A novel account of the explanatory role of representation in both the cognitive sciences and commonsense practice that preserves the virtues without the defects of the prevailing two views about mental representation. Philosophers of mind tend to hold one of two broad views about mental representation: they are either robustly realist about mental representations, taking them to have determinate, objective content independent of attributors' explanatory interests and goals, or they embrace some form of anti-realism, holding that mental representations are at best useful fictions. Neither view is satisfactory. In Deflating Mental Representation , Frances Egan develops and defends a distinctive third way—a view she calls a deflationary account of mental representation—that both resolves philosophical worries about content and best fits actual practice in science and everyday life. According to Egan's deflationary account, appeal to mental representation does indeed pick out causes of behavior, but the attribution of content to these causes is best understood as a pragmatically motivated gloss , justified in part by attributors' explanatory interests and goals. Content plays an explanatory role in the deflationary account, but one quite different than that assumed by robust representational realists. Egan also develops a novel account of perceptual experience as a kind of modeling of our inner lives by aspects of external reality and explains the role of appeal to representation in this process.

How dominant culture—from sexism and homophobia to racism, capitalism, ableism, and more—has limited the science of animal behavior, and how we can free ourselves from these limited perspectives. In Feminism in the Wild, Ambika Kamath and Melina Packer reveal how scientists studying animal behavior have long projected human norms and values onto animals while seeking to understand them. When scientific studies conclude that these norms and values are natural in animals, it makes it easier to think of them as natural in humans too. And because scientists, historically and to this day, largely belong to elite, powerful segments of society, the norms and values embedded in animal behavior science match those of the already powerful. How can animal behavior science escape this trap of naturalizing dominant culture? Drawing from decades of feminist, antiracist, queer, disability justice, and Marxist contributions—including those of biologists—Kamath and Packer break down persistent assumptions in the status quo of animal behavior science and offer a multitude of alternative approaches. Core concepts in animal behavior science and evolutionary biology—from sex categories and sexual selection to fitness, adaptation, biological determinism, and more—are carefully contextualized and critically reexamined. This unique collaboration between an animal behavior scientist and a feminist science studies scholar is an illuminating and hopeful read for anyone who is curious about how animals behave, and anyone who wants to break free from scientific approaches that perpetuate systems of oppression.

The definitive volume of recent innovations in antenna technology developed for a wide variety of system applications at MIT Lincoln Laboratory. Antenna technology plays a key role in enabling next-generation sensing and communications for ground-based, airborne, and spaceborne systems across a wide spectrum of frequencies and applications. Advances in radio frequency microelectronics, commercial high-volume manufacturing and packaging, high-fidelity modeling and simulation tools, and affordable high-speed digital signal processing offer new options for next-generation antenna systems. Perspectives in Antenna Technology , by Jeffrey S. Herd, Alan J. Fenn, and M. David Conway, describes a variety of antenna research and development projects from MIT Lincoln Laboratory over the past fifteen years. In addition to highlighting current systems applications for the new antenna technologies, the book provides a modern perspective on the evolution of antenna technology at MIT Lincoln Laboratory. The contributors to this book are all from MIT Lincoln Laboratory. The developments covered include those aimed at reducing the cost of phased array antennas by leveraging high-volume printed circuit board manufacturing and highly integrated packaging techniques; novel solutions to enable ultra-lightweight deployable antennas for space and airborne applications; vector sensor arrays; two unique imaging radar systems, a video-rate microwave imaging system for person-borne concealed threat detection and a system capable of ultrawideband imaging of satellites; simultaneous transmit and receive (STAR) antennas; a variety of novel wideband array antennas, including dual-polarized stepped-notch arrays and coupled dipole arrays; and several types of custom millimeter wave (mmWave) antennas.

An engaging introduction to standards, the invisible infrastructure that shapes the built and digital environments of the modern world. Standards are the DNA of the built environment, encoded in nearly all objects that surround us in the modern world. In Standards, Jeffrey Pomerantz and Jason Griffey provide an essential introduction to this invisible but critical form of infrastructure—the rules and specifications that govern so many elements of the physical and digital environments, from the color of school buses to the shape of shipping containers. In an approachable, often outright funny fashion, Pomerantz and Griffey explore the nature, function, and effect of standards in everyday life. Using examples of specific standards and contexts in which they are applied—in the realms of technology, economics, sociology, and information science—they illustrate how standards influence the development and scope, and indeed the very range of possibilities of our built and social worlds. Deeply informed and informally written, their work makes a subject generally deemed boring, complex, and fundamentally important comprehensible, clear, and downright engaging.

How scientific studies of human behavior can be replicated with the consistency and rigor characteristic of the physical sciences, yielding scientific “laws.” In Laws of Human Behavior , Donald Pfaff and Sandra Sherman argue that many behavioral and neural discoveries—verified over the years through precise, reliable measurement—are tantamount to “laws,” comparable in rigor and replicability to physical laws such as gravity and the second law of thermodynamics. Drawing on research in areas including psychophysics, various types of conditioning and habit formation, and even social behaviors, they show how important aspects of the behavioral sciences contribute to laws that should be celebrated now. Responding to what some commentators have called a crisis in reliability, the authors make a compelling case for the progress that experimental work in areas, formerly labeled as “soft” science, has achieved. The book is international in scope. References range from the early nineteenth-century work of Weber to papers published in 2023. In particular, the authors cite important accomplishments in the behavioral and neural sciences of the past few decades that support the characterization of these sciences as “exact.” Each chapter of the book has three parts: examples of the law's manifestations in everyday life, examples of the laboratory science that supports the law, and neurobiological results that further support the validity of the law. The book also offers clues for understanding where the field of behavioral science is headed. The authors intend for the book to be accessible to interested nonscientists.

An edited collection that explores the multifaceted experiences of Chinese culinary modernity both within and outside of mainland China from the mid-19th century to present. Modern Chinese Foodways defines some of the major processes by which Chinese food and foodways have become modern, with a focus on the period from the mid-nineteenth to the twenty-first century. The editors, Jia-Chen Fu, Michelle T. King, and Jakob A. Klein, highlight four prominent areas of change: commodification of food production; the scientization of expertise and the development of new food technologies; the creation of new culinary identities based on gender, ethnicity, and nation; and the circuits of migration taking place since the nineteenth century. This collection argues that Chinese food and foodways are very much modern—not a given in the face of the chorus of voices that insists on emphasizing its ancient roots—in ways that both recall the experiences of other cultures, as well as in ways unique to China's own historical trajectory. The book combines incisive, original scholarship by thirteen leading voices in the field with editorial essays on the past and future of Chinese food studies to frame the field of inquiry for the next generation of Chinese food studies scholars. Demonstrating the significance of modern Chinese foodways to the phenomenon of culinary modernity writ large, which is still largely shaped by Euro-American perspectives and priorities, Modern Chinese Foodways is the first book of its kind.

In this pioneering science-fictional treatment of superhuman intelligence, a mutant wonder child's insights prove devastating. Science fiction luminary Ted Chiang introduces The Hampdenshire Wonder , one of the genre's first treatments of superhuman intelligence. Victor Stott is a large-headed “supernormal” mutated in the womb by his parents' desire to have a child born without habits. Known as “the Wonder,” Victor surveys humankind's science, philosophy, history, literature, religion—the best that has been thought and said—and dismisses it brutally: “So elementary. . . inchoate. . . a disjunctive patchwork.” Rejecting “the interposing and utterly false concepts of space and time,” the Wonder claims that life itself is merely “a disease of the ether.” Unable to deal with the child's disenchanting insights, his adult interlocutors seek to silence him. . . perhaps permanently.

On the timing of seasonal activity in plants and animals, the impact of climate change, and what each of us, as everyday phenologists, can do to help. Phenology is all about timing—when trees leaf out, flowers bloom, birds migrate, animals bear young and hibernate—and it is everywhere around us. This handy companionable volume shows how we are all phenologists in our own way, and how the everyday science can help us make sense of the changing seasons and our changing world. Explaining how the phenomenon of phenology is threaded through our daily lives, Theresa Crimmins points to events that occur on an annual basis in plants' and animals' lives in response to fluctuations in daylength, temperatures, and rainfall patterns. She also covers less visible seasonal events, such as when roots typically begin to grow or when mushrooms release their spores. On a more urgent note, Phenology describes how this seasonal activity is being affected by rapidly changing climate conditions—and why this matters. Consequently, the book invites readers to participate in documenting the timing of seasonal life cycle events—for the practice's real benefits to mental health, but also for the good of the environment, as the data gathered can be directly helpful in supporting climate change action.

A scientifically-precipitated, out-of-control tale of evolution set in Antarctica—it predates Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness —by a mathematician of note who also wrote science fiction. In The Greatest Adventure , an expedition to Antarctica discovers remnants of an elder race with advanced technology. These ancients had discovered the secret of developing new life-forms. . . but when the mutations threatened to run amok, their creators entombed their entire civilization in ice. Intrepid aviatrix Edith Lane and her comrades must flee through caverns inhabited by the mutated monsters, and when frozen spores begin to thaw out, the planet is threatened by malign plant life. The Greatest Adventure is a tale of horror by John Taine—the pseudonym of mathematician Eric Temple Bell—that is not without moments of humor.

The problem with expertise—and the dark side of the equation “knowledge = power.” Experts are not infallible. Treating them as such has done us all a grave disservice and, as The Weaponization of Expertise makes painfully clear, given rise to the very populism that all-knowing experts and their elite coterie decry. Jacob Hale Russell and Dennis Patterson use the devastating example of the COVID-19 pandemic to illustrate their case, revealing how the hubris of all-too-human experts undermined—perhaps irreparably—public faith in elite policymaking. Paradoxically, by turning science into dogmatism, the overweening elite response has also proved deeply corrosive to expertise itself—in effect, doing exactly what elite policymakers accuse their critics of doing. A much-needed corrective to a dangerous blind faith in expertise, The Weaponization of Expertise identifies a cluster of pathologies that have enveloped many institutions meant to help referee expert knowledge, in particular a disavowal of the doubt, uncertainty, and counterarguments that are crucial to the accumulation of knowledge. At a time when trust in expertise and faith in institutions are most needed and most lacking, this work issues a stark reminder that a crisis of misinformation may well begin at the top.

A new perspective on the spatial complexity and plurality of Japanese videogames. Unboxing Japanese Videogames uncovers the complex and plural spatialities of commercial videogames published in Japan between 1985 and 2015. Rejecting the “boxing” inherent in the phrase “Japanese videogames,” Martin Roth explores a series of spatialities that unfold in videogame production and distribution. The book develops a notion of spatialization that is applied in the analysis of contents or genre distributions in Japan, the US, the UK, Germany, and France, the distribution of videogame works across different important markets, the geography of actors involved in videogame production and their gradual spatialization over time, and the functional spatialization of game production across a diverse range of platforms. This book is the first English-language study to provide an overview of the subject and also the first to explore the spatial history of FromSoftware games. It stands out because it does so quantitatively, offering a macro-perspective on the field of commercial videogames instead of relying on sales statistics or case studies. In addition to a wide range of related scholarship in English, the book engages actively with scholarship and other relevant resources in Japanese. Over thirty visualizations make the findings of the book tangible and invite the reader to explore the spatial complexity of commercial videogames further.

How technology creates new possibilities for transgender people, and how trans experiences, in turn, create new possibilities for technology. Mainstream technologies often exclude or marginalize transgender users. Trans Technologies describes what happens when trans people take technology design into their own hands. Oliver L. Haimson, whose research into gender transition and technology has defined this area of study, draws on transgender studies and his own in-depth interviews with more than 100 creators of technology—including apps, games, health resources, extended reality systems, and supplies designed to address challenges trans people face—to explain what trans technology is and to explore its present possibilities and limitations, as well as its future prospects. Haimson surveys the landscape of trans technologies to reveal the design processes that brought these technologies to life, and to show how trans people often must rely on community, technology, and the combination of the two to meet their basic needs and challenges. His work not only identifies the role of trans technology in caring for individuals within the trans community but also shows how trans technology creation empowers some trans people to create their own tools for navigating the world. Articulating which trans needs and challenges are currently being addressed by technology and which still need to be addressed; describing how trans technology creators are accomplishing this work; examining how privilege, race, and access to resources impact which trans technologies are built and who may be left out; and highlighting new areas of innovation to be explored, Trans Technologies opens the way to meaningful social change.

How the built environment, understood as spatial capital, governs both everyday life in cities and urban systems more generally. In an age of social and environmental crises, we need to critically rethink the role of the built environment and how best to put it to work. Measures and Meanings of Spatial Capital presents a new theory of spatial capital, arguing that spatial form is essential for building resilience into highly complex urban systems. Lars Marcus argues that the built environment constitutes a form of capital that enhances other forms of capital in cities (such as social, economic, and ecological capital), if designed with those goals in mind. This represents an important and necessary shift in how we approach urban space in the numerous studies of cities that are conducted in a range of disciplines today, such as urban sociology, urban economics, and urban ecology. In contemporary urban studies, land has oddly lost its position alongside labor and capital as one of the three fundamental production factors in economic theory, but as Marcus shows, misconceptions of land are at the root of social and environmental crises worldwide. By defining the challenges and modeling our use of spatial form to enhance/improve land, and then synthesizing data into a unified theory of spatial capital, Marcus provides a crucial reframing of how we can best plan and design our cities for the global challenges we are facing.

How to create our industrial future with inspiration and lessons from the originators of the industrial revolution. Climate change, global disruption, and labor scarcity are forcing us to rethink the underlying principles of industrial society. In The New Lunar Society , David Mindell envisions this new industrialism from the fundamentals, drawing on the eighteenth century when first principles were formed at the founding of the Industrial Revolution. While outlining the new industrialism, he tells the story of the Lunar Society, a group of engineers, scientists, and industrialists who came together to apply the principles of the Enlightenment to industrial processes. Those principles were collaboration, the marriage of practical and scientific knowledge, and the belief that the world could progress through making things. The Lunar Society included pioneers like James Watt, Benjamin Franklin, and Josiah Wedgwood, and their conversations no less than ignited the Industrial Revolution and shaped the founding of the United States. Telling the stories of these makers in parallel with those of our current moment of crisis on multiple fronts, Mindell argues for a new industrialism. He asks: What does industry look like when it strives to optimize for the lowest carbon footprint as well as the greatest profit? When it values resilience as much as efficiency? When it upholds dignified, inclusive, sustainable work? Optimistic but not utopian about our ability to build the world, The New Lunar Society shines a light on how a new generation can reanimate the best ideas of our thinking doer forebears and begin to build a future that is both realistic and human-centered.

From the distinguished art critic and historian, vital essays on key artists and critics, revealing how they redefined art and criticism over the last six decades. “Serious art anticipates the future as much as it reflects the present,” Hal Foster remarked in a 2015 interview. “By the same token serious art history is driven by the present as much as it is informed by the past.” In Fail Better , Foster, an art critic and historian whose influential work spans disciplines and decades, brings this peripatetic perspective to contemporary art, art criticism, art history, and his own work over the past 50 years. In these 40 texts, Foster reviews artists from Richard Hamilton and Jasper Johns to Gerhard Richter and Ed Ruscha; considers contemporaries from Louise Lawler and Cindy Sherman to Jeremy Deller and Adam Pendleton; and traces the development of criticism since the early 1960s, with essays on such influential figures as Susan Sontag and Rosalind Krauss and institutions like Artforum magazine and the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. Taking his title from Beckett—“try again, fail again, fail better”—Foster notes that, etymologically, an essay is always an attempt, more or less failed. Critics fail artworks, because there can never be a definitive reading; art fails its historical moment, because it cannot resolve the contradictions that prompt it. But in these failures Foster finds historical consciousness, and with it the promise of future work, future illumination. In his “reckonings” he turns his own long history of criticism to account, and succeeds in conveying shifting concepts of art and criticism, the work of key artists and critics, and the relationships between criticism, theory, history, and politics over the last six decades.

How a small number of risky experiments creates many unwieldy problems for life science research. The life sciences have never been more critical to human health, wealth, and security. But with any endeavor comes risk, and the last decade has seen concerns raised about gain-of function-research in which a microbe, usually a virus, is given new properties like enhanced lethality, transmissibility, or the capability to infect new species. In 2021 the term seeped into the tabloids when a conflict between Senator Rand Paul and Dr. Anthony Fauci arose over the origins of COVID-19. In Gain of Function , Nicholas Evans—who has spent his career studying gain-of-function research—describes what this kind of research is, what it isn't, and why a small number of scientific experiments continues to make headlines. Evans begins with a description of what gain-of-function research is in science, and what it means in government policy. He tells the story of the original papers that sparked controversy more than a decade ago, unpacking them for readers unfamiliar with virology research, and he identifies where and why policymakers and scientists alike became concerned. He then turns to the history of policies that attempt to regulate gain-of-function research, the current controversies, and the ethics of risky research. He concludes with the future of gain of function, including how debates about gain of function will influence science and public health in years to come.

A fascinating and beautifully illustrated account of trying to conceive in both the past and the present. Inspired by the author's own experiences, Conceiving Histories brings together history, personal memoir, and illustration to investigate the culturally hidden experience of trying to conceive. In elegant, engaging prose, Isabel Davis explores the combination of myth, fantasy, science, and pseudo-science that the (un)reproductive body encounters in pursuit of a viable pregnancy. The book chronicles the trying-to-conceive lifecycle arc from sex education at school, through the desire to be a parent, into the specifics of trying and struggling to conceive. It also looks back at conception throughout history to open a new vista on what we live with today. A central argument of Davis's is that historical people lived with the unknown just like we do but were more explicitly able to acknowledge it. In an age of assistive reproductive technologies, the act of embracing uncertainty seems difficult. Although the topic of not conceiving is potentially painful, this is not a grim book; more than grief, it is motivated by curiosity, wonder, compassion, and even humor. With 108 full-color illustrations by Anna Burel, Conceiving Histories is also a beautiful material object, an intentionally playful antidote and supplement to online search engines—the resort of so many embroiled in fertility challenges.

The definitive guidebook for using video in modern communication. Video (television, film, the moving image generally) is today's most popular information medium. Two-thirds of the world's internet traffic is video. Americans get their news and information more often from screens and speakers than through any other means. The Moving Image is the first authoritative account of how we have arrived here, together with the first definitive manual to help writers, educators, and publishers use video more effectively. Drawing on decades as an educator, publisher, and producer, MIT's Peter Kaufman presents new tools, best practices, and community resources for integrating film and sound into media that matters. Kaufman describes video's vital role in politics, law, education, and entertainment today, only 130 years since the birth of film. He explains how best to produce video, distribute it, clear rights to it, cite it, and, ultimately, archive and preserve it. With detailed guidance on producing and deploying video and sound for publication, finding and using archival video and sound, securing rights and permissions, developing distribution strategies, and addressing questions about citation, preservation, and storage—across the broadest spectrum of platforms, publications, disciplines, and formats— The Moving Image equips readers for the medium's continued ascendance in education, publishing, and knowledge dissemination in the decades to come. And, modeled in part on Strunk and White's classic, The Elements of Style , it's also a highly enjoyable read.

What makes human cognition distinct from animal and artificial forms of intelligence—and how analogies play a crucial role in our unique abilities. In The Human Edge , cognitive scientist, poet, and translator Keith Holyoak takes a fresh look at what makes human intelligence special. His focus is analogy—the ability to see relational similarities between things that on the surface seem unalike. The book brings together a half century of research in cognitive, comparative, and developmental psychology, coupled with work in philosophy, law, education, linguistics, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence. Rather than simply examining analogy as an isolated human ability, Holyoak places it in the broader context of a trinity of special human capacities—analogy, language, and understanding the minds of other people. Each of these capacities relies on distinct neural circuitry in the human brain. Holyoak analyzes the similarities—and critical differences—between cognition in humans and in other intelligent animals, ranging from crows to chimpanzees. He also traces how relational thinking develops in children, emphasizing the distinctive advances that begin at about age three. Along the way, Holyoak paints a broad picture of how people use analogy in everyday life—to make jokes, to argue, to teach, to make moral judgments. He considers when an analogy counts as rational evidence—for or against a scientific hypothesis, or the judgment in a legal case. He also evaluates the most recent advances in artificial intelligence that have started to achieve complex tasks previously limited to humans while highlighting the distinctive aspects of human creativity. In a time of rapid technological change, with ominous portents for society, this book provides a timely reexamination of what really counts as the human edge.

An in-depth investigation of the Twitch streamers who make up the largest population on the platform: those streaming to small audiences or even no one. The vast majority of people who stream themselves playing videogames online do so with few or no viewers. In Streaming by the Rest of Us , Mia Consalvo, Marc Lajeunesse, and Andrei Zanescu investigate who they are, why they do so, and why this form of leisure activity is important to understand. Unlike the esports athletes and streaming superstars who receive the lion's share of journalistic and academic attention, microstreamers are not in it for the money and barely have an audience. In this, the first book dedicated to the latter group, the authors gather interviews from dozens of microstreamers from 2017 to 2019 to discuss their lives, struggles, hopes, and goals. For readers interested in livestreaming, and Twitch in particular, the book rethinks the medium's history through accounts of the everyday uses of webcams, with particular attention to notions of liveness and authenticity. These two concepts have become calling cards for the videogame livestreaming platform and underlie streamer motivations, the construction of their practices (whether casual, serious, or anywhere in between), and the complex “metas” that take shape over time. The book also looks at the authors' own practices of livestreaming, focusing on what can be gained through experiencing the lived reality of the practice. Finally, the authors explain how Twitch's platform (studied from 2017–2023) informs how streamers structure their every day and how corporate ideologies bleed into real-world spaces like TwitchCon.