This scholarly collection examines the origins, history, and contemporary nature of Chinese Judaism in the community of Kaifeng. These essays, written by a diverse, international team of contributors, explore the culture and history of this thousand-year-old Jewish community, whose synthesis of Chinese and Jewish cultures helped guarantee its survival. Part I of this study analyzes the origin and historical development of the Kaifeng community, as well as the unique cultural synthesis it e...

A smart, incisive work of technology criticism that examines the technologies sold as artificial intelligence, the drawbacks of systems sold under this banner, and why it’s crucial to recognize the many ways in which AI hype covers for a small set of power-hungry actors.Is artificial intelligence going to take over the world? Have big tech scientists created an artificial lifeform that can think on its own? Is it going to put authors, artists, and others out of bus...

Un libro imprescindible para desenmascarar las falsas promesas de la inteligencia artificial y entender cómo las grandes tecnológicas convierten su hype en un negocio a costa de nuestras vidas.¿Va a acabar la inteligencia artificial dominando el mundo? ¿Han creado los científicos una forma de vida artificial capaz de pensar por sí misma? ¿Va a quedarse con nuestros puestos de trabajo? ¿Estamos entrando en una era en la que los ordenadores son mejores que los humano...

Le tecnologie vendute come “intelligenza artificiale” sono spesso presentate come una magia capace di risolvere ogni problema. Emily M. Bender e Alex Hanna, due delle voci più influenti nel dibattito sull’IA, spiegano perché non è così. In questo saggio illuminante smontano l’esaltazione mediatica alimentata dalle Big Tech: l’IA di oggi è fatta di sistemi statistici su larga scala, che producono linguaggio e immagini senza comprenderli ‒ non un’intelligenza pensante ma «pappagalli stocasti...

Brought to you by Penguin.A smart, incisive take-down of the bogus claims being made about so-called ‘artificial intelligence’, exposing the real harm these technologies do to our jobs, health, society and environment, who stands to gain from them, and how to fight back.Is AI going to take over the world? Have scientists created an artificial lifeform that can think on its own? Is it going to replace all our jobs, even creative ones, like d...

Meaning is a fundamental concept in Natural Language Processing (NLP), in the tasks of both Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and Natural Language Generation (NLG).This is because the aims of these fields are to build systems that understand what people mean when they speak or write, and that can produce linguistic strings that successfully express to people the intended content. In order for NLP to scale beyond partial, task-specific solutions, researchers in t...

A smart, incisive look at the technologies sold as artificial intelligence, the drawbacks and pitfalls of technology sold under this banner, and why it’s crucial to recognize the many ways in which AI hype covers for a small set of power-hungry actors at work and in the world.Is artificial intelligence going to take over the world? Have big tech scientists created an artificial lifeform that can think on its own? Is it going to put authors, artists, and others out ...

Alex Carey and Bender Baxter had been friends since early childhood. Now, approaching their sixteenth birthdays, Alex is drowned in the Latoon River in a tragic diving accident. While Bender goes for help, Alex is mysteriously rescued, but unconscious, never sees his savior. Assuming him to be Jubel Owens, a local hermit, Alex and Bender set out to find and thank Old Jubel.What lies across Old Jubel's Bridge in the Oregon wilderness area known as Old Jubel's Woods are the answers t...

O mundo não é mais o mesmo e você sabe disso. Passamos por uma crise mundial que impactou nossas vidas como um todo. Nesse novo cenário, foi preciso reinventarmos nossa forma de trabalhar, liderar, planejar e até mesmo conviver em sociedade. Que o futuro prometia grandes transformações, especialmente na esfera dos negócios, nós sabíamos. Mas quando a mudança vem de forma tão acelerada, a incerteza sobre as tendências e habilidades necessárias surgem. O que esperar deste novo mundo?...

Aimee Bender’s Willful Creatures conjures a fantastical world in which authentic love blooms. This is a place where a boy with keys for fingers is a hero, a woman’s children are potatoes, and a little boy with an iron for a head is born to a family of pumpkin heads. With her singular mix of surrealism, musical prose, and keenly felt emotion, Bender once again proves herself to be a masterful chronicler of the human condition.

"A collection of wistful, witty stories." --Esquire"Hilarious, deep and a little bit dirty." --Harper's BazaarA grief-stricken librarian decides to have sex with every man who enters her library. A half-mad, unbearably beautiful heiress follows a strange man home, seeking total sexual abandon: He only wants to watch game shows. A woman falls in love with a hunchback; when his deformity turns out to be a prosthesis, she leaves him. A wife wh...

The debut title of a new city-based anthology series featuring stories with speculative, sci-fi, and paranormal themesAs an incubator of the future, Los Angeles has long mesmerized writers from Philip K. Dick to Aldous Huxley. With its natural disasters, Hollywood artifice, staggering wealth and poverty, urban sprawl, and diversity, one can argue that Los Angeles is already so weird, surreal, irrational, and mythic that any fiction emerging from this place should b...