Changes in the routines of domestic life were among the most striking social phenomena of the period between the two World Wars, when the home came into focus as a problem to be solved: re-imagined, streamlined, electrified, and generally cleaned up. Modernist writers understood themselves to be living in an epochal moment when the design and meaning of home life were reconceived. Moving among literature, architecture, design, science, and technology, Machines for Living shows how the modernization of the home led to profound changes in domestic life and relied on a set of emergent concepts, including standardization, scientific method, functionalism, efficiency science, and others, that form the basis of literary modernism and stand at the confluence of modernism and modernity. Even as modernist writers criticized the expanding reach of modernization into the home, they drew on its conceptual vocabulary to develop both the thematic and formal commitments of literary modernism. Rosner's work develops a new methodology for interdisciplinary modernist studies and shows how the reinvention of domestic life is central to modernist literature.

Thermodynamics was created in the ?rst half of the 19th century as a theory designed to explain the functioning of heat engines converting heat into mechanical work. In the course of time, while the scope of research in this ?eld was being extended to a wider and wider class of energy transformations, thermodynamics came to be considered as a general theory of machines identi?ed with energy transducers. Imp- tant progress in biochemistry in the ?rst half of the 20th century, and in molecular biology in the second half, made it possible to think of treating even living organisms as machines, at least on the subcellular level. However, success in applying thermodynamics to elucidate the phenomenon of life has been rather mitigated. Two reasons seem to be responsible for this unsatisfactory s- uation. Nineteenth century thermodynamics dealt only with simple (homogeneous) systems in complete equilibrium. Although during the 20th century a nonequilibrium thermodynamics was developed, sta- ing with the Onsager theory of linear response and ending with the Prigogine nonlinear theory of dissipative structures, these theories still concern the originally homogeneous systems. Because living organisms are complex systems with a historically frozen spatial and functional structure, a thermodynamics of both nonequilibrium and complex s- tems is needed for their description. The ?rst goal of the present book is to formulate the foundations of such a thermodynamics.

When Machines Play Chopin brings together music aesthetics, performance practices, and the history of automated musical instruments in nineteenth-century German literature. Philosophers defined music as a direct expression of human emotion while soloists competed with one another to display machine-like technical perfection at their instruments. When Machines Play Chopin looks at this paradox between thinking about and practicing music to show what three literary works say about automation and the sublime in art.

First published in 1990, Laws, Men and Machines is an original interpretation of the lasting influence that Newtonian mechanics has had on the design and operation of the American political system. The author argues that it is this mechanistic tradition that now instinctively shapes the way we conceive of, analyse, and evaluate American politics, and that the Newtonian conception of the world still finds expression in the 'checks and balances' of the American system.

This book is a collection of essays in honor of Paul Ziff written by his col leagues, students, and friends. Many of the authors address topics that Ziff has discussed in his writings: understanding, rules and regularities, proper names, the feelings of machines, expression, and aesthetic experience. Paul Ziff began his professional career as an artist, went on to study painting with J. M. Hanson at Cornell, and then studied for the Ph. D. in philosophy, also at Cornell, with Max Black. Over the next three decades he produced a series of remarkable papers in philosophy of art, culminating in 1984 with the publica tion of Antiaesthetics: An Appreciation of the Cow with the Subtile Nose. In 1960 he published Semantic Analysis, his masterwork in philosophy of lan guage. Throughout his career he made important contributions to philosophy of mind in such papers as "The Simplicity of Other Minds" (1965) and "About Behaviourism" (1958). In addition to his work in these areas, his lec tures at Harvard on philosophy of religion are an underground classic; and throughout his career he has continued to make art and to search for the meaning of life in the properties of prime numbers. Although his interests are wide and deep, questions about language, art, and mind have dominated his philosophical work, and it is problems in these areas that provide the topics of most of the essays in this volume.

How productivity culture and technology became emblematic of the American economic system in pre- and postwar Germany. The concept of productivity originated in a statistical measure of output per worker or per work-hour, calculated by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. A broader productivity culture emerged in 1920s America, as Henry Ford and others linked methods of mass production and consumption to high wages and low prices. These ideas were studied eagerly by a Germany in search of economic recovery after World War I, and, decades later, the Marshall Plan promoted productivity in its efforts to help post–World War II Europe rebuild. In Productivity Machines, Corinna Schlombs examines the transatlantic history of productivity technology and culture in the two decades before and after World War II. She argues for the interpretive flexibility of productivity: different groups viewed productivity differently at different times. Although it began as an objective measure, productivity came to be emblematic of the American economic system; post-World War II West Germany, however, adapted these ideas to its own political and economic values. Schlombs explains that West German unionists cast a doubtful eye on productivity's embrace of plant-level collective bargaining; unions fought for codetermination—the right to participate in corporate decisions. After describing German responses to US productivity, Schlombs offers an in-depth look at labor relations in one American company in Germany—that icon of corporate America, IBM. Finally, Schlombs considers the emergence of computer technology—seen by some as a new symbol of productivity but by others as the means to automate workers out of their jobs.

This book explores the idea of time travel from the first account in English literature to the latest theories of physicists such as Kip Thorne and Igor Novikov. This very readable work covers a variety of topics including: the history of time travel in fiction; the fundamental scientific concepts of time, spacetime, and the fourth dimension; the speculations of Einstein, Richard Feynman, Kurt Goedel, and others; time travel paradoxes, and much more.

TheArti?cialLifetermappearedmorethan20yearsagoinasmallcornerofNew Mexico, USA. Since then the area has developed dramatically, many researchers joining enthusiastically and research groups sprouting everywhere. This frenetic activity led to the emergence of several strands that are now established ?elds in themselves. We are now reaching a stage that one may describe as maturer: with more rigour, more benchmarks, more results, more stringent acceptance criteria, more applications, in brief, more sound science. This, which is the n- ural path of all new areas, comes at a price, however. A certain enthusiasm, a certain adventurousness from the early years is fading and may have been lost on the way. The ?eld has become more reasonable. To counterbalance this and to encourage lively discussions, a conceptual track, where papers were judged on criteria like importance and/or novelty of the concepts proposed rather than the experimental/theoretical results, has been introduced this year. A conference on a theme as broad as Arti?cial Life is bound to be very - verse,but a few tendencies emerged. First, ?elds like ‘Robotics and Autonomous Agents’ or ‘Evolutionary Computation’ are still extremely active and keep on bringing a wealth of results to the A-Life community. Even there, however, new tendencies appear, like collective robotics, and more speci?cally self-assembling robotics, which represent now a large subsection. Second, new areas appear.