Search results for ""In Other Words""

For this book, fifteen distinguished historians were given a deceptively simple task: identify their choice for the worst military leader in history and then explain why theirs is the worst.From the clueless Conrad von Hötzendorf and George A. Custer to the criminal Baron Roman F. von Ungern-Sternberg and the bungling Garnet Wolseley, this book presents a rogues’ gallery of military incompetents. Rather than merely rehashing biographical details, the contributors take an original and unconventional look at military leadership in a way that appeals to both specialists and general readers alike.While there are plenty of books that analyse the keys to success, The Worst Military Leaders in History offers lessons of failure to avoid. In other words, this book is a 'how-not-to' guide to leadership."Ranging far and wide in chronology and geography . . . this is a stimulating collection of essays—pithily written and persuasively argued—that fills a gap in the important study of 'those who make someone else’s victory possible.'" - Saul David / Times (UK)"On the night Russia invaded Ukraine, I was reading a new book, The Worst Military Leaders in History, edited by Jennings and Steele. The monumental failings of leadership described range from the well-known death of General Custer and all his men to the less remembered Athenian leader, Nikias, whose disastrous attempt to capture Syracuse led to the collapse of the entire Athenian empire. Three weeks on, it seems like a second edition might have to include the Russian defense minister, Sergei Shoygu, and his top brass." - William Hague / Times (UK)

Read more less

When the world’s problems seem overwhelming, as they so often do, it’s easy to fall into feelings of helplessness. It becomes too painful to care, so we turn to the latest “how to not give a f*ck” self-help book. Yet caring about our world and each other is a natural instinct all humans have. What is it doing to our minds, bodies, and souls to ignore this part of our humanity? In Love without Reason: The Lost Art of Giving a F*ck, LaRayia Gaston helps us connect with our hearts, reawaken our innate desire to make a difference, and then actually make that difference in a way that is both enjoyable and impactful. In other words, she teaches us how to show up and care about each other and our world. Central to Gaston’s teachings is the idea that giving doesn’t have to be difficult, and you don’t have to go out of your way to do it. “Need is all around us,” she writes. “You’ll never know the ripples one small act of kindness can create.” Gaston calls these acts micro-gestures, moments when you stop, look around, and ask yourself how you can contribute in your own way. Throughout the book, Gaston pulls apart the stories we tell ourselves about helping - it’s too difficult, we’ll just be in the way, it won’t change anything - and provides strategies to help us get started. In the end, you’ll discover that showing you care isn’t about sacrifice - it’s about joy.

Read more less

A forgotten episode of mathematical resistance reveals the rise of modern mathematics and its cornerstone, mathematical purity, as political phenomena. The nineteenth century opened with a major shift in European mathematics, and in the Kingdom of Naples, this occurred earlier than elsewhere. Between 1790 and 1830 its leading scientific institutions rejected as untrustworthy the “very modern mathematics” of French analysis and in its place consolidated, legitimated, and put to work a different mathematical culture. The Neapolitan mathematical resistance was a complete reorientation of mathematical practice. Over the unrestricted manipulation and application of algebraic algorithms, Neapolitan mathematicians called for a return to Greek-style geometry and the preeminence of pure mathematics. For all their apparent backwardness, Massimo Mazzotti explains, they were arguing for what would become crucial features of modern mathematics: its voluntary restriction through a new kind of rigor and discipline, and the complete disconnection of mathematical truth from the empirical world—in other words, its purity. The Neapolitans, Mazzotti argues, were reacting to the widespread use of mathematical analysis in social and political arguments: theirs was a reactionary mathematics that aimed to technically refute the revolutionary mathematics of the Jacobins. During the Restoration, the expert groups in the service of the modern administrative state reaffirmed the role of pure mathematics as the foundation of a newly rigorous mathematics, which was now conceived as a neutral tool for modernization. What Mazzotti’s penetrating history shows us in vivid detail is that producing mathematical knowledge was equally about producing certain forms of social, political, and economic order.

Read more less

‘Exhilarating… Wise and compassionate’ New Statesman An expert, empathetic guide to the science, psychology and physiology of breaking, from the acclaimed author of How We AreWhat happens when our minds and bodies are pushed beyond their limits? Vincent Deary is a health psychologist who has spent years helping his patients cope with whatever life has thrown at them. In How We Break, he has written a book for all of us who sometimes feel we have reached our breaking point. Drawing on clinical case studies, cutting-edge scientific research, intimate personal stories and references from philosophy, literature and film, How We Break offers a consoling new vision of everyday human struggle. The big traumas in life, Deary points out, are relatively rare. More common is when too many things go wrong at once, or we are exposed to prolonged periods of difficulty or precarity. When the world shrinks to nothing but our daily coping, we become unhappy, worried, hopeless, exhausted. In other words, we break. Breaking, he shows us, happens when the same systems that enable us to navigate through life become dysregulated. But if we understand how the wear and tear of life affects us, then we have a better chance of navigating through times of burnout, stress, fatigue and despair. By equipping us with a better understanding of what happens to us when we're struggling to cope, and making a bold case for the power of rest and recuperation, How We Break helps chart a path through difficult times.

Read more less

A charming and beautifully written account of the pleasures of slow travel - for readers of Patrick Leigh Fermor, Colin Thubron and Eric Newby.'Lawrence Sterne once suggested that we travel for one of just three reasons: imbecility of mind, infirmity of body or inevitable necessity. One might add to Sterne's little list: envy, curiosity - or just too much bloody rain at home. Escape, in other words.' Campaigner, publisher and wanderer Alastair Sawday has spent his life travelling. En route he has unearthed a multitude of stories - stories of people ploughing their own furrows, of travellers' tales, stories from the 'front line' of his publishing , ruminations and reflections about places, people and ideas. In this deeply charming, erudite and spirited book, he shares his experiences and explores the value of travel.'The richer our imaginations, the richer our travel experience. We British do things one way and the Spaniards another; there are unlimited ways of doing everything. Kindness is found in unexpected places, as is eccentricity. Eccentrics are an endangered species and need as much protection as does the house sparrow.'Travelling Light is a gradual awakening to the fragility of everything we love through contemplative, consciously slow journeying. Every visit uncovers difference - from France profonde to the darker side of Sicily, and to the woodland, flora, fauna, views and silence of rural Britain. Alastair Sawday gives voice to those of us who have climbed no mountains, discovered no rivers, created no great institutions, powered no legislation, changed very little - but who yearn to understand the world and make sense of its infinite variety.

Read more less

Buddhism is said to be universal because it transcends all notions of time and culture. A French shepherd from the Middle Ages can apply it just as easily as a Singaporean businessman from the twenty-first century. The Buddha’s teachings offer a method for understanding how to be and how to act—in other words, how to live our humanity while taking care of ourselves and others. The heroes referred to in this book are ordinary beings like us who choose to develop as individuals through their understanding and application of kindness and compassion. These heroes are bodhisattvas who wish for all beings to meet with lasting happiness and to experience protection from all causes for unhappiness. This handbook provides accessible explanations of what it means to live like a bodhisattva and offers a series of simple exercises directly related to daily life. It gives us key points for facing the difficulties we encounter in a new way and perceiving our lives according to altruistic values.Born in Tibet in 1949, Lama Jigme Rinpoche grew up and received his education with the principal teachers of the Kagyu lineage of Tibetan Buddhism. The Sixteenth Karmapa named Lama Jigme Rinpoche as his official representative and the spiritual director of Dhagpo Kagyu Ling in France. Ever since, Lama Jigme Rinpoche has filled this role. Strengthened by many years of experience in the West, his unique and modern approach renders the Buddha’s millennia-old wisdom accessible and allows students to apply it concretely in daily twenty-first- century life.

Read more less

Jeter Publishing presents the second nonfiction biography in a brand-new series that celebrates men and women who altered the course of history often without recognition. On July 16, 1969, a Gemini rocket lifted off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Previous launches had focused on getting astronauts into space, docking two spacecraft, and even walking in space, but this mission was different. Apollo 11 was designed to land two astronauts on the moon and then bring them back to Earth. Four days later, two astronauts, Neal Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, did walk on the moon. But did you know that there were actually three astronauts aboard the rocket on July 16? Michael Collins didn’t get to walk on the Moon, but his contribution is just as important as Armstrong and Aldrin’s. Prior to joining NASA, Collins was in the Air Force and flew fighter jets. After joining NASA, he made two trips into space, performing one of the first EVAs or Extravehicular activities (in other words, walking in space) as well as making that trip to the moon. Collins continued to contribute even after leaving the space program. He took a job in the State Department and even served as director of the National Air & Space Museum and as undersecretary of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. He may not have walked on the moon, but he’s one of only twenty-four people to travel there. In fact, without Michael Collins, that first moon landing might never have happened.

Read more less

Originally published in 1968. Professor Dryden sees Melville's novels both as metaphysical processes and as technical forms. The novelist is not a reporter but a creator, and what he creates from his experience is his vision of truth. Herman Melville saw the function of the novelist in terms of his ability to expose the reader to truth while simultaneously protecting him from it or, in other words, to enable the reader to experience reality indirectly and, therefore, safely. In Melville's own writing, however, this function became more difficult as his nihilism deepened. He became increasingly sensitive to his own involvement in the world of lies, and when he could no longer protect himself from the truth, he could no longer transform it into fiction. Melville's struggle to maintain the distinction between art and truth was reflected in the changing forms of his novels.Dryden traces Melville's evolving metaphysical views and studies their impact on the craftsmanship of this acutely self-conscious artist from his early novels—Typee, Redburn, and White Jacket—through Moby-Dick, Pierre, Israel Potter, and The Confidence-Man to the posthumously published Billy Budd and the closely related Benito Cereno, and he concludes that "all of Melville's narrators are in some way portraits of the artist at work." Dryden's study is a unique contribution to Melville scholarship and an important journey through the world of the novelist's vision. As such, it has significant implications for the novel as a genre and for understanding its development in America.

Read more less

What if historical fiction were understood as a disfiguring of calculus? Or poems enacting the formation and breakdown of community as expositions of irrational numbers? What if, in other words, literary texts possessed a kind of mathematical unconscious? The persistence of the rhetoric of "two cultures," one scientific, the other humanities-based, obscures the porous border and productive relationship that has long existed between literature and mathematics. In eighteenth-century Scottish universities, geometry in particular was considered one of the humanities; anchored in philosophy, it inculcated what we call critical thinking. But challenges to classical geometry within the realm of mathematics obligated Scottish geometers to become more creative in their defense of the traditional discipline; and when literary writers and philosophers incorporated these mathematical problems into their own work, the results were not only ingenious but in some cases pioneering. Literature After Euclid tells the story of the creative adaptation of geometry in Scotland during and after the long eighteenth century. It argues that diverse attempts in literature and philosophy to explain or even emulate the geometric achievements of Isaac Newton and others resulted in innovations that modify our understanding of descriptive and bardic poetry, the aesthetics of the picturesque, and the historical novel. Matthew Wickman's analyses of these innovations in the work of Walter Scott, Robert Burns, James Thomson, David Hume, Thomas Reid, and other literati change how we perceive the Scottish Enlightenment and the later, modernist ethos that purportedly relegated the "classical" Enlightenment to the dustbin of history. Indeed, the Scottish Enlightenment's geometric imagination changes how we see literary history itself.

Read more less

A look at the benefits and consequences of the rise of community-based organizations in urban developmentWho makes decisions that shape the housing, policies, and social programs in urban neighborhoods? Who, in other words, governs? Constructing Community offers a rich ethnographic portrait of the individuals who implement community development projects in the Fairmount Corridor, one of Boston’s poorest areas. Jeremy Levine uncovers a network of nonprofits and philanthropic foundations making governance decisions alongside public officials—a public-private structure that has implications for democratic representation and neighborhood inequality.Levine spent four years following key players in Boston’s community development field. While state senators and city councilors are often the public face of new projects, and residents seem empowered through opportunities to participate in public meetings, Levine found a shadow government of nonprofit leaders and philanthropic funders, nonelected neighborhood representatives with their own particular objectives, working behind the scenes. Tying this system together were political performances of “community”—government and nonprofit leaders, all claiming to value the community. Levine provocatively argues that there is no such thing as a singular community voice, meaning any claim of community representation is, by definition, illusory. He shows how community development is as much about constructing the idea of community as it is about the construction of physical buildings in poor neighborhoods.Constructing Community demonstrates how the nonprofit sector has become integral to urban policymaking, and the tensions and trade-offs that emerge when private nonprofits take on the work of public service provision.

Read more less

A look at the benefits and consequences of the rise of community-based organizations in urban developmentWho makes decisions that shape the housing, policies, and social programs in urban neighborhoods? Who, in other words, governs? Constructing Community offers a rich ethnographic portrait of the individuals who implement community development projects in the Fairmount Corridor, one of Boston’s poorest areas. Jeremy Levine uncovers a network of nonprofits and philanthropic foundations making governance decisions alongside public officials—a public-private structure that has implications for democratic representation and neighborhood inequality.Levine spent four years following key players in Boston’s community development field. While state senators and city councilors are often the public face of new projects, and residents seem empowered through opportunities to participate in public meetings, Levine found a shadow government of nonprofit leaders and philanthropic funders, nonelected neighborhood representatives with their own particular objectives, working behind the scenes. Tying this system together were political performances of “community”—government and nonprofit leaders, all claiming to value the community. Levine provocatively argues that there is no such thing as a singular community voice, meaning any claim of community representation is, by definition, illusory. He shows how community development is as much about constructing the idea of community as it is about the construction of physical buildings in poor neighborhoods.Constructing Community demonstrates how the nonprofit sector has become integral to urban policymaking, and the tensions and trade-offs that emerge when private nonprofits take on the work of public service provision.

Read more less

This book explores one of the great questions of our time: How can we preserve our sense of what it means to be a person while at the same time accepting what science tells us to be true--namely, that human nature is continuous with the rest of nature? What, in other words, does it mean to be a person in a world of things? Alan Mittleman shows how the Jewish tradition provides rich ways of understanding human nature and personhood that preserve human dignity and distinction in a world of neuroscience, evolutionary biology, biotechnology, and pervasive scientism. These ancient resources can speak to Jewish, non-Jewish, and secular readers alike. Science may tell us what we are, Mittleman says, but it cannot tell us who we are, how we should live, or why we matter. Traditional Jewish thought, in open-minded dialogue with contemporary scientific perspectives, can help us answer these questions. Mittleman shows how, using sources ranging across the Jewish tradition, from the Hebrew Bible and the Talmud to more than a millennium of Jewish philosophy. Among the many subjects the book addresses are sexuality, birth and death, violence and evil, moral agency, and politics and economics. Throughout, Mittleman demonstrates how Jewish tradition brings new perspectives to--and challenges many current assumptions about--these central aspects of human nature. A study of human nature in Jewish thought and an original contribution to Jewish philosophy, this is a book for anyone interested in what it means to be human in a scientific age.

Read more less

The poems in Auto/Body are an inexhaustible engine—sometimes a body, sometimes flesh—a sensual exploration of what it means to repair, to remake, to keep going even when rebuilding feels impossible. From the greased-up engines of auto body shops to the innumerable points of light striking the dance floor of a queer nightclub, Auto/Body, winner of the Ernest Sandeen Prize in Poetry, connects the vulnerability of the narrating queer body to the language of auto mechanics to reveal their shared decadence. Behind the wheel of this book is an insistent, humorous voice whose experiences have lent themselves to a deep, intimate knowledge of survival, driven by the pursuit of joy and exalted pleasure. Raised in and near auto body shops, Vickie Vértiz remembers visiting them to elevate the family car to examine what’s underneath, to see what’s working and what’s not. The poetry in this book is also a body shop, but instead we take our bodies, identities, desires, and see what’s firing. In this shop we ask: What needs changing? How do our bodies transcend ways of being we have received so that we may become more ourselves? From odes to drag, to pushing back on the tyranny of patriarchy, to loving too hard and too queer, to growing up working-class in a time of incessant border violence and incarceration, this collection combusts with blood and fuel. In other words, Vértiz writes to dissolve a colonial engine and reconstruct a new vessel with its remains.

Read more less

This work was first published in 1947 in German under the title "Re­ chenmethoden der Quantentheorie". It was meant to serve a double purpose: to help both, the student when first confronted with quantum mechanics and the experimental scientist, who has never before used it as a tool, to learn how to apply the general theory to practical problems of atomic physics. Since that early date, many excellent books have been written introducing into the general framework of the theory and thus indispensable to a deeper understanding. It seems, however, that the more practical side has been somewhat neglected, except, of course, for the flood of special monographs going into broad detail on rather restricted topics. In other words, an all-round introduction to the practical use of quantum mechanics seems, so far, not to exist and may still be helpful. It was in the hope of filling this gap that the author has fallen in with the publishers' wish to bring the earlier German editions up to date and to make the work more useful to the worldwide community of science students and scientists by writing the new edition in English. From the beginning there could be no doubt that the work had to be much enlarged. New approximation methods and other developments, especially in the field of scattering, had to be added. It seemed necessary to include relativistic quantum mechanics and to offer, at least, a glimpse of radiation theory as an example of wave field quantization.

Read more less

A wide-ranging rethinking of the many factors that comprise the making of American Grand Strategy. What is grand strategy? What does it aim to achieve? And what differentiates it from normal strategic thought--what, in other words, makes it "grand"? In answering these questions, most scholars have focused on diplomacy and warfare, so much so that "grand strategy" has become almost an equivalent of "military history." The traditional attention paid to military affairs is understandable, but in today's world it leaves out much else that could be considered political, and therefore strategic. It is in fact possible to consider, and even reach, a more capacious understanding of grand strategy, one that still includes the battlefield and the negotiating table while expanding beyond them. Just as contemporary world politics is driven by a wide range of non-military issues, the most thorough considerations of grand strategy must consider the bases of peace and security--including gender, race, the environment, and a wide range of cultural, social, political, and economic issues. Rethinking American Grand Strategy assembles a roster of leading historians to examine America's place in the world. Its innovative chapters re-examine familiar figures, such as John Quincy Adams, George Kennan, and Henry Kissinger, while also revealing the forgotten episodes and hidden voices of American grand strategy. They expand the scope of diplomatic and military history by placing the grand strategies of public health, race, gender, humanitarianism, and the law alongside military and diplomatic affairs to reveal hidden strategists as well as strategies.

Read more less

Extractive metallurgy is the art and science of extracting metals from their ores and refining them. The production of metals and alloys from these source materials is still one of the most important and fundamental industries in both developed and developing economies around the world. The outputs and products are essential resources for the metallic, mechanical, electromagnetic, electrical and electronics industries (silicon is treated as a metal for these purposes). This series is devoted to the extraction of metals from ores, concentrates (enriched ores), scraps, and other sources and their refining to the state of either liquid metal before casting or to solid metals. The extraction and refining operations that are required may be carried out by various metallurgical reaction processes. Extractive Metallurgy 1 deals with the fundamentals of thermodynamics and kinetics of the reaction processes. Extractive Metallurgy 2 focuses on pyrometallurgical, hydrometallurgical, halide and electro-metallurgical (conversion) processes. Extractive Metallurgy 3 deals with the industrial processing operations, technologies, and process routes, in other words the sequence of steps or operations used to convert the ore to metal. Processes and operations are studied using the methodology of "chemical reaction engineering". As the fundamentals of the art and science of Extractive Metallurgy are infrequently taught as dedicated university or engineering schools courses, this series is intended both for students in the fields of Metallurgy and Mechanical Engineering who want to acquire this knowledge, and also for engineers put in charge of the operation of an industrial production unit or the development of a new process, who will need the basic knowledge of the corresponding technology.

Read more less

Digital Fabrications is a collection of essays and half-true stories about design software and hardware. Written from the perspective of architectural design, each piece expands on emerging trends, devices, foibles, and phenomena engendered by an increased reliance on interactions with interfaces in the discipline. The essays ask: how do we characterise our post-digital design labour? What are the politics of design software? How is architecture adapting to a world largely dependent on platforms and scripts? What are the spatial mechanisms of the internet and VR? Using storytelling techniques, this book accepts that software is everywhere, and narrows in on a few ways it has taken command of our cultural products. From the perspective of architectural design, a field traditionally associated with sketching and its own myths of creativity, computers are an essential workplace tool. Projects rely on a wide assortment of software packages and standalone applications, but rarely do architects reflect on the structure of those programs or how they have infiltrated our disciplinary conventions. PDFs and JPGs are as much a part of our vocabulary as plans, sections, and elevations. A drawing today might refer to a rendering, a CAD document, a proprietary BIM file, or anything that describes a project visually. While one way of examining this disciplinary shift might be to re-imagine what digital drawing can be, this collection of essays puts forth another way: to look at the behaviours, phenomena, collective trends, and oddities emerging as a result of global software proliferation. In other words, this book accepts that software is everywhere, and narrows in on a few ways it has taken command of our cultural products.

Read more less

Explorations of plant consciousness and human interactions with the natural world.From apples to ayahuasca, coffee to kurrajong, passionflower to peyote, plants are conscious beings. How they interact with each other, with humanity and with the world at large has long been studied by researchers, scientists and spiritual teachers and seekers. The Mind of Plants: Narratives of Vegetal Intelligence brings together works from all these disciplines and more in a collection of essays that highlights what we know and what we intuit about botanical life.The Mind of Plants, featuring a foreword by Dennis McKenna, is a collection of short essays, narratives and poetry on plants and their interaction with humans. Contributors include Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of the New York Times’ best seller Braiding Sweetgrass, Jeremy Narby, John Kinsella, Luis Eduardo Luna, Megan Kaminski and dozens more. The book’s editors, John C. Ryan, Patrícia Vieira and Monica Gagliano – each of whom also contributed works to the collection – weave together essays, personal reflections and poems paired with intricate illustrations by José María Pout.Recent scientific research in the field of plant cognition highlights the capacity of botanical life to discern between options and learn from prior experiences or, in other words, to think. The Mind of Plants includes texts that interpret this concept broadly. As Mckenna writes in his foreword, “What the reader will find here, expressed in poetry and prose, are stories that are infused with cherished memories and inspired celebrations of unique relationships with a group of organisms that are alien and unlike us in every way, yet touch human lives in myriad ways.”

Read more less

Widely recognized as one of the most powerful healing methods that have ever been developed, bioenergy healing is relatively easy to learn. Csongor’s unique writing—as if you were listening to him live at one of his seminars—makes this comprehensive book on energy healing a light, yet very informative read. If you are a fast reader, you may learn to heal in only one day. By the end of the book, you will become a healer for a lifetime.Csongor Daniel was one of the first officially recognized bioenergy healers in the former Yugoslavia, trained by the legendary Zdenko Domancic. While his teacher has healed more than a million people, Csongor has no such ambitions. Instead, he would like to teach more than a million of you how to become healers yourselves. Bioenergy Healing will teach you how to feel and see the energy fields of the body and how to manipulate the energy in order to induce healing. QR codes throughout the book enable readers to see the techniques demonstrated in brief videos.Who needs Bioenergy Healing? Anyone who has ever dabbled in healing, but is still looking for the right method; people who read most books on energy healing, but are still puzzled by complicated approaches and explanations; individuals who want to learn energy healing, but are too busy to take months or years of courses; health professionals who want to add a new effective modality to their practices; parents and children who want to help their friends and family members reduce or eliminate pain and heal without drugs. In other words: everyone wanting to help others to heal.

Read more less

The emergence of a true systemic science - the systemic one - capable of rigorously addressing the many problems posed by the design and management of the evolution of modern complex systems is therefore urgently needed if wants to be able to provide satisfactory answers to the many profoundly systemic challenges that humanity will have to face at the dawn of the third millennium. This emergence is of course not easy because one can easily understand that the development of the systemic is mechanically confronted with all the classical disciplines which can all pretend to bring part of the explanations necessary to the understanding of a system and which do not naturally see a good eye a new discipline claim to encompass them in a holistic approach ... The book of Jacques Printz is therefore an extremely important contribution to this new emerging scientific and technical discipline: it is indeed first of all one of the very few "serious" works published in French and offering a good introduction to the systemic. It gives an extremely broad vision of this field, taking a thread given by the architecture of systems, in other words by the part of the systemic that is interested in the structure of systems and their design processes, which allows everyone to fully understand the issues and issues of the systemic. We can only encourage the reader to draw all the quintessence of the masterful work of Jacques Printz which mixes historical reminders explaining how the systemic emerged, introduction to key concepts of the systemic and practical examples to understand the nature and the scope of the ideas introduced.

Read more less

This volume revisits the concepts of enchantment and sacralization in light of perspectives which challenge the modern notion that man (alone) is the measure of all things. As Bruno Latour has argued, the battle against superstition entailed shifting power away from God/the gods to humans, thereby disqualifying the agency of all the other objects in the world. Might enchantment and sacralization be understood in other ways than through this battle between almighty gods and almighty humans? Might enchantment be understood to involve processes where power and control are not distributed so clearly and definitely?Like social constructionists, Latour emphasizes that things are constructed; yet, like many other new materialists, such as Jane Bennett, Manuel De Landa and Karen Barad, he emphasizes that this construction is not the result of projecting meaning onto a passive and meaningless world, but a matter of compositional achievements, whereby assemblages of actants co-compose each other and frame, enable and delimit one another's agency.This move recognizes the active and entangled participation of players beyond the humans versus God(s) framework that informed the modernist project. Understanding enchantment and sacralisation as compositionally and relationally constructed does not mean the same as understanding them as constructed by humans alone. What it means is one of the main questions posed in this book. In other words, if enchantment and sacralization are not understood (solely) in terms of projecting anthropocentric meaning onto mute objects, what are some promising alternative approaches - old and new - and what are their implications for how we understand modernity and for method and theory in the study of religion?

Read more less

A comprehensive guide to excelling in a complex matrix organization Debra was not in a good mood as she entered Johann’s office for their third meeting. One of her colleagues had just been promoted and, although the guy who got it was good, she didn’t think he was any better than her. Well, except at one thing, he was always playing politics - sucking up to the more senior guys and volunteering to be on any committee going. Debra knew the type - went to the same school, belonged to the same club - she didn’t have a hope against the kind of connections he had so she might as well give up. It seemed doing a good job just wasn’t enough around here. Debra and Johann work in an environment with multiple and complex reporting lines – in other words, a matrix. There’s room to “slip between the cracks” – if a person wants to take advantage of confusion over who is managing performance; or if they can’t make the necessary transition to self-management. Communication can be difficult even when there is an apparently shared language. Read how Johann and Debra work together to identify the skills needed to succeed in a matrix, and how using Emotional Intelligence (EI) can develop specific behaviours you can incorporate in your daily job. The result will help reduce stress and increase your chances of success. Dawn Metcalfe, Managing Director of PDS, based in Dubai, uses her experience as a coach and trainer to give us a behind the curtain look at how mentoring can help an individual develop the skills they need to survive and thrive in today’s complex work environments.

Read more less

A look at the extraordinary ways the brain turns thoughts into actions—and how this shapes our everyday livesWhy is it hard to text and drive at the same time? How do you resist eating that extra piece of cake? Why does staring at a tax form feel mentally exhausting? Why can your child expertly fix the computer and yet still forget to put on a coat? From making a cup of coffee to buying a house to changing the world around them, humans are uniquely able to execute necessary actions. How do we do it? Or in other words, how do our brains get things done? In On Task, cognitive neuroscientist David Badre presents the first authoritative introduction to the neuroscience of cognitive control—the remarkable ways that our brains devise sophisticated actions to achieve our goals. We barely notice this routine part of our lives. Yet, cognitive control, also known as executive function, is an astonishing phenomenon that has a profound impact on our well-being.Drawing on cutting-edge research, vivid clinical case studies, and examples from daily life, Badre sheds light on the evolution and inner workings of cognitive control. He examines issues from multitasking and willpower to habitual errors and bad decision making, as well as what happens as our brains develop in childhood and change as we age—and what happens when cognitive control breaks down. Ultimately, Badre shows that cognitive control affects just about everything we do.A revelatory look at how billions of neurons collectively translate abstract ideas into concrete plans, On Task offers an eye-opening investigation into the brain’s critical role in human behavior.

Read more less

There is a crisis in business today: the invisible employee. Feeling threatened, ignored, and unappreciated, invisible employees fight back the only way they know how—by staying hidden in the corporate shadows, doing just enough to get by, grumbling about this and that, and passing these techniques along to new workers. After all, why bother shining when no one notices your achievements? Why bother trying when you could be let go in the next batch of layoffs? A business fable packed with hard-won wisdom, The Invisible Employee follows a group of people who live and work together on a mysterious island. In this second edition—updated with new case studies and current survey results—managers learn how to combat one of the most common negative attitudes in business: that smart employees keep their heads down and never do more than is asked. Bestselling authors Adrian Gostick and Chester Elton show how effective leaders change this mind-set by engaging their people in their cause—setting clear goals, encouraging productive behavior, and celebrating every success along the way. The end result is an organization of productive employees who feel noticed, valued, and appreciated. In other words, they feel visible. In today’s competitive environment, all of us are looking for the next big product, the next big capability or solution. But great managers are finding that recognizing people leads to a more engaged workforce and a more successful business. The Invisible Employee shows you how to bring out the hidden potential in your team and your business. Learn more about growing a Carrot Culture at carrots.com

Read more less

'Spectacular and terrifyingly true' Owen Jones'Explosive' John McDonnell, New Statesman, Books of the Year'Thought-provoking and funny' The TimesFT BUSINESS BOOK OF THE YEAR 2018, THE TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR 2018, NEW STATESMAN BOOK OF THE YEAR 2018 and CITY AM BOOK OF THE YEAR 2018Be honest: if your job didn't exist, would anybody miss it? Have you ever wondered why not? Up to 40% of us secretly believe our jobs probably aren't necessary. In other words: they are bullshit jobs. This book shows why, and what we can do about it.In the early twentieth century, people prophesied that technology would see us all working fifteen-hour weeks and driving flying cars. Instead, something curious happened. Not only have the flying cars not materialised, but average working hours have increased rather than decreased. And now, across the developed world, three-quarters of all jobs are in services, finance or admin: jobs that don't seem to contribute anything to society. In Bullshit Jobs, David Graeber explores how this phenomenon - one more associated with the Soviet Union, but which capitalism was supposed to eliminate - has happened. In doing so, he looks at how, rather than producing anything, work has become an end in itself; the way such work maintains the current broken system of finance capital; and, finally, how we can get out of it. This book is for anyone whose heart has sunk at the sight of a whiteboard, who believes 'workshops' should only be for making things, or who just suspects that there might be a better way to run our world.

Read more less

HIGHLIGHT Open Source SOA shows readers how to build state-of-the-art SOA applications using freely-available open-source technologies. DESCRIPTION You can build a world-class SOA infrastructure entirely using popular, and mature, open-source applications. Unfortunately, the technical documentation for most open-source projects focuses on a specific product, the big SOA picture. You're left to your own devices to figure out how to cobble together a full solution from the various bits. In other words, unless you already know how Mule and Tuscany work with jBPM, you're stuck. Open Source SOA shows readers how to build an entire SOA application using open-source technologies. It shows readers how to apply key ideas like Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) design and Business Process Management (BPM) and learn the tools and techniques to implement them effectively. To pull everything together, the author describes real-life case studies from his own work to tie together all the principles and practices. These hard-to-find case studies are pure gold for the reader, as most developers keep these trade secrets to themselves. KEY POINTS • Theory—what SOA really represents • Enablers—SOA core technologies • Open-source applications that address the core technology • Best-of-breed open-source solutions • Real-life case studies MARKET INFORMATION SOA is a fact of life for enterprise developers. Open source technologies have caught up with—and in many cases, surpassed—their commercial rivals in terms of power, ease of use, and sophistication. This book shows a Java EE developer how to apply SOA techniques using the best-of-breed open-sources tools.

Read more less

The ancient world, much like our own, thrived on cultural diversity and exchange. The riches of this social reality are evident in the writings of Jews in the Hellenistic and Roman eras. Jewish authors drew on the wide range of Greek literary conventions and gave fresh expressions to the proud traditions of their faith and ethnic identity. They did not hesitate to modify and adapt the forms they received from the surrounding culture, but their works stand as legitimate participants in Greco-Roman literary tradition.In Greek Genres and Jewish Authors, Sean Adams argues that a robust understanding of ancient genre facilitates proper textual interpretation. This perspective is vital for insight on the author, the work's original purpose, and how the original readers would have received it. Adopting a cognitive-prototype theory of genre, Adams provides a detailed discussion of Jewish authors writing in Greek from ca. 300 BCE to ca. 135 CE - including New Testament authors - and their participation in Greek genres. The nine chapters focus on broad genre divisions (e.g., poetry, didactic, philosophy) to provide studies on each author's engagement with Greek genres, identifying both representative and atypical expressions and features.The book's most prominent contribution lies in its data synthesis to provide a macroperspective on the ways in which Jewish authors participated in and adapted Greek genres - in other words, how members of a minority culture intentionally engaged with the dominant culture's literary practices alongside traditional Jewish features, resulting in unique text expressions. Greek Genres and Jewish Authors provides a rich resource for Jewish, New Testament, and classical scholars, particularly those who study cultural engagement, development of genres, and ancient education.

Read more less

This book aims to help research practitioners in technology science avoid some of the most common pitfalls or at least make them easier to overcome. Many technology scientists put too little weight on how they conduct their work and should be able to become significantly better at what they do by being more aware of methodological issues. The book differs from other related works in two main respects: First, by focusing on creating, producing, or inventing new artifacts – in other words, technology science. Second, by describing a general approach to technology science linking together specialized research methods. The book consists of 14 chapters. Following the first introductory chapter are two chapters providing the foundation for the rest of the book. These chapters clarify the meaning of key concepts and describe an overall process for technology science. The subsequent chapters 4–11 are about this process. Chapters 4, 5, and 6 concern problem analysis, research planning, and hypothesis formulation. The following five chapters then aim at evaluation. Chapter 7 introduces the concept of prediction, which plays a fundamental role in evaluating hypotheses. Chapters 8–10 address the evaluation of universal, existential, and statistical hypotheses. Chapter 11 concerns quality assurance and introduces the concepts of validity and reliability. Next, in chapters 12 and 13, we address publishing with an emphasis on the specifics of technology science. Eventually the last chapter, chapter 14, briefly introduces the philosophy of science. The book systematically collects in the form of suggestions, recommendations, and guidelines the author’s 35-year experience as a researcher, author and reviewer in technology science. It is written for anyone working in technology science, from master’s students to researchers and supervisors.

Read more less

This book is your complete guide to Snowflake security, covering account security, authentication, data access control, logging and monitoring, and more. It will help you make sure that you are using the security controls in a right way, are on top of access control, and making the most of the security features in Snowflake. Snowflake is the fastest growing cloud data warehouse in the world, and having the right methodology to protect the data is important both to data engineers and security teams. It allows for faster data enablement for organizations, as well as reducing security risks, meeting compliance requirements, and solving data privacy challenges. There are currently tens of thousands of people who are either data engineers/data ops in Snowflake-using organizations, or security people in such organizations. This book provides guidance when you want to apply certain capabilities, such as data masking, row-level security, column-level security, tackling role hierarchy, building monitoring dashboards, etc., to your organizations. What You Will Learn Implement security best practices for Snowflake Set up user provisioning, MFA, OAuth, and SSO Set up a Snowflake security model Design roles architecture Use advanced access control such as row-based security and dynamic masking Audit and monitor your Snowflake Data Cloud Who This Book Is For Data engineers, data privacy professionals, and security teams either with security knowledge (preferably some data security knowledge) or with data engineering knowledge; in other words, either “Snowflake people” or “data people” who want to get security right, or “security people” who want to make sure that Snowflake gets handled right in terms of security

Read more less

Already in 1929, Walter Benjamin described “a one hundred per cent image-space.” Such an image space saturates our world now more than ever, constituting the visibility in which we live. The Supermarket of the Visible analyzes this space and the icons that populate it as the culmination of a history of the circulation and general commodification of images and gazes. From the first elevators and escalators (tracking shots avant la lettre) to cinema (the great conductor of gazes), all the way down to contemporary eye-tracking techniques that monitor the slightest saccades of our eyes, Peter Szendy offers an entirely novel theory of the intersection of the image and economics. The Supermarket of the Visible elaborates an economy proper to images, icons, in other words, an iconomy. Deleuze caught a glimpse of this when he wrote that “money is the back side of all the images that cinema shows and edits on the front.” Since “cinema,” for Deleuze, is synonymous with “universe,” Szendy argues that this sentence must be understood in its broadest dimension and that a reading of key works in the history of cinema allows us a unique vantage point upon the reverse of images, their monetary implications. Paying close attention to sequences in Hitchcock, Bresson, Antonioni, De Palma, and The Sopranos, Szendy shows how cinema is not a uniquely commercial art form among other, purer arts, but, more fundamentally, helps to elaborate what might be called, with Bataille, a general iconomy. Moving deftly and lightly between political economy, aesthetic theory, and popular movies and television, The Supermarket of the Visible will be a necessary book for anyone concerned with media, philosophy, politics, or visual culture.

Read more less

Interfaces are back, or perhaps they never left. The familiar Socratic conceit from the Phaedrus, of communication as the process of writing directly on the soul of the other, has returned to center stage in today's discussions of culture and media. Indeed Western thought has long construed media as a grand choice between two kinds of interfaces. Following the optimistic path, media seamlessly interface self and other in a transparent and immediate connection. But, following the pessimistic path, media are the obstacles to direct communion, disintegrating self and other into misunderstanding and contradiction. In other words, media interfaces are either clear or complicated, either beautiful or deceptive, either already known or endlessly interpretable. Recognizing the limits of either path, Galloway charts an alternative course by considering the interface as an autonomous zone of aesthetic activity, guided by its own logic and its own ends: the interface effect. Rather than praising user-friendly interfaces that work well, or castigating those that work poorly, this book considers the unworkable nature of all interfaces, from windows and doors to screens and keyboards. Considered allegorically, such thresholds do not so much tell the story of their own operations but beckon outward into the realm of social and political life, and in so doing ask a question to which the political interpretation of interfaces is the only coherent answer. Grounded in philosophy and cultural theory and driven by close readings of video games, software, television, painting, and other images, Galloway seeks to explain the logic of digital culture through an analysis of its most emblematic and ubiquitous manifestation – the interface.

Read more less

How businesses and other organizations can improve their performance by tapping the power of differences in how people think What if workforce diversity is more than simply the right thing to do in order to make society more integrated and just? What if diversity can also improve the bottom line of businesses and other organizations facing complex challenges in the knowledge economy? It can. And The Diversity Bonus shows how and why. Scott Page, a leading thinker, writer, and speaker whose ideas and advice are sought after by corporations, nonprofits, universities, and governments around the world, makes a clear and compellingly pragmatic case for diversity and inclusion. He presents overwhelming evidence that teams that include different kinds of thinkers outperform homogenous groups on complex tasks, producing what he calls "diversity bonuses." These bonuses include improved problem solving, increased innovation, and more accurate predictions--all of which lead to better performance and results. Page shows that various types of cognitive diversity--differences in how people perceive, encode, analyze, and organize the same information and experiences--are linked to better outcomes. He then describes how these cognitive differences are influenced by other kinds of diversity, including racial and gender differences--in other words, identity diversity. Identity diversity, therefore, can also produce bonuses. Drawing on research in economics, psychology, computer science, and many other fields, The Diversity Bonus also tells the stories of people and organizations that have tapped the power of diversity to solve complex problems. And the book includes a challenging response from Katherine Phillips of the Columbia Business School. The result changes the way we think about diversity in the workplace--and far beyond it.

Read more less

Of the many charges laid against contemporary literary scholars, one of the most common - and perhaps the most wounding - is that they simply don't love books. And while the most obvious response is that, no, actually the profession of literary studies does acknowledge and address personal attachments to literature, that answer risks obscuring a more fundamental question: Why should they? That question led Deidre Shauna Lynch into the historical and cultural investigation of Loving Literature. How did it come to be that professional literary scholars are expected not just to study, but to love literature, and to inculcate that love in generations of students? What Lynch discovers is that books, and the attachments we form to them, have long played a role in the formation of private life - that the love of literature, in other words, is neither incidental to, nor inextricable from, the history of literature. Yet at the same time, there is nothing self-evident or a historical about our love of literature: our views of books as objects of affection have clear roots in late eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century publishing, reading habits, and domestic history. While never denying the very real feelings behind our warm relationship to books, Loving Literature nonetheless serves as a riposte to those who use the phrase "the love of literature" as if its meaning were transparent, its essence happy and healthy. Lynch writes, "It is as if those on the side of love of literature had forgotten what literary texts themselves say about love's edginess and complexities." With this masterly volume, Lynch restores those edges, and allows us to revel in those complexities.

Read more less

AS SEEN ON GOOD MORNING AMERICAHave you ever accomplished something you weren’t so sure you could do? Success has always been the end goal, but when you achieve it ... something infuriatingly predictable happens. You start wondering what more you can do.Instead of success bringing you happiness, it hands you an increased hunger to achieve something even bigger. And with that desire also comes uncertainty, self-doubt, anxiety and stress.Success, in other words, is kinda wonderful ... but it’s also kinda hell. Welcome to Wonderhell.Wonderhell is that space in your psyche where the burden of your newly discovered potential plops down, unpacks its backpack, and asks: Hey, you! Whatcha got for me?Living in an ambitious, results-oriented society, we often mischaracterize the turbulent emotions that surround success, deeming them a “necessary evil”—a byproduct of one’s rise to the top. We tend to think that we just need to survive these difficult moments, to hang on by our fingernails and somehow get through these stressful, unwanted side effects of our success. We torture ourselves with a never-ending internal dialogue: I can handle this. Can I handle this?But we are wrong. Learning to live in this newfound potential can be exciting rather than exhausting. Emotions like fear, anxiety, and heartbreak are not collateral damage, slings and arrows to be absorbed and swallowed down, silenced and pushed aside. Rather, each emotion is a portal that shows us what more we can do, if instead we recognize that on the other side of this wonderful hell that we so badly wanted is another and another and another . . . but only if we choose to accept it.

Read more less

This fascinating and unique history reveals the major influence of the Oxford Chemistry School on the advancement of chemistry. It shows how the nature of the University, and individuals within it, have shaped the school and made great achievements both in teaching and research. The book will appeal to those interested in the history of science and education, the city of Oxford and chemistry in general. Chemistry has been studied in Oxford for centuries but this book focuses on the last 400 years and, in particular, the seminal work of Robert Boyle, Robert Hooke, and the proto- Royal Society of the 1650's. Arranged in chronological fashion, it includes specialist studies of particular areas of innovation. The book shows that chemistry has advanced, not just as a consequence of research but, because of the idiosynchratic nature of the collegiate system and the characters of the individuals involved. In other words, it demonstrates that science is a human endeavour and its advance in any institution is conditioned by the organization and people within it. For chemists, the main appeal will be the book's examination of the way separate branches of chemistry (organic, physical, inorganic and biological) have evolved in Oxford. It also enables comparison with the development of the subject at other universities such as Cambridge, London and Manchester. For historians and sociologists, the book reveals the motivations of both scientists and non-scientists in the management of the School. It exposes the unusual character of Oxford University and the tensions between science and administration. The desire of the college to retain its academic values in the face of external and financial pressures is emphasized.

Read more less

Nobel laureate Richard H. Thaler has spent his career studying the radical notion that the central agents in the economy are humans—predictable, error-prone individuals. Misbehaving is his arresting, frequently hilarious account of the struggle to bring an academic discipline back down to earth—and change the way we think about economics, ourselves, and our world. Traditional economics assumes rational actors. Early in his research, Thaler realized these Spock-like automatons were nothing like real people. Whether buying a clock radio, selling basketball tickets, or applying for a mortgage, we all succumb to biases and make decisions that deviate from the standards of rationality assumed by economists. In other words, we misbehave. More importantly, our misbehavior has serious consequences. Dismissed at first by economists as an amusing sideshow, the study of human miscalculations and their effects on markets now drives efforts to make better decisions in our lives, our businesses, and our governments. Coupling recent discoveries in human psychology with a practical understanding of incentives and market behavior, Thaler enlightens readers about how to make smarter decisions in an increasingly mystifying world. He reveals how behavioral economic analysis opens up new ways to look at everything from household finance to assigning faculty offices in a new building, to TV game shows, the NFL draft, and businesses like Uber. Laced with antic stories of Thaler’s spirited battles with the bastions of traditional economic thinking, Misbehaving is a singular look into profound human foibles. When economics meets psychology, the implications for individuals, managers, and policy makers are both profound and entertaining. Shortlisted for the Financial Times & McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award

Read more less

The book reports three studies that were undertaken of what "moves" people - firstly as individuals, through verbal interviews; secondly in a public house, through working behind the bar; and thirdly in a residential community, through being the Rector of a parish. In each case it poses the question, whether our understanding of the human reality revealed in the situation, can be progressed by comparing it with what is known about religion. In other words, can Religious Studies help us to understand secular life, in the way that Social-scientific Studies have helped us to understand the religious life? The Implicit Religion that is looked for in the three studies is defined in terms of people's commitments or integrating foci, or intensive concerns with extensive effects. The first study revealed an all-but-ineffable apprehension and valuation of the Self. The second revealed a context in which Selves can "hold their own" with other Selves. The third unexpectedly revealed a commitment, which was as ultimate as it was intimate, to what was called "Christianity". The content of this belief is analysed, and compared with historical forms of Christianity. This attention to intentionality may be seen as the particular contribution that the study of Religion, and of Religions (as type-cases), can make to the social-scientific understanding of human behaviour and human being. In the three decades that have passed since Dr. Bailey began to test this approach, much "post-modernity" theory has moved in a similar direction. This volume constitutes the firts full-lenght report, of the first systematic tests to have been made, of a concept that has come to be accepeted in both academic and religious circles.

Read more less

The skeletons in the closet have nothing on the one in your backyard.Freshly divorced and grieving the death of her father, Josie Lauer has caged herself inside her home. To cope with her losses, Josie follows a strict daily routine of work, playing with her dog, Po, and trying to remember to eat a decent meal—and ending each night by drinking copious amounts of vodka. In other words, she is not coping at all.Everything changes when Josie wakes to find a small shrub has sprouted in her otherwise dirt backyard the morning after yet another bender. Within hours, the vine-like plant is running amok—and it’s brought company. The appearance of the unwieldly growth has also heralded the arrival of a busybody new neighbor who insists on thrusting herself into Josie’s life. The neighbor Josie can deal with. The talking skeleton called Skelly that has perched itself in Josie’s backyard on a throne made of vines, however, is an entirely different matter.As the strangely sentient plant continues to grow and twist its tendrils inside Josie’s suddenly complicated life, Josie begins to realize her new neighbor knows a lot more about the vines and her bizarre new visitor than she initially lets on. There’s a reason Skelly has chosen to appear in Josie’s suddenly-blooming backyard and insists on pulling her out of her carefully kept self-isolation. All Josie has to do is figure out what that reason is—and she has only a few days to do it, or else she might find herself on the wrong side of catastrophe.LITTLE BIRD is a story about found family, no matter how bizarre.

Read more less

Overwhelmed by the news cycle and the state of affairs in our world? Pastor, blogger, and powerful voice in the Resistance, John Pavlovitz has the answer: this rousing and inspirational guide, drawing from lessons of our favorite superheroes, for how we can band together, live more heroically (and meaningfully), and save the world. It’s exhausting to give a damn these days, isn’t it? Perhaps you’re feeling anguished about what you see on the news or in your social media timeline, or by your personal circumstances, and are paralyzed waiting for political or religious leaders, or celebrities, to rescue us from it all. But what if you didn’t have to wait for someone else? What if you could be the hero? This book—a spirited call to action—shows you how. In these pages, John offers a path away from the vitriol and toward com­passion, and a plan to transform our burdens into dreams and our outrage into activism. Drawing from lessons of beloved fictional superheroes, John shows us how to identify our origin story, build protective suits of armor, guard against our personal kryptonite, and vanquish our villains. He also identifies ten specific “superpowers” that we can enlist to make our lives and our world better. Along the way, he shares inspiring anecdotes and profiles about ordinary people who saw a gap in the world in empathy or kindness or gratitude and decided to fill it. Hope and Other Superpowers is an invitation to anyone hoping to be the kind of person the world so desperately needs—the kind who can save it. In other words: it’s an invitation to you.

Read more less

This volume revisits the concepts of enchantment and sacralization in light of perspectives which challenge the modern notion that man (alone) is the measure of all things. As Bruno Latour has argued, the battle against superstition entailed shifting power away from God/the gods to humans, thereby disqualifying the agency of all the other objects in the world. Might enchantment and sacralization be understood in other ways than through this battle between almighty gods and almighty humans? Might enchantment be understood to involve processes where power and control are not distributed so clearly and definitely?Like social constructionists, Latour emphasizes that things are constructed; yet, like many other new materialists, such as Jane Bennett, Manuel De Landa and Karen Barad, he emphasizes that this construction is not the result of projecting meaning onto a passive and meaningless world, but a matter of compositional achievements, whereby assemblages of actants co-compose each other and frame, enable and delimit one another's agency.This move recognizes the active and entangled participation of players beyond the humans versus God(s) framework that informed the modernist project. Understanding enchantment and sacralisation as compositionally and relationally constructed does not mean the same as understanding them as constructed by humans alone. What it means is one of the main questions posed in this book. In other words, if enchantment and sacralization are not understood (solely) in terms of projecting anthropocentric meaning onto mute objects, what are some promising alternative approaches - old and new - and what are their implications for how we understand modernity and for method and theory in the study of religion?

Read more less

Already in 1929, Walter Benjamin described “a one hundred per cent image-space.” Such an image space saturates our world now more than ever, constituting the visibility in which we live. The Supermarket of the Visible analyzes this space and the icons that populate it as the culmination of a history of the circulation and general commodification of images and gazes. From the first elevators and escalators (tracking shots avant la lettre) to cinema (the great conductor of gazes), all the way down to contemporary eye-tracking techniques that monitor the slightest saccades of our eyes, Peter Szendy offers an entirely novel theory of the intersection of the image and economics. The Supermarket of the Visible elaborates an economy proper to images, icons, in other words, an iconomy. Deleuze caught a glimpse of this when he wrote that “money is the back side of all the images that cinema shows and edits on the front.” Since “cinema,” for Deleuze, is synonymous with “universe,” Szendy argues that this sentence must be understood in its broadest dimension and that a reading of key works in the history of cinema allows us a unique vantage point upon the reverse of images, their monetary implications. Paying close attention to sequences in Hitchcock, Bresson, Antonioni, De Palma, and The Sopranos, Szendy shows how cinema is not a uniquely commercial art form among other, purer arts, but, more fundamentally, helps to elaborate what might be called, with Bataille, a general iconomy. Moving deftly and lightly between political economy, aesthetic theory, and popular movies and television, The Supermarket of the Visible will be a necessary book for anyone concerned with media, philosophy, politics, or visual culture.

Read more less

Love seems like the most personal experience, one that touches each of us in a unique way that is more personal than social, and hence it is not surprising that it has been largely neglected by sociologists and social theorists. While it has long been a central preoccupation of writers and novelists, love has rarely attracted anything more than the most cursory attention of social scientists. This short text, originally written in 1969 by the eminent German social theorist Niklas Luhmann, goes a long way to redressing this neglect. Rather than seeing love as a unique and ineffable personal experience, Luhmann treats love as a solution to a problem that depends on a wider range of social structures and forms. Human beings are faced with a world of enormous complexity and they have to find ways to order and make sense of this world. In other words, they need certain facilities for action Ð what Luhmann calls ‘media of communication’ Ð that enable them to select from a host of alternatives in ways that will be understood as meaningful by others. Love is one of these media; truth, power, money and art are others. With the development of modern societies, greater demands are made on this medium of love, altering the relationship between love and sexuality and giving rise to the distinctive difficulties we associate with love today. This short text by one of the most brilliant social theorists of the 20th century will be of great interest to students and scholars throughout the social sciences and humanities. It is a concise and pithy statement of what is still the only sociological theory of love we have.

Read more less

A look at the extraordinary ways the brain turns thoughts into actions—and how this shapes our everyday livesWhy is it hard to text and drive at the same time? How do you resist eating that extra piece of cake? Why does staring at a tax form feel mentally exhausting? Why can your child expertly fix the computer and yet still forget to put on a coat? From making a cup of coffee to buying a house to changing the world around them, humans are uniquely able to execute necessary actions. How do we do it? Or in other words, how do our brains get things done? In On Task, cognitive neuroscientist David Badre presents the first authoritative introduction to the neuroscience of cognitive control—the remarkable ways that our brains devise sophisticated actions to achieve our goals. We barely notice this routine part of our lives. Yet, cognitive control, also known as executive function, is an astonishing phenomenon that has a profound impact on our well-being.Drawing on cutting-edge research, vivid clinical case studies, and examples from daily life, Badre sheds light on the evolution and inner workings of cognitive control. He examines issues from multitasking and willpower to habitual errors and bad decision making, as well as what happens as our brains develop in childhood and change as we age—and what happens when cognitive control breaks down. Ultimately, Badre shows that cognitive control affects just about everything we do.A revelatory look at how billions of neurons collectively translate abstract ideas into concrete plans, On Task offers an eye-opening investigation into the brain’s critical role in human behavior.

Read more less

This comparative study gathers together new research by local historians into aspects of welfare in Hertfordshire spanning four centuries and focusing on towns and villages across the county, including Ashwell, Cheshunt, Hertford, Pirton, and Royston, amongst many others. In so doing it makes a valuable contribution to the current debate about the spatial and chronological variation in the character of welfare regimes within single counties, let alone more widely. As well as viewing poor relief geographically and chronologically, the book also considers the treatment of particular groups such as the aged, the mad, children, and the unemployed, and shows how, within the constraints of the relevant welfare laws, each group was dealt with differently, giving a more nuanced picture than has perhaps been the case before. The overarching question that the book attempts to answer is how effectively Hertfordshire cared for those in need. With chapters on madhouses, workhouses, certified industrial schools, the Foundling Hospital, pensions, and medical care, the book covers a very broad range of topics through which a complex picture emerges. While some officials seem to have been driven by a relatively narrow sense of their obligations to the poor and vulnerable, others appear to have tailored welfare packages to their precise needs. Naturally, self-interest played a part: if the weakest citizens were well managed, vagrancy might be lessened, the spread of disease contained, and control maintained over the cost of looking after the poor and sick. It seems that Hertfordshire was relatively nimble and sensitive in discovering and treating its people's needs. Evidence is beginning to emerge, in other words, that Hertfordshire was in essence a caring county.

Read more less

The Anglo-Saxons held sway in this country from the Romans departing until the Norman Conquest; a period of over 600 years: in other words the same length of time from the late medieval England of the War of the Roses until the present day. This Anglo-Saxon legacy has endured. They gave us our language, place names, an English identity and an administrative system of dividing the country into shires which is still with us today. This Guide brings the tremendous accomplishments of the Anglo-Saxons to life. It is written in an accessible and clear way and is aimed at the general reader but could also be used as a springboard to more advanced study. The book is presented in two parts. Part One is an overview of the course of events in Anglo-Saxon England. Its purpose is to put Part Two into context. Part Two is a richly illustrated place-by-place exploration of what there is to see and enjoy today of the Anglo-Saxon world. The book is designed to be used in the field by those who enjoy exploring our country with guide book in hand, as well as by the armchair reader. All well-known places are described, from the magnificence of Bede’s Jarrow and Monkwearmouth, to the wonderful churches at Brixworth and Earl’s Barton. As well as the famous, more secret and hidden treasures are described from the fells of Cumbria to the South Downs in Sussex. The simple but breath-taking architecture of Anglo-Saxon churches, their intricate sculpture and captivating historical associations are all waiting to be discovered

Read more less

In The Invented State, Emily Thorson argues that a problematic and understudied aspect of political misinformation reflects widespread public misperception about what the government does. Because much of public policy is invisible to the public, there is fertile ground for false beliefs to flourish, leading to the creation of what Thorson terms the "invented state": systematic misperceptions about public policy. However, people get the facts wrong not because they are lazy, stupid, or blinded by partisan loyalty. Rather, misperceptions are created when three conditions are met: when citizens have incomplete information about an issue, when their own biases color their understanding of it, and when they feel that the issue is important. In other words, the invented state is created not just by exposure to explicit misinformation, but also by individuals' cognitive errors. Correcting these policy misperceptions is highly effective at reducing false beliefs. In addition, providing people with corrective information has downstream effects on attitudes. When they learn how policies - including Social Security, refugee policy, and the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program - really work, their approval of these policies increases, and they also shift their policy priorities. Contrary to pundits' assumptions of a public who is largely indifferent to policy, there is a deep public desire to learn basic facts about how the government works. Thorson meets that desire with analysis on how the news media can identify and effectively correct substantive policy misperceptions. The Invented State not only sheds a new light on how Americans think about policy, but can also help to inform evidence-based interventions to improve democratic competence.

Read more less

If we understand the liturgy of the Church as a form of tradition, how can a theological concept of tradition then contribute to the development of evaluation criteria for reforms of the liturgy? In other words: how can we make the concept of tradition productive for the evaluation of the process of liturgical renewal? In order to be able to formulate a satisfactory answer to this question, the first half of this study offers a number of theoretical explorations on liturgical reform, on a theological concept of tradition that is expressed in liturgy, on the factors that disrupt or aid liturgical communication, and on criteria for evaluating liturgical reforms. The second part comprises six case studies, in which the theory that has been developed is tested. Throughout this work it becomes clear that liturgy in itself is the process of transmitting the person and message of Jesus, in which the Spirit of God and the human person work together indivisibly. The case studies in the second part of this book, concerning the liturgical reform of Vaticanum II, lead to such questions as: Was the traditional nature of the liturgy and its reform sufficiently taken into account? Should the intended changes not have been introduced over the course of a much longer period of time, for instance multiple generations, in order to give the process of tradition with its aspects of maturation, reception, and correction sufficient opportunity? Was the principle of the identity of the liturgy of a rite throughout time given sufficient consideration? Was there enough attention for the sometimes irrational nature of liturgical communication, which is partly a consequence of its traditional nature?

Read more less

Extractive metallurgy is the art and science of extracting metals from their ores and refining them. The production of metals and alloys from these source materials is still one of the most important and fundamental industries in both developed and developing economies around the world. The outputs and products are essential resources for the metallic, mechanical, electromagnetic, electrical and electronics industries (silicon is treated as a metal for these purposes). This series is devoted to the extraction of metals from ores, concentrates (enriched ores), scraps, and other sources and their refining to the state of either liquid metal before casting or to solid metals. The extraction and refining operations that are required may be carried out by various metallurgical reaction processes. Extractive Metallurgy 1 deals with the fundamentals of thermodynamics and kinetics of the reaction processes. Extractive Metallurgy 2 focuses on pyrometallurgical, hydrometallurgical, halide and electro-metallurgical (conversion) processes. Extractive Metallurgy 3 deals with the industrial processing operations, technologies, and process routes, in other words the sequence of steps or operations used to convert the ore to metal. Processes and operations are studied using the methodology of “chemical reaction engineering”. As the fundamentals of the art and science of Extractive Metallurgy are infrequently taught as dedicated university or engineering schools courses, this series is intended both for students in the fields of Metallurgy and Mechanical Engineering who want to acquire this knowledge, and also for engineers put in charge of the operation of an industrial production unit or the development of a new process, who will need the basic knowledge of the corresponding technology.

Read more less