Overnight Code is a must-read for anyone seeking inspiration to overcome social barriers and to shatter glass ceilings." —Carolyn Porter, Marcel's Letters: A Font and the Search for One Man's Fate The inspiring story of a groundbreaking African American female engineer who created the first computer-designed ship for the US Navy Raye Montague was an ambitious little girl in segregated Little Rock. She grew to be a woman who spent a lifetime educating herself, both inside and outside of the classroom, so that she could become the person and professional she aspired to be. Where some saw roadblocks, Montague only saw hurdles that needed to be overcome. Her mindset helped her become the first person to draft a Naval ship design by computer, using a program she worked late nights to debug. She did this as a single mother during the height of the Cold War, all the while imbuing her son with the hard-won wisdom she had accumulated throughout the years. Equal parts coming-of-age tale, civil rights history, and reflection on the power of education, Overnight Code is a tale about persistence and perseverance when the odds against you seem insurmountable.
An analysis of how economic theories can be used to understand disordered and pathological gambling that calls on empirical evidence about behavior and the brain and argues that addictive gambling is the basic form of all addiction. The explanatory power of economic theory is tested by the phenomenon of irrational consumption, examples of which include such addictive behaviors as disordered and pathological gambling. Midbrain Mutiny examines different economic models of disordered gambling, using the frameworks of neuroeconomics (which analyzes decision making in the brain) and picoeconomics (which analyzes patterns of consumption behavior), and drawing on empirical evidence about behavior and the brain. The book describes addiction in neuroeconomic terms as chronic disruption of the balance between the midbrain dopamine system and the prefrontal and frontal serotonergic system, and reviews recent evidence from trials testing the effectiveness of antiaddiction drugs. The authors argue that the best way to understand disordered and addictive gambling is with a hybrid picoeconomic-neuroeconomic model.
Long-term monitoring programs are fundamental to understanding the natural environment and effectively tackling major environmental problems. Yet they are often done very poorly and ineffectively. Effective Ecological Monitoring describes what makes successful and unsuccessful long-term monitoring programs. Short and to the point, it illustrates key aspects with case studies and examples. It is based on the collective experience of running long-term research and monitoring programs of the two authors – experience which spans more than 70 years. The book first outlines why long-term monitoring is important, then discusses why long-term monitoring programs often fail. The authors then highlight what makes good and effective monitoring. These good and bad aspects of long-term monitoring programs are further illustrated in the fourth chapter of the book. The final chapter sums up the future of long-term monitoring programs and how to make them better, more effective and better targeted.
This volume examines two main questions: What is linguistics about? And how do the results of linguistic theorizing bear on inquiry in related fields, particularly in psychology? The book develops views that depart from received wisdom in both philosophy and linguistics. With regard to questions concerning the subject matter, methodological goals, and ontological commitments of formal syntactic theorizing, it argues that the cognitive conception adopted by most linguists and philosophers is not the only acceptable view, and that the arguments in its favor collapse under scrutiny. Nevertheless, as the book shows, a detailed examination of the relevant psycholinguistic results and computational models does support the claim that the theoretical constructs of formal linguistics are operative in real-time language comprehension. These constructs fall into two categories: mental phrase markers and mental syntactic principles. Both are indeed psychologically real, but in importantly different ways. The book concludes by drawing attention to the importance of the often-elided distinction between personal and subpersonal psychological states and processes, as well as the logical character of dispositional and occurrent states. By clarifying these concepts, particularly by reference to up-and-running psychological and computational models, the book yields a richer and more satisfying perspective on the psychological reality of language.
In this exhilarating and often hilarious book, David Crystal examines why we devote so much time and energy to language games, how professionals make a career of them, and how young children instinctively take to them. Crystal makes a simple argument-that since playing with language is so natural, a natural way to learn language is to play with it-while he discusses puns, crosswords, lipograms, comic alphabets, rhymes, funny voices taken from dialect and popular culture, limericks, anagrams, scat singing, and much more.
Edited in collaboration with FoLLI, the Association of Logic, Language and Information, this book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th International Tbilisi Symposium on Logic, Language, and Computation, TbiLLC 2007, held in Tbilisi, Georgia, in October 2007. The 22 revised full papers included in the book were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous presentations given at the symposium. The focus of the papers is on the following topics: conceptual modeling of spatial relations, pragmatics and game theory, atypical valency phenomena, lexical typology, formal semantics and experimental evidence, exceptional quantifier scope, Georgian focussing particles, polarity and pragmatics, dynamics of belief, learning theory, inquisitive semantics, modal logic, coalgebras, computational linguistics of Georgian, type-logical grammar and cross-serial dependencies, non-monotonic logic, Japanese quantifiers, intuitionistic logic, semantics of negated nominals, word sense disambiguation, semantics of question-embedding predicates, and reciprocals and computational complexity.
A textbook that teaches students to read and write proofs using Athena. Proof is the primary vehicle for knowledge generation in mathematics. In computer science, proof has found an additional use: verifying that a particular system (or component, or algorithm) has certain desirable properties. This book teaches students how to read and write proofs using Athena, a freely downloadable computer language. Athena proofs are machine-checkable and written in an intuitive natural-deduction style. The book contains more than 300 exercises, most with full solutions. By putting proofs into practice, it demonstrates the fundamental role of logic and proof in computer science as no other existing text does. Guided by examples and exercises, students are quickly immersed in the most useful high-level proof methods, including equational reasoning, several forms of induction, case analysis, proof by contradiction, and abstraction/specialization. The book includes auxiliary material on SAT and SMT solving, automated theorem proving, and logic programming. The book can be used by upper undergraduate or graduate computer science students with a basic level of programming and mathematical experience. Professional programmers, practitioners of formal methods, and researchers in logic-related branches of computer science will find it a valuable reference.
This theoretically motivated approach to pragmatics (vs. semantics) produces a radically new view of culture and its role vis-a-vis society. Understanding what words mean in use requires an open-ended recourse to pragmatic cultural knowledge. Cultural knowledge makes up a productive conceptual system. Members of a cultural community share the system but not all of the system's content, making culture a system of parallel distributed cognition. This book presents such a system, and then elaborates a version of "cultural models" that relates actions to goals, values, emotional content, and context, and that allows both systematic generative capacity and systematic variation across cultural and subcultural groups. Such models are offered as the basic units of cultural action. Culture thus conceived is shown as a tool that people use rather than as something deeply internalized in their psyches.
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