Search results for ""Basic Books""

The most complete account of the theory and application of Multiple Intelligences available anywhere.Howard Gardner's brilliant conception of individual competence, known as Multiple Intelligences theory, has changed the face of education. Tens of thousands of educators, parents, and researchers have explored the practical implications and applications of this powerful notion, that there is not one type of intelligence but several, ranging from musical intelligence to the intelligence involved in self-understanding.Multiple Intelligences distills nearly three decades of research on Multiple Intelligences theory and practice, covering its central arguments and numerous developments since its introduction in 1983. Gardner includes discussions of global applications, Multiple Intelligences in the workplace, an assessment of Multiple Intelligences practice in the current conservative educational climate, new evidence about brain functioning, and much more.

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Winner of the Pulitzer PrizeA metaphorical fugue on minds and machines in the spirit of Lewis CarrollDouglas Hofstadter's book is concerned directly with the nature of "maps" or links between formal systems. However, according to Hofstadter, the formal system that underlies all mental activity transcends the system that supports it. If life can grow out of the formal chemical substrate of the cell, if consciousness can emerge out of a formal system of firing neurons, then so too will computers attain human intelligence. Gödel, Escher, Bach is a wonderful exploration of fascinating ideas at the heart of cognitive science: meaning, reduction, recursion, and much more.

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One of our greatest philosophers and scientists of the mind asks, where does the self come from -- and how our selves can exist in the minds of others. Can thought arise out of matter? Can self, soul, consciousness, "I" arise out of mere matter? If it cannot, then how can you or I be here? I Am a Strange Loop argues that the key to understanding selves and consciousness is the "strange loop"-a special kind of abstract feedback loop inhabiting our brains. The most central and complex symbol in your brain is the one called "I." The "I" is the nexus in our brain, one of many symbols seeming to have free will and to have gained the paradoxical ability to push particles around, rather than the reverse. How can a mysterious abstraction be real-or is our "I" merely a convenient fiction? Does an "I" exert genuine power over the particles in our brain, or is it helplessly pushed around by the laws of physics? These are the mysteries tackled in I Am a Strange Loop, Douglas Hofstadter's first book-length journey into philosophy since Gödel, Escher, Bach. Compulsively readable and endlessly thought-provoking, this is a moving and profound inquiry into the nature of mind.

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Learn how to think like a physicist from a Nobel laureate and "one of the greatest minds of the twentieth century" (New York Review of Books) with these six classic and beloved lessonsIt was Richard Feynman's outrageous and scintillating method of teaching that earned him legendary status among students and professors of physics. From 1961 to 1963, Feynman delivered a series of lectures at the California Institute of Technology that revolutionized the teaching of physics around the world. Six Easy Pieces, taken from these famous Lectures on Physics, represent the most accessible material from the series.In these classic lessons, Feynman introduces the general reader to the following topics: atoms, basic physics, energy, gravitation, quantum mechanics, and the relationship of physics to other topics. With his dazzling and inimitable wit, Feynman presents each discussion with a minimum of jargon. Filled with wonderful examples and clever illustrations, Six Easy Pieces is the ideal introduction to the fundamentals of physics by one of the most admired and accessible physicists of modern times."If one book was all that could be passed on to the next generation of scientists it would undoubtedly have to be Six Easy Pieces."- John Gribbin, New Scientist

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Despite your graduate education, brainpower, and technical prowess, your career in scientific research is far from assured. Permanent positions are scarce, science survival is rarely part of formal graduate training, and a good mentor is hard to find. In A Ph.D. Is Not Enough! , physicist Peter J. Feibelman lays out a rational path to a fulfilling long-term research career. He offers sound advice on selecting a thesis or postdoctoral adviser choosing among research jobs in academia, government labouratories, and industry preparing for an employment interview and defining a research program. The guidance offered in A Ph.D. Is Not Enough! will help you make your oral presentations more effective, your journal articles more compelling, and your grant proposals more successful. A classic guide for recent and soon-to-be graduates, A Ph.D. Is Not Enough! remains required reading for anyone on the threshold of a career in science. This new edition includes two new chapters and is revised and updated throughout to reflect how the revolution in electronic communication has transformed the field.

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These selections from the many writings of Thomas Sowell over a period of a half century cover social, economic, cultural, legal, educational, and political issues. The sources range from Dr. Sowell's letters, books, newspaper columns, and articles in both scholarly journals and popular magazines. The topics range from late-talking children to "tax cuts for the rich," baseball, race, war, the role of judges, medical care, and the rhetoric of politicians. These topics are dealt with by sometimes drawing on history, sometimes drawing on economics, and sometimes drawing on a sense of humour.

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With a new preface by the author. Ten years after his murder, Tupac Shakur is even more loved, contested, and celebrated than he was in life. His posthumously released albums, poetry, and motion pictures have catapulted him into the upper echelon of American cultural icons. In Holler If You Hear Me , hip-hop intellectual" Michael Eric Dyson, acclaimed author of the bestselling Is Bill Cosby Right? , offers a wholly original way of looking at Tupac that will thrill those who already love the artist and enlighten those who want to understand him.

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Alan Bloom's new translation of Emile , Rousseau's masterpiece on the education and training of the young, is the first in more than seventy years. In it, Bloom, whose magnificent translation of Plato's Republic has been universally hailed as a virtual rediscovery of that timeless text, again brings together the translator's gift for journeying between two languages and cultures and the philosopher's perception of the true meaning and significance of the issues being examined in the work. The result is a clear, readable, and highly engrossing text that at the same time offers a wholly new sense of the importance and relevance of Rousseau's thought to us.In addition to his translation, Bloom provides a brilliant introduction that relates the structure and themes of the book to the vital preoccupation's of our own age, particularly in the field of education, but also more generally to the current concerns about the limits and possibilities of human nature. Thus in this translation Emile, long a classic in the history of Western thought and educational theory, becomes something more: a prescription, fresh and dazzling, for the bringing up of autonomous, responsible,that is, truly democratic,human beings.

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This classic work is a monumental, integrated view of man's search for an understanding of the inner reaches of the mind. In an account that is both exhaustive and exciting, the distinguished psychiatrist and author demonstrates the long chain of development,through the exorcists, magnetists, and hypnotists,that led to the fruition of dynamic psychiatry in the psychological systems of Janet, Freud, Adler, and Jung.

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This revised edition of Applied Economics is about fifty percent larger than the first edition. It now includes a chapter on the economics of immigration and new sections of other chapters on such topics as the"creative” financing of home-buying that led to the current"subprime” mortgage crisis, the economics of organ transplants, and the political and economic incentives that lead to money earmarked for highways being diverted to mass transit and to a general neglect of infrastructure. On these and other topics, its examples are drawn from around the world. Much material in the first edition has been updated and supplemented. The revised and enlarged edition of Applied Economics retains the easy readability of the first edition, even for people with no prior knowledge of economics.

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For eighteen centuries pious Jews had prayed for the return to Jerusalem, but only in the revolutionary atmosphere of nineteenth-century Europe was this yearning transformed into an active political philosophy: Zionism. In The Making of Modern Zionism, the distinguished political scientist Shlomo Avineri rejects the common view that Zionism was solely a reaction to anti-Semitism and persecution. Rather, he sees it as part of the universal quest for self-determination. In sharply-etched intellectual profiles of Zionism's major thinkers from Moses Hess to Theodore Herzl and from Vladimir Jabotinsky to David Ben Gurion, Avineri traces the evolution of this quest from its intellectual origins in the early nineteenth century to the establishment of the State of Israel. In an expansive new epilogue, he tracks the rise of religious Zionism since the 1970s, explaining its pernicious effect on the nation that secular Zionism created. The result is a book that enables us to understand, as perhaps never before, one of the truly revolutionary ideas of our time.

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The landscape of contemporary art has changed dramatically during the last hundred years. We have seen a painting of a single black square on a white ground, Kazimir Malevich's Black Square (1915), and a hand-signed porcelain urinal, Marcel Duchamp's Fountain (1917). Mid-century brought us the Abstract Expressionist "drip" paintings ofJackson Pollock. In Piero Manzoni's Artist's Shit (1961), we got a series of 90 sealed tin cans purportedly containing Manzoni's own excrement. A decade later, with Chris Burden's Shoot (1971), we saw a performance in which the artist was voluntarily shot in the arm with a rifle. More recently, Damien Hirst exhibited a shark floating in a glass tank of formaldehyde and fellow British artist Tracey Emin-in her autobiographical installation The History of Painting (1999)-displayed, among other items, her own used tampons.It is no wonder, then, that the art-viewing public is perplexed. What's going on here? Do today's renowned artists-like earlier masters such as Giotto, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, and Matisse-represent the highest achievements of civilization? Or something else entirely? Have viewers always felt this way; or is their confusion a sign of something new-something exclusive to the experience of today's contemporary art?In The Art of Looking, renowned art critic Lance Esplund shows that works of Modern and contemporary art are not as indecipherable as they might seem to be. Nor do they represent a dramatic break from the past. He situates more recent movements in the tradition of art and examines the threads that tie the art of the past to that of the present. For instance, Esplund elucidates the similarities between Picasso and El Greco; between the ancient Egyptian Pyramids and sculptor Richard Serra's monumental Torqued Ellipses. The Art of Looking will open the eyes of viewers who think that contemporary art is obtuse, nonsensical, and irrelevant, as well as the eyes of those who think that the art of the past has nothing to say to our present.As our expert guide, Esplund has curated a personalized selection of moving and important works, using them as examples to walk the reader through the formal, emotional, and metaphoric experience of art, illuminating how an artist builds and explores a theme. Eager to democratize a genre that can feel inaccessible, Esplund empowers viewers to trust their own eyes, guts, and common sense. With The Art of Looking, readers will have the confidence to evaluate and appreciate galleries and museums for themselves, whether they are looking at a Greco-Roman statue, a Byzantine Madonna, a Rembrandt portrait, a Marina Abramovic performance, or one of Richard Serra's monumental sculptures.

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The provocative bestseller explaining the decline of power in the twenty-first century -- in government, business, and beyond.br> Power is shifting -- from large, stable armies to loose bands of insurgents, from corporate leviathans to nimble start-ups, and from presidential palaces to public squares. But power is also changing, becoming harder to use and easier to lose. In The End of Power, award-winning columnist and former Foreign Policy editor MoiséNaíilluminates the struggle between once-dominant megaplayers and the new micropowers challenging them in every field of human endeavor. Drawing on provocative, original research and a lifetime of experience in global affairs, Naíexplains how the end of power is reconfiguring our world."The End of Power will . . . change the way you look at the world." -- Bill Clinton"Extraordinary." -- George Soros"Compelling and original." -- Arianna Huffington"A fascinating new perspective . . . Naímakes eye-opening connections." -- Francis Fukuyama

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The Crimea, the Boer War, the Somme, Tobruk, Pearl Harbor, the Bay of Pigs: these are just some of the milestones in a century of military incompetence, of costly mishaps and tragic blunders. Are these simple accidents--as the "bloody fool" theory has it--or are they inevitable? The psychologist Norman F. Dixon argues that there is a pattern to inept generalship, and locates this pattern within the very act of creating armies in the first place, which in his view produces a levelling down of human capability that encourages the mediocre and limits the gifted. In this light, successful generals achieve what they do despite the stultifying features of the organization to which they belong. A classic study of military leadership, On the Psychology of Military Incompetence is at once an original exploration of the battles that have defined the last two centuries of human civilization and an essential guide for the next generation of military leaders.

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From the Revolution through the Civil Rights Movement, Americans mobilized against political, social, and economic privilege. But over the last half-century that political will has vanished. In The Age of Acquiescence, Steve Fraser explains why. His account of national transformation brilliantly examines the rise of American capitalism, the visionary attempts to protect the democratic commonwealth, and the great surrender to today's delusional fables of freedom and the politics of fear. Effervescent and razorsharp, The Age of Acquiescence is indispensable for understanding why we no longer fight for a more just society, and how we can revive the great American tradition of resistance in our own time.

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In Caliphate, Islamic historian Hugh Kennedy dissects the idea of the caliphate and its history, and explores how it became used and abused today. Contrary to popular belief, there is no one enduring definition of a caliph; rather, the idea of the caliph has been the subject of constant debate and transformation over time. Kennedy offers a grand history of the caliphate since the beginning of Islam to its modern incarnations. Originating in the tumultuous years following the death of the Mohammad in 632, the caliphate, a politico-religious system, flourished in the great days of the Umayyads of Damascus and the Abbasids of Baghdad. From the seventh-century Orthodox caliphs to the nineteenth-century Ottomans, Kennedy explores the tolerant rule of Umar, recounts the traumatic murder of the caliph Uthman, dubbed a tyrant by many, and revels in the flourishing arts of the golden eras of Abbasid Baghdad and Moorish Andalucia. Kennedy also examines the modern fate of the caliphate, unraveling the British political schemes to spur dissent against the Ottomans and the ominous efforts of Islamists, including ISIS, to reinvent the history of the caliphate for their own malevolent political ends. In exploring and explaining the great variety of caliphs who have ruled throughout the ages, Kennedy challenges the very narrow views of the caliphate propagated by extremist groups today. An authoritative new account of the dynasties of Arab leaders throughout the Islamic Golden Age, Caliphate traces the history--and misappropriations--of one of the world's most potent political ideas.

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