Motivated by the remarkable fluidity of memory the way in which items are pulled spontaneously and effortlessly from our memory by vague similarities to what is currently occupying our attention Sparse Distributed Memory presents a mathematically elegant theory of human long term memory.The book, which is self contained, begins with background material from mathematics, computers, and neurophysiology; this is followed by a step by step development of the memory model. The concluding chapter describes an autonomous system that builds from experience an internal model of the world and bases its operation on that internal model. Close attention is paid to the engineering of the memory, including comparisons to ordinary computer memories.Sparse Distributed Memory provides an overall perspective on neural systems. The model it describes can aid in understanding human memory and learning, and a system based on it sheds light on outstanding problems in philosophy and artificial intelligence. Applications of the memory are expected to be found in the creation of adaptive systems for signal processing, speech, vision, motor control, and (in general) robots. Perhaps the most exciting aspect of the memory, in its implications for research in neural networks, is that its realization with neuronlike components resembles the cortex of the cerebellum.Pentti Kanerva is a scientist at the Research Institute for Advanced Computer Science at the NASA Ames Research Center and a visiting scholar at the Stanford Center for the Study of Language and Information. A Bradford Book.

A companion to such acclaimed works as The Age of Wonder, A Clockwork Universe, and Darwin’s Ghosts—a groundbreaking examination of the greatest event in history, the Scientific Revolution, and how it came to change the way we understand ourselves and our world.
We live in a world transformed by scientific discovery. Yet today, science and its practitioners have come under political attack. In this fascinating history spanning continents and centuries, historian David Wootton offers a lively defense of science, revealing why the Scientific Revolution was truly the greatest event in our history.
The Invention of Science goes back five hundred years in time to chronicle this crucial transformation, exploring the factors that led to its birth and the people who made it happen. Wootton argues that the Scientific Revolution was actually five separate yet concurrent events that developed independently, but came to intersect and create a new worldview. Here are the brilliant iconoclasts—Galileo, Copernicus, Brahe, Newton, and many more curious minds from across Europe—whose studies of the natural world challenged centuries of religious orthodoxy and ingrained superstition.
From gunpowder technology, the discovery of the new world, movable type printing, perspective painting, and the telescope to the practice of conducting experiments, the laws of nature, and the concept of the fact, Wotton shows how these discoveries codified into a social construct and a system of knowledge. Ultimately, he makes clear the link between scientific discovery and the rise of industrialization—and the birth of the modern world we know.

Der Bestseller-Autor Stefan Klein erzählt in seinem mitreißenden und zugleich poetischen Buch »Das All und das Nichts. Von der Schönheit des Universums« erstaunliche Geschichten über Raum und Zeit.
Gibt es das Nichts? Sind Raum und Zeit nur Illusionen? Reicht unser Verstand aus, um das All zu verstehen? Und warum sind wir auf der Welt? Die Physik des 21. Jahrhunderts verändert unsere Sicht auf die Welt und uns selbst. Ausgehend von der Blüte einer Rose spürt er der Schönheit des Unbekannten nach, beim Betrachten des Wetters erklärt er die Unberechenbarkeit der Welt, und mittels einer Kriminalgeschichte führt er uns die wahre Gestalt des Raumes vor Augen. Mit großem literarischem Gespür versetzt uns Stefan Klein ins Staunen und nimmt uns mit auf eine Reise in unsere Wirklichkeit, die ganz anders ist, als sie uns scheint.

From the bestselling author of Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, a concise, elegant exploration of time.
Why do we remember the past and not the future? What does it mean for time to “flow”? Do we exist in time or does time exist in us? In lyric, accessible prose, Carlo Rovelli invites us to consider questions about the nature of time that continue to puzzle physicists and philosophers alike.
For most readers this is unfamiliar terrain. We all experience time, but the more scientists learn about it, the more mysterious it remains. We think of it as uniform and universal, moving steadily from past to future, measured by clocks. Rovelli tears down these assumptions one by one, revealing a strange universe where at the most fundamental level time disappears. He explains how the theory of quantum gravity attempts to understand and give meaning to the resulting extreme landscape of this timeless world. Weaving together ideas from philosophy, science and literature, he suggests that our perception of the flow of time depends on our perspective, better understood starting from the structure of our brain and emotions than from the physical universe.
Already a bestseller in Italy, and written with the poetic vitality that made Seven Brief Lessons on Physics so appealing, The Order of Time offers a profoundly intelligent, culturally rich, novel appreciation of the mysteries of time.

Nationalism, in China as much as elsewhere, is today adopted, filtered, transformed, enhanced, and accelerated through digital networks. And as we have increasingly seen, nationalism in digital spheres interacts in complicated ways with nationalism "on the ground". If we are to understand the social and political complexities of the twenty-first century, we need to ask: what happens to nationalism when it goes digital?
In China's Digital Nationalism, Florian Schneider explores the issue by looking at digital China first hand, exploring what search engines, online encyclopedias, websites, hyperlink networks, and social media can tell us about the way that different actors construct and manage a crucial topic in contemporary Chinese politics: the protracted historical relationship with neighbouring Japan. Using two cases, the infamous Nanjing Massacre of 1937 and the ongoing disputes over islands in the East China Sea, Schneider shows how various stakeholders in China construct networks and deploy power to shape nationalism for their own ends. These dynamics provide crucial lessons on how nation states adapt to the shifting terrain of the digital age and highlight how digital nationalism is today an emergent property of complex communication networks.

This important new text and reference for researchers and students in machine learning, game theory, statistics and information theory offers the first comprehensive treatment of the problem of predicting individual sequences. Unlike standard statistical approaches to forecasting, prediction of individual sequences does not impose any probabilistic assumption on the data-generating mechanism. Yet, prediction algorithms can be constructed that work well for all possible sequences, in the sense that their performance is always nearly as good as the best forecasting strategy in a given reference class. The central theme is the model of prediction using expert advice, a general framework within which many related problems can be cast and discussed. Repeated game playing, adaptive data compression, sequential investment in the stock market, sequential pattern analysis, and several other problems are viewed as instances of the experts' framework and analyzed from a common nonstochastic standpoint that often reveals new and intriguing connections. Old and new forecasting methods are described in a mathematically precise way in order to characterize their theoretical limitations and possibilities.

Outnumbered is a journey to the dark side of mathematics, from how it dictates our social media activities to our travel routes. Algorithms are running our society, and as Facebook's Cambridge Analytica scandal has revealed, we don't even realize how our data has been used against us. David Sumpter investigates whether mathematics is crossing dangerous lines when it comes to what we can make decisions about. Our increasing reliance on technology and the internet has opened a window for mathematicians and data researchers to gaze through into our lives. Using the data they are constantly collecting about where we travel, where we shop, what we buy, and what interests us, they can begin to predict our daily habits, and increasingly we are relinquishing our decision-making to algorithms. Are we giving this up too easily?Without understanding what mathematics can and can't do it is impossible to get a handle on how it is changing our lives. In this book, David Sumpter takes an algorithm-strewn journey to the dark side of mathematics. He investigates the equations that analyze us, influence us and will (maybe) become like us, answering questions like:Who are Cambridge Analytica, and what are they doing with our data?How does Facebook build a 100-dimensional picture of your personality?Are Google algorithms racist and sexist?Why do election predictions fail so drastically? Are algorithms that are designed to find criminals making terrible mistakes?What does the future hold as we relinquish our decision-making to machines?Featuring interviews with those working at the cutting edge of algorithm, Outnumbered explains how mathematics and statistics work in the real world, and what we should and shouldn't worry about.

An Economist Best Book of the Year
“Sweeping . . . an ambitious synthesis . . . [Evans] writes with admirable narrative power and possesses a wonderful eye for local color . . . Fascinating.”—Stephen Schuker, The Wall Street Journal
From the bestselling author of The Third Reich at War, a masterly account of Europe in the age of its global hegemony; the latest volume in the Penguin History of Europe series
Richard J. Evans, bestselling historian of Nazi Germany, returns with a monumental new addition to the acclaimed Penguin History of Europe series, covering the period from the fall of Napoleon to the outbreak of World War I. Evans’s gripping narrative ranges across a century of social and national conflicts, from the revolutions of 1830 and 1848 to the unification of both Germany and Italy, from the Russo-Turkish wars to the Balkan upheavals that brought this era of relative peace and growing prosperity to an end. Among the great themes it discusses are the decline of religious belief and the rise of secular science and medicine, the journey of art, music, and literature from Romanticism to Modernism, the replacement of old-regime punishments by the modern prison, the end of aristocratic domination and the emergence of industrial society, and the dramatic struggle of feminists for women’s equality and emancipation. Uniting the era’s broad-ranging transformations was the pursuit of power in all segments of life, from the banker striving for economic power to the serf seeking to escape the power of his landlord, from the engineer asserting society’s power over the environment to the psychiatrist attempting to exert science’s power over human nature itself.
The first single-volume history of the century, this comprehensive and sweeping account gives the reader a magnificently human picture of Europe in the age when it dominated the rest of the globe.

This book offers a detailed history of parametric statistical inference. Covering the period between James Bernoulli and R.A. Fisher, it examines: binomial statistical inference; statistical inference by inverse probability; the central limit theorem and linear minimum variance estimation by Laplace and Gauss; error theory, skew distributions, correlation, sampling distributions; and the Fisherian Revolution. Lively biographical sketches of many of the main characters are featured throughout, including Laplace, Gauss, Edgeworth, Fisher, and Karl Pearson. Also examined are the roles played by DeMoivre, James Bernoulli, and Lagrange.

海上航路将被海洋分隔开的大陆连接起来。与陆地上的道路不同，每次航行时，海上航路都有可能如同海市蜃楼般消失不见。没有可靠航海图的海洋航行，就如同在黑暗中摸索前行一样充满了危险。于是，航海图成为人们驶往新世界的必备工具。
航海图的诞生是人类俯瞰世界的尝试。与航海图相伴的一次次神奇发现之旅，也是人类不断探索世界、拓展认知边界、重新认识自己的过程。本书以航海图为针，海上航路为线，将分散在各处的零散的、孤立的历史织成一部动态的、完整的、相互呼应的世界历史，描绘了从单一世界到复合世界的演进历程。
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【编辑推荐】
1.有用：媲美《极简欧洲史》的崭新世界通史，秒懂现代世界的形成，快速搭建知识体系，拓展认知边界。
相比不遗巨细的大部头，这本200多页的世界史，轻松好读不晦涩，涵盖大航海、新技术的应用、交通网的形成、三个世界的连接、思想观念的转变等关键节点，帮助读者快速搭建知识体系，拓展认知边界，是上班族上下班路上、旅途、休闲的好伴侣，更是大中学生课堂之外的知识营养源。
2.有料：冒险故事串联起单一世界到复合世界的进化历程，生动刺激不单调，满足读者娱乐化、长知识的需求。
“为了找到亚洲，我也是操碎了心”“一张航海图霸占全世界”“食盐变黄金，这不是神话”……发现新世界的阴差阳错与生死之别、新旧世界的矛盾冲突、不同利益集团煞费心机的竞赛，以及地理、气象、天文、数学等众多学科硬知识融合在命悬一线的探险故事中，激发读者的好奇心和想象力，满足读者娱乐化、长知识、求刺激的多重心理。
3.新鲜：从陆地走向海洋，俯瞰地球，从航海图角度讲世界史，视角与众不同。
航海图的出现，是人类首次俯瞰世界的尝试，把人类头脑里想象的世界变为现实。以往的世界史偏向以陆地为中心叙事，本书选择立足海洋，从航海图这个少有人关注的角度讲述不同地域的、被海洋割裂的世界是怎么连结为一个整体的，不同地区的人们又是怎么从毫无联系变成现在牵一发而动全身的局面的。
4.有内涵：表面写大航海与世界史，实则探究人类对地球的再发现。
航海图的诞生与完善，不仅记录了海上航线的开拓，更是人类对地球一次次再发现。在这个过程中，新大陆被发现、达尔文的进化论产生、资本主义的基础得以奠定、现代世界的大门开启。
5.有范儿：20多幅精美地图真实还原人类探索世界、突破思想禁锢的点滴脚步；封面书名组成一艘帆船，若隐若现地航行在茫茫大海上，穿越迷茫、晦暗和明朗，寻找着未曾被发现的彼岸；别人都不知道的冷知识，我知道。
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见识丛书（见识城邦出品）：
01《时间地图：大历史，130亿年前至今》［美］大卫·克里斯蒂安
02《太阳底下的新鲜事：20世纪人与环境的全球互动》［美］约翰·R.麦克尼尔
03《革命的年代：1789—1848》［英］艾瑞克·霍布斯鲍姆
04《资本的年代：1848—1875》［英］艾瑞克·霍布斯鲍姆
05《帝国的年代：1875—1914》［英］艾瑞克·霍布斯鲍姆
06《极端的年代：1914—1991》［英］艾瑞克·霍布斯鲍姆
07《守夜人的钟声：我们时代的危机和出路》［美］丽贝卡·D. 科斯塔
08《1913，一战前的世界》［英］查尔斯·埃默森
09《文明史：人类五千年文明的传承与交流》［法］费尔南·布罗代尔
10《基因传：众生之源》（平装 精装）［美］悉达多·穆克吉
11《一万年的爆发：文明如何加速人类进化》［美］格雷戈里·柯克伦 [美］亨利·哈本丁
12《审问欧洲：二战时期的合作、抵抗与报复》［美］伊斯特万·迪克
13《哥伦布大交换：1492年以后的生物影响和文化冲击》［美］艾尔弗雷德·W.克罗斯比
14《从黎明到衰落：西方文化生活五百年，1500年至今》（平装 精装）［美］雅克·巴尔赞
15《瘟疫与人》［美］威廉·麦克尼尔
16《西方的兴起：人类共同体史》［美］威廉·麦克尼尔
17《奥斯曼帝国的终结：战争、革命以及现代中东的诞生，1908—1923》［美］西恩·麦克米金
18《科学的诞生：科学革命新史》（平装 精装）［美］戴维·伍顿
19《内战：观念中的历史》 [美]大卫·阿米蒂奇
20《第五次开始》 [美]罗伯特·L.凯利
21《人类简史：从动物到上帝》（精装 平装） [以色列] 尤瓦尔·赫拉利
22《黑暗大陆：20世纪的欧洲》［英］马克·马佐尔
23《现实主义者的乌托邦：如何开创一个理想世界》[荷]罗杰·布雷格曼
24《民粹主义大爆炸：经济大衰退如何改变美国和欧洲政治》 [美]约翰·朱迪斯
25《自私的基因（40周年纪念版）》（平装 精装） [英]理查德·道金斯
26《权力与文化：日美战争1941—1945》 [美]入江昭
27《犹太文明：比较视野下的犹太历史》 [美] S. N. 艾森斯塔特
28《技术垄断：文化向技术投降》 [美]尼尔·波兹曼
29《从丹药到枪炮：世界史上的中国军事格局》 [美]欧阳泰
30《起源：万物大历史》 [美]大卫·克里斯蒂安
31《为什么不平等至关重要》 [美]托马斯·斯坎伦
32《认知工具：文化进化心理学》 [美]塞西莉亚·海斯
33《简明大历史》 [美]大卫·克里斯蒂安 [美]威廉·麦克尼尔等主编
34《专家之死：反智主义的盛行及其影响》 [美]托马斯·M.尼克尔斯
35《大历史与人类的未来（修订版）》 [荷]弗雷德·斯皮尔
36《人性中的善良天使》[美]斯蒂芬·平克
37《历史性的体制》[法]弗朗索瓦·阿赫托戈
38《希罗多德的镜子》[法]弗朗索瓦·阿赫托戈
39《出发去希腊》[法]弗朗索瓦·阿赫托戈
40《灯塔工的休息室》[法]弗朗索瓦·阿赫托戈
41《从航海图到世界史：海上道路改变历史》[日]宫崎正胜
42《人类的旅程：基因的奥德赛之旅》[美]斯宾塞·韦尔斯
43《西方的困局：欧洲与美国的当下危机》[德]海因利希·奥古斯特·温克勒
44《没有思想的世界：科技巨头对独立思考的威胁》[美]富兰克林·福尔
45《锥形帐篷的起源：思想如何进化》[英]乔尼·休斯
……后续新品，敬请关注……

Europe in 1618 was divided between Protestants and Catholics, and Bourbon and Hapsburg — as well as empires, kingdoms, and countless independent states. After angry Protestants tossed three representatives of the Holy Roman Empire out the window of the royal castle in Prague, world war spread from Bohemia with similar abandon and relentless persistence, destroying European powers from Spain to Sweden as they marched on the contested soil of Germany. Fanatics, speculators, and ordinary people found themselves trapped in a nightmarish world of famine, disease, and seemingly unstoppable destruction.
The Thirty Years War was a turning point in the making of modern Europe and the modern world: out of it came the system of nation-states that remains fundamental to international law. C. V. Wedgewood's magisterial book is the only comprehensive account of the war in English, as well as a triumph of scholarship and literature. Includes maps and charts.

In the bitter winter of 1847, from an Ireland torn by famine and injustice, the Star of the Sea sets sail for NewYork. On board are hundreds of refugees, some optimistic, many more desperate. Among them are a maid with a devastating secret, the bankrupt Lord Merridith, his wife and children, and a killer stalking the decks, hungry for the vengeance that will bring absolution.
This journey will see many lives end, others begin anew. Passionate loves are tenderly recalled, shirked responsibilities regretted too late, and profound relationships shockingly revealed. In this spellbinding tale of tragedy and mercy, love and healing, the farther the ship sails toward the Promised Land, the more her passengers seem moored to a past that will never let them go.
As urgently contemporary as it is historical, this exciting and compassionate novel builds with the pace of a thriller to a stunning conclusion.

In 1932, Cambridge University Press published Remembering, by psychologist, Frederic Bartlett. The landmark book described fascinating studies of memory and presented the theory of schema which informs much of cognitive science and psychology today. In Bartlett's most famous experiment, he had subjects read a Native American story about ghosts and had them retell the tale later. Because their background was so different from the cultural context of the story, the subjects changed details in the story that they could not understand. Based on observations like these, Bartlett developed his claim that memory is a process of reconstruction, and that this construction is in important ways a social act. His concerns about the social psychology of memory and the cultural context of remembering were long neglected but are finding an interested and responsive audience today. Now reissued in paperback, Remembering has a new Introduction by Walter Kintsch of the University of Colorado, Boulder.