Books

An accessible guide to the major issues and arguments surrounding school choice. The issues and arguments surrounding school choice are sometimes h...

What beliefs are, what they do for us, how we come to hold them, and how to evaluate them. Our beliefs constitute a large part of our knowledge of ...

The idea of technological singularity, and what it would mean if ordinary human intelligence were enhanced or overtaken by artificial intelligence....

A concise, nontechnical overview of the development of machine translation, including the different approaches, evaluation issues, and major player...

A concise history of GPS, from its military origins to its commercial applications and ubiquity in everyday life. GPS is ubiquitous in everyday lif...

How the future has been imagined and made, through the work of writers, artists, inventors, and designers. The future is like an unwritten book. It...

A guided tour through the Internet of Things, a networked world of connected devices, objects, and people that is changing the way we live and work...

What extremism is, how extremist ideologies are constructed, and why extremism can escalate into violence. A rising tide of extremist movements thr...

An accessible introduction to the basics of macroeconomics and how it affects the local and global economies. Macroeconomics takes a broad perspect...

An accessible, nontechnical overview of active touch sensing, from sensory receptors in the skin to tactile surfaces on flat screen displays. Hapti...

A short, informal account of our ever-increasing dependence on a complex multiplicity of messages, records, documents, and data. We live in an info...

A biography of two troublesome words. Isn't it ironic? Or is it? Never mind, I'm just being sarcastic (or am I?). Irony and sarcasm are two of the ...

A concise overview of machine learning-computer programs that learn from data-which underlies applications that include recommendation systems, fac...

A concise and accessible guide to techniques for detecting doctored and fake images in photographs and digital media. Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Mussolin...

An accessible introduction to the history, fundamental concepts, challenges, and controversies of the fMRI by one of the pioneers in the field. The...

A comprehensive overview of developments in augmented reality, virtual reality, and mixed reality-and how they could affect every part of our lives...

Why cloud computing represents a paradigm shift for business, and how business users can best take advantage of cloud services. Most of the informa...

How networked technology enables the emergence of a new collaborative society. Humans are hard-wired for collaboration, and new technologies of com...

A compact and accessible history, from punch cards and calculators to UNIVAC and ENIAC, the personal computer, Silicon Valley, and the Internet. Th...

A concise introduction to crowdsourcing that goes beyond social media buzzwords to explain what crowdsourcing really is and how it works. Ever sinc...

What happens when people turn their everyday experience into data: an introduction to the essential ideas and key challenges of self-tracking. Peop...

A concise history of spaceflight, from military rocketry through Sputnik, Apollo, robots in space, space culture, and human spaceflight today. Spac...

Key concepts, definitions, examples, and historical contexts for understanding smart cities, along with discussions of both drawbacks and benefits ...

Everything you always wanted to know about MOOCs: an account of massive open online courses and what they might mean for the future of higher educa...

A concise introduction to the basics of open access, describing what it is (and isn't) and showing that it is easy, fast, inexpensive, legal, and b...

An exploration of quantum entanglement and the ways in which it contradicts our everyday assumptions about the ultimate nature of reality. Quantum ...

An overview of recycling as an activity and a process, following different materials through the waste stream. Is there a point to recycling? Is re...

An accessible and engaging account of robots, covering the current state of the field, the fantasies of popular culture, and implications for life ...

Everything we need to know about metadata, the usually invisible infrastructure for information with which we interact every day. When "metadata" b...

Taking "Gangnam Style" seriously: what Internet memes can tell us about digital culture. In December 2012, the exuberant video "Gangnam Style" beca...

In this provocative book, Robert Atkinson and Michael Lind argue that small business is not, as is widely claimed, the basis of American prosperity...

Photographs have been doctored since photography was invented. Dictators have erased people from photographs and from history. Politicians have man...

How food pantries stigmatize their clients through a discourse that emphasizes hard work, self help, and economic productivity rather than food jus...

An astronaut returns to Earth after a ten-year mission and finds a society that he barely recognizes. Stanislaw Lem's Return from the Stars recount...

Translated by Michael Kandel A playful, witty, reflective memoir of childhood by the science fiction master Stanislaw Lem. With Highcastle, Stanisl...

Translated by Bill Johnston A space cruiser, in search of its sister ship, encounters beings descended from self-replicating machines. In the grand...

Translated by William Brand An early realist novel by Stanislaw Lem, taking place in a Polish psychiatric hospital during World War II. Taking plac...

Translated by Michael Kandel Scientists attempt to decode what may be a message from intelligent beings in outer space. By pure chance, scientists ...

The many books on globalization published over the past few years range from claims that the world is flat to an unlikely rehabilitation of Genghis...

In Artificial Unintelligence, Meredith Broussard argues that our collective enthusiasm for applying computer technology to every aspect of life has...

Growth has been both an unspoken and an explicit aim of our individual and collective striving. It governs the lives of microorganisms and galaxies...

Most of us feel at home in front of a computer; we own smartphones, tablets, and laptops; we look things up online and check social media to see wh...

In The Spider's Thread, Keith Holyoak looks at metaphor as a microcosm of the creative imagination. Holyoak, a psychologist and poet, draws on the ...

In this provocative book, Ramesh Srinivasan describes the internet as both an enabler of frictionless efficiency and a dirty tangle of politics, ec...

Twitter offers a unique medium for creativity and curiosity for humans and machines. The tweets of Twitterbots, autonomous software systems that se...

Finding opportunities for innovation on the path between farmer and table. Even if we think we know a lot about good and healthy food--even if we b...

The debate over genetically modified organisms: health and safety concerns, environmental impact, and scientific opinions. Since they were introduc...

In the vibrant downtown Manhattan art scene of the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Taiwanese-American artist Tehching Hsieh made a series of extrao...