MIT

If you've always wondered what the hoopla over the Media Lab was all about, this book can help fill in the blanks. It covers the basics about the founding of the lab and provides a little biographical background on people like Negroponte and Minsky.

However, a large portion of the book is spent describing specific projects, many of which are obviously a little out of date. Don't get the wrong idea, though. These projects were obviously very exciting when new. Further, some of the projects still seem so far out that I would not be surprised to see them announced as new research in 2000!

All in all, recommended. But perhaps you're better off skimming a copy from your local library than buying this one. That's why 3 stars instead of 4.

Even though this book is somewhat dated now, it still has a purpose in that it provides a look at what one innovative facility was like at the time. For example, an opening observation made by the founder and director of the MIT lab, Nicolas Negroponte still applies, i.e., that all communications media and technologies are poised for redefinition. In terms of innovation, Brand writes "Once a technology rolls over you, if you're not part of the steamroller, you're part of the road."

We're told that Negroponte views all communication technologies as a single subject and the process itself as a craft. He divides advertising into two categories, "advertising as noise" and "advertising as news."

This book goes to show that while the delivery systems are always changing, content is significant. Some of the technologies which were relatively new at the time this book came out are commonplace now. The philosophical insights Brand makes are worth consideration at any time. As a result this book is still pertinent.

This book was given to me as a gift when I learned that I was admitted to MIT in 1988. Over the years (and more so recently), I often see things that are the end result of the research done during the '80s at the Media Lab and documented in this book. Lego Mindstorms, custom Portals and personalized Internet, virtual reality games, this was all developed, envisioned, conceptualized, or influenced by Media Lab research.

After reading it, I lost it somewhere along the way. I came here to see if I could find a copy to re-read it and check my memory. It really should be an interesting read after all these years for anyone interested in the process and history of science.

I sent a regular mail and 2 emails according to the instruction included in the CD package to get an account passwrod to access the web site content. No response!!!

i am an engineering student and i enjoy reading this book. Although many topics are about psychology, you can find all kind of different subjects that you will never find anywhere else. That is way it is so valuable. the book is very heavy.

The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences - "MITECS" - is a truly excellent book. MITECS is the book I spent four years wishing for back when I started studying cognitive science. MITECS is also a very *large* book; I've set out to read all 471 articles, and I'm currently on "Computational Neuroscience" (p. 166 of 900), although I've also read a lot of other articles as circumstances required. From that sample size, my comments:

The good news: There are some truly excellent articles in this book. Microcolumns and macrocolumns, cerebellar chips, the pathways of the visual system - you can read this book and find out a hundred amazingly cool things that you never even realized you desperately needed to know. Oddly enough, MITECS is also a pretty good as an encyclopedia - if you suddenly need to know more about vision, you'll find what you need to know in "Visual Anatomy and Physiology". (Or "Visual Processing Streams". Or "High-Level Vision". Or "Computational Vision". Or "Mental Rotation". You do need to do a certain amount of hunting, if it's a sufficiently broad subject. More than half the cerebral cortex is devoted to vision - see "Mid-Level Vision" - and MITECS reflects this fact.)

MITECS *excels* as an authoritative reference; you'll almost never need to quote anything else. If you're familiar with cognitive science, you'll often laugh when you get to the end of an article and see the author's byline: "Columns and Modules" by William Calvin, "Chinese Room Argument" by John Searle, "Evolutionary Computation" by Melanie Mitchell, "Evolutionary Psychology" by Leda Cosmides and John Tooby.

The bad news: If you try to read MITECS linearly, you will find that many of the articles, perhaps even a majority, are eminently skippable. (For the record, I read them anyway.) As all of the articles were written by independent individuals - none of whom could read the book first, since it didn't exist yet - there is understandably a great deal of duplication of information. Every third author feels the need to inform you that the mind is a computational information-processing system. (If I had one request to make of the hundreds of authors who write the next edition, it would be: "Skip all the introductory material and the philosophy and try to pack in as much useful detail as you can.") There are also some understandable problems with depth of coverage, made worse by the aforesaid tendency to write introductions; whenever I read an article about a topic that I had earlier studied in more detail, it really brought home the realization that each of these 471 articles tries to cover a topic about which *multiple* entire books have been written.

There are several things I'd like to see in future editions of this book. First and foremost is *less philosophy* and more focus on concrete details, particularly *surprising* details, or details that have something substantial to say about how the mind works. I don't want to know what David Hume thought about causality; I want to know if anything interesting happens when research subjects are asked to reason about causality. (I must also confess myself uninterested in most of the biographical articles that form much of MITECS - but then, that's probably because I'm not using it to study history.) Finally, I would like to see a neuroanatomical index as well as a table of contents. It's already a big book, but they can afford another six pages to show a detailed neuroanatomical map, with names for the areas, and references to the appropriate sections of the book. Such a map would be an enormous help to those of us trying to build up a concrete visualization of the brain.

Conclusion: This is a *really good* book. It's not so much "a good book with a few drawbacks" as "an excellent book with tremendous potential for *even more* improvement", and I mean this in all seriousness. If you're a cognitive scientist, you have basically no choice but to buy this book. If you're a student of the mind or a cognitive hobbyist, then this may not be the *first* book you buy, but you will buy it sooner or later.

It's just such a great book.

This book should seriously be used ONLY with another text. A good one (in my opinion) is Griffiths. It goes into great depth (sometimes too much) conceptually and is very weak with the mathematics. Another reviewer said somethings about not giving many applications, and i agree. It gets the idea down, but no more than that. Griffiths along side this is awesome, and if you have time after those two, take a look at Shakars book; its a little harder mathematically, but if you hit those three together, youll prolly have a good idea of what QM is about. Feynman Lectures also help.
Point being: Dont use this book alone, very good otherwise.

This book is very pedagogical. It follows a logical order in presenting the very complicated development of quantum physics. It's like taking a step back and collecting your thoughts. No physics student or physics teacher should be without it.

This is one of the clearest and well thought out introductions on quantum physics that I've seen. It is beautifully written with abundant diagrams and examples. The chapter on photons and polarization is an excellent pedagogical approach to understanding state vectors. This will also come in handy later on in a more advanced course when trying to understand the motivations behind the postulates of quantum mechanics.

The book is fast reading and to the point. This is not the kind of diet everyone can handle, but it worked wonders for my husband and me. We are in our 50's and I have struggled with my weight most of my life. I expected minimal results but was pleasantly surprised that I lost 11 lbs. the first two-week fast and 14 lbs. the second with the recommended three weeks in between fasts. There was no yo-yo effect afterwards. We are just entering our third fast and look forward to utilizing this method to achieve and maintain our ideal weight.

Not having solid food for two weeks at a time is a major deal to many people. But think about how much time during the day is taken up in planning, purchasing, preparing, eating and cleaning up after meals. Fasting is almost a vacation to a busy person. Also, the savings in food more than makes up for the cost of the supplement. I'm familiar with other liquid diet programs that have comparable if not higher costs associated with them. To skeptics, I would have to say "Don't knock it until you've tried it."

I actually read the German version of this book first, which is exactly the same. I actually tried this diet when it first came out in Germany in '99 after I had seen several pple loose quite a bit of weight on it. I stuck to it for 2wks. It was hard not to eat the first day or two, but with the help of the home-made veggie broth I got through it. I never cheated once. The drink is not nasty nor is it very tasty or filling....once again, the veggie broth always saved my day. I drank almost a gallon of water per day. To my disappointment I did not loose more then 10lbs within those two weeks, other than the 30-40lbs I had seen in the other pple, and swore myself, never to go on a liquid fast again if that was the result...my body just works different from others. BUT after I got off it, I was not hungry anymore and I had this urge for fruits and healthy stuff all of a sudden. So I actually started loosing after I got off it and thinking back, must have lost another 15lbs in the weeks following. Unfortunately, I gotta say, that if you don't stick to a healthy/sensible diet, the weight will eventually come back....very slowly, but double. However, after endless trials with stupid weightloss pills and powders, I'm finally as fat as I was as a child and have come to the conclusion....Markert is a good thing. I will start it again next week.

This diet is absolutely phenomenal. It works exceptionally well, and I saw excellent results with it. All told, I lost 20 pounds with the diet, and the key point here is that I did not gain any of the weight back whatsoever. Even when I went back to my usually .... and very non-low carb diet. I give it 4 stars because I never did make it to the 2 week mark, it was just too hard for me, so I ended up doing this diet for 5 - up to 8 days at a time which is how I lost the sum total of 20 lbs. I must also mention that I am hypoglycemic, meaning my blood sugar drops fairly low, and this diet does cause your blood sugar to drop. This diet is not for the faint of heart and it can be very difficult. But if you are in a pinch, it is a great way to lose some extra pounds in a hurry!

After almost 20 years in and around MIT, I've encountered only two great MIT books: (1) A.R. Gurney's out-of-print novel _The Snow Ball_; (2) Pepper White's book.

White went to a top undergraduate school and was very strong academically. Yet he was completely unprepared for MIT grad school and couldn't believe how easily the folks who'd been MIT undergrads took everything in stride. He didn't know that they'd had exactly the same experience four years before!

It is all here. Losing the girlfriend. Being surrounded by nerds. Scrambling for funding. Being called a jackinape by professors.

Every MIT kid should make his parents read this book, if only to increase the supply of mailed-in CARE packages.

The book is MIT as seen by the author during the process of getting his masters. One can see opinions and biases sometimes, but I have to give credit to the author for stating his opinions straight regardless of whether they sound nice or not. I am sure the experiences may not sound familiar to everyone who went through grad school, but there are lot of instances that remind me of situations very common in grad school - social situations and personal issues especially. One major point I saw is that the author enters MIT with huge reverence for MIT and low self esteem. May be MIT ambience forces it.

Some of the mechnical engineering stuff felt like too much detail for me. Author does have strong opinions about his school and other schools, but he is entitled to his ideas. If one can put up with that, this book is a very interesting read.

Only thing I kept thinking is that if the author managed to go into the PhD program, the book could have had a very different tone. Who knows? Given the constant drive of the author in the book (big bucks and cushy job - usual stuff), I think he did well in the end.

I read this the summer before entering MIT as an undergrad, and it had me crying and wishing I could change my mind and go somewhere else.

Although my MIT experience wasn't as harrowing as White's, I think he does a good job of capturing the essence of the culture. The undergrad and graduate experiences are very different, but I think his experience as a GRT in an undergrad dorm helps to give you both perspectives.

A great book - but I wouldn't read it just as you're about to go to MIT.

Ward presents several computer architectures, exploring details from processor implementation to mulit-processor cache coherency issues. It was formerly a required text in 6.004, but as the course evolved, the book became less and less applicable. The book is now quite old and does not explore contemporary issues in computer architecture.

Many pages are devoted to theoretical arguments with few real-world examples (i.e., case studies). The writing is direct but uninspired.

This book is quite idiosyncratic in its kind. The content is quite theoretic, so that probably it won't be the best choice for more pragmatic and practice-oriented courses, for which the two books from Patterson-Hennessy, e.g., will be more suited. However, the value of this book lays in the shocking amount of knowledge it carries. This is the classic gap-filling book: my opinion is that many CS student of us that will read this book page by page, will discover that they really didn't know something they thought they knew instead. This is simply because the discussion is organic and continuos from the start to the end, and the writing is never too hard, so that any gap will easily show itself during the reading.

Have a look at the table of contents. It starts from digital logic basics and it ends at the Interrupts chapter (this means, almost, operating systems). The distance seems to be prohibitive, but the path traced by prof. Ward and Halstead is remarkably solid and meaningful. Once basic logic circuits blocks are covered, it leads to computation issues (from FSM to Turing Machines), passing from performance considerations (e.g. pipelining) and memory hierarchies (cache memory is extensively covered).
Two chapters are devoted to milestone architectures: the S machine and the G machine. Such a thorough coverage on these two machines is something I've not found in other books.
The chapters on Processes, Processor Multiplexing, Processes Synchronization and Interrupts are good and at the level of an OS course. The astonishing thing is that the background to face these issues is well built before (again, recall that the book starts from basic Logic Levels !).

This book has been a very worthy read. My course used materials from different books, internet resources and my instructor's knowledge. The instructor itself suggested us to give the book a complete read when we had time (we didn't cover all the topics of the book) because we would have really learned important things. I've not done it completely, but the more I do it, the more I agree.

For anyone interested (and who wouldn't be?) the title reads something like this: "The functions of the party organizations with the further implementation of the decisions of the 11th Party Congress of the SED: from the paper of the General Secretary of the ZK of the SED and chairman of the Council of State of the GDR on the consultation of the secretariat of the central committee of the SED with the head secretariat of the regional leadership on 6 February 1987." END

Steffahn's book came close to filling a wide gap in White Rose literature. He almost grasped that the group consisted of more than Hans and Sophie Scholl.

But in the end, he lost courage and took the easy way out. His book, therefore, is riddled with inaccuracies, some small, some large. And that makes his writing disconcerting. For once you start finding errors, it places the entire work in doubt.

A shame, because he could have done it right with only a little extra effort.

this book is much more a novel but a biography. it starts with zarah already playing in vienna/austria and it continues with her way to stardom as the leading lady for ufa, the biggest (an nazi controlled) film company in germany. it is written in various chapters with lots of fictional dialogues. first i was a bit disappointed by this technique. very soon i was kept by the story showing zarahs motivation for success, her relation to her husband(s) and other men she knew. micheal jary was one of them and, according to the author, zarah's one and only real love. this book is not idealizing zarah or trying to rewrite history. zarah was a star in the germany of the 30s and being an intelligent woman she knew the price she had to pay for that. the book is not judging her for what she had done (or not done). if you know the political and biographical details as well as her films and songs this book is nice and easy to read. perfect for some rainy days ...

I bought this map as a guide for my first trip to Zurich and after reading and reviewing it before I left, I realized I had to buy another. Why? Sheer amount of content on this map. It's very handy and has the tram map along with the map of Zurich's airport - but it's just information overload. There's nothing wrong, per se, but it's helpful to get another source and use this map as a secondary and more detailed source.