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EBookClubs

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Book Even Odder Perceptions

Download or read book Even Odder Perceptions written by Richard L. Gregory and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-03-27 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why did Newton struggle for thirty years to make gold by alchemy – and then become Master of the Mint? Why do we blush? Why do we have illusions? In this collection of essays, originally published in 1994, Richard Gregory once again delights and tantalizes with tales of his childhood, his family and friends, the famous and the infamous, and weaves them into a rich pattern to illuminate scientific principles and puzzles. If you can put the book down, each essay is complete on its own, but they are united by the magic of human perception. From seeing and hearing to feeling and believing, from the shape of traffic signs to knowledge of quantum mechanics, all our interactions with the outside world are mediated by perception. Our knowledge is further distilled by the machines which help our own biological mechanisms, like microscopes and telescopes, electric light, and even more powerfully by computer technology. But if the natural structures of perception can affect our interpretation of the world, how much more dramatically might science education and tools of information technology enhance – though sometimes mislead – our perception of reality? Even Odder Perceptions may not have all the answers, but it certainly poses more questions.

Book When Brains Meet Buildings

Download or read book When Brains Meet Buildings written by Michael A. Arbib and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021 with total page 697 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Each brain enlivens a body in interaction with the social and physical environment. Peter Zumthor's Therme at Vals exemplifies the interplay of interior with surroundings, and ways the actions of users fuse with their multi-modal experience. The action-perception cycle includes both practical and contemplative actions. We analyze what Louis Sullivan meant by "form ever follows function" but will more often talk of aesthetics and utility. Not only are action, perception and emotion intertwined, but so are remembering and imagination. Architectural design leads to the physical construction of buildings - but much of what our brains achieve can be seen as a form of mental construction. A first look at neuroscience offers schema theory as a bridge from cognitive processes to neural circuitry. Some architects fear that neuroscience will strip the architect of any creativity. In counterpoint, two-way reduction explores how neuroscience can "dissect" phenomenology by showing how first-person experiences arise from melding diverse subconscious processes. This raises the possibility that neuroscience can extend the effectiveness of architectural design by showing how different aspects of a building may affect human experience in ways that are not apparent to self-reflection"--

Book A Jacobean Company and its Playhouse

Download or read book A Jacobean Company and its Playhouse written by Eva Griffith and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-11-28 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eva Griffith's book fills a major gap concerning the world of Shakespearean drama. It tells the previously untold story of the Servants of Queen Anna of Denmark, a group of players parallel to Shakespeare's King's Men, and their London playhouse, The Red Bull. Built in vibrant Clerkenwell, The Red Bull lay within the northern suburbs of Jacobean London, with prostitution to the west and the Revels Office to the east. Griffith sets the playhouse in the historical context of the Seckford and Bedingfeld families and their connections to the site. Utilising a wealth of primary evidence including maps, plans and archival texts, she analyses the court patronage of figures such as Sir Robert Sidney, Queen Anna's chamberlain, alongside the company's members, function and repertoire. Plays performed included those by Webster, Dekker and Heywood - entertainments characterised by spectacle, battle sequence and courtroom drama, alongside London humour and song.

Book Dictionary of Visual Discourse

Download or read book Dictionary of Visual Discourse written by Barry Sandywell and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-22 with total page 722 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This substantial and ambitious dictionary explores the languages and cultures of visual studies. It provides the basis for understanding the foundations and motivations of current theoretical and academic discourse, as well as the different forms of visual culture that have come to organize everyday life. The book is firmly placed in the context of the 'visual turn' in contemporary thought. It has been designed as an interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary introduction to the vocabularies and grammars of visuality that inform thinking in the arts and humanities today. It also offers insight into the philosophical frameworks which underpin the field of visual culture. A central theme that runs throughout the entries is the task of moving away from a narrow understanding of visuality inherited from traditional philosophy toward a richer cultural and multi-sensorial philosophy of concrete experience. The dictionary incorporates intertextual links that encourage readers to explore connections between major themes, theories and key figures in the field. In addition the author's introduction provides a comprehensive and critical introduction which documents the significance of the visual turn in contemporary theory and culture. It is accompanied by an extensive bibliography and further reading list. As both a substantive academic contribution to this growing field and a useful reference tool, this book offers a theoretical introduction to the many languages of visual discourse. It will be essential reading for graduate students and scholars in visual studies, the sociology of visual culture, cultural and media studies, philosophy, art history and theory, design, film and communication studies.

Book Digital Wood Design

Download or read book Digital Wood Design written by Fabio Bianconi and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-02-24 with total page 1525 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores various digital representation strategies that could change the future of wooden architectures by blending tradition and innovation. Composed of 61 chapters, written by 153 authors hailing from 5 continents, 24 countries and 69 research centers, it addresses advanced digital modeling, with a particular focus on solutions involving generative models and dynamic value, inherent to the relation between knowing how to draw and how to build. Thanks to the potential of computing, areas like parametric design and digital manufacturing are opening exciting new avenues for the future of construction. The book’s chapters are divided into five sections that connect digital wood design to integrated approaches and generative design; to model synthesis and morphological comprehension; to lessons learned from nature and material explorations; to constructive wisdom and implementation-related challenges; and to parametric transfigurations and morphological optimizations.

Book Fundamentals of Cognitive Science

Download or read book Fundamentals of Cognitive Science written by Thomas Hardy Leahey and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-07-19 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fundamentals of Cognitive Science draws on research from psychology, philosophy, artificial intelligence, linguistics, evolution, and neuroscience to provide an engaging and student-friendly introduction to this interdisciplinary field. While structured around traditional cognitive psychology topics, from attention, learning theory, and memory to information processing, thinking, and decision making, the book also looks at neural networks, cognitive neuroscience, embodied cognition, and magic to illustrate cognitive science principles. The book is organized around the history of thinking about the mind and its relation to the world. It considers the evolution of cognition and how it demonstrates how our current thinking about cognitive processes is derived from pre-scientific philosophies and common sense, through psychologists’ empirical inquiries into mind and behavior as they pursued a science of cognition and the construction of artificial intelligences. The architectures of cognition are also applied throughout, and the book proposes a synthesis of them, from traditional symbol system architectures to recent work in embodied cognition and Bayesian predictive processing. Practical and policy implications are also considered but solutions are left for the readers to determine. Using extended case studies to address the most important themes, ideas, and findings, this book is suitable for upper-level undergraduate and graduate courses in psychology and related fields. It is also suitable for general readers interested in an accessible treatment of cognitive science and its practical implications. Please visit www.fundamentalsofcognitivescience.com for further resources to accompany the book.

Book Talking Nets

    Book Details:
  • Author : James A. Anderson
  • Publisher : MIT Press
  • Release : 2000-02-28
  • ISBN : 9780262511117
  • Pages : 452 pages

Download or read book Talking Nets written by James A. Anderson and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2000-02-28 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Surprising tales from the scientists who first learned how to use computers to understand the workings of the human brain. Since World War II, a group of scientists has been attempting to understand the human nervous system and to build computer systems that emulate the brain's abilities. Many of the early workers in this field of neural networks came from cybernetics; others came from neuroscience, physics, electrical engineering, mathematics, psychology, even economics. In this collection of interviews, those who helped to shape the field share their childhood memories, their influences, how they became interested in neural networks, and what they see as its future. The subjects tell stories that have been told, referred to, whispered about, and imagined throughout the history of the field. Together, the interviews form a Rashomon-like web of reality. Some of the mythic people responsible for the foundations of modern brain theory and cybernetics, such as Norbert Wiener, Warren McCulloch, and Frank Rosenblatt, appear prominently in the recollections. The interviewees agree about some things and disagree about more. Together, they tell the story of how science is actually done, including the false starts, and the Darwinian struggle for jobs, resources, and reputation. Although some of the interviews contain technical material, there is no actual mathematics in the book. Contributors James A. Anderson, Michael Arbib, Gail Carpenter, Leon Cooper, Jack Cowan, Walter Freeman, Stephen Grossberg, Robert Hecht-Neilsen, Geoffrey Hinton, Teuvo Kohonen, Bart Kosko, Jerome Lettvin, Carver Mead, David Rumelhart, Terry Sejnowski, Paul Werbos, Bernard Widrow

Book Workshops in Perception

Download or read book Workshops in Perception written by R. P. Power and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-03-27 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in 1981, Workshops in Perception is designed to enable students to devise their own experiments in sensory processes or perception. The thirty workshops include over a hundred different possible student projects covering the full range of the senses and interactions among them. The topics range from simple perimetry to the perception of language and social situations. In addition to more traditional topics such as illusions, adaptation and after-effects, they include lifespan perceptual development, musical illusions, and even a consumer-oriented study of road atlases. Each of the ten major sections has a general introduction to the topic with suggestions for reading. Each workshop has a more specific introduction to its topic, and an experiment outlined. A typical outline will suggest more independent variables than a student can handle, and it is up to the student to select the variables he considers important and to choose the appropriate levels of the variables. Although many suggestions are made regarding the actual running of each workshop, deciding precisely how to carry out the experiment is left up to the student. Pilot work and consultation with the tutor is encouraged. Suggestions for the form of the analysis are made, but again the details are left to the student. Several alternatives to the main workshop are outlined briefly, and these are suited to the more adventurous or advanced student. Thus the book is suited to students with a wide range of ability.

Book The Rationality of Perception

Download or read book The Rationality of Perception written by Susanna Siegel and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There is an important division in the human mind between perception and reasoning. We reason from information that we have already, but perception is a means of taking in new information. Susanna Siegel argues that these two aspects of the mind become deeply intertwined when beliefs, fears, desires, or prejudice influence what we perceive.

Book The Realistic Empiricism of Mach  James  and Russell

Download or read book The Realistic Empiricism of Mach James and Russell written by Erik C. Banks and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-08-28 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book redevelops an important movement in philosophy for the first time, exploring the ways in which three of the greatest thinkers can be connected, and applying their ideas to contemporary problems in the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of science.

Book Digital Draw Connections

    Book Details:
  • Author : Fabio Bianconi
  • Publisher : Springer Nature
  • Release : 2021-04-27
  • ISBN : 3030597431
  • Pages : 1137 pages

Download or read book Digital Draw Connections written by Fabio Bianconi and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-04-27 with total page 1137 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book stems from the seminal work of Robert Venturi and aims at re-projecting it in the current cultural debate by extending it to the scale of landscape and placing it in connection with representative issues. It brings out the transdisciplinary synthesis of a necessarily interdisciplinary approach to the theme, aimed at creating new models which are able to represent the complexity of a contradictory reality and to redefine the centrality of human dimension. As such, the volume gathers multiple experiences developed in different geographical areas, which come into connection with the role of representation. Composed of 43 chapters written by 81 authors from around the world, with an introduction by Jim Venturi and Cezar Nicolescu, the volume is divided into two parts, the first one more theoretical and the other one which showcases real-world applications, although there is never a total split between criticism and operational experimentation of research.

Book Passibility

    Book Details:
  • Author : Wolff-Michael Roth
  • Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media
  • Release : 2011-08-05
  • ISBN : 9400719086
  • Pages : 282 pages

Download or read book Passibility written by Wolff-Michael Roth and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2011-08-05 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book argues that the ‘constructivist metaphor’ has become a self-appointed overriding concept that suppresses other modes of thinking about knowing and learning science. Yet there are questions about knowledge that constructivism cannot properly answer, such as how a cognitive structure can intentionally develop a formation that is more complex than itself; how a learner can aim at a learning objective that is, by definition, itself unknown; how we learn through pain, suffering, love or passion; and the role emotion and crises play in knowing and learning. In support of the hypothesis that passibility underlies cognition, readers are provided with a collation of empirical studies and phenomenological analyses of knowing and learning science—in schools, scientific laboratories and everyday life—all of which defy a constructivist explanation. The author argues that ‘passibility’ constitutes an essential factor in the development of consciousness, with a range of essential experiences that cannot be brought into the linguistic realm. His exploration is guided by concepts such as ‘otherness’, passion, passivity and undecidability, and concludes by resituating the construction metaphor to accord it its proper place in a more comprehensive theory of learning.

Book More Examples  Less Theory

Download or read book More Examples Less Theory written by Michael Billig and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-10-03 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By examining key psychologists from the past, this book shows why examples are so important and theory is over-valued.

Book The Psychologist

Download or read book The Psychologist written by and published by . This book was released on 1995 with total page 638 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Book Cognition  Assessment and Debriefing in Aviation

Download or read book Cognition Assessment and Debriefing in Aviation written by Wolff-Michael Roth and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2017-07-20 with total page 474 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Debriefing is a major component of the job in many high-risk industries where errors can have considerable, often deadly consequences, including combat, surgery, and aviation. Although there exists considerable literature on debriefing, recent reviews of the literature suggest (a) shortcomings in the topics researched, (b) paucity of related theory, (c) limitations in the number of empirical studies, and (d) problems in research design. There are also recent suggestions that "there are surprisingly studies in the scholarly literature that show how to debrief, how to teach or learn to debrief, what methods of debriefing exists and how effective they are at achieving learning objectives and goals" Meta-analyses reveal substantial variations in research findings—e.g., on the use of video as a means of debriefing—that can be traced to the problems. This book redresses these problems in that it provides a detailed look at debriefing and assessment, the functions of different cognitive artifacts used, and a theoretical framework that accounts for the complexity of flying an aircraft and for the debriefing of the pilots’ experiences, especially under the high-stakes condition of their bi-annual evaluation for licensing purposes. The book provides detailed investigation of flight examiners’ methods to arrive at assessments of aviation pilot performance. It shows and theoretically models why there are good reasons for lower than desired inter-rater agreements. It offers detailed scenarios of how debriefing can be made to draw maximum benefit for pilot learning, that is, for the take-home messages that will make them better pilots. The theoretical framework includes objective factors that determine performance and the subjective experience pilots have while undergoing training and testing in flight simulators

Book Possibilities of Perception

Download or read book Possibilities of Perception written by Jennifer Church and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2013-07-25 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The epistemology and the phenomenology of perception are closely related insofar as both depend on experiences of self-evident objectivity—experiences in which the objectivity of a state of affairs is evident from within our experience of that state of affairs. Jennifer Church offers a distinctive account of perception, showing how imagining alternative perspectives and alternative possibilities plays a key role in creating and validating experiences of self-evident objectivity. Offered first as an account of what it takes to perceive ordinary objects such as birds and trees, the account is then extended to show how it is also possible to perceive such things as causes, reasons, mental states, distant galaxies, molecular arrangements, mathematical relations, and interpersonal obligations. A chapter is devoted to the phenomenology and epistemology of moral perception, including the perception of persons as such; and a chapter is devoted to the peculiarities of aesthetic perception, including the perception of artworks as such. In all of these cases, Church argues, perception can be literal (not merely figurative or metaphorical) and substantive (not merely formal or deflationary). Her account helps to explain the advantages of perceptual versus non-perceptual knowledge. It also helps to make sense of some historical discussions of the role of the imagination in acquiring and validating knowledge, in relation to Plato's cave, Descartes' explanation of rational intuition, and Kant's arguments concerning objectivity, causality, and the Categorical Imperative.

Book Geometry as Objective Science in Elementary School Classrooms

Download or read book Geometry as Objective Science in Elementary School Classrooms written by Wolff-Michael Roth and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2011-05-09 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study examines the origins of geometry in and out of the intuitively given everyday lifeworlds of children in a second-grade mathematics class. These lifeworlds, though pre-geometric, are not without model objects that denote and come to anchor geometric idealities that they will understand at later points in their lives. Roth's analyses explain how geometry, an objective science, arises anew from the pre-scientific but nevertheless methodic actions of children in a structured world always already shot through with significations. He presents a way of understanding knowing and learning in mathematics that differs from other current approaches, using case studies to demonstrate contradictions and incongruences of other theories – Immanuel Kant, Jean Piaget, and more recent forms of (radical, social) constructivism, embodiment theories, and enactivism – and to show how material phenomenology fused with phenomenological sociology provides answers to the problems that these other paradigms do not answer.