What do infants know? How does the knowledge that they begin with prepare them for learning about the particular physical, cultural, and social world in which they live? Answers to this question shed light not only on infants but on children and adults in all cultures, because the core knowledge possessed by infants never goes away. Instead, it underlies the unspoken, common sense knowledge of people of all ages, in all societies. By studying babies, researchers gain insights into infants themselves, into older children's prodigious capacities for learning, and into some of the unconscious assumptions that guide our thoughts and actions as adults. In this major new work, Elizabeth Spelke shares these insights by distilling the findings from research in developmental, comparative, and cognitive psychology, with excursions into studies of animal cognition in psychology and in systems and cognitive neuroscience, and studies in the computational cognitive sciences. Weaving across these disciplines, she paints a picture of what young infants know, and what they quickly come to learn, about objects, places, numbers, geometry, and people's actions, social engagements, and mental states. A landmark publication in the developmental literature, the book will be essential for students and researchers across the behavioral, brain, and cognitive sciences.

The book as object, as content, as idea, as interface. What is the book in a digital age? Is it a physical object containing pages encased in covers? Is it a portable device that gives us access to entire libraries? The codex, the book as bound paper sheets, emerged around 150 CE. It was preceded by clay tablets and papyrus scrolls. Are those books? In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Amaranth Borsuk considers the history of the book, the future of the book, and the idea of the book. Tracing the interrelationship of form and content in the book's development, she bridges book history, book arts, and electronic literature to expand our definition of an object we thought we knew intimately. Contrary to the many reports of its death (which has been blamed at various times on newspapers, television, and e-readers), the book is alive. Despite nostalgic paeans to the codex and its printed pages, Borsuk reminds us, the term “book” commonly refers to both medium and content. And the medium has proved to be malleable. Rather than pinning our notion of the book to a single form, Borsuk argues, we should remember its long history of transformation. Considering the book as object, content, idea, and interface, she shows that the physical form of the book has always been the site of experimentation and play. Rather than creating a false dichotomy between print and digital media, we should appreciate their continuities.

A comprehensive, visual reference, enhanced by two thousand photographs and illustrations, provides information on all major fields of knowledge and includes timelines, sidebars, cross-reference, and other useful features.

Handbook of Knowledge Representation describes the essential foundations of Knowledge Representation, which lies at the core of Artificial Intelligence (AI). The book provides an up-to-date review of twenty-five key topics in knowledge representation, written by the leaders of each field. It includes a tutorial background and cutting-edge developments, as well as applications of Knowledge Representation in a variety of AI systems. This handbook is organized into three parts. Part I deals with general methods in Knowledge Representation and reasoning and covers such topics as classical logic in Knowledge Representation; satisfiability solvers; description logics; constraint programming; conceptual graphs; nonmonotonic reasoning; model-based problem solving; and Bayesian networks. Part II focuses on classes of knowledge and specialized representations, with chapters on temporal representation and reasoning; spatial and physical reasoning; reasoning about knowledge and belief; temporal action logics; and nonmonotonic causal logic. Part III discusses Knowledge Representation in applications such as question answering; the semantic web; automated planning; cognitive robotics; multi-agent systems; and knowledge engineering. This book is an essential resource for graduate students, researchers, and practitioners in knowledge representation and AI. * Make your computer smarter* Handle qualitative and uncertain information* Improve computational tractability to solve your problems easily

This paperback edition, with a new introduction, offers a powerful, compelling, and unassailable argument for reforming America's schooling methods and ideas--by one of America's most important educators, and author of the bestselling Cultural Literacy. For over fifty years, American schools have operated under the assumption that challenging children academically is unnatural for them, that teachers do not need to know the subjects they teach, that the learning "process" should be emphasized over the facts taught. All of this is tragically wrong. Renowned educator and author E. D. Hirsch, Jr., argues that, by disdaining content-based curricula while favoring abstract--and discredited--theories of how a child learns, the ideas uniformly taught by our schools have done terrible harm to America's students. Instead of preparing our children for the highly competitive, information-based economy in which we now live, our schools' practices have severely curtailed their ability, and desire, to learn. With an introduction that surveys developments in education since the hardcover edition was published, The Schools We Need is a passionate and thoughtful book that will appeal to the millions of people who can't understand why America's schools aren't educating our children.