Tarski’s World is an innovative and exciting method of introducing students to the language of first-order logic. Using the courseware package, students quickly master the meanings of connectives and qualifiers and soon become fluent in the symbolic language at the core of modern logic. The program allows students to build three-dimensional worlds and then describe them in first-order logic. The program, compatible with Macintosh and Windows formats, also contains a unique and effective corrective tool in the form of a game, which methodically leads students back through their errors if they wrongly evaluate the sentences in the constructed worlds.

A brand new feature in this revised and expanded edition is student access to Grade Grinder, an innovative Internet-based grading service that provides accurate and timely feedback to students whenever they need it. Students can submit solutions for the program’s more than 100 exercises to the Grade Grinder for assessment, and the results are returned quickly to the students and optionally to the teacher as well. A web-based interface also allows instructors to manage assignments and grades for their classes.

Intended as a supplement to a standard logic text, Tarski’s World is an essential tool for helping students learn the language of logic.

 

In Technological Turf Wars, Jessica Johnston analyzes the tensions and political dilemmas that coexist in the interrelationship among science, technology and society. Illustrating how computer security is as concerned with social relationships as it is with technology, Johnston provides an illuminating ethnography that considers corporate culture and the workplace environment of the antivirus industry.

Using a qualitative, interdisciplinary approach, which combines organizational and security studies with critical and social analysis of science and technology, Johnston questions the motivations, contradictions and negotiations of antivirus professionals. She examines the tensions between the service ethics and profit motives—does the industry release viruses to generate demand for antivirus software?—and considers the dynamics within companies by looking at facets such as gender bias and power politics. Technological Turf Wars is an informed, enlightened and entertaining view of how the production of computer security technology is fraught with social issues.

Text as Ride re-situates our understanding of new media in the social contexts of mobile apps, thrill rides, walking in the city, 3D cinema, video games, and DJ culture. Rather than a continuation of print-based literature by other means, this book considers electronic literature as a practice that foregrounds new media’s specificity. Janez Strehovec deals with post-hypertext eLiterature that has become conceptual: Moving beyond hyperlinked storytelling, it deals with digital materiality and boundaries of language; with code, textual ecology, and the limits of the sayable. This book will appeal to scholars of electronic literature, gaming, urban studies, cinema, and digital culture.
 

How does a computer scientist understand infinity? What can probability theory teach us about free will? Can mathematical notions be used to enhance one's personal understanding of the Bible?

Perhaps no one is more qualified to address these questions than Donald E. Knuth, whose massive contributions to computing have led others to nickname him "The Father of Computer Science"—and whose religious faith led him to understand a fascinating analysis of the Bible called the 3:16 project. In this series of six spirited, informal lectures, Knuth explores the relationships between his vocation and his faith, revealing the unique perspective that his work with computing has lent to his understanding of God.

His starting point is the 3:16 project, an application of mathematical "random sampling" to the books of the Bible. The first lectures tell the story of the project's conception and execution, exploring its many dimensions of language translation, aesthetics, and theological history. Along the way, Knuth explains the many insights he gained from such interdisciplinary work. These theological musings culminate in a surprising final lecture tackling the ideas of infinity, free will, and some of the other big questions that lie at the juncture of theology and computation.

Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About, with its charming and user-friendly format—each lecture ends with a question and answer exchange, and the book itself contains more than 100 illustrations—is a readable and intriguing approach to a crucial topic, certain to edify both those who are serious and curious about their faiths and those who look at the science of computation and wonder what it might teach them about their spiritual world.

Includes "Creativity, Spirituality, and Computer Science," a panel discussion featuring Harry Lewis, Guy L. Steele, Jr., Manuela Veloso, Donald E. Knuth, and Mitch Kapor.

Eschewing the traditional focus on object/viewer spatial relationships, Timothy Scott Barker’s Time and the Digital stresses the role of the temporal in digital art and media. The connectivity of contemporary digital interfaces has not only expanded the relationships between once separate spaces but has increased the complexity of the temporal in nearly unimagined ways. Invoking the process philosophy of Whitehead and Deleuze, Barker strives for nothing less than a new philosophy of time in digital encounters, aesthetics, and interactivity. Of interest to scholars in the fields of art and media theory and philosophy of technology, as well as new media artists, this study contributes to an understanding of the new temporal experiences emergent in our interactions with digital technologies.

In this probing study, Eric Freedman focuses on what images from photography, mobile communications, and the Internet reveal about looking. Exploring subjectivity by critically examining the look, he elaborates on the nature of the photographic frame and its relation to interpretive practices. Freedman scrutinizes what he calls "technobiography"—a life written through technology, and considers the movement of personal images into public spaces. He also considers authorship that situates the self as inherently engaged with and inscribed by information technology.

All of the chapters in Transient Images explore Freedman's interest in examining how media technologies activate particular notions of self and community. He provides examples that address trauma—pictures of missing children on milk cartons and episodes of the reality series Intervention—as well as the strategies behind creating and distributing personal advertisements on the Internet. Transient Images draws out the tensions that exist in images circulating in the digital era.

Travelling Facts explores the production and distribution of facts : their life cycles as well as the material networks through which they travel. Acknowledging that facts are fallible and originate primarily in isolated laboratories and field sites, the volume includes discussions about how facts are reassembled into practical knowledge, how they translate locally, and what lessons may be learned from those who attempt to regulate fact production and circulation in the face of the marked acceleration and expansion of digital technologies worldwide.

Hypertext is now commonplace: links and linking structure nearly all of our experiences online. Yet the literary, as opposed to commercial, potential of hypertext has receded. One of the few tools still focused on hypertext as a means for digital storytelling is Twine, a platform for building choice-driven stories without relying heavily on code. In Twining, Anastasia Salter and Stuart Moulthrop lead readers on a journey at once technical, critical, contextual, and personal. The book’s chapters alternate careful, stepwise discussion of adaptable Twine projects, offer commentary on exemplary Twine works, and discuss Twine’s technological and cultural background. Beyond telling the story of Twine and how to make Twine stories, Twining reflects on the ongoing process of making.

"While there have certainly been attempts to study Twine historically and theoretically... no single publication has provided such a detailed account of it. And no publication has even attempted to situate Twine amongst its many different conversations and traditions, something this book does masterfully." —James Brown, Rutgers University, Camden

In Two Bits, Christopher M. Kelty investigates the history and cultural significance of Free Software, revealing the people and practices that have transformed not only software but also music, film, science, and education. Free Software is a set of practices devoted to the collaborative creation of software source code that is made openly and freely available through an unconventional use of copyright law. Kelty explains how these specific practices have reoriented the relations of power around the creation, dissemination, and authorization of all kinds of knowledge. He also makes an important contribution to discussions of public spheres and social imaginaries by demonstrating how Free Software is a “recursive public”—a public organized around the ability to build, modify, and maintain the very infrastructure that gives it life in the first place.

Drawing on ethnographic research that took him from an Internet healthcare start-up company in Boston to media labs in Berlin to young entrepreneurs in Bangalore, Kelty describes the technologies and the moral vision that bind together hackers, geeks, lawyers, and other Free Software advocates. In each case, he shows how their practices and way of life include not only the sharing of software source code but also ways of conceptualizing openness, writing copyright licenses, coordinating collaboration, and proselytizing. By exploring in detail how these practices came together as the Free Software movement from the 1970s to the 1990s, Kelty also considers how it is possible to understand the new movements emerging from Free Software: projects such as Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization that creates copyright licenses, and Connexions, a project to create an online scholarly textbook commons.