Exploring Top Books of Shelfari

Brain Fiction: Self-Deception and the Riddle of Confabulation (Philosophical Psychopathology)

Brain Fiction: Self-Deception and the Riddle of Confabulation (Philosophical Psychopathology)

by William Hirstein

CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title for 2005 Some neurological patients exhibit a striking tendency to confabulate—to construct false answers to a question while genuinely believing that they are telling the truth. A stroke victim, for example, will describe in detail a conference he attended over the weekend when in fact he has not left the hospital. Normal people, too, sometimes have a tendency to... (more)

Seeing the Forest and the Trees: Human-Environment Interactions in Forest Ecosystems

Seeing the Forest and the Trees: Human-Environment Interactions in Forest Ecosystems

Throughout much of human history, changes to forest ecosystems have come about through natural climatic changes occurring over long periods of time. But scientists now find changes in forest cover dramatically accelerated by such human activities as large-scale agriculture, the building of dams and roads, and the growth of cities with vast areas of asphalt. Changes that once took centuries now take only decades. ... (more)

Thoughtful Interaction Design: A Design Perspective on Information Technology

Thoughtful Interaction Design: A Design Perspective on Information Technology

by Jonas Lo?wgren

The authors of Thoughtful Interaction Design go beyond the usual technical concerns of usability and usefulness to consider interaction design from a design perspective. The shaping of digital artifacts is a design process that influences the form and functions of workplaces, schools, communication, and culture; the successful interaction designer must use both ethical and aesthetic judgment to create designs... (more)

Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture

Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture

by Lisa Gitelman

Choice Outstanding Academic Title, 2007. In Always Already New , Lisa Gitelman explores the newness of new media while she asks what it means to do media history. Using the examples of early recorded sound and digital networks, Gitelman challenges readers to think about the ways that media work as the simultaneous subjects and instruments of historical inquiry. Presenting original case studies of Edison's... (more)

Cornucopia Limited: Design and Dissent on the Internet

Cornucopia Limited: Design and Dissent on the Internet

by Richard Coyne

The network economy presents itself in the transactions of electronic commerce, finance, business, and communications. The network economy is also a social condition of discontinuity, indefinite limits, and in-between spaces. In Cornucopia Limited, Richard Coyne uses the liminality of design—its uneasy position between creativity and commerce—to explore the network economy. He argues that design, with its... (more)

Invisible Engines: How Software Platforms Drive Innovation and Transform Industries

Invisible Engines: How Software Platforms Drive Innovation and Transform Industries

by David S. Evans

Winner of the Business, Management & Accounting category in the 2006 Professional/Scholarly Publishing Annual Awards Competition presented by the Association of American Publishers, Inc. Winner of the Business, Management & Accounting category in the 2006 Professional/Scholarly Publishing Annual Awards Competition presented by the Association of American Publishers, Inc. Software platforms are... (more)

The Evolution of Morality (Life and Mind: Philosophical Issues in Biology and Psychology)

The Evolution of Morality (Life and Mind: Philosophical Issues in Biology and Psychology)

by Richard Joyce

Moral thinking pervades our practical lives, but where did this way of thinking come from, and what purpose does it serve? Is it to be explained by environmental pressures on our ancestors a million years ago, or is it a cultural invention of more recent origin? In The Evolution of Morality , Richard Joyce takes up these controversial questions, finding that the evidence supports an innate basis to human... (more)

Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness (Jean Nicod Lectures)

Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness (Jean Nicod Lectures)

by Daniel C. Dennett

Winner in the Psychology & Cognitive Science catagory of the 2005 Professional/Scholarly Publishing Annual Awards Competition presented by the Association of American Publishers, Inc. In the years since Daniel Dennett's influential Consciousness Explained was published in 1991, scientific research on consciousness has been a hotly contested battleground of rival theories—"so rambunctious," Dennett... (more)

Kernel Methods in Computational Biology (Computational Molecular Biology)

Kernel Methods in Computational Biology (Computational Molecular Biology)

Modern machine learning techniques are proving to be extremely valuable for the analysis of data in computational biology problems. One branch of machine learning, kernel methods, lends itself particularly well to the difficult aspects of biological data, which include high dimensionality (as in microarray measurements), representation as discrete and structured data (as in DNA or amino acid sequences), and the... (more)

Industrial Organization and the Digital Economy

Industrial Organization and the Digital Economy

Digital technology has dramatically changed the structure of many industrial sectors. The rise of the Internet and increased broadband access have given rise to new business models and strategies for firms dealing with both electronic and physical goods. Industrial Organization and the Digital Economy focuses on changes in the two industries most affected by the new technology: software and music. The book... (more)

Living Standards and the Wealth of Nations: Successes and Failures in Real Convergence

Living Standards and the Wealth of Nations: Successes and Failures in Real Convergence

by Stanley Fischer

The question of convergence, or under what conditions the per capita income levels of developing countries can catch up to those found in advanced economies, is critical for understanding economic growth and development. Convergence has happened in many countries and appears to be taking place now in China and India—yet in general per capita income levels in the poorer countries do not converge towards those of... (more)

Sustainability or Collapse?: An Integrated History and Future of People on Earth

Sustainability or Collapse?: An Integrated History and Future of People on Earth

Human history, as written traditionally, leaves out the important ecological and climate context of historical events. But the capability to integrate the history of human beings with the natural history of the Earth now exists, and we are finding that human-environmental systems are intimately linked in ways we are only beginning to appreciate. In Sustainability or Collapse?, researchers from a range of... (more)

The Subtlety of Emotions

by Aharon Ben-Ze?ev

Why do we cry at the movies? What is the best way to manage destructive feelings such as jealousy? Although emotions pervade our lives, their nature, causes, and effects have only recently been studied by social scientists and philosophers. Despite growing scientific interest in the subject, empirical findings have not yet caught up with our intuitive knowledge. In this book Aaron Ben-Ze'ev carries out what he... (more)

Semi-Supervised Learning (Adaptive Computation and Machine Learning)

Semi-Supervised Learning (Adaptive Computation and Machine Learning)

In the field of machine learning, semi-supervised learning (SSL) occupies the middle ground, between supervised learning (in which all training examples are labeled) and unsupervised learning (in which no label data are given). Interest in SSL has increased in recent years, particularly because of application domains in which unlabeled data are plentiful, such as images, text, and bioinformatics. This first... (more)

Learning Kernel Classifiers: Theory and Algorithms (Adaptive Computation and Machine Learning)

Learning Kernel Classifiers: Theory and Algorithms (Adaptive Computation and Machine Learning)

by Ralf Herbrich

Linear classifiers in kernel spaces have emerged as a major topic within the field of machine learning. The kernel technique takes the linear classifier--a limited, but well-established and comprehensively studied model--and extends its applicability to a wide range of nonlinear pattern-recognition tasks such as natural language processing, machine vision, and biological sequence analysis. This book provides the... (more)

Niche Envy: Marketing Discrimination in the Digital Age

Niche Envy: Marketing Discrimination in the Digital Age

by Joseph Turow

We have all been to Web sites that welcome us by name, offering us discounts, deals, or special access to content. For the most part, it feels good to be wanted—to be valued as a customer. But if we thought about it, we might realize that we've paid for this special status by turning over personal information to a company's database. And we might wonder whether other customers get the same deals we get, or... (more)

From Molecule to Metaphor: A Neural Theory of Language (Bradford Books)

From Molecule to Metaphor: A Neural Theory of Language (Bradford Books)

by Jerome A. Feldman

In From Molecule to Metaphor , Jerome Feldman proposes a theory of language and thought that treats language not as an abstract symbol system but as a human biological ability that can be studied as a function of the brain, as vision and motor control are studied. This theory, he writes, is a "bridging theory" that works from extensive knowledge at two ends of a causal chain to explicate the links between.... (more)

Spinning the Semantic Web: Bringing the World Wide Web to Its Full Potential

Spinning the Semantic Web: Bringing the World Wide Web to Its Full Potential

As the World Wide Web continues to expand, it becomes increasingly difficult for users to obtain information efficiently. Because most search engines read format languages such as HTML or SGML, search results reflect formatting tags more than actual page content, which is expressed in natural language. Spinning the Semantic Web describes an exciting new type of hierarchy and standardization that will replace the... (more)

Body Language: Representation in Action (Bradford Books)

Body Language: Representation in Action (Bradford Books)

by Mark Rowlands

In Body Language , Mark Rowlands argues that the problem of representation—how it is possible for one item to represent another—has been exacerbated by the assimilation of representation to the category of the word. That is, the problem is traditionally understood as one of relating inner to outer—relating an inner representing item to something extrinsic or exterior to it. Rowlands argues that at least some... (more)

Virtual Music: Computer Synthesis of Musical Style

Virtual Music: Computer Synthesis of Musical Style

by David Cope

Virtual Music is about artificial creativity. Focusing on the author's Experiments in Musical Intelligence computer music composing program, the author and a distinguished group of experts discuss many of the issues surrounding the program, including artificial intelligence, music cognition, and aesthetics. The book is divided into four parts. The first part provides a historical background to Experiments in... (more)

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