Instituting nature Mathews, Andrew S
2011, 20111104, 2011-11-04, 2013-06-26, 20110101
eBook, Book
A study of how encounters between forestry bureaucrats and indigenous forest managers in Mexico produced official knowledge about forests and the state.
Most designers know that yellow text presented against a blue background reads clearly and easily, but how many can explain why, and what really are the best ways to help others and ourselves clearly ...see key patterns in a bunch of data? When we use software, access a website, or view business or scientific graphics, our understanding is greatly enhanced or impeded by the way the information is presented. This book explores the art and science of why we see objects the way we do. Based on the science of perception and vision, the author presents the key principles at work for a wide range of applications--resulting in visualization of improved clarity, utility, and persuasiveness. The book offers practical guidelines that can be applied by anyone: interaction designers, graphic designers of all kinds (including web designers), data miners, and financial analysts. * Complete update of the recognized source in industry, research, and academic for applicable guidance on information visualizing * Includes the latest research and state of the art information on multimedia presentation * More than 160 explicit design guidelines based on vision science * A new final chapter that explains the process of visual thinking and how visualizations help us to think about problems * Packed with over 400 informative full color illustrations, which are key to understanding of the subject
As the largest and greenest multilateral lender in the world, the EIB helps economies flourish, creates jobs and promotes equality. Since 1958, the EIB has provided loans and expert advice for ...thousands of projects in over 160 countries.
This book describes the new generation of discrete choice methods, focusing on the many advances that are made possible by simulation. Researchers use these statistical methods to examine the choices ...that consumers, households, firms, and other agents make. Each of the major models is covered: logit, generalized extreme value, or GEV (including nested and cross-nested logits), probit, and mixed logit, plus a variety of specifications that build on these basics. Simulation-assisted estimation procedures are investigated and compared, including maximum simulated likelihood, method of simulated moments, and method of simulated scores. Procedures for drawing from densities are described, including variance reduction techniques such as anithetics and Halton draws. Recent advances in Bayesian procedures are explored, including the use of the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm and its variant Gibbs sampling. No other book incorporates all these fields, which have arisen in the past 20 years. The procedures are applicable in many fields, including energy, transportation, environmental studies, health, labor, and marketing.
AI (Artificial Intelligence) is predicted to radically change teaching and learning in both schools and industry causing radical disruption of work. AI can support well-being initiatives and lifelong ...learning but educational institutions and companies need to take the changing technology into account. Moving towards AI supported by digital tools requires a dramatic shift in the concept of learning, expertise and the businesses built off of it. Based on the latest research on AI and how it is changing learning and education, this book will focus on the enormous opportunities to expand educational settings with AI for learning in and beyond the traditional classroom. This open access book also introduces ethical challenges related to learning and education, while connecting human learning and machine learning. This book will be of use to a variety of readers, including researchers, AI users, companies and policy makers.
Around 1542, descendants of the Aztec rulers of Mexico created accounts of the pre-Hispanic history of the city of Tetzcoco, Mexico, one of the imperial capitals of the Aztec Empire. Painted in ...iconic script (picture writing), the Codex Xolotl, the Quinatzin Map, and the Tlohtzin Map appear to retain and emphasize both pre-Hispanic content and also pre-Hispanic form, despite being produced almost a generation after the Aztecs surrendered to Hernn Corts in 1521. Yet, as this pioneering study makes plain, the reality is far more complex. Eduardo de J. Douglas offers a detailed critical analysis and historical contextualization of the manuscripts to argue that colonial economic, political, and social concerns affected both the content of the three Tetzcocan pictorial histories and their archaizing pictorial form. As documents composed by indigenous people to assert their standing as legitimate heirs of the Aztec rulers as well as loyal subjects of the Spanish Crown and good Catholics, the Tetzcocan manuscripts qualify as subtle yet shrewd negotiations between indigenous and Spanish systems of signification and between indigenous and Spanish concepts of real property and political rights. By reading the Tetzcocan manuscripts as calculated responses to the changes and challenges posed by Spanish colonization and Christian evangelization, Douglass study significantly contributes to and expands upon the scholarship on central Mexican manuscript painting and recent critical investigations of art and political ideology in colonial Latin America.
The residents of Caxambu, a squatter neighborhood in Rio de Janeiro, live in a state of insecurity as they face urban violence.Living with Insecurity in a Brazilian Favelaexamines how inequality, ...racism, drug trafficking, police brutality, and gang activities affect the daily lives of the people of Caxambu. Some Brazilians see these communities, known asfavelas, as centers of drug trafficking that exist beyond the control of the state and threaten the rest of the city. For other Brazilians, favelas are symbols of economic inequality and racial exclusion. Ben Penglase's ethnography goes beyond these perspectives to look at how the people of Caxambu themselves experience violence.
Although the favela is often seen as a war zone, the residents are linked to each other through bonds of kinship and friendship. In addition, residents often take pride in homes and public spaces that they have built and used over generations. Penglase notes that despite poverty, their lives are not completely defined by illegal violence or deprivation. He argues that urban violence and a larger context of inequality create a social world that is deeply contradictory and ambivalent. The unpredictability and instability of daily experiences result in disagreements and tensions, but the residents also experience their neighborhood as a place of social intimacy. As a result, the social world of the neighborhood is both a place of danger and safety.
This book studies the rise of social media in the first decade of the twenty-first century, up until 2012. It provides both a historical and a critical analysis of the emergence of networking ...services in the context of a changing ecosystem of connective media. Such history is needed to understand how the intricate constellation of platforms profoundly affects our experience of online sociality. In a short period of time, services like Facebook, YouTube and many others have come to deeply penetrate our daily habits of communication and creative production. While most sites started out as amateur-driven community platforms, half a decade later they have turned into large corporations that do not just facilitate user connectedness, but have become global information and data mining companies extracting and exploiting user connectivity. Offering a dual analytical prism to examine techno-cultural as well as socio-economic aspects of social media, the author dissects five major platforms: Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, and Wikipedia. Each of these microsystems occupies a distinct position in the larger ecosystem of connective media, and yet, their underlying mechanisms for coding interfaces, steering users, filtering content, governance and business models rely on shared ideological principles. Reconstructing the premises on which these platforms are built, this study highlights how norms for online interaction and communication gradually changed. “Sharing,” “friending,” “liking,” “following,” “trending,” and “favoriting” have come to denote online practices imbued with specific technological and economic meanings. This process of normalization is part of a larger political and ideological battle over information control in an online world where everything is bound to become “social.”