In the spirit of Guns, Germs and Steel, Sex and War asks the basic questions: Why is war so fundamental to our species? And what can we do about it?Malcolm Potts explores these questions from the frontlines, as a witness to war-torn countries around the world. As a scientist and obstetrician, Potts has worked with governments and aid organizations globally, and in the trenches with women who have been raped and brutalized in the course of war. Combining their own experience with scientific findings in primatology, genetics, and anthropology, Potts and Hayden explain war’s pivotal position in the human experience and how men in particular evolved under conditions that favored gang behavior, rape, and organized aggression. Drawing on these new insights, they propose a rational plan for making warfare less frequent and less brutal in the future.Anyone interested in understanding human nature, warfare, and terrorism at their most fundamental levels will find Sex and War to be an illuminating work, and one that might change the way they see the world.

    Without scientific theory, these developments would not have been possible.In this exceptionally clear and engaging introduction to philosophy of science, James Ladyman explores the philosophical questions that arise when we reflect on the nature of the scientific method and the knowledge it produces. He discusses whether fundamental philosophical questions about knowledge and reality might be answered by science, and considers in detail the debate between realists and antirealists about the extent of scientific knowledge. Along the way, central topics in philosophy of science, such as the demarcation of science from non-science, induction, confirmation and falsification, the relationship between theory and observation and relativism are all addressed. Important and complex current debates over underdetermination, inference to the best explaination and the implications of radical theory change are clarified and clearly explained for those new to the subject.

    The award-winning author Melanie Mitchell, a leading computer scientist, now reveals AI’s turbulent history and the recent spate of apparent successes, grand hopes, and emerging fears surrounding it.In Artificial Intelligence, Mitchell turns to the most urgent questions concerning AI today: How intelligent—really—are the best AI programs? How do they work? What can they actually do, and when do they fail? How humanlike do we expect them to become, and how soon do we need to worry about them surpassing us? Along the way, she introduces the dominant models of modern AI and machine learning, describing cutting-edge AI programs, their human inventors, and the historical lines of thought underpinning recent achievements. She meets with fellow experts such as Douglas Hofstadter, the cognitive scientist and Pulitzer Prize–winning author of the modern classic Gödel, Escher, Bach, who explains why he is “terrified” about the future of AI. She explores the profound disconnect between the hype and the actual achievements in AI, providing a clear sense of what the field has accomplished and how much further it has to go.Interweaving stories about the science of AI and the people behind it, Artificial Intelligence brims with clear-sighted, captivating, and accessible accounts of the most interesting and provocative modern work in the field, flavored with Mitchell’s humor and personal observations. This frank, lively book is an indispensable guide to understanding today’s AI, its quest for “human-level” intelligence, and its impact on the future for us all.

    It is rich in narrative, anecdote, attention to human detail, and stories of competition among scientists who have dominated the field.

    Putting people into places and situations unprecedented in history is stirred the imagination while the human experience was expanding and redefining. Yet, space exploration compels humans to confront a hostile environment of cosmic radiations, radical changes in the gravity and magnetic fields, as well as social isolation. Therefore, any space traveller is submitted to relevant health-related threats. In the twenty-first century, human space flight is poised to continue, but it will enjoy the ongoing developments in science and technology. It will become more networked, more global, and more oriented toward primary goals. A novel international human space flight policy could help achieve these objectives by clarifying the rationale, the ethics of acceptable risk, the role of remote presence, and the need for balance between funding and ambition to justify the risk of human lives. In order to address such a challenge, a preliminary careful survey of the available scientific data is mandatory to set forth adequate countermeasures. Envisaged solutions should provide a sound and technically feasible approach for counteracting microgravity and cosmic rays effects, which represent the main health risk for space crews. This objective must necessarily be sustained by national/international space agencies, which would coordinate their common efforts into a defined international spaceflight program.

    

    Following the hugely successful The Science Book and The Math Book comes a richly illustrated chronology of physics, containing 250 short, entertaining, and thought-provoking entries. In addition to exploring such engaging topics as dark energy, parallel universes, the Doppler effect, the God particle, and Maxwells demon, the books timeline extends back billions of years to the hypothetical Big Bang and forward trillions of years to a time of “quantum resurrection.” Like the previous titles in this series, The Physics Book helps readers gain an understanding of major concepts without getting bogged down in complex details.

    Evolutionary Dynamics is concerned with these equations of life. In this book, Martin A. Nowak draws on the languages of biology and mathematics to outline the mathematical principles according to which life evolves. His work introduces readers to the powerful yet simple laws that govern the evolution of living systems, no matter how complicated they might seem. Evolution has become a mathematical theory, Nowak suggests, and any idea of an evolutionary process or mechanism should be studied in the context of the mathematical equations of evolutionary dynamics. His book presents a range of analytical tools that can be used to this end: fitness landscapes, mutation matrices, genomic sequence space, random drift, quasispecies, replicators, the Prisoner's Dilemma, games in finite and infinite populations, evolutionary graph theory, games on grids, evolutionary kaleidoscopes, fractals, and spatial chaos. Nowak then shows how evolutionary dynamics applies to critical real-world problems, including the progression of viral diseases such as AIDS, the virulence of infectious agents, the unpredictable mutations that lead to cancer, the evolution of altruism, and even the evolution of human language. His book makes a clear and compelling case for understanding every living system--and everything that arises as a consequence of living systems--in terms of evolutionary dynamics.

    Destroyed. Beyond broken.⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀After a lifetime of unbearable pain, all Tia wants is revenge—vengeance for all that was stripped from her. She’s been fed lies all her life, and it’s time to reveal all the truths hidden in the fragments of her mind. Her plan is in motion, and she knows where her target is, and what she has to do. But the darkness is the only thing stopping her, forcing her to question her own sanity. She can’t lose sight of her goal when it's in reaching distance. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀Revenge is the only thing getting Braxton through the days, and nights. That is, until Tia knocks him off course and everything changes. His path becomes hers, and hers becomes his. But when secrets so damning are revealed they change the course of his plan.⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀Can he learn to trust this shattered girl?⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀Can the pieces of a broken mind ever be repaired?

    In Pittsburgh, a child welfare agency uses a statistical model to try to predict which children might be future victims of abuse or neglect.Since the dawn of the digital age, decision-making in finance, employment, politics, health and human services has undergone revolutionary change. Today, automated systems—rather than humans—control which neighborhoods get policed, which families attain needed resources, and who is investigated for fraud. While we all live under this new regime of data, the most invasive and punitive systems are aimed at the poor.In Automating Inequality, Virginia Eubanks systematically investigates the impacts of data mining, policy algorithms, and predictive risk models on poor and working-class people in America. The book is full of heart-wrenching and eye-opening stories, from a woman in Indiana whose benefits are literally cut off as she lays dying to a family in Pennsylvania in daily fear of losing their daughter because they fit a certain statistical profile.The U.S. has always used its most cutting-edge science and technology to contain, investigate, discipline and punish the destitute. Like the county poorhouse and scientific charity before them, digital tracking and automated decision-making hide poverty from the middle-class public and give the nation the ethical distance it needs to make inhumane choices: which families get food and which starve, who has housing and who remains homeless, and which families are broken up by the state. In the process, they weaken democracy and betray our most cherished national values.This deeply researched and passionate book could not be more timely.Naomi Klein: "This book is downright scary."Ethan Zuckerman, MIT: "Should be required reading."Dorothy Roberts, author of Killing the Black Body: "A must-read for everyone concerned about modern tools of inequality in America."Astra Taylor, author of The People's Platform: "This is the single most important book about technology you will read this year."

    In addition to offering traditional methods for assessing and grading skeletal muscle function, the book provides a comprehensive section on muscle anatomy and innervations that rounds out the testing chapters by linking muscle topography and function. This edition includes a new DVD of tests and procedures video clips that supplement the tests explained in the book.

    Displaying mesmerizing flights of fancy, he shows how seemingly unrelated ideas and innovations bounce off one another, spinning a vast, interactive web on which everything is connected to everything else: Carmen leads to the theory of relativity, champagne bottling links to wallpaper design, Joan of Arc connects through vaudeville to Buffalo Bill. Illustrating his open, connective theme in the form of a journey across a web, Burke breaks down complex concepts, offering information in a manner accessible to anybody -- high school graduates and Ph.D. holders alike. The journey touches almost two hundred interlinked points in the history of knowledge, ultimately ending where it begins. At once amusing and instructing, The Knowledge Web heightens our awareness of our interdependence -- with one another and with the past. Only by understanding the interrelated nature of the modern world can we hope to identify complex patterns of change and direct the process of innovation to the common good.

    South Africa's leading introductory business management textbook continues to introduce students from undergraduate and diploma courses, as well as MBA courses, to the dynamics of the organisational environment.

    It is a critical history of the utopian vision and a profound exploration of the possible reality of utopia. Even as the world has rejected the doctrine on which Bloch sought to base his utopia, his work still challenges us to think more insightfully about our own visions of a better world.The Principle of Hope is published in three volumes: Volume 1 lays the foundations of the philosophy of process and introduces the idea of the Not-Yet-Conscious - the anticipatory element that Bloch sees as central to human thought. It also contains a remarkable account of the aesthetic interpretations of utopian "wishful images" in fairy tales, popular fiction, travel, theater, dance, and the cinema. Volume 2 presents "the outlines of a better world." It examines the utopian systems that progressive thinkers have developed in the fields of medicine, painting, opera, poetry, and ultimately, philosophy. It is nothing less than an encyclopedic account of utopian thought from the Greeks to the present. Volume 3 offers a prescription for ways in which humans can reach their proper "homeland," where social justice is coupled with an openness to change and to the future.

    Hewitt's text is famous for engaging readers with analogies and imagery from real-world situations that build a strong conceptual understanding of physical principles ranging from classical mechanics to modern physics. With this strong foundation, readers are better equipped to understand the equations and formulas of physics, and motivated to explore the thought-provoking exercises and fun projects in each chapter. Included in the package is the workbook. Mechanics, Properties of Matter, Heat, Sound, Electricity and Magnetism, Light, Atomic and Nuclear Physics, Relativity. For all readers interested in conceptual physics.