Books published by MIT Press Ltd

How people judge humans and machines differently, in scenarios involving natural disasters, labor displacement, policing, privacy, algorithmic bias, and more.How would you feel about losing your job to a machine? How about a tsunami alert system that fails? Would you react differently to acts of discrimination depending on whether they were carried out by a machine or by a human? What about public surveillance? How Humans Judge Machines compares people's reactions to actions performed by humans and machines. Using data collected in dozens of experiments, this book reveals the biases that permeate human-machine interactions. Are there conditions in which we judge machines unfairly? Is our judgment of machines affected by the moral dimensions of a scenario? Is our judgment of machine correlated with demographic factors such as education or gender? César Hidalgo and colleagues use hard science to take on these pressing technological questions. Using randomized experiments, they create revealing counterfactuals and build statistical models to explain how people judge artificial intelligence and whether they do it fairly. Through original research, How Humans Judge Machines bring us one step closer tounderstanding the ethical consequences of AI.

A reconceptualization of origins research that exploits a modern understanding of non-covalent molecular forces that stabilize living prokaryotic cells.Scientific research into the origins of life remains exploratory and speculative. Science has no definitive answer to the biggest questions--"What is life?" and "How did life begin on earth?" In this book, Jan Spitzer reconceptualizes origins research by exploiting a modern understanding of non-covalent molecular forces and covalent bond formation--a physicochemical approach propounded originally by Linus Pauling and Max Delbrück. Spitzer develops the Pauling-Delbrück premise as a physicochemical jigsaw puzzle that identifies key stages in life's emergence, from the formation of first oceans, tidal sediments, and proto-biofilms to progenotes, proto-cells and the first cellular organisms.

Rules for building formal models that use fast-and-frugal heuristics, extending the psychological study of classification to the real world of uncertainty.This book focuses on classification--allocating objects into categories--"in the wild," in real-world situations and far from the certainty of the lab. In the wild, unlike in typical psychological experiments, the future is not knowable and uncertainty cannot be meaningfully reduced to probability. Connecting the science of heuristics with machine learning, the book shows how to create formal models using classification rules that are simple, fast, and transparent and that can be as accurate as mathematically sophisticated algorithms developed for machine learning.

An essential guide for teaching and learning computational art and design: exercises, assignments, interviews, and more than 170 illustrations of creative work.This book is an essential resource for art educators and practitioners who want to explore code as a creative medium, and serves as a guide for computer scientists transitioning from STEM to STEAM in their syllabi or practice. It provides a collection of classic creative coding prompts and assignments, accompanied by annotated examples of both classic and contemporary projects, and more than 170 illustrations of creative work, and features a set of interviews with leading educators. Picking up where standard programming guides leave off, the authors highlight alternative programming pedagogies suitable for the art- and design-oriented classroom, including teaching approaches, resources, and community support structures.

An engaging introduction to human and animal movement seen through the lens of mechanics.How do Olympic sprinters run so fast? Why do astronauts adopt a bounding gait on the moon? How do running shoes improve performance while preventing injuries? This engaging and generously illustrated book answers these questions by examining human and animal movement through the lens of mechanics. The authors present simple conceptual models to study walking and running and apply mechanical principles to a range of interesting examples. They explore the biology of how movement is produced, examining the structure of a muscle down to its microscopic force-generating motors. Drawing on their deep expertise, the authors describe how to create simulations that provide insight into muscle coordination during walking and running, suggest treatments to improve function following injury, and help design devices that enhance human performance.Throughout, the book emphasizes established principles that provide a foundation for understanding movement. It also describes innovations in computer simulation, mobile motion monitoring, wearable robotics, and other technologies that build on these fundamentals. The book is suitable for use as a textbook by students and researchers studying human and animal movement. It is equally valuable for clinicians, roboticists, engineers, sports scientists, designers, computer scientists, and others who want to understand the biomechanics of movement.

Detailed answer keys to all 140 self-assessment exercises and solutions to the 173 odd-numbered end-of-chapter exercises in Intermediate Microeconomic Theory.This book accompanies Ana Espinola-Arredondo and Felix Muñoz-Garcia's Intermediate Microeconomic Theory: Tools and Step-by-Step Examples, offering detailed answer keys to all 140 self-assessment exercises and solutions to the 173 odd-numbered end-of-chapter exercises. It provides readable step-by-step explanations and algebra support, enabling students to approach similar exercises on their own, emphasizing the economic intuition behind mathematical results.

Artists and writers consider a tactical desertion from the "culture wars”—a refusal to be distracted, an embrace of the emancipatory understanding of culture.Deserting from the Culture Wars reflects upon and intervenes in our current moment of ever-more polarizing ideological combat, often seen as the return of the "culture wars.” How are these culture wars defined and waged? Engaging in a theater of war that has been delineated by the enemy is a shortcut to defeat. Getting out of the reactive mode that produces little but a series of Pavlovian responses, this book proposes a tactical desertion from the culture wars as they are being waged today—a refusal to play the other side's war games, an unwillingness to be distracted.The volunteer troops in the culture wars are often given marching orders by professional masters of propaganda. What, then, might artists and others who are professionally engaged with images and imaginaries, with narratives and assemblies, have to contribute to the collective discovery of different modes of living culture? Far from limiting the performance of culture to a one-sided speech act, to the abstract "right to say something,” an emancipatory understanding of culture needs to conceive of it as embodied and intersubjective—as a collective performance.ContributorsBini Adamczak, Kader Attia, Rose Hammer, Tom Holert, Charl Landvreugd and Sebastian Olma, Geert Lovink and Esmee Schoutens, Sven Lütticken, Diana McCarty, Dan McQuillan, Johannes Paul Raether, Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Jonas Staal

An examination of free-to-play and mobile games that traces what is valued and what is marginalized in discussions of games.Free-to-play and mobile video games are an important and growing part of the video game industry, and yet they are often disparaged by journalists, designers, and players and pronounced inferior to to games with more traditional payment models. In this book, Christopher Paul shows that underlying the criticism is a bias against these games that stems more from who is making and playing them than how they are monetized. Free-to-play and mobile games appeal to a different kind of player, many of whom are women and many of whom prefer different genres of games than multi-level action-oriented killing fests. It's not a coincidence that some of the few free-to-play games that have been praised by games journalists are League of Legends and World of Tanks.

A collection that goes beyond the canon to analyze influential yet under-examined works of electronic music.This collection of writings on electronic music goes outside the canon to analyze influential works by under-recognized musicians. The contributors, many of whom are composers and performers themselves, offer their unsung musical heroes the sort of in-depth examinations usually reserved for more well-known composers and works. They analyze music from around the world and across genders, race, nationality, and age, discussing works that range from soundscapes of rushing water and resonating pipes to compositions by algorithm. Subjects include the collaboration of performer and composer, as seen in the work of Anne La Berge, Luciano Berio and Cathy Berberian, and others; the choice by Asian composers Zhang Xiaofu and Unsuk Chin to embrace (or not) Eastern themes and styles; and how technologies used by composers created the sound of the works, as exemplified by Bülent Arel's use of voltage-control components as compositional tools and Charles Dodge's resynthesizing of the human voice.ContributorsMarc Battier, Valentina Bertolani, Kerry L. Hagan, Yvette Janine Jackson, Leigh Landy, Pamela Madsen, Miller Puckette, David Rosenboom, Jøran Rudi, Margaret Anne Schedel, Juliana Snapper, Laura ZattraComposersBülent Arel, Cathy Berberian and Luciano Berio, Anne La Berge, Unsuk Chin, Charles Dodge, Jacqueline George, Salvatore Martirano, Teresa Rampazzi, Hildegard Westerkamp, Knut Wiggen, Gayle Young, Zhang Xiaofu