Bøger udgivet af MIT Press Ltd

The third edition of a leading text on the microeconomic foundations of banking, comprehensively updated with new coverage of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, fintech, and the latest research in banking theory.The banking industry has undergone seismic change in the twenty-first century, from the overhaul of regulation in the wake of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis to the digitalization of the economy and the disruption of traditional business models by ascendant tech giants. Now in a comprehensively updated third edition, this essential graduate-level text on the microeconomic foundations of banking provides the rigorous theoretical approach required to understand these new structures and norms, functioning as a user’s guide to recent academic literature. Microeconomics of Banking offers a comprehensive view of the evolution of banking theory and the rapidly changing realm of financial intermediation, examining the central issues and offering the necessary tools for understanding how they have been modeled. New edition highlights:Up-to-date coverage of the latest research in banking theory as well as the events of the global financial crisis and resultant Basel III regulatory frameworkNew chapters on liquidity and systemic riskNew material throughout on cryptocurrencies, fintech, and other facets of a digitalized economy

The fascinating story of glutamate, the neurotransmitter that controls the structure and function of the brain in health and neurological disorders.Sculptor and Destroyer tells the story of a simple, little-known molecule that became a master architect and commander of the human brain: glutamate. Upward of 90 percent of the neurons in the human brain deploy glutamate as their neurotransmitter. Other neurotransmitters can only exert their effects on brain function by subtly modifying the ongoing activity of glutamatergic neurons, but during brain development glutamate controls the growth of dendrites and the formation of synapses. In this eye-opening book, Mark Mattson explains how the neurotransmitter glutamate controls the structure and function of neuronal networks in the brain, thereby mediating the brain’s capabilities, including learning and memory, creativity, and imagination.Mattson also delves deeply into the dark side of glutamate, which he calls the “destroyer” side. He shows how relatively subtle aberrancies in the activity of neurons that deploy glutamate may result in behavioral disorders ranging from autism and schizophrenia to chronic anxiety and depression. More dramatically, he describes how glutamate can excite neurons to death, a process that occurs in epilepsy and stroke and, perhaps even more insidiously, in Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, ALS, and Huntington’s disease. Sculptor and Destroyer concludes with a perspective on how knowledge of glutamate’s roles in neuroplasticity might be applied to the optimization of brain health throughout our lives.Written in engaging, approachable prose, Sculptor and Destroyer will be of interest to anyone in the fields of neuroscience, neurology, psychiatry, and psychology, as well as to anyone with a curiosity about the human brain.

An intellectual history of the social sciences that offers a library of 101 books that broke new ground for the field.What are the social sciences? What unifies them? This essay collection seeks to answer these and other important questions as it considers how the field has developed over the years, from post–World War II in France to the present day throughout the world. Edited by Cyril Lemieux, Laurent Berger, Marielle Macé, Gildas Salmon, and Cécile Vidal, A History of the Social Sciences in 101 Books brings together a diverse range of researchers in the social sciences to present short essays on 101 books—both renowned and lesser known—that have shaped the field, from Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947) to Michel Aglietta’s Money: 5000 Years of Debt and Power (2016).While there have been surveys and intellectual histories of particular disciplines within the social sciences (history, anthropology, sociology), until now there has been no intellectual history of the social sciences as a unified whole. Far from presenting a fixed and frozen canon, A History of the Social Sciences in 101 Books offers instead a moving, multiform landscape with no settled questions, only an ongoing series of new perspectives and challenges to previously established grounding.

An essay collection exploring the board game’s relationship to the built environment, revealing the unexpected ways that play reflects perceptions of space.Board games harness the creation of entirely new worlds. From the medieval warlord to the modern urban planner, players are permitted to inhabit a staggering variety of roles, and are prompted to incorporate preexisting notions of placemaking into their decisions. To what extent do board games represent the social context of their production? How might they reinforce or subvert normative ideas of community and fulfillment? In Playing Place, Chad Randl and D. Medina Lasansky have curated a collection of 37 fascinating essays, supplemented by a rich trove of photo illustrations, that unpack these questions with breadth and care.Although board games are often recreational objects, their mythologies and infrastructure do not exist in a vacuum—rather, they echo and reproduce prevalent cultural landscapes. This thesis forms the throughline of pieces reflecting on subjects as diverse as the rigidly gendered fantasies of classic mass-market games; the imperial convictions embedded in games that position player-protagonists as conquerors establishing dominion over their “discoveries”; and even the uncanny prescience of games that have players responding to a global pandemic. Representing a thrilling convergence of historiography, architectural history, and media studies scholarship, Playing Place suggests not only that tabletop games should be taken seriously but also that the medium itself is uniquely capable of facilitating our critical consideration of structures that are often taken for granted.

The first English translation of the French cult classic that lampoons France’s most popular intellectuals of the post-1968 period and their ideas, which became forces of counterrevolution.Eric-John Russell’s translation of Jaime Semprún’s brutal takedown of France’s best-known intellectuals of the post-1968 period, A Gallery of Recuperation, is one of the first full English versions of any of Semprún’s books. Originally titled Précis de recuperation, the book is a scathing critique of ten major thinkers, including Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Jean-François Lyotard, and Cornelius Castoriadis. Semprún uses this catalog of careerism to reflect on the concept of recuperation—capitalism’s uncanny ability to coopt anticapitalist critiques and subvert subversion. His central question: What happens to revolutionary ideas, including Marxism itself, in the hands of professional intellectuals?Semprún’s idiosyncratic and playful style of polemics takes existentialism, humanism, structuralism, poststructuralism, postmodernism, aesthetics, and psychoanalysis to task, casting new light on the figures who have become dominant staples of modern Anglophone academia, and proving the necessity of critiquing intellectuals’ roles within contemporary capitalism. A cult classic among the French radical left and scholars of the Situationist International and May 1968, A Gallery of Recuperation never made the impact it should have. Russell’s translation marks a major step in recognizing Semprún’s work beyond its French context.

A fundamental critique of the current property regime, calling for radical social and political change.In The Abuse of Property, Daniel Loick offers a multifaceted philosophical critique of the concept of property, broadly understood. He argues that property should not be the dominant framework in which human beings regulate the use of things, that property is not the same as use. Property rights, in his view, are not conditions of freedom or justice, but deficient, dysfunctional, and harmful ways of interacting with other people and the natural environment. He dissects not only the classic justifications of property (from John Locke's justification of property as a natural right based on individual freedom to Hegel's justification of property as a form of mutual recognition) but also the classic critiques of property, from Proudhon and Marx up to Adorno and Agamben.Through an innovative critical approach to legal studies, Loick demonstrates how the concept of property, historically applied to things and people and still a linchpin of our distorted relation with the world, forms a direct line from the Occupy movement to Black Lives Matter and beyond.

An exploration of historical memory and networks of meaning in the context of today’s crises of extremism and polarization.As authoritarianism continues to rise around the world, the stories we tell ourselves about what has happened and what is happening become ever more relevant. In Memory, Edited, Abby Smith Rumsey examines collective memory, how it binds us, and how it can be used by bad actors to manipulate us. Bringing forward the voices of a rich cast of Eastern European artists from the past two hundred years—from Fyodor Dostoevsky to Gerhard Richter—Rumsey shows how their work and lives illustrate the devastation wrought by regimes dependent on entrenched lies to survive. Not only does this hijacking of the narrative polarize communities, but it also hijacks our future.Through an interdisciplinary lens that includes the best thinking from history, the arts, cognitive science, psychology, and political philosophy, Rumsey lays bare our narratives, showing how they are constructed and how they have changed over time. Ever-aware of resisting the false promise of utopia, Rumsey argues that only by confronting the past and reckoning with the crimes that were committed can we ever hope to heal and gain self-knowledge. Memory, Edited is an indispensable text for anyone who cares about democracy, equality, and freedom in our current age of crisis.

A breathtaking history of America’s trail-blazing female science journalists—and the timely lessons they can teach us about equity, access, collaboration, and persistence.Writing for Their Lives tells the stories of women who pioneered the nascent profession of science journalism from the 1920s through the 1950s. Like the “hidden figures” of science, such as Dorothy Vaughan and Katherine Johnson, these women journalists, Marcel Chotkowski LaFollette writes, were also overlooked in traditional histories of science and journalism. But, at a time when science, medicine, and the mass media were expanding dramatically, Emma Reh, Jane Stafford, Marjorie Van de Water, and many others were explaining theories, discoveries, and medical advances to millions of readers via syndicated news stories, weekly columns, weekend features, and books—and they deserve the recognition they have long been denied.Grounded in extensive archival research and enlivened by passages of original correspondence, Writing for Their Lives addresses topics such as censorship, peer review, and news embargoes, while also providing intimate glimpses into the personal lives and adventures of mid-twentieth-century career women. They were single, married, or divorced; mothers with child-care responsibilities; daughters supporting widowed mothers; urban dwellers who lived through, and wrote about, the Great Depression, World War II, and the dawn of the Atomic Age—all the while, daring to challenge the arrogance and misogyny of the male scientific community in pursuit of information that could serve the public.Written at a time when trust in science is at a premium, Writing for Their Lives is an inspiring untold history that underscores just how crucial dedicated, conscientious journalists are to the public understanding and acceptance of scientific guidance and expertise.

The first historical examination of working parenthood in the late twentieth century—and how the concepts of “family-friendly” work culture and “work–life balance” came to be.Since the 1980s, families across the developed West have lived through a revolution on a scale unprecedented since industrialization. With more mothers than ever before in paid work and the rise of the middle-class, dual-income household, we have entered a new era in the history of everyday life: the era of the working parent. In Inventing the Working Parent, Sarah E. Stoller charts the politics that shaped the creation of the phenomenon of working parenthood in Britain as it arose out of a new culture of work.Stoller begins with the first sustained efforts by feminists to mobilize politically on behalf of working parents in the late 1970s and concludes in the context of an emerging national political agenda for working families with the rise of New Labour in the 1990s. She explores how and why the notion of working parenthood emerged as a powerful new political claim and identity category and addresses how feminists used the concept of working parenthood to advocate for new organizational policies and practices. Lastly, Stoller shows how neoliberal capitalism under Margaret Thatcher and subsequent New Labour governments made a family’s ability to survive on one income nearly impossible—with significant consequences for individual experience, the gendered division of labor, and intimate life.

A comprehensive and cutting-edge introduction to quantitative methods of causal analysis, including new trends in machine learning.Reasoning about cause and effect—the consequence of doing one thing versus another—is an integral part of our lives as human beings. In an increasingly digital and data-driven economy, the importance of sophisticated causal analysis only deepens.  Presenting the most important quantitative methods for evaluating causal effects, this textbook provides graduate students and researchers with a clear and comprehensive introduction to the causal analysis of empirical data. Martin Huber’s accessible approach highlights the intuition and motivation behind various methods while also providing formal discussions of key concepts using statistical notation. Causal Analysis covers several methodological developments not covered in other texts, including new trends in machine learning, the evaluation of interaction or interference effects, and recent research designs such as bunching or kink designs.Most complete and cutting-edge introduction to causal analysis, including causal machine learning Clean presentation of rigorous material avoids extraneous detail and emphasizes conceptual analogies over statistical notationSupplies a range of applications and practical examples using R

An ethnographic study of diverse children on the autism spectrum and the role of media and technology in their everyday lives.In spite of widespread assumptions that young people on the autism spectrum have a “natural” attraction to technology—a premise that leads to significant speculation about how media helps or harms them—relatively little research actually exists about their everyday tech use. In Kids Across the Spectrums, Meryl Alper fills this gap with the first book-length ethnography of the digital lives of autistic young people. Based on research with more than sixty neurodivergent children from an array of racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic backgrounds, Kids Across the Spectrums delves into three overlapping areas of their media usage: cultural belonging, social relationships, and physical embodiment. Alper’s work demonstrates that what autistic youth do with technology is not radically different from their non-autistic peers. However, significant social and health inequalities—including limited recreational programs, unsafe neighborhoods, and challenges obtaining appropriate therapeutic services—spill over into their media habits. With an emphasis on what autistic children bring to media as opposed to what they supposedly lack socially, Alper argues that their relationships do not exist outside of how communication technologies affect sociality, nor beyond the boundaries of stigmatization and society writ large. Finally, she offers practical suggestions for the education, healthcare, and technology sectors to promote equity, inclusion, access, and justice for autistic kids at home, at school, and in their communities.

The cultural ramifications of online live streaming, including its effects on identity and power in digital spaces.Some consider live streaming—the broadcasting of video and/or audio footage live online—simply an internet fad or source of entertainment, yet it is at the center of the digital mediation of our lives. In this edited volume, Johanna Brewer, Bo Ruberg, Amanda L. L. Cullen, and Christopher J. Persaud present a broad range of essays that explore the cultural implications of live streaming, paying special attention to how it is shifting notions of identity and power in digital spaces. The diverse set of international authors included represent a variety of perspectives, from digital media studies to queer studies, from human-computer interaction to anthropology, and more.While important foundational work has been carried out by game studies scholars, many other elements of streaming practices remain to be explored. To deepen engagement with diversity and social justice, the editors have included a variety of voices on such topics as access, gender, sexuality, race, disability, harassment, activism, and the cultural implications of design aesthetics. Live streaming affects a wide array of behaviors, norms, and patterns of communication. But above all, it lets participants observe and engage with real life as it unfolds in real time. Ultimately, these essays challenge us to look at both the possibilities for harm and the potential for radical change that live streaming presents.

A clearer view of entrepreneurship, based on new comprehensive data, that upends what we know about job creation and survival among US startups.Startups create jobs and power economic growth. That’s an article of faith in the United States—but, as The Promise and Peril of Entrepreneurship reveals, our faith may be built on shaky ground. Economists Robert Fairlie, Zachary Kroff, Javier Miranda, and Nikolas Zolas—working with Census Bureau microdata—have developed a new data set, the Comprehensive Startup Panel, that tracks job creation and the survival of every startup in the country. In doing so, they recalibrate our understanding of how startups behave in the US economy. Specifically, their work seeks to answer three critical questions: How many jobs does each entrepreneur create? Do those jobs disappear quickly? And how long do entrepreneurial enterprises survive?Job creation and survival rates are, the authors conclude, much lower than those reported by official federal sources. Such discrepancies emerge from the more comprehensive picture drawn from this new data set—a picture that, for instance, highlights the important but understudied differences between employer firms (startups that hire people) and nonemployer firms (startups that do not initially hire people but may do so in later years as they grow). This reframing captures the vast number of businesses that start with no employees, a number largely missing from the statistics underpinning the mythos of the riskiness of entrepreneurship. The book also explores who owns startups—focusing on differences by race and ethnicity.With its new, wider view of the realities of job creation and survival among startups, The Promise and Peril of Entrepreneurship has significant implications for economic policymaking and research, and for the billions of dollars that the government and the private sector invest in promoting entrepreneurship.

A critical edition of a classic work by the renowned philosopher George Santayana evaluating key movements in American intellectual history.Winds of Doctrine presents six essays by the internationally recognized critic and philosopher George Santayana. The essays, edited by David E. Spiech, Martin A. Coleman, and Faedra Lazar Weiss, and introduced by Paul Forster, address the broad sweep of intellectual trends—or, as the title suggests, the ever-changing winds of thought—of the Spanish-born American thinker’s time. The topics range from the secularization of American culture to the rise of religious modernism to the “genteel tradition” in American philosophy, the subject of Santayana’s final lecture in America and perhaps his best known essay. The original Winds of Doctrine, published in 1913, was the first book published after Santayana’s 1912 departure for Europe. Santayana had felt stifled at Harvard for some time, and his long-contemplated resignation from academia released him from previous obligations and allowed him a new freedom to think and write. Much later, Santayana remarked on the significance of that choice to step away: “In Winds of Doctrine and my subsequent books, a reader of my earlier writings may notice a certain change of climate. . . . It was not my technical philosophy that was principally affected, but rather the meaning and status of philosophy for my inner man.”An insightful document of American intellectual history, supplemented with annotations and rich textual commentary, Winds of Doctrine is a vital and engaging survey of the religious, political, philosophical, and literary trends of the twentieth century.

A clear, comprehensive, and rigorous introduction to the theory of computation.What is computable? What leads to efficiency in computation? Computability and Complexity offers a clear, comprehensive, and rigorous introduction to the mathematical study of the capabilities and limitations of computation. Hubie Chen covers the core notions, techniques, methods, and questions of the theory of computation before turning to several advanced topics. Emphasizing intuitive learning and conceptual discussion, this textbook’s accessible approach offers a robust foundation for understanding both the reach and restrictions of algorithms and computers.Extensive exercises and diagrams enhance streamlined, student-friendly presentation of mathematically rigorous materialIncludes thorough treatment of automata theory, computability theory, and complexity theory—including the P versus NP question and the theory of NP-completenessSuitable for undergraduate and graduate students, researchers, and professionals

From a former Chief Economist of the World Bank, a brief, balanced, and sobering discussion of globalization trends, their drivers, and effects on inequality.The recent retreat from globalization has been triggered by a perception that increased competition from global trade is not fair and leads to increased inequality within countries. Is this phenomenon a small hiccup in the overall wave of globalization, or are we at the beginning of a new era of deglobalization? Former Chief Economist of the World Bank Group Pinelopi Koujianou Goldberg tells us that the answer depends on the policy choices we make, and in this book The Unequal Effects of Globalization, she calls for exploring alternative policy approaches including place-based policies, while sustaining international cooperation.At this critical moment of shifting attitudes toward globalization, The Unequal Effects of Globalization enters the debate while also taking a step back. Goldberg investigates globalization’s many dimensions, disruptions, and complex interactions, from the late twentieth century’s wave of trade liberalizations to the rise of China, the decline of manufacturing in advanced economies, and the recent effects of trade on global poverty, inequality, labor markets, and firm dynamics. From there, Goldberg explores the significance of the recent backlash against and potential retreat from globalization, and considers the key policy implications of these trends and emerging dynamics.As comprehensive as it is well-balanced, The Unequal Effects of Globalization is an essential read on trade and cooperation between nations that will appeal as much to academics and policymakers as it will to general readers who are interested in learning more about this timely subject.

A creative and comprehensive exploration of the institutional forces undermining the management of environments critical to public health.For almost two decades, the citizens of Western Mexico have called for a cleanup of the Santiago River, a water source so polluted it emanates an overwhelming acidic stench. Toxic clouds of foam lift off the river in a strong wind. In Sewer of Progress, Cindy McCulligh examines why industrial dumping continues in the Santiago despite the corporate embrace of social responsibility and regulatory frameworks intended to mitigate environmental damage. The fault, she finds, lies in a disingenuous discourse of progress and development that privileges capitalist growth over the health and well-being of ecosystems. Rooted in research on institutional behavior and corporate business practices, Sewer of Progress exposes a type of regulatory greenwashing that allows authorities to deflect accusations of environmental dumping while “regulated” dumping continues in an environment of legal certainty. For transnational corporations, this type of simulation allows companies to take advantage of double standards in environmental regulations, while presenting themselves as socially responsible and green global actors. Through this inversion, the Santiago and other rivers in Mexico have become sewers for urban and industrial waste. Institutionalized corruption, a concept McCulligh introduces in the book, is the main culprit, a system that permits and normalizes environmental degradation, specifically in the creation and enforcement of a regulatory framework for wastewater discharge that prioritizes private interests over the common good.Through a research paradigm based in institutional ethnography and political ecology, Sewer of Progress provides a critical, in-depth look at the power relations subverting the role of the state in environmental regulation and the maintenance of public health.

An innovative, wide-ranging consideration of the global ecological crisis and its deep philosophical and theological roots.Global crises, from melting Arctic ice to ecosystem collapse and the sixth mass extinction, challenge our age-old belief in nature as a phoenix with an infinite ability to regenerate itself from the ashes of destruction. Moving from antiquity to the present and back, Michael Marder provides an integrated examination of philosophies of nature drawn from traditions around the world to illuminate the theological, mythical, and philosophical origins of the contemporary environmental emergency. From there, he probes the contradictions and deadlocks of our current predicament to propose a philosophy of nature for the twenty-first century.As Marder analyzes our reliance on the image and idea of the phoenix to organize our thoughts about the natural world, he outlines the obstacles in the path of formulating a revitalized philosophy of nature. His critical exposition of the phoenix complex draws on Chinese, Indian, Russian, European, and North African traditions. Throughout, Marder lets the figure of the phoenix guide readers through theories of immortality, intergenerational and interspecies relations, infinity compatible with finitude, resurrection, reincarnation, and a possibility of liberation from cycles of rebirth. His concluding remarks on a phoenix-suffused philosophy of nature and political thought extend from the Roman era to the writings of Hannah Arendt.

An insightful investigation into the mechanisms underlying the predictive functions of neural networks—and their ability to chart a new path for AI.Prediction is a cognitive advantage like few others, inherently linked to our ability to survive and thrive. Our brains are awash in signals that embody prediction. Can we extend this capability more explicitly into synthetic neural networks to improve the function of AI and enhance its place in our world? Gradient Expectations is a bold effort by Keith L. Downing to map the origins and anatomy of natural and artificial neural networks to explore how, when designed as predictive modules, their components might serve as the basis for the simulated evolution of advanced neural network systems.Downing delves into the known neural architecture of the mammalian brain to illuminate the structure of predictive networks and determine more precisely how the ability to predict might have evolved from more primitive neural circuits. He then surveys past and present computational neural models that leverage predictive mechanisms with biological plausibility, identifying elements, such as gradients, that natural and artificial networks share. Behind well-founded predictions lie gradients, Downing finds, but of a different scope than those that belong to today’s deep learning. Digging into the connections between predictions and gradients, and their manifestation in the brain and neural networks, is one compelling example of how Downing enriches both our understanding of such relationships and their role in strengthening AI tools.  Synthesizing critical research in neuroscience, cognitive science, and connectionism, Gradient Expectations offers unique depth and breadth of perspective on predictive neural-network models, including a grasp of predictive neural circuits that enables the integration of computational models of prediction with evolutionary algorithms.

A framework for knowledge ownership that challenges the mechanisms of inequality in modern society.Scholars of science, technology, medicine, and law have all tended to emphasize knowledge as the sum of human understanding, and its ownership as possession by law. Breaking with traditional discourse on knowledge property as something that concerns mainly words and intellectual history, or science and law, Dagmar Schäfer, Annapurna Mamidipudi, and Marius Buning propose technology as a central heuristic for studying the many implications of knowledge ownership. Toward this end, they focus on the notions of knowledge and ownership in courtrooms, workshops, policy, and research practices, while also shedding light on scholarship itself as a powerful tool for making explicit the politics inherent in knowledge practices and social order.  The book presents case studies showing how diverse knowledge economies are created and how inequalities arise from them. Unlike scholars who have fragmented this discourse across the disciplines of anthropology, sociology, and history, the editors highlight recent developments in the emerging field of the global history of knowledge—as science, as economy, and as culture. The case studies reveal how notions of knowing and owning emerge because they reciprocally produce and determine each other’s limits and possibilities; that is, how we know inevitably affects how we can own what we know; and how we own always impacts how and what we are able to know.Contributors (Listed in Order of Appearance)Dagmar Schäfer, Annapurna Mamidipudi, Cynthia Brokaw, Marius Buning, Viren Murthy, Marjolijn Bol, Amy E. Slaton, James Leach, Myles W. Jackson, Lissant Bolton, Vivek S. Oak, Jörn Oeder

A new way to teach media studies that centers students’ lived experiences and diverse perspectives from around the world.From the intimate to the mundane, most aspects of our lives—how we learn, love, work, and play—take place in media. Taking an expansive, global perspective, this introductory textbook covers what it means to live in, rather than with, media. Mark Deuze focuses on the lived experience—how people who use smartphones, the internet, and television sets make sense of their digital environment—to investigate the broader role of media in society and everyday life.  Life in Media uses relatable examples and case studies from around the world to illustrate the foundational theories, concepts, and methods of media studies. The book is structured around six core themes: how media inform and inspire our daily activities; how we live our lives in the public eye; how we make distinctions between real and fake; how we seek and express love; how we use media to effect change; how we create media and shared narratives; and how we seek to create well-being within media. By deliberately including diverse voices and radically embracing the everyday and mundane aspects of media life, this book innovates ways to teach and talk about media.Highlights diverse international voices, images, and casesUses accessible examples from everyday life to contextualize theory Offers a comprehensive, student-centered introduction to media studiesExtensively annotated bibliography offers dynamic sources for further study, including readings and documentary films

How marketers learned to dream of optimization and speak in the idiom of management science well before the widespread use of the Internet.Algorithms, data extraction, digital marketers monetizing "eyeballs": these all seem like such recent features of our lives. And yet, Lee McGuigan tells us in this eye-opening book, digital advertising was well underway before the widespread use of the Internet.  Explaining how marketers have brandished the tools of automation and management science to exploit new profit opportunities, Selling the American People traces data-driven surveillance all the way back to the 1950s, when the computerization of the advertising business began to blend science, technology, and calculative cultures in an ideology of optimization. With that ideology came adtech, a major infrastructure of digital capitalism.To help make sense of today's attention merchants and choice architects, McGuigan explores a few key questions: How did technical experts working at the intersection of data processing and management sciences come to command the center of gravity in the advertising and media industries? How did their ambition to remake marketing through mathematical optimization shape and reflect developments in digital technology? In short, where did adtech come from, and how did data-driven marketing come to mediate the daily encounters of people, products, and public spheres? His answers show how the advertising industry's efforts to bend information technologies toward its dream of efficiency and rational management helped to make "surveillance capitalism" one of the defining experiences of public life.

A compelling and innovative account that reshapes our view of nineteenth-century chemistry, explaining a critical period in chemistry’s quest to understand and manipulate organic nature.According to existing histories, theory drove chemistry’s remarkable nineteenth-century development. In Molecular World, Catherine M. Jackson shows instead how novel experimental approaches combined with what she calls “laboratory reasoning” enabled chemists to bridge wet chemistry and abstract concepts and, in so doing, create the molecular world. Jackson introduces a series of practice-based breakthroughs that include chemistry’s move into lampworked glassware, the field’s turn to synthesis and subsequent struggles to characterize and differentiate the products of synthesis, and the gradual development of institutional chemical laboratories, an advance accelerated by synthesis and the dangers it introduced.Jackson’s historical reassessment emerges from the investigation of alkaloids by German chemists Justus Liebig, August Wilhelm Hofmann, and Albert Ladenburg. Stymied in his own research, Liebig steered his student Hofmann into pioneering synthesis as a new investigative method. Hofmann’s practice-based laboratory reasoning produced a major theoretical advance, but he failed to make alkaloids. That landmark fell to Ladenburg, who turned to cutting-edge theory only after his successful synthesis.In telling the story of these scientists and their peers, Jackson reveals organic synthesis as the ground chemists stood upon to forge a new relationship between experiment and theory—with far-reaching consequences for chemistry as a discipline.

A history of urban travel demand modeling (UTDM) and its enormous influence on American life from the 1920s to the present.For better and worse, the automobile has been an integral part of the American way of life for decades. Its ascendance would have been far less spectacular, however, had engineers and planners not devised urban travel demand modeling (UTDM). This book tells the story of this irreplaceable engineering tool that has helped cities to accommodate continuous rise in traffic from the 1950s on. Beginning with UTDM’s origins as a method to help plan new infrastructure, Konstantinos Chatzis follows its trajectory through new generations of models that helped make optimal use of existing capacity and examines related policy instruments, including the recent use of intelligent transportation systems.Chatzis investigates these models as evolving entities involving humans and nonhumans that were shaped through a specific production process. In surveying the various generations of UTDM, he delves into various means of production (from tabulating machines to software packages) and travel survey methods (from personal interviews to GPS tracking devices and smartphones) used to obtain critical information. He also looks at the individuals who have collectively built a distinct UTDM social world by displaying specialized knowledge, developing specific skills, and performing various tasks and functions, and by communicating, interacting, and even competing with one another.Original and refreshingly accessible, Forecasting Travel in Urban America offers the first detailed history behind the thinkers and processes that impact the lives of millions of city dwellers every day.

The first reader in critical plant studies, exploring a rapidly growing multidisciplinary field—the intersection of philosophy with plant science and the visual arts.In recent years, philosophy and art have testified to how anthropocentrism has culturally impoverished our world, leading to the wide destruction of habitats and ecosystems. In this book, Giovanni Aloi and Michael Marder show that the field of critical plant studies can make an important contribution, offering a slew of possibilities for scientific research, local traditions, Indigenous knowledge, history, geography, anthropology, philosophy, and aesthetics to intersect, inform one another, and lead interdisciplinary and transcultural dialogues. Vegetal Entwinements in Philosophy and Art considers such topics as the presence of plants in the history of philosophy, the shifting status of plants in various traditions, what it means to make art with growing life-forms, and whether or not plants have moral standing. In an experimental vegetal arrangement, the reader presents some of the most influential writing on plants, philosophy, and the arts, together with provocative new contributions, as well as interviews with groundbreaking contemporary artists whose work has greatly enhanced our appreciation of vegetal being.Contributors:Catriona A.H. Sandilands, Giovanni Aloi, Marlene Atleo, Monica Bakke, Emily Blackmer, Jodi Brandt, Teresa Castro, Dan Choffness, D. Denenge Duyst-Akpem, Mark Dion, Elisabeth E. Schussler, Braden Elliott, Monica Gagliano, Elaine Gan, Prudence Gibson, James H. Wandersee, Manuela Infante,  Luce Irigaray, Nicholas J. Reo, Jonathon Keats, Zayaan Khan, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Eduardo Kohn, Stefano Mancuso, Michael Marder, Anguezomo Mba Bikoro, Elaine Miller, Samaneh Moafi, Uriel Orlow, Mark Payne, Allegra Pesenti, Špela Petrič, Michael Pollan, Darren Ranco, Angela Roothaan, Marcela Salinas, Diana Scherer, Vandana Shiva, Linda Tegg, Maria Theresa Alves, Krista Tippet, Anthony Trewavas, Alessandra Viola, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, B+W, Mathai Wangari, Lois Weinberger, Kyle Whyte, David Wood, Anicka Yi

An innovative historical analysis of the intersection of religion and technology in making the modern state, focusing on bodily production and reproduction across the human-animal divide.In Milk and Honey, Tamar Novick writes a revolutionary environmental history of the state that centers on the intersection of technology and religion in modern Israel/Palestine. Focusing on animals and the management of their production and reproduction across three political regimes—the late-Ottoman rule, British rule, and the early Israeli state—Novick draws attention to the ways in which settlers and state experts used agricultural technology to recreate a biblical idea of past plenitude, literally a “land flowing with milk and honey,” through the bodies of animals and people. Novick presents a series of case studies involving the management of water buffalo, bees, goats, sheep, cows, and peoplein Palestine/Israel. She traces the intimate forms of knowledge and bodily labor—production and reproduction—in which this process took place, and the intertwining of bodily, political, and environmental realms in the transformation of Palestine/Israel. Her wide-ranging approach shows technology never replaced religion as a colonial device. Rather, it merged with settler-colonial aspirations to salvage the land, bolstering the effort to seize control over territory and people.Fusing technology, religious fervor, bodily labor, and political ecology, Milk and Honey provides a novel account of the practices that defined and continue to shape settler-colonialism in the Palestine/Israel, revealing the ongoing entanglement of technoscience and religion in our time.

This book presents empirical methods for studying complex computer programs: exploratory tools to help find patterns in data, experiment designs and hypothesis-testing tools to help data speak convincingly, and modeling tools to help explain data.

"A theorization of habit that emphasizes its excessive, unsettling, and disturbing material and temporal qualities rather than its mediating and stabilizing functions"--