Disaster Robotics
March 20, 2014
Today we have Dr. Robin Murphy, author of Disaster Robotics, weighing in on the use of robotics in tragic disasters such as the missing Malaysian Airlines jet and Air France Flight AF447.
News
A Composer’s Guide to Game Music
March 17, 2014
Today Winifred Phillips, author of A Composer’s Guide to Game Music, guest blogs about her new book.
A Lunch BIT from Artificial Love by Paul Shepheard
March 16, 2014
Artificial Love, Paul Shepheard’s highly original book about architecture and machines, was published in 2003 and received much critical acclaim. Liz Bailey provided this wonderful assessment of the book in The Architect’s Journal:
A Lunch BIT from Perplexities of Consciousness by Eric Schwitzgebel
March 15, 2014
Early in Perplexities of Consciousness, Eric Schwitzgebel asks a wonderful and deceptively simple question: Do you dream in color or black and white? Think about it for a second before you answer. OK, which is it? And how can you be certain? And if you think you’re sure, consider that prior to the advent of color television, most people reported dreaming in black and white. After it became commonplace, well, you can probably guess what happened. Now how sure are you?
Five Minutes with Mark Balaguer
March 14, 2014
Mark Balaguer, author of the newly released book Free Will from the Essential Knowledge series, answers a few questions on this timeless subject.
A Lunch BIT from Borges and Memory by Rodrigo Quian Quiroga
March 13, 2014
Imagine the astonishment felt by neuroscientist Rodrigo Quian Quiroga when he found a fantastically precise interpretation of his research findings in a story written by the great Argentinian fabulist Jorge Luis Borges fifty years earlier. In this BIT, Quian Quiroga explores real-life cases that recall Borges’s fictional “Funes the Memorious,” investigating a man who couldn’t forget, and another who could not form new memories.
A Lunch BIT from The Digital Rights Movement by Hector Postigo
March 12, 2014
What began as an assertion of consumer rights to digital content has become something broader: a movement concerned not just with consumers and gadgets but with cultural ownership. In this excerpt from Origins of the Digital Rights Movement: The White Paper and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act: A BIT of The Digital Rights Movement, Hector Postigo examines the evolution of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, showing that citizens’ concerns were largely ignored in the policy process.
A Lunch BIT from Democracy Despite Itself by Danny Oppenheimer and Mike Edwards
March 9, 2014
On March 6th several news outlets broke the news that the House of Representatives approved one billion dollars in loan guarantees to the embattled country of Ukraine, drawing grumbles from the general population.
A Lunch BIT from The Memory Process edited by Suzanne Nalbantian, Paul M. Matthews, and James L. McClelland
March 7, 2014
In this excerpt from Memory in Art: A BIT of the Memory Process edited by Suzanne Nalbantian, Paul M. Matthews and James L. McClelland, David Freedberg, an art historian investigating the neural bases of empathy, draws on recent neuroscientific research to explore one of the great masterpieces of fifteenth-century Flemish painting, Rogier van der Weyden’s Descent from the Cross. Freedberg connects memory to the direct and indirect bodily responses to a work of art.
A Lunch BIT from Racing the Beam by Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost
March 6, 2014
Before Xbox, Playstation, Wii, and even Nintendo, there was the Atari Video Computer System, known simply as Atari. Gamers of the 1970s and 80s will recall countless hours spent entranced before dots bouncing across their monitors while playing early video games like Breakout and Combat on this pioneering console. In their book, Racing the Beam, the inaugural volume in the MIT Press’s Platform Studies series, Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost investigate game systems’ underlying computing, developing a critical approach that examines the relationship between platforms and creative expression.