Essential Knowledge

Artificial intelligence powers Google's search engine, enables Facebook to target advertising, and allows Alexa and Siri to do their jobs. AI is also behind self-driving cars, predictive policing, and autonomous weapons that can kill without human intervention. These and other AI applications raise complex ethical issues that are the subject of ongoing debate. This volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series offers an accessible synthesis of these issues.

Give your tween the tools they need to thrive. Download this audiobook to help them grow with confidence and make great connections with others.

Drone Essential Knowledge and Skills (DEKS) is about helping students go from general awareness of drones to flying safely as part of a team, then earning the FAA Part 107 commercial license, and starting their own drone business. Drones are becoming more relevant and pervasive in our schools and society. DEKS are designed to scaffold students through knowledge of drones, safety and responsible usage, technical knowledge, and skills to become a commercial drone operator, intern with a drone business, then build their own drone business in their local community.

Pragmatism, America's homegrown philosophy, has been a major intellectual movement for over a century. Unlike its rivals, it reaches well beyond the confines of philosophy into concerns and disciplines as diverse as religion, politics, science, and culture. In this concise, engagingly written overview, John R. Shook describes pragmatism's origins, concepts, and continuing global relevance and appeal.

Why do we vividly recall a traumatic childhood event but forget where we left our keys five minutes ago? How can a scent take us back fifty years while a colleague's name eludes us? In this compact introduction, two leading psychological researchers describe memory—how it works and why it sometimes doesn't; how it can be tricked, trained, or improved; and what changes with time. In a manner as engaging as it is informative, Fergus Craik and Larry Jacoby explain the strengths and weaknesses of memory.

The growing movement for universal basic income (UBI) has been gaining attention from politics and the media with the audacious idea of a regular, unconditional cash grant for everyone as a right of citizenship. This volume in the Essential Knowledge series presents the first short, solid UBI introduction that is neither academic nor polemic. It takes a position in favor of UBI, but its primary goal remains the provision of essential knowledge by answering the fundamental questions about it: What is UBI? How does it work? What are the arguments for and against it? What is the evidence?

Over the past 10 years, urban planners, technology companies, and governments have promoted smart cities with a somewhat utopian vision of urban life made knowable and manageable through data collection and analysis. Emerging smart cities have become both crucibles and showrooms for the practical application of the Internet of Things, cloud computing, and the integration of big data into everyday life. Are smart cities optimized, sustainable, digitally networked solutions to urban problems? Or are they neoliberal, corporate-controlled, undemocratic non-places?

An update to Simple CISSP Exam Questions, Essential CISSP Test Questions tests your CISSP knowledge using more than 2,400 unique test questions in a multiple-choice format, just like the actual exam.

Providing relief from burnout and overwhelm, The Secret to Alzheimer’s Dementia Care, is a compassionate and practical guide for family caregivers facing the challenges of Alzheimer’s disease. Written with deep empathy, it equips you with the confidence, compassion, and knowledge to care for your loved one while maintaining your own health and peace of mind. This comprehensive resource takes you step-by-step through each stage of care, from diagnosis to end-of-life, providing essential tools to help you care for your loved one while managing your own emotional well-being.

The dream of a universal translation device goes back many decades, long before Douglas Adams's fictional Babel fish provided this service in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Since the advent of computers, research has focused on the design of digital machine translation tools - computer programs capable of automatically translating a text from a source language to a target language. This has become one of the most fundamental tasks of artificial intelligence.

A few decades into the digital era, scientists discovered that thinking in terms of computation made possible an entirely new way of organizing scientific investigation; eventually, every field had a computational branch: computational physics, computational biology, computational sociology. More recently, "computational thinking" has become part of the K-12 curriculum. But what is computational thinking? This volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series offers an accessible overview.

In the late 1850s, a physician in New York City used a syringe and glass tube to inject half a drop of sperm into a woman's uterus, marking the first recorded instance of artificial insemination. From that day forward, doctors and scientists have turned to technology in ever more innovative ways to facilitate conception. Fertility Technology surveys this history in all its medical, practical, and ethical complexity, and offers a look at state-of-the-art fertility technology in various social and political contexts around the world.

A concise introduction to the history and methods of espionage, illustrated by spy stories from antiquity to today's high-tech world.

Billions of people around the globe use various applications of spatial computing daily - by using a ride-sharing app, GPS, social media check-ins, even Pokemon Go. Scientists and researchers use spatial computing to track diseases, map the bottom of the oceans, chart the behavior of endangered species, and create election maps in real time. Drones and driverless cars use a variety of spatial computing technologies. Spatial computing works by understanding the physical world, knowing and communicating our relation to places in that world, and navigating through those places.

Irony and sarcasm are two of the most misused, misapplied, and misunderstood words in our conversational lexicon. In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, psycholinguist Roger Kreuz offers an enlightening and concise overview of the life and times of these two terms, mapping their evolution from Greek philosophy and Roman rhetoric to modern literary criticism to emojis.

Everyone's a cynic, yet few will admit it. Today's cynics excuse themselves half-heartedly - "I hate to be a cynic, but...." - before making their pronouncements. Narrowly opportunistic, always on the take, contemporary cynicism has nothing positive to contribute. The Cynicism of the ancient Greeks, however, was very different. Bold and shameless, it was committed to transforming the values on which civilization depends.

Humans are hard-wired for collaboration, and new technologies of communication act as a super-amplifier of our natural collaborative mindset. This volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series examines the emergence of a new kind of social collaboration enabled by networked technologies. This new collaborative society might be characterized as a series of services and startups that enable peer-to-peer exchanges and interactions though technology.

In this accessible guide to the meanings of sustainability, Kent Portney describes the evolution of the idea and examines its application in a variety of contemporary contexts - from economic growth and consumption to government policy and urban planning.

The Internet of Things is a networked world of connected devices, objects, and people. In this book Samuel Greengard offers a guided tour through this emerging world and how it will change the way we live and work. Greengard explains that the Internet of Things (IoT) is still in its early stages. Smartphones, cloud computing, RFID (radio-frequency identification), technology, sensors, and miniaturization are converging to make possible a new generation of embedded and immersive technology.

Robots are entering the mainstream. Technologies have advanced to the point of mass commercialization - Roomba, for example - and adoption by governments - most notably, their use of drones. Meanwhile, these devices are being received by a public whose main sources of information about robots are the fantasies of popular culture. We know a lot about C-3PO and Robocop, but not much about Atlas, Motoman, Kiva, or Beam - real-life robots that are reinventing warfare, the industrial workplace, and collaboration.