An accessible synthesis of ethical issues raised by artificial intelligence that moves beyond hype and nightmare scenarios to address concrete questions. Artificial intelligence powers Google's search engine, enables Facebook to target advertising, and allows Alexa and Siri to do their jobs. AI is also behind self-driving cars, predictive policing, and autonomous weapons that can kill without human intervention. These and other AI applications raise complex ethical issues that are the subject...

What does the city's form actually mean to the people who live there? What can the city planner do to make the city's image more vivid and memorable to the city dweller? To answer these questions, Mr. Lynch, supported by studies of Los Angeles, Boston, and Jersey City, formulates a new criterion -- imageability -- and shows its potential value as a guide for the building and rebuilding of cities. The wide scope of this study leads to an original and vital method for the evaluation of city for...

This upper-level undergraduate text provides an introduction to industrial organization theory along with applications and nontechnical analyses of the legal system and antitrust laws. Using the modern approach but without emphasizing the mathematical generality inherent in many of the arguments, it bridges the gap between existing nontheoretical texts written for undergraduates and highly technical texts written for graduate students. The book can also be used in masters' programs, and advan...

A synthesis of biomechanics and neural control that draws on recent advances in robotics to address control problems solved by the human sensorimotor system. This book proposes a transdisciplinary approach to investigating human motor control that synthesizes musculoskeletal biomechanics and neural control. The authors argue that this integrated approach-which uses the framework of robotics to understand sensorimotor control problems-offers a more complete and accurate description than either...

How lessons from kindergarten can help everyone develop the creative thinking skills needed to thrive in today's society. In kindergartens these days, children spend more time with math worksheets and phonics flashcards than building blocks and finger paint. Kindergarten is becoming more like the rest of school.

In Lifelong Kindergarten, learning expert Mitchel Resnick argues for exactly the opposite: the rest of school (even the rest of life) should be more like kindergarten. To thrive in to...

A completely revised edition, offering new design recipes for interactive programs and support for images as plain values, testing, event-driven programming, and even distributed programming. This introduction to programming places computer science at the core of a liberal arts education. Unlike other introductory books, it focuses on the program design process, presenting program design guidelines that show the reader how to analyze a problem statement, how to formulate concise goals, how to...

A concise introduction to the theory of contracts, emphasizing basic tools that allow the reader to understand the main theoretical models; revised and updated throughout for this edition. The theory of contracts grew out of the failure of the general equilibrium model to account for the strategic interactions among agents that arise from informational asymmetries. This popular text, revised and updated throughout for the second edition, serves as a concise and rigorous introduction to the th...

An introduction to the mathematical concepts and techniques needed for the construction and analysis of models in molecular systems biology.

Systems techniques are integral to current research in molecular cell biology, and system-level investigations are often accompanied by mathematical models. These models serve as working hypotheses: they help us to understand and predict the behavior of complex systems. This book offers an introduction to mathematical concepts and techniques needed for t...

Interdisciplinary perspectives on the capacity to perceive, appreciate, and make music. Research shows that all humans have a predisposition for music, just as they do for language. All of us can perceive and enjoy music, even if we can't carry a tune and consider ourselves unmusical. This volume offers interdisciplinary perspectives on the capacity to perceive, appreciate, and make music. Scholars from biology, musicology, neurology, genetics, computer science, anthropology, psychology, and ...

The new edition of a comprehensive overview of the modern Chinese economy, revised to reflect the end of the miracle growth period. This comprehensive overview of the modern Chinese economy by a noted expert on China's economic development offers a quality and breadth of coverage not found in any other English-language text. In The Chinese Economy, Barry Naughton provides both a broadly focused introduction to China's economy since 1949 and original insights based on his own extensive researc...