Thierry Poibeau
The MIT Press

Machine translation, writes Thierry Poibeau, can be considered ¡°one of the most fundamental [research programmes] in the field of artificial intelligence¡±. Yet even when the task is restricted to ¡°the most accurate translation of everyday texts¡±, ignoring literature and poetry, it has proved ¡°immensely difficult, and current systems are far from satisfactory¡±. Poibeau surveys the progress to date, notably through ¡°the statistical analysis of very large corpora of texts¡±. In doing so, he throws new light on underlying questions about the nature of translation, the kinds of knowledge involved in translation ¨C and what it means to ¡°transpose a text from one language to another¡±.

James H. Mittelman
Princeton University Press

¡°Legions of educators¡±, according to James Mittelman, ¡°view Harvard and its [Ivy League ilk] as the gold standard.¡± Yet since Harvard had an endowment in 2016 of more than $35 billion [?26.3 billion], few can genuinely hope to emulate it. To help universities ¡°deflate the implausible dream¡± and find more realistic ways of repurposing themselves, Mittelman explores in depth the US ¡°neoliberal model¡±, the Finnish ¡°social democratic path¡± and the ¡°postcolonial experience¡± of Uganda. Dismissing utopian thinking, he goes on to propose ¡°a more sustainable vision of pluralism in the service of nurturing local-global critical thinking¡±.

Vanda Felbab-Brown
Hurst

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Vanda Felbab-Brown, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, calls herself ¡°an expert on non-traditional security threats¡±. After books on counter-insurgency and the war on drugs, she turns to species extinction, now proceeding at a rate ¡°as much as 1,000 times the historical average¡±. Drawing out parallels between the wildlife and drugs trades, she explores a range of policy options, from reducing demand and going after smugglers¡¯ money to mobilising local community buy-ins for conservation. Although all these ¡°have failed far more often than they have succeeded¡±, they can prove valuable if tailored to circumstances, she argues.

Andrea Flynn, Susan R. Holmberg, Dorian T. Warren and Felicia J. Wong
Cambridge University Press

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While the ¡°rules¡± governing policies around race in the US are far less ¡°explicitly discriminatory¡± than in the past, even those ¡°that purport to be colorblind¡±, argue this book¡¯s authors, ¡°frequently have both racialized origins and racialized consequences¡±. Alongside rules that have an overt negative impact and others that ¡°advance racial inclusion and equality¡±, there are many areas in which ¡°the absence of rules ¡­allows discrimination and racially unequal consequences to persist¡±. If we genuinely want to ¡°promote greater overall economic health and greater racial inclusion¡±, therefore, we urgently need to adopt ¡°an agenda of positive rules and targeted universalism¡±.

DNA: The Story of the Genetic Revolution
James Watson, with Andrew Berry and Kevin Davies
Arrow Books

First published in 2003 to mark the 50th anniversary of Crick and Watson¡¯s discovery of the double helix, this offers an insider¡¯s introduction accessible to those with ¡°zero biological knowledge¡±. Once DNA became ¡°the heart of a technology that is transforming many aspects of the way we all live¡±, as the authors note, it brought with it ¡°a host of difficult questions about its impact ¨C practical, social, and ethical¡±. This ¡°fully revised and updated¡± second edition includes two new chapters by Kevin Davies exploring the technological advances that have spurred developments in ¡°areas such as consumer genetics and clinical genome sequencing¡± and the progress made towards winning the seemingly unwinnable war against cancer.