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An information processing approach to how citizens make important political decisions

How often do we hear that Americans are so ignorant about politics that their civic competence is impaired, and that the media are to blame because they do a dismal job of informing the public? Processing Politics shows that average Americans are far smarter than the critics believe. Integrating a broad range of current research on how people learn (from political science, social psychology, communication, physiology, and artificial intelligence), Doris Graber shows that televised presentations—at their best—actually excel at transmitting information and facilitating learning. She critiques current political offerings in terms of their compatibility with our learning capacities and interests, and she considers the obstacles, both economic and political, that affect the content we receive on the air, on cable, or on the Internet.

More and more people rely on information from television and the Internet to make important decisions. Processing Politics offers a sound, well-researched defense of these remarkably versatile media, and challenges us to make them work for us in our democracy.

Reflection, the capacity to represent our ideas and to make them the object of our own thoughts, has for many centuries been recognized as a key mark of human intelligence. The very success and extension of reflective ideas in logic and computer science underscores the need for conceptual foundations.

This book proposes a general theory of reflective logics and reflective declarative programming languages. This theory provides a conceptual foundation for judging the extent to which a computational system is reflective. Manuel Clavel presents a proof of the reflective nature of rewriting logic and provides examples of the potential for reflective programming in a number of novel computer applications. These applications are implemented in Maude, a reflective programming language and environment based on rewriting logic that can define, represent and execute a breadth of logics, languages and models of computation. A general method to easily build theorem-proving tools in Maude is also proposed and illustrated. The book goes on to promote the notion of a "universal theory" that can simulate the deductions of all representable theories within any given logic.

The Strange Music of Social Life presents a dialogue on dialogic sociology, explored through the medium of music. Sociologist and composer Michael Mayerfeld Bell presents an argument that both sociology and classical music remain largely in the grip of a nineteenth-century totalizing ambition of prediction and control. He provides the refreshing approach of "strangency" to explain a sociology that tries to understand not only the regularities of social life but also the social conditions in which people do what we do not expect.

Nine important sociologists and musicians respond-often vigorously-to the conversation Bell initiates by raising pivotal questions. The Strange Music of Social Life concludes with Bell's reply to those responses and offers new insight into sociology and music sociology.