Recommending Books for Purchase (Bulletin 91 - July 2020): Economic Theory

Publisher : MIT

Examining the potential benefits and risks of using artificial intelligence to advance global sustainability. Drones with night vision are tracking elephant and rhino poachers in African wildlife parks and sanctuaries; smart submersibles are saving coral from carnivorous starfish on Australia's Great Barrier Reef; recycled cell phones alert Brazilian forest rangers to the sound of illegal logging. The tools of artificial intelligence are being increasingly deployed in the battle for global sustainability. And yet, warns Peter Dauvergne, we should be cautious in declaring AI the planet's savior. In AI in the Wild, Dauvergne avoids the AI industry-powered hype and offers a critical view, exploring both the potential benefits and risks of using artificial intelligence to advance global sustainability. Dauvergne finds that corporations and states often use AI in ways that are antithetical to sustainability. The competition to profit from AI is entrenching technocratic management, revving up resource extraction, and turbocharging consumption, as consumers buy new smart devices (and discard their old, less-smart ones). Smart technology is helping farmers grow crops more efficiently, but also empowering the agrifood industry. Moreover, states are weaponizing AI to control citizens, suppress dissent, and aim cyberattacks at rival states. Is there a way to harness the power of AI for environmental and social good? Dauvergne argues for precaution and humility as guiding principles in the deployment of AI.

Print Price : $29.95

Publisher : Oxford

The iconic Periodic Table of the Elements is probably in its most satisfactory, elegant form it will ever have. This is because all the "gaps" corresponding to missing elements in the seventh row, or period, have recently been filled and the elements named. But where do these names come from?For some (usually the most recent), the origins are quite obvious, such as germanium or californium, but for others - even the well-known elements, such as oxygen or nitrogen - their roots are less clear.Here, Peter Wothers explores the fascinating and often surprising stories behind how the chemical elements received their names. Delving back in time to explore the history and gradual development of chemistry, he sifts through medieval manuscripts for clues to the stories surrounding the discoveryof the elements, showing how they were first encountered or created, and how they were used in everyday lives. As he reveals, the oldest-known elements were often associated with astronomical bodies, and the connections with the heavens influenced the naming of a number of elements. Following this,a number of elements, including hydrogen and oxygen, were named during the great reform of chemistry, set amidst the French revolution. Whilst some of the origins of the names were controversial (and, indeed incorrect - some saying, for instance, that oxygen might be literally taken to mean "the sonof a vinegar merchant"), they have nonetheless influenced the language used throughout the world to this very day. Throughout, Wothers delights in dusting off the original sources, and bringing to light the astonishing, the unusual, and the downright weird origins behind the names of the elements wetake for granted today.

Price: $29.95
Format : eBook

Publisher : North Carolina

James P. Woodard's history of consumer capitalism in Brazil, today the world's fifth most populous country, is at once magisterial, intimate, and penetrating enough to serve as a history of modern Brazil itself. It tells how a new economic outlook took hold over the course of the twentieth century, a time when the United States became Brazil's most important trading partner and the tastemaker of its better-heeled citizens. In a cultural entangling with the United States, Brazilians saw Chevrolets and Fords replace horse-drawn carriages, railroads lose to a mania for cheap automobile roads, and the fabric of everyday existence rewoven as commerce reached into the deepest spheres of family life. The United States loomed large in this economic transformation, but American consumer culture was not merely imposed on Brazilians. By the seventies, many elements once thought of as American had slipped their exotic traces and become Brazilian, and this process illuminates how the culture of consumer capitalism became a more genuinely transnational and globalized phenomenon. This commercial and cultural turn is the great untold story of Brazil's twentieth century, and one key to its twenty-first.

eBook Price: $29.99

Publisher : Cambridge

Understanding how cultural diversity relates to international order is an urgent contemporary challenge. Building on ideas first advanced in Reus-Smit's On Cultural Diversity (2018), this groundbreaking book advances a new framework for understanding the nexus between culture and order in world politics. Through a pioneering interdisciplinary collaboration between leading historians, international lawyers, sociologists and international relations scholars, it argues that cultural diversity in social life is ubiquitous rather than exceptional, and demonstrates that the organization of cultural diversity has been inextricably tied to the constitution and legitimation of political authority in diverse international orders, from Warring States China, through early modern Europe and the Ottoman and Qing Empires, to today's global liberal order. It highlights the successive 'diversity regimes' that have been constructed to govern cultural difference since the nineteenth century, traces the exclusions and resistances these projects have engendered and considers contemporary global vulnerabilities and axes of contestation.

eBook Price: $28.00

Publisher : Cambridge

Liberalism is a critically important topic in the contemporary world as liberal values and institutions are in retreat in countries where they seemed relatively secure. Lucidly written and accessible, this book offers an important yet neglected Russian aspect to the history of political liberalism. Vanessa Rampton examines Russian engagement with liberal ideas during Russia's long nineteenth century, focusing on the high point of Russian liberalism from 1900 to 1914. It was then that a self-consciously liberal movement took shape, followed by the founding of the country's first liberal (Constitutional-Democratic or Kadet) party in 1905. For a brief, revelatory period, some Russians - an eclectic group of academics, politicians and public figures - drew on liberal ideas of Western origin to articulate a distinctively Russian liberal philosophy, shape their country's political landscape, and were themselves partly responsible for the tragic experience of 1905.

eBook Price: $80.00

Publisher : American Mathematical Society

Number Theory Revealed: A Masterclass acquaints enthusiastic students with the ``Queen of Mathematics''. The text offers a fresh take on congruences, power residues, quadratic residues, primes, and Diophantine equations and presents hot topics like cryptography, factoring, and primality testing. Students are also introduced to beautiful enlightening questions like the structure of Pascal's triangle mod $p$ and modern twists on traditional questions like the values represented by binary quadratic forms, the anatomy of integers, and elliptic curves. This Masterclass edition contains many additional chapters and appendices not found in Number Theory Revealed: An Introduction, highlighting beautiful developments and inspiring other subjects in mathematics (like algebra). This allows instructors to tailor a course suited to their own (and their students') interests. There are new yet accessible topics like the curvature of circles in a tiling of a circle by circles, the latest discoveries on gaps between primes, a new proof of Mordell's Theorem for congruent elliptic curves, and a discussion of the $abc$-conjecture including its proof for polynomials. About the Author: Andrew Granville is the Canada Research Chair in Number Theory at the University of Montreal and professor of mathematics at University College London. He has won several international writing prizes for exposition in mathematics, including the 2008 Chauvenet Prize and the 2019 Halmos-Ford Prize, and is the author of Prime Suspects (Princeton University Press, 2019), a beautifully illustrated graphic novel murder mystery that explores surprising connections between the anatomies of integers and of permutations.

Print Price: $99.00

Publisher : Apple Academic Press

This new volume will help materials scientists and engineers fully comprehend the principles of optics and optical phenomena and effectively utilize them for the design and fabrication of optical materials and devices. Materials science is an interdisciplinary field at the intersection of various fields, such as metallurgy, ceramics, solid-state physics, chemistry, chemical engineering, and mechanical engineering. Thus, many physicists, chemists, and engineers also work in materials science. Many materials scientists generally do not have a strong background in optics, and this book aims to fill that gap. The volume explains the fundamentals of optics legibly to nonspecialists and presents theoretical treatments for a variety of optical phenomena resulting from light-matter interactions. It covers thin film optics, interference lithography, and metal plasmonics as practical applications of optics for materials research. Each chapter of the book has a problem and reference section to facilitate the reader's understanding. The book is aimed at assisting materials scientists and engineers who must be aware of optics and optical phenomena. This book will also be useful as a textbook for students in materials science, physics, chemistry, and engineering throughout their undergraduate and early graduate years.  

Price: $169.95
Format : eBook

Publisher : Cambridge

Master the usage of s-parameters in signal integrity applications and gain full understanding of your simulation and measurement environment with this rigorous and practical guide. Solve specific signal integrity problems including calculation of the s-parameters of a network, linear simulation of circuits, de-embedding, and virtual probing, all with expert guidance. Learn about the interconnectedness of s-parameters, frequency responses, filters, and waveforms. This invaluable resource for signal integrity engineers is supplemented with the open-source software SignalIntegrity, a Python package for scripting solutions to signal integrity problems.

Price: $125.00
Format : eBook

Publisher : Nebraska

The Storied Landscape of Iroquoia explores the creation, destruction, appropriation, and enduring legacy of one of early America's most important places: the homelands of the Haudenosaunees (also known as the Iroquois Six Nations). Throughout the late seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries of European colonization the Haudenosaunees remained the dominant power in their homelands and one of the most important diplomatic players in the struggle for the continent following European settlement of North America by the Dutch, British, French, Spanish, and Russians. Chad L. Anderson offers a significant contribution to understanding colonialism, intercultural conflict, and intercultural interpretations of the Iroquoian landscape during this time in central and western New York. Although American public memory often recalls a nation founded along a frontier wilderness, these lands had long been inhabited in Native American villages, where history had been written on the land through place-names, monuments, and long-remembered settlements. Drawing on a wide range of material spanning more than a century, Anderson uncovers the real stories of the people--Native American and Euro-American--and the places at the center of the contested reinvention of a Native American homeland. These stories about Iroquoia were key to both Euro-American and Haudenosaunee understandings of their peoples' pasts and futures. For more information about The Storied Landscape of Iroquoia, visit storiedlandscape.com.

eBook Price: $65.00

Publisher : Red Lightning Books

Aliens. Ley lines. Water dowsing. Conspiracies and myths captivate imaginations and promise mystery and magic. Whether it's arguing about the moon landing hoax or a Frisbee-like Earth drifting through space, when held up to science and critical thinking, these ideas fall flat. In Weird Earth: Debunking Strange Ideas About Our Planet, Donald R. Prothero demystifies these conspiracies and offers answers to some of humanity's most outlandish questions. Applying his extensive scientific knowledge, Prothero corrects misinformation that con artists and quacks use to hoodwink others about geology--hollow earth, expanding earth, and bizarre earthquakes--and mystical and paranormal happenings--healing crystals, alien landings, and the gates of hell. By deconstructing wild claims such as prophesies of imminent natural disasters, Prothero provides a way for everyone to recognize dubious assertions. Prothero answers these claims with facts, offering historical and scientific context in a light-hearted manner that is accessible to everyone, no matter their background. With a careful layering of evidence in geology, archaeology, and biblical and historical records, Prothero's Weird Earth examines each conspiracy and myth and leaves no question unanswered.

Price: $20.00
Format : eBook