{"title":"Mit Press Essential Knowledge Series","description":"\u003cp\u003eNavigate the complexities of modern thought with the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series. These concise, accessible books offer expert insights into everything from AI to climate change. Start exploring today!\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"virtual-reality-book-samuel-greengard-9780262537520","title":"Virtual Reality","description":"A comprehensive overview of developments in augmented reality, virtual reality, and mixed reality—and how they could affect every part of our lives.  After years of hype, extended reality—augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), and mixed reality (MR)—has entered the mainstream. Commercially available, relatively inexpensive VR headsets transport wearers to other realities—fantasy worlds, faraway countries, sporting events—in ways that even the most ultra-high-definition screen cannot. AR glasses receive data in visual and auditory forms that are more useful than any laptop or smartphone can deliver. Immersive MR environments blend physical and virtual reality to create a new reality. In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, technology writer Samuel Greengard offers an accessible overview of developments in extended reality, explaining the technology, considering the social and psychological ramifications, and discussing possible future directions.  Greengard describes the history and technological development of augmented and virtual realities, including the latest research in the field, and surveys the various shapes and forms of VR, AR, and MR, including head-mounted displays, mobile systems, and goggles. He examines the way these technologies are shaping and reshaping some professions and industries, and explores how extended reality affects psychology, morality, law, and social constructs. It's not a question of whether extended reality will become a standard part of our world, he argues, but how, when, and where these technologies will take hold. Will extended reality help create a better world? Will it benefit society as a whole? Or will it merely provide financial windfalls for a select few? Greengard's account equips us to ask the right questions about a transformative technology.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ LIKE_NEW \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49505863598353,"sku":"GOR011688864","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49559899439377,"sku":"GOR011635380","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49729813283089,"sku":"NGR9780262537520","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49758432231697,"sku":"CIN0262537524G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50839383605521,"sku":"CIN0262537524VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51000607867153,"sku":"NIN9780262537520","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0262537524.jpg?v=1751227611"},{"product_id":"extraterrestrials-book-wade-roush-9780262538435","title":"Extraterrestrials","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eAre we alone in the universe? If not, where is everybody? An engaging exploration of one of the most important unsolved problems in science.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eEverything we know about how planets form and how life arises suggests that human civilization on Earth should not be unique. We ought to see abundant evidence of extraterrestrial activity--but we don't. Where is everybody? In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, science and technology writer Wade Roush examines one of the great unsolved problems in science: is there life, intelligent or otherwise, on other planets? \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis paradox (they're bound to be out there; but where are they?), first formulated by the famed physicist Enrico Fermi, has fueled decades of debate, speculation, and, lately, some actual science. Roush lays out the problem in its historical and modern-day context and summarizes the latest thinking among astronomers and astrobiologists. He describes the long history of speculation about aliens (we've been debating the idea for thousands of years); the emergence of SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) as a scientific discipline in the 1960s, and scientists' use of radio and optical techniques to scan for signals; and developments in astrobiology (the study of how life might arise in non-Earth like environments) and exoplanet research (the discovery of planets outside our solar system). Finally, he discusses possible solutions to the Fermi Paradox and suggests way to refocus SETI work that might increase the chances of resolving the paradox--and finding extraterrestrials.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49511509917969,"sku":"GOR011950483","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49735765393681,"sku":"NGR9780262538435","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50448238412049,"sku":"CIN0262538431G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ LIKE_NEW \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50781683089681,"sku":"GOR014070484","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51000575394065,"sku":"NIN9780262538435","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":53092819468561,"sku":"CIN0262538431A","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0262538431.jpg?v=1751432105"},{"product_id":"spatial-computing-book-shashi-shekhar-9780262538046","title":"Spatial Computing","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eAn accessible guide to the ideas and technologies underlying such applications as GPS, Google Maps, \u003ci\u003ePok mon Go\u003c\/i\u003e, ride-sharing, driverless cars, and drone surveillance.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBillions of people around the globe use various applications of spatial computing daily--by using a ride-sharing app, GPS, the e911 system, social media check-ins, even \u003ci\u003ePok mon Go\u003c\/i\u003e. Scientists and researchers use spatial computing to track diseases, map the bottom of the oceans, chart the behavior of endangered species, and create election maps in real time. Drones and driverless cars use a variety of spatial computing technologies. Spatial computing works by understanding the physical world, knowing and communicating our relation to places in that world, and navigating through those places. It has changed our lives and infrastructures profoundly, marking a significant shift in how we make our way in the world. This volume in the MIT Essential Knowledge series explains the technologies and ideas behind spatial computing.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe book offers accessible descriptions of GPS and location-based services, including the use of Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and RFID for position determination out of satellite range; remote sensing, which uses satellite and aerial platforms to monitor such varied phenomena as global food production, the effects of climate change, and subsurface natural resources on other planets; geographic information systems (GIS), which store, analyze, and visualize spatial data; spatial databases, which store multiple forms of spatial data; and spatial statistics and spatial data mining, used to analyze location-related data.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49513516531985,"sku":"GOR012109404","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51000582471953,"sku":"NIN9780262538046","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":51565638287633,"sku":"NGR9780262538046","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0262538040.jpg?v=1750974269"},{"product_id":"information-and-society-book-michael-buckland-9780262533386","title":"Information and Society","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eA short, informal account of our ever-increasing dependence on a complex multiplicity of messages, records, documents, and data.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWe 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, Michael Buckland explores the influence of information on what we know, the role of communication and recorded information in our daily lives, and the difficulty (or ease) of finding information. He shows that all this involves human perception, social behavior, changing technologies, and issues of trust.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBuckland argues that every society is an information society; a non-information society would be a contradiction in terms. But the shift from oral and gestural communication to documents, and the wider use of documents facilitated by new technologies, have made our society particularly information intensive. Buckland describes the rising flood of data, documents, and records, outlines the dramatic long-term growth of documents, and traces the rise of techniques to cope with them. He examines the physical manifestation of information as documents, the emergence of data sets, and how documents and data are discovered and used. 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He describes several philosophical and scientific arguments against free will, including one based on Benjamin Libet's famous neuroscientific experiments, which allegedly show that our conscious decisions are caused by neural events that occur before we choose. He considers various religious and philosophical views, including the philosophical pro-free-will view known as compatibilism. Balaguer concludes that the anti-free-will arguments put forward by philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists simply don't work. They don't provide any good reason to doubt the existence of free will. But, he cautions, this doesn't necessarily mean that we have free will. 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Today, more than eighty percent of workers collect and analyze information (often in digital form) in the course of doing their jobs. This book offers a guide to the role of information in modern business, mapping the use of information within work processes and tracing flows of information across supply-chain management, product development, customer relations, and sales. The emphasis is on information itself, not on information technology. Information, overshadowed for a while by the glamour and novelty of IT, is the fundamental component of the modern corporation.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn Information and the Modern Corporation, longtime IBM manager and consultant James Cortada clarifies the differences among data, facts, information, and knowledge and describes how the art of analytics has all but eliminated decision making based on gut feeling, replacing it with fact-based decisions. 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She finds that paradoxes are more than mere puzzles but can prompt new ways of thinking. A paradox can be defined as a set of mutually inconsistent claims, each of which seems true. Paradoxes emerge not just in salons and ivory towers but in everyday life. (An Internet search for paradox brings forth a picture of an ashtray with a no smoking symbol inscribed on it.) Proposing solutions, Cuonzo writes, is a natural response to paradoxes. She invites us to rethink paradoxes by focusing on strategies for solving them, arguing that there is much to be learned from this, regardless of whether any of the more powerful paradoxes is even capable of solution. Cuonzo offers a catalog of paradox-solving strategies -- including the Preemptive-Strike (questioning the paradox itself), the Odd-Guy-Out (calling one of the assumptions into question), and the You-Can't-Get-There-from-Here (denying the validity of the reasoning). She argues that certain types of solutions work better in some contexts than others, and that as paradoxicality increases, the success of certain strategies grows more unlikely. Cuonzo shows that the processes of paradox generation and solution proposal are interesting and important ones. Discovering a paradox leads to advances in knowledge: new science often stems from attempts to solve paradoxes, and the concepts used in the new sciences lead to new paradoxes. As Niels Bohr wrote, How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. 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The glorification of citizenship is a given in today's world, part of a civic narrative that invokes liberation, dignity, and nationhood. In reality, explains Dimitry Kochenov, citizenship is a story of complacency, hypocrisy, and domination, flattering to citizens and demeaning for noncitizens. In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Kochenov explains the state of citizenship in the modern world.   Kochenov offers a critical introduction to a subject most often regarded uncritically, describing what citizenship is, what it entails, how it came about, and how its role in the world has been changing. He examines four key elements of the concept: status, considering how and why the status of citizenship is extended, what function it serves, and who is left behind; rights, particularly the right to live and work in a state; duties, and what it means to be a “good citizen”; and politics, as enacted in the granting and enjoyment of citizenship.   Citizenship promises to apply the attractive ideas of dignity, equality, and human worth—but to strictly separated groups of individuals. Those outside the separation aren't citizens as currently understood, and they do not belong. 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Technologies have advanced to the point of mass commercialization--Roomba, for example--and adoption by governments--most notably, their use of drones. Meanwhile, these devices are being received by a public whose main sources of information about robots are the fantasies of popular culture. We know a lot about C-3PO and Robocop but not much about Atlas, Motoman, Kiva, or Beam--real-life robots that are reinventing warfare, the industrial workplace, and collaboration. In this book, technology analyst John Jordan offers an accessible and engaging introduction to robots and robotics, covering state-of-the-art applications, economic implications, and cultural context.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eJordan chronicles the prehistory of robots and the treatment of robots in science fiction, movies, and television--from the outsized influence of Mary Shelley's \u003ci\u003eFrankenstein\u003c\/i\u003e to Isaac Asimov's \u003ci\u003eI, Robot\u003c\/i\u003e (in which Asimov coined the term robotics). He offers a guided tour of robotics today, describing the components of robots, the complicating factors that make robotics so challenging, and such applications as driverless cars, unmanned warfare, and robots on the assembly line. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eRoboticists draw on such technical fields as power management, materials science, and artificial intelligence. 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It is the basis of the new approach in computing where we do not write programs but collect data; the idea is to learn the algorithms for the tasks automatically from data. As computing devices grow more ubiquitous, a larger part of our lives and work is recorded digitally, and as Big Data has gotten bigger, the theory of machine learning--the foundation of efforts to process that data into knowledge--has also advanced. In this book, machine learning expert Ethem Alpaydin offers a concise overview of the subject for the general reader, describing its evolution, explaining important learning algorithms, and presenting example applications.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAlpaydin offers an account of how digital technology advanced from number-crunching mainframes to mobile devices, putting today's machine learning boom in context. 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Critical thinking is regularly cited as an essential twenty-first century skill, the key to success in school and work. Given our propensity to believe fake news, draw incorrect conclusions, and make decisions based on emotion rather than reason, it might even be said that critical thinking is vital to the survival of a democratic society. But what, exactly, is critical thinking? In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Jonathan Haber explains how the concept of critical thinking emerged, how it has been defined, and how critical thinking skills can be taught and assessed.  Haber describes the term's origins in such disciplines as philosophy, psychology, and science. He examines the components of critical thinking, including structured thinking, language skills, background knowledge, and information literacy, along with such necessary intellectual traits as intellectual humility, empathy, and open-mindedness. He discusses how research has defined critical thinking, how elements of critical thinking have been taught for centuries, and how educators can teach critical thinking skills now.  Haber argues that the most important critical thinking issue today is that not enough people are doing enough of it. Fortunately, critical thinking can be taught, practiced, and evaluated. 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