MITPressLog

Alphabet City Festival

   

If you are in Toronto this weekend and coming week, check-out the Alphabet City Festival.  This year’s theme is Fuel.  Organized around the recently published book Fuel, the Alphabet City festival will have a cabaret performance tonight (Thursday Nov 27th) at 8pm, an exhibition which opens on Nov. 27th and a book launch on the 28th.  

For more information click here.

Vaclav Smil in The American

 Vaclav Smil, author of many books with us, has an op-ed on energy in the November/December issue of The American, the magazine of the American Enterprise Institute. In his piece, "Moore’s Curse and the Great Energy Delusion," Smil throws some cold water on the idea that the U.S. can quickly execute a move away from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources. Here's a taste:

The historical verdict is unassailable: because of the requisite technical and infrastructural imperatives and because of numerous (and often entirely unforeseen) socio-economic adjustments, energy transitions in large economies and on a global scale are inherently protracted affairs. That is why, barring some extraordinary commitments and actions, none of the promises for greatly accelerated energy transitions will be realized, and during the next decade none of the new energy sources and prime movers will make a major difference by capturing 20 percent to 25 percent of its respective market.

Read the whole thing here. Smil's tag line mentions two of his energy-based books, Energy at the Crossroads and Energy in Nature and Society. His most recent Press book is Global Catastrophes and Trends.

Cognet Adds New Content, Revamps Site

Cognet - the Press's online destination for the cognitive science and neuroscience communities - has expanded its online library, adding 38 new books from the neuroscience and cognitive science collections. In addition, the look and navigability of the site has been improved, with cleaner, more accessible features and a new logo.

Cognet now offers over 480 titles from leading figures in the field, providing a superior resource for the brain and cognitive research community. Some of Cognet’s newly acquired titles include:

Introduction to Cognitive Science by Paul Thagard

Seeing and Visualizing: It’s not What You Think by Zenon W. Pylyshyn

Neither Brain nor Ghost: A Nondualist Alternative to the Mind-Brain Identity Theory by W. Teed Rockwell

How the Body Shapes the Way We Think: A New View of Intelligence by Rolf Pfeifer and Josh C. Bongard

Visit Cognet at http://cognet.mit.edu/.

Sherry Turkle Speaks at MIT Tomorrow

authors@mit presents:

SHERRY TURKLE
THE INNER HISTORY OF DEVICES

Thursday, November 6, 2008, 6:00 p.m.
MIT 35-225, Sloan Laboratory Building
127 Massachusetts Avenue , Cambridge

Please join us as MIT's Sherry Turkle introduces her newest book, The Inner History of Devices

In this volume, the third in a trilogy, Turkle combines memoir, clinical writings, and ethnography to draw new perspectives on the experience of technology. Her  personal stories illuminate how
technology enters the inner life.

This event is sponsored by authors@mit, a lecture series cosponsored by MIT Libraries and The MIT Press Bookstore. Its open to the public, free, and wheelchair accessible. Click here for a map. For more information call (617) 253-5249, email authors@mit.edu, or visit the MIT Press Bookstore. 

Award News - Memory Practices in the Sciences wins ASIS&T Award

Last week, Christine Borgman was awarded the "Best Information Science Book Award" for Scholarship in the Digital Age. This award is given by the American Society for Information Science & Technology (ASIS&T) to the author of an outstanding book relevant to the information sciences.

Borgman also won the same award in 2001 for her From Gutenberg to the Global Infrastructure. See a list of all past winners here, including a number of MIT Press titles such as Geoffrey Bowker's Memory Practices in the Sciences (just released this year in paperback).

Election Day

Glenn Loury, the first, tenured African American Professor in the Economics Department at Harvard University (he's now at Brown and the author of Race, Incarceration, and the American Experience) and the Anneberg School's Kathleen Hall Jamieson spoke with Bill Moyers on Friday night about the election cycle and issues surrounding it.

On this historic election day, we thought this thoughtful and intelligent summation might be worth a second look.