Books
BOOK 1
About the book:
To the outsider, an expert seems as if they are doing everything effortlessly. A master chess player, an expert golfer, and a prolific writer seem to be able to quickly home in on what needs to be done and execute flawlessly over and over again. How do we master new skills? How do our brains and bodies transform performance from novice to expert? In Mastery, Arturo E. Hernandez shows that new skills are not built but rather bloom from the combination and recombination of small parts that come to represent a new whole.
About the author:
Arturo E. Hernandez, Ph.D. is a professor of psychology at the University of Houston specializing in the brain bases of bilingualism. He is the winner of the Wilhelm Bessel Research Award from the Humboldt Foundation in Germany and a Fulbright Global Scholar award, among other awards. He is the author of The Bilingual Brain and has written more than 80 journal articles. As a child, Hernandez was exposed to four languages and became proficient in two of them, English and Spanish. He learned Portuguese as a third language in early adulthood and German in his thirties. He is also an avid tennis player, having competed in tournaments himself and spent time coaching his children.
Source of description: https://www.prometheusbooks.com/9781633889408/mastery
BOOK 2
About the book:
In 1987, the Houston Museum of Natural Science and the University of Houston partnered in a pioneering examination of an Egyptian mummy named Ankh-Hap. The body and coffin were analyzed using a CT scan (computer tomography) and carbon dating. The results were immediately puzzling. Much of the mummy’s skeletal structure was missing or displaced; there were wasp nests in the skull. Some body parts had been replaced by dummies made of wood and cloth, and a network of wooden poles could be detected throughout the mummy. Some of these anomalies were clearly not part of the original mummification process, suggesting a long history of disturbance. This led to an ongoing Egyptological investigation of the mysterious journey taken by Ankh-Hap from ancient Egypt to modern America.
About the editor:
Frank L. Holt, Ph.D. Dr. Holt (MA, PhD University of Virginia) is one of the world’s leading authorities on Alexander the Great, Hellenistic Asia, and new research methodologies such as Cognitive Numismatics. He has published nine books and over eighty articles in journals such as Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik, Numismatic Chronicle, Indian Historical Review, Revue Numismatique, Mnemon, Notae Numismaticae, and Ancient Macedonia.
Source of description: https://academic.oup.com/book/55236/chapter/428590118?login=true
BOOK 3
About the book:
Transpacific Cartographies examines how contemporary Chinese diasporic narratives address the existential loss of home for immigrant communities at a time of global precarity and amid rising Sino-US tensions. Focusing on cultural productions of the Chinese diaspora from the 1990s to the present -- including novels by the Sinophone writers Yan Geling (The Criminal Lu Yanshi), Shi Yu (New York Lover), Chen Qian (Listen to the Caged Bird Sing), and Rong Rong (Notes of a Couple), as well as by the Anglophone writer Ha Jin (A Free Life; A Map of Betrayal), selected TV shows (Beijinger in New York; The Way We Were), and online literature -- Melody Yunzi Li argues that the characters in these stories create multilayered maps that transcend the territorial boundaries that make finding a home in a foreign land a seemingly impossible task. In doing so, these “maps” outline a transpacific landscape that reflects the psycho-geography of homemaking for diasporic communities. Intersecting with and bridging Sinophone studies, Chinese American studies, and diaspora studies and drawing on theories of literary cartography, Transpacific Cartographies demonstrates how these “maps” offer their readers different paths for finding a sense of home no matter where they are.
About the author:
Melody Yunzi Li an assistant professor in Chinese studies at the University of Houston, Texas. She is the coeditor of Affective Geographies and Narratives of Chinese Diaspora.
Information taken from: https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/transpacific-cartographies/9781978829336/
BOOK 4
About the book:
This book provides a framework for thinking about foundational philosophical questions surrounding the use of deep artificial neural networks ("deep learning") to achieve artificial intelligence. Specifically, it links recent breakthroughs to classic works in empiricist philosophy of mind. In recent assessments of deep learning's potential, scientists have cited historical figures from the philosophical debate between nativism and empiricism, which concerns the origins of abstract knowledge. These empiricists were faculty psychologists; that is, they argued that the extraction of abstract knowledge from experience involves the active engagement of psychological faculties such as perception, memory, imagination, attention, and empathy. This book explains how recent deep learning breakthroughs realized some of the most ambitious ideas about these faculties from philosophers such as Aristotle, Ibn Sina (Avicenna), John Locke, David Hume, William James, and Sophie de Grouchy. It illustrates the utility of this interdisciplinary connection by showing how it can provide benefits to both philosophy and computer science: computer scientists can continue to mine the history of philosophy for ideas and aspirational targets to hit, and philosophers can see how some of the historical empiricists' most ambitious speculations can now be realized in specific computational systems.
About the author:
Cameron J. Buckner is an Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Houston. He received an Alexander von Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellowship at Ruhr-University Bochum from 2011 to 2013 and has been a visiting fellow at the University of Cambridge.
Information taken from: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/from-deep-learning-to-rational-machines-9780197653302?cc=us&lang=en&#
BOOK 5
About the book:
In (Don’t) Stop Me If You’ve Heard This Before, Peter Turchi combines personal narrative and close reading of a wide range of stories and novels to reveal how writers create the fiction that matters to us. Building on his much-loved Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer, Turchi leads readers and writers to an understanding of how the intricate mechanics of storytelling—including shifts in characters’ authority, the subtle manipulation of images, careful attention to point of view, the strategic release of information, and even digressing from the (apparent) story—can create powerful effects.
About the author:
Peter Turchi is the author of five books and the co-editor of three anthologies. His books include “Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer”; “Suburban Journals: The Sketchbooks, Drawings, and Prints of Charles Ritchie”, in collaboration with the artist; a novel, “The Girls Next Door”; a collection of stories, “Magician; and The Pirate Prince”, co-written with Cape Cod treasure hunter Barry Clifford, about Clifford's discovery of the pirate ship Whydah.
Source of description: https://www.uh.edu/class/english/people/faculty/turchi/