New Books in Systems and Cybernetics
Episodes
Rebecca Lemov, “Database of Dreams: The Lost Quest to Catalog Humanity” (Yale University Press, 2015)
27 Apr 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Rebecca Lemov‘s beautifully written Database of Dreams: The Lost Quest to Catalog Humanity (Yale University Press, 2015) is at once an exploration o...
Jeffery Pomerantz, “Metadata” (MIT, 2015)
22 Feb 2016
Contributed by Lukas
What is the “stuff” that fuels the information society in which we live? In his new book, Metadata (MIT 2015), information scientist Jeffrey Pomer...
Eric T. Meyer and Ralph Schroeder, “Knowledge Machines: Digital Transformations of the Sciences and Humanities” (MIT Press, 2015)
15 Nov 2015
Contributed by Lukas
By now it is incontrovertible that new technology has had an effect on how regular people get information. Whether in the form of an online newspaper ...
Christopher Vitale, “Networkologies: A Philosophy of Networks for a Hyperconnected Age” (Zero Books, 2014)
12 Aug 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Networks seem to be the dominant metaphor for contemporary society. In Networkologies: A Philosophy of Networks for a Hyperconnected Age (Zero Books, ...
Margaret Morrison, “Reconstructing Reality: Models, Mathematics, and Simulations” (Oxford UP, 2015)
15 Jul 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Almost 400 years ago, Galileo wrote that the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics. Today, mathematics is integral to physics and c...
Timothy Jordan, “Information Politics: Liberation and Exploitation in the Digital Society” (Pluto Press, 2015)
05 May 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Struggles over information in the digital era are central to Tim Jordan‘s new book, Information Politics: Liberation and Exploitation in the Digital...
Christine L. Borgman, “Big Data, Little Data, No Data: Scholarship in the Networked World” (MIT Press, 2015)
20 Apr 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Social media and digital technology now allow researchers to collect vast amounts of a variety data quickly. This so-called “big data,” and the pr...
Orit Halpern, “Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason since 1945” (Duke UP, 2014)
09 Mar 2015
Contributed by Lukas
The second half of the twentieth century saw a radical transformation in approaches to recording and displaying information. Orit Halpern‘s new book...
Frank Pasquale, “The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information” (Harvard UP, 2015)
24 Dec 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Hidden algorithms make many of the decisions that affect significant areas of society: the economy, personal and organizational reputation, the promot...
Hugh F. Cline, “Information Communication Technology and Social Transformation” (Routledge, 2014)
09 Oct 2014
Contributed by Lukas
There is no doubt that innovations in technology have had, and are having, a significant impact on society, changing the way we live, work, and play. ...
Anne Jaap Jacobson, “Keeping the World in Mind” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014)
15 Aug 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Some theorists in the cognitive sciences argue that the sciences of the mind don’t need or use a concept of mental representation. In her new book, ...
Marcin Milkowski, “Explaining the Computational Mind” (MIT Press, 2013)
15 Jul 2014
Contributed by Lukas
The computational theory of mind has its roots in Alan Turing’s development of the basic ideas behind computer programming, specifically the manipul...
Peter Gardenfors, “The Geometry of Meaning: Semantics Based on Conceptual Spaces” (MIT Press, 2014)
09 Jun 2014
Contributed by Lukas
A conceptual space sounds like a rather nebulous thing, and basing a semantics on conceptual spaces sounds similarly nebulous. In The Geometry of Mean...
Vincent Mosco, “To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World” (Paradigm Publishers, 2014)
29 May 2014
Contributed by Lukas
The “cloud” and “cloud computing” have been buzzwords over the past few years, with businesses and even governments praising the ability to sa...
Michael Strevens, “Tychomancy: Inferring Probability from Causal Structure” (Harvard UP, 2013)
15 Apr 2014
Contributed by Lukas
When we’re faced with a choice between Door #1, Door #2, and Door #3, how do we infer correctly that there’s an equal chance of the prize being be...
Hallam Stevens, “Life Out Of Sequence: A Data-Driven History of Bioinformatics” (University of Chicago Press, 2013)
31 Jan 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Hallam Stevens‘s new book is a rich and fascinating ethnographic and historical account of the transformations wrought by integrating statistical an...
Michael Weisberg, “Simulation and Similarity: Using Models to Understand the World” (Oxford UP, 2013)
15 Jan 2014
Contributed by Lukas
In 1956 and 1957, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers decided to test a plan to dam up the San Francisco Bay in order to protect its water supply: they b...
Tadeusz Zawidzki, “Mindshaping: A New Framework for Understanding Human Social Cognition” (MIT Press, 2013)
15 Oct 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Social cognition involves a small bundle of cognitive capacities and behaviors that enable us to communicate and get along with one another, a bundle ...
Paul Thagard, “The Cognitive Science of Science: Explanation, Discovery, and Conceptual Change” (MIT Press, 2012)
15 May 2012
Contributed by Lukas
We’ve all heard about scientific revolutions, such as the change from the Ptolemaic geocentric universe to the Copernican heliocentric one. Such dra...
Susan Schneider, “The Language of Thought: A New Philosophical Direction” (MIT Press, 2011)
15 Aug 2011
Contributed by Lukas
In 1975, Jerry Fodor published a book entitled The Language of Thought, which is aptly considered one of the most important books in philosophy of min...