MITPressLog

Cracking Media, Making Music and Art

Our latest podcast is now live!  Caleb Kelly talks with Chris Gondek about artists and musicians who manipulate, crack, and break audio media to produce fascinating new sounds. Whether you are just a klutz with your CDs or break them on purpose, Cracked Media: The Sound of Malfunction illustrates how artists and musicians are using malfunction to create art.

Listen to this and all of our podcasts here. 
 

Our authors, in sound and pictures

One of the more interesting events we were involved with recently was a discussion at the London Chess Classic in December. The participants were Diego Rasskin-Gutman, author of Chess Metaphors: Artificial Intelligence and the Human Mind, and Alan Trefler, foudner and CEO of Pegasystems, a business process management firm and co-winner of the 1975 World Open Chess Championship. Three-time Chess Grandmaster Jonathan Rowson moderated. The discussion ranged over what chess can teach us about the structure of the mind, and what those processes can tell us about organizational strategy.

It was a far-ranging and fascinating discussion, and the Pegasystems folks were good enough to record the whole thing and post it on their website here.

And last week, Thomas Lee, author of Chaos and Organization in Health Care, was on the radio show Conversations on Health Care to talk about the prospects for reforming the health care system from the inside, not just in the political process. His conversation is here.

MIT Press Outstanding Academic Titles from 2009

Choice Magazine reviews and recommends scholarly books and media for academic libraries. Each year, Choice publishes a list of “Outstanding Academic Titles”. This prestigious list reflects the best titles reviewed by Choice in the preceding year and brings with it the recognition of the academic library community. The 2009 list, which has just been announced, includes 612 print and 40 electronic titles. The following MIT Press titles have been recognized as Outstanding Academic Titles for 2009:

The Ethics of Protocells: Moral and Social Implications of Creating Life in the Laboratory, edited by Mark A. Bedau and Emily C. Parke

America's Food: What You Don't Know About What You Eat, by Harvey Blatt

Race and Entrepreneurial Success: Black-, Asian-, and White-Owned Businesses in the United States, by Robert W. Fairlie and Alicia M. Robb

Conflicts of Conscience in Health Care: An Institutional Compromise, by Holly Fernandez Lynch

Minimum Wages, by David Neumark and William L. Wascher

Video Game Spaces: Image, Play, and Structure in 3D Game Worlds, by Michael Nitsche

Contagion and Chaos: Disease, Ecology, and National Security in the Era of Globalization, by Andrew T. Price-Smith

Design Concepts in Programming Languages, by Franklyn Turbak and David Gifford with Mark A. Sheldon