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A guide to using the power of design flexibility to improve the performance of complex technological projects, for designers, managers, users, and analysts. Project teams can improve results by recognizing that the future is inevitably uncertain and that by creating flexible designs they can adapt to eventualities. This approach enables them to take advantage of new opportunities and avoid harmful losses. Designers of complex, long-lasting projects—such as communication networks, power plants, or hospitals—must learn to abandon fixed specifications and narrow forecasts. They need to avoid the “flaw of averages,” the conceptual pitfall that traps so many designs in underperformance. Failure to allow for changing circumstances risks leaving significant value untapped. This book is a guide for creating and implementing value-enhancing flexibility in design. It will be an essential resource for all participants in the development and operation of technological systems: designers, managers, financial analysts, investors, regulators, and academics. The book provides a high-level overview of why flexibility in design is needed to deliver significantly increased value. It describes in detail methods to identify, select, and implement useful flexibility. The book is unique in that it explicitly recognizes that future outcomes are uncertain. It thus presents forecasting, analysis, and evaluation tools especially suited to this reality. Appendixes provide expanded explanations of concepts and analytic tools.
We acquire concepts such as "atom," "force," "integer," and "democracy" long after we are born; these concepts are not part of the initial cognitive state of human beings. Other concepts like "object," "cause," or "agent" may be present early in infancy--if not innately. Processes of change occur throughout our conceptual development, which prompts two key questions: Which human concepts constitute innate, core knowledge? How do humans acquire new concepts, and how do these concepts change in development? Core Knowledge and Conceptual Change provides a unique theoretical and empirical introduction to the study of conceptual development, documenting key advances in case studies, including ground-breaking science on human representations of language, objects, number, events, color, space, time, beliefs, and desires. Additionally, it explores how humans engage in moral reasoning and causal explanation: Are humans born good and tainted by an imperfect world, or do we need to teach children to be moral? Could a concept like "freedom" be woven into the human soul, or is it a historical invention, constructed over generations of humans? Written by an eminent list of contributors renowned in child development and cognitive science, this book delves widely, and deeply, into the cognitive tools available at birth that are repurposed, combined, and transformed to complex, abstract adult conceptual representations, and should be of interest to developmental psychologists, linguists, philosophers, and students of cognitive science.
This two-volume set provides a comprehensive overview of the multidisciplinary field of Embodied Cognition. With contributions from internationally acknowledged researchers from a variety of fields, Foundations of Embodied Cognition reveals how intelligent behaviour emerges from the interplay between brain, body and environment. Drawing on the most recent theoretical and empirical findings in embodied cognition, Volume 2 Conceptual and Interactive Embodiment is divided into four distinct parts, bringing together a number of influential perspectives and new ideas. Part one introduces the field of embodied language processing, before part two presents recent developments in our understanding of embodied conceptual understanding. The final two parts look at the applied nature of embodied cognition, exploring the embodied nature of social co-ordination as well as the emerging field of artificial embodiment. Building on the idea that knowledge acquisition, retention and retrieval are intimately interconnected with sensory and motor processes, Foundations of Embodied Cognition is a landmark publication in the field. It will be of great interest to researchers and advanced students from across the cognitive sciences, including those specialising in psychology, neuroscience, intelligent systems and robotics, philosophy, linguistics and anthropology.
Conceptual Tension: Essays on Kinship, Politics, and Individualism is a critical philosophical examination of the role of concepts and concept formation in social sciences. Written by Leon J. Goldstein, a preeminent Jewish philosopher who examined the epistemological foundations of social science inquiry during the second half of the twentieth century, the book undertakes a study of concept formation and change by looking at the four critical terms in anthropology (kinship), politics (parliament and Rousseau’s concept of the general will), and sociology (individualism). The author challenges prevailing notions of concept formation and definition, specifically assertions by Gottlieb Frege that concepts have fixed, clear boundaries that are not subject to change. Instead, drawing upon arguments by R.G. Collingwood, Goldstein asserts that concepts have a historical dimension with boundaries and meanings that change with their use and context. Goldstein’s work provides insight for philosophers, historians, political scientists, anthropologists, and Judaica scholars interested in the study and meaning of critical concepts within their fields.
On Flexibility presents a force planning concept that will enable armies to cope with the growing diversity of battlefield requirements, and especially with technological and doctrinal surprises, through applied adaptability and flexibility, minimizing the over dependence on intelligence and prediction involved in this process today.
New essays by leading philosophers and cognitive scientists that present recent findings and theoretical developments in the study of concepts. The study of concepts has advanced dramatically in recent years, with exciting new findings and theoretical developments. Core concepts have been investigated in greater depth and new lines of inquiry have blossomed, with researchers from an ever broader range of disciplines making important contributions. In this volume, leading philosophers and cognitive scientists offer original essays that present the state-of-the-art in the study of concepts. These essays, all commissioned for this book, do not merely present the usual surveys and overviews; rather, they offer the latest work on concepts by a diverse group of theorists as well as discussions of the ideas that should guide research over the next decade. The book is an essential companion volume to the earlier Concepts: Core Readings, the definitive source for classic texts on the nature of concepts. The essays cover concepts as they relate to animal cognition, the brain, evolution, perception, and language, concepts across cultures, concept acquisition and conceptual change, concepts and normativity, concepts in context, and conceptual individuation. The contributors include such prominent scholars as Susan Carey, Nicola Clayton, Jerry Fodor, Douglas Medin, Joshua Tenenbaum, and Anna Wierzbicka. Contributors Aurore Avarguès-Weber, Eef Ameel, Megan Bang, H. Clark Barrett, Pascal Boyer, Elisabeth Camp, Susan Carey, Daniel Casasanto, Nicola S. Clayton, Dorothy L. Cheney, Vyvyan Evans, Jerry A. Fodor, Silvia Gennari, Tobias Gerstenberg, Martin Giurfa, Noah D. Goodman, J. Kiley Hamlin, James A. Hampton, Mutsumi Imai, Charles W. Kalish, Frank Keil, Jonathan Kominsky, Stephen Laurence, Gary Lupyan, Edouard Machery, Bradford Z. Mahon, Asifa Majid, Barbara C. Malt, Eric Margolis, Douglas Medin, Nancy J. Nersessian, bethany ojalehto, Anna Papafragou, Joshua M. Plotnik, Noburo Saji, Robert M. Seyfarth, Joshua B. Tenenbaum, Sandra Waxman, Daniel A. Weiskopf, Anna Wierzbicka
Provides a revolutionary conceptual framework and practical tools to quantify uncertainty and recognize the value of flexibility in real estate development This book takes a practical "engineering" approach to the valuation of options and flexibility in real estate. It presents simple simulation models built in universal spreadsheet software such as Microsoft Excel®. These realistically reflect the varying and erratic sources of uncertainty and price dynamics that uniquely characterize real estate. The text covers new analytic procedures that are valuable for existing properties and enable a new, more profitable perspective on the planning, design, operation, and evaluation of large-scale, multi-phase development projects. The book thereby aims to significantly improve valuation and investment decision making. Flexibility and Real Estate Valuation under Uncertainty: A Practical Guide for Developers is presented at 3 levels. First, it introduces and explains the concepts underlying the approach at a basic level accessible to non-technical and non-specialized readers. Its introductory and concluding chapters present the important “big picture” implications of the analysis for economics and valuation and for project design and investment decision making. At a second level, the book presents a framework, a roadmap for the prospective analyst. It describes the practical tools in detail, taking care to go through the elements of the approach step-by-step for clarity and easy reference. The third level includes more technical details and specific models. An Appendix discusses the technical details of real estate price dynamics. Associated web pages provide electronic spreadsheet templates for the models used as examples in the book. Some features of the book include: • Concepts and tools that are simple and accessible to a broad audience of practitioners; • An approach relevant for all development projects; • Complementarity with the author's Commercial Real Estate Analysis & Investments—the most-cited real estate investments textbook on the market. Flexibility and Real Estate Valuation under Uncertainty: A Practical Guide for Developers is for everyone studying or concerned with the implementation of large-scale or multi-phase real estate development projects, as well as property investment and valuation more generally.
Understanding Cognitive Development provides a fresh, evidence-based research perspective on the story of children’s cognitive development in the first ten years of human life. Starting with a brief survey of the key theoretical positions that have come to define developmental psychology, the textbook then focuses on the different cognitive abilities as they emerge throughout early development. Uniquely, it examines these in terms of their interdependence; that is how skills such as perception, memory, language and reasoning relate to one another. This holistic treatment allows students to see the many important intersections in this critical phase of human life development. This textbook employs a novel design that will be of immense help to both students and instructors and is intended to be read at two levels: at the first level, it provides a fully referenced explanatory account of experimental research on cognitive development with complete attention to the needs of students who have never been exposed to experimental methodology nor studies in cognitive development before. At the second level, and mapped directly onto numbered sub-sections within the text, the author uses illustrative panels designed along the lines of PowerPoint presentations to summarise studies and key findings, employing lots of pictorial material together with bullet-points to give vividness and texture to the material covered. These panels are replicated on the accompanying companion website in PowerPoint for lecturers and students to make further use of in teaching and revision. Revision points are provided at the end of every chapter. Rich in academic coverage, including a widespread database of the most important empirical research in the field, this textbook will be essential reading for students of cognitive development and developmental psychology across psychology and education.