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A concise history of spaceflight, from military rocketry through Sputnik, Apollo, robots in space, space culture, and human spaceflight today. Spaceflight is one of the greatest human achievements of the twentieth century. The Soviets launched Sputnik, the first satellite, in 1957; less than twelve years later, the American Apollo astronauts landed on the Moon. In this volume of the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Michael Neufeld offers a concise...
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The history of computing could be told as the story of hardware and software, or the story of the Internet, or the story of "smart" hand-held devices, with subplots involving IBM, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook and Twitter. In this account of the invention and development of digital technology, the author, a computer historian offers a broader and more useful perspective. He identifies four major threads running throughout all of computing's technological...
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A few decades into the digital era, scientists discovered that thinking in terms of computation made possible an entirely new way of organizing scientific investigation; eventually, every field had a computational branch: computational physics, computational biology, computational sociology. More recently, "computational thinking" has become part of the K-12 curriculum. But what is computational thinking? This volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge...
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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...
5) Nihilism
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When someone is labeled a nihilist, it's not usually meant as a compliment. Most of us associate nihilism with destructiveness and violence. Nihilism means, literally, "an ideology of nothing. " Is nihilism, then, believing in nothing? Or is it the belief that life is nothing? Or the belief that the beliefs we have amount to nothing? If we can learn to recognize the many varieties of nihilism, Nolen Gertz writes, then we can learn to distinguish what...
6) 3D printing
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"3-D Printing is a general introduction to both industrial and consumer fabrication of material for the educated lay reader. It looks at established markets for plastic and metal printing, as well as at emerging uses such as buildings, food, bioprinting, and clothing. Implications for organizations, law, policy, and existing businesses are a major emphasis: the book is less about how 3-D printing works than on what it means and why it matters"--
7) Extremism
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A rising tide of extremist movements threaten to destabilize civil societies around the globe. It has never been more important to understand extremism, yet the dictionary definition-a logical starting point in a search for understanding-tells us only that extremism is "the quality or state of being extreme." In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, J. M. Berger offers a nuanced introduction to extremist movements, explaining what...
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Humans are hard-wired for collaboration, and new technologies of communication act as a super-amplifier of our natural collaborative mindset. This volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series examines the emergence of a new kind of social collaboration enabled by networked technologies. This new collaborative society might be characterized as a series of services and startups that enable peer-to-peer exchanges and interactions though technology....
9) Algorithms
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Digital technology runs on algorithms, sets of instructions that describe how to do something efficiently. Application areas range from search engines to tournament scheduling, DNA sequencing, and machine learning. Arguing that every educated person today needs to have some understanding of algorithms and what they do, in this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Panos Louridas offers an introduction to algorithms that is accessible...
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Billions 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 Pokemon Go. 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...
11) Smart Cities
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Over the past ten years, urban planners, technology companies, and governments have promoted smart cities with a somewhat utopian vision of urban life made knowable and manageable through data collection and analysis. Emerging smart cities have become both crucibles and showrooms for the practical application of the Internet of Things, cloud computing, and the integration of big data into everyday life. Are smart cities optimized, sustainable, digitally...
12) AI Ethics
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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 of ongoing debate. This volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series offers an accessible synthesis of...
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The beginning of the modern contraceptive era began in 1882, when Dr. Aletta Jacobs opened the first birth control clinic in Amsterdam. The founding of this facility, and the clinical provision of contraception that it enabled, marked the moment when physicians started to take the prevention of pregnancy seriously as a medical concern. In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Donna Drucker traces the history of modern contraception,...
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The dream of a universal translation device goes back many decades, long before Douglas Adams's fictional Babel fish provided this service in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Since the advent of computers, research has focused on the design of digital machine translation tools-computer programs capable of automatically translating a text from a source language to a target language. This has become one of the most fundamental tasks of artificial...
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A concise introduction to the history and methods of espionage, illustrated by spy stories from antiquity to today's high-tech world.
Espionage is one of the most secret of human activities. It is also, as the popularity of spy stories suggests, one of the most intriguing. This book pulls the veil back on the real world of espionage, revealing how spying actually works. In a refreshingly clear, concise manner, Kristie Macrakis guides listeners through...
16) Neuroplasticity
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Fifty years ago, neuroscientists thought that a mature brain was fixed like a fly in amber, unable to change. Today, we know that our brains and nervous systems change throughout our lifetimes. This concept of neuroplasticity has captured the imagination of a public eager for self-improvement -- and has inspired countless Internet entrepreneurs who peddle dubious "brain training" games and apps. In this book, Moheb Costandi offers a concise and engaging...
17) The Future
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In this volume of the MIT Press's Essential Knowledge series, Nick Montfort argues that the future is something to be made, not predicted. Montfort offers what he considers essential knowledge about the future, as seen in the work of writers, artists, inventors, and designers (mainly in Western culture) who developed and described the core components of the futures they envisioned. Montfort's approach is not that of futurology or scenario planning;...
18) Causal Inference
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A nontechnical guide to the basic ideas of modern causal inference, with illustrations from health, the economy, and public policy.
Which of two antiviral drugs does the most to save people infected with Ebola virus? Does a daily glass of wine prolong or shorten life? Does winning the lottery make you more or less likely to go bankrupt? How do you identify genes that cause disease? Do unions raise wages? Do some antibiotics have lethal side effects?...
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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?
Haber describes the term's origins in such disciplines as philosophy,...
20) fMRI
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The discovery of functional MRI (fMRI) methodology in 1991 was a breakthrough in neuroscience research. This non-invasive, relatively high-speed, and high sensitivity method of mapping human brain activity enabled observation of subtle localized changes in blood flow associated with brain activity. Thousands of scientists around the world have not only embraced fMRI as a new and powerful method that complemented their ongoing studies but have also...
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