Neither vision was fully realized—Allende's government ended with a vi…
The United States is addicted to crude oil. In this book, Andrew Price-Smith argues that this addiction has distorted the conduct of American foreign policy in profound and malign ways, resulting in interventionism, exploitation, and other illiberal behaviors that hide behind a facade of liberal internationalism. The symbiotic relationship between the state and the oil industry has produced dev…
Climate change represents a “tragedy of the commons” on a global scale, requiring the cooperation of nations that do not necessarily put the Earth's well-being above their own national interests. And yet international efforts to address global warming have met with some success; the Kyoto Protocol, in which industrialized countries committed to reducing their collective emissions, took effe…
Vision is a massively parallel computational process, in which the retinal image is transformed over a sequence of stages so as to emphasize behaviorally relevant information (such as object category and identity) and deemphasize other information (such as viewpoint and lighting). The processes behind vision operate by concurrent computation and message passing among neurons within a visual are…
An analysis of the effect of public pension schemes on a country's fertility rate and a proposal for policies to reform pension coverage in light of this.The rapidly aging populations of many developed countries--most notably Japan and member countries of the European Union--present obvious problems for the public pension plans of these countries. Not only will there be disproportionately fewer…
"A Bradford book."A review of a broad range of neurobehavioral syndromes from both neurological and cognitive neuroscientific perspectives.Despite dramatic advances in neuroimaging techniques, patient-based analyses of brain disorders continue to offer important insights into the functioning of the normal brain. Bridging the gap between the work of neurologists studying clinical disorders and n…
The story of molecular biologist Elizabeth Blackburn and her groundbreaking research on telomeres and what it reveals about the resourceful optimism that characterizes the best scientific thinking.
Provides an analytical framework for assessing the impact of NGOs on intergovernmental negotiations on the environment and identifying the factors that determine the degree of NGO influence, with case studies that apply the framework to negotiations on cl.
A fresh approach to the economics of climate change that bridges integrated assessment modeling and game theoretic modeling.