Search results for ""author nicholas""

Urban planning is not just about applying a suite of systematic principles or plotting out pragmatic designs to satisfy the briefs of private developers or public bodies. Planning is also an activity of imagination, with a stock of wisdom and an array of useful methods for making decisions and getting things done. This critical introduction uncovers and celebrates this imagination and its creative potential. Nicholas A. Phelps explores the key themes and driving questions in the circulation of planning ideas and methods over time and across spaces, identifying the contrasts and commonalities between urban planning systems and cultures. He argues that the tools for inclusive urban planning are today, more than ever, not solely restricted to the hands of planning bodies, but are distributed across citizens, a variety of organizations (what Phelps calls ‘clubs’) and states. As a result, the book sets the ground for the new arrangements between these groups and actors which will be central to the future of urban planning. By unsettling standard accounts, this book compels us towards more critical and creative thinking to ensure that the imagination, wisdom and methods of urban planning are mobilized towards achieving the aspiration of shaping better places.

Read more less

Widespread human alteration of the planet has led many scholars to claim that we have entered a new epoch in geological time: the Anthropocene, an age dominated by humanity. This ethnography is the first to directly engage the Anthropocene, tackling its problems and paradoxes from the vantage point of the world’s largest tropical rainforest.Drawing from extensive ethnographic research, Nicholas Kawa examines how pre-Columbian Amerindians and contemporary rural Amazonians have shaped their environment, describing in vivid detail their use and management of the region’s soils, plants, and forests. At the same time, he highlights the ways in which the Amazonian environment resists human manipulation and control—a vital reminder in this time of perceived human dominance. Written in engaging, accessible prose, Amazonia in the Anthropocene offers an innovative contribution to debates about humanity’s place on the planet, encouraging deeper ecocentric thinking and a more inclusive vision of ecology for the future.

Read more less

In this beautifully designed and illustrated volume, leading craft scholars, curators and artists come together to assess the post-War history and contemporary flourishing of craft in America. Their critical gaze encompasses craft practice by artists, professional makers, and amateurs; crafting as it takes place in the studio and in the domestic space, and as it is exhibited in museums and galleries; craft that uses materials and crafting in the digital arena, and critical issues confronting craft such as industry, education and digitization.

Read more less

There is no shortage of incentives to study and reduce poverty in our societies. Poverty is studied in economics and political sciences, and population surveys are an important source of information about it. The design and analysis of such surveys is principally a statistical subject matter and the computer is essential for their data compilation and processing.Focusing on The European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC), a program of annual national surveys which collect data related to poverty and social exclusion, Statistical Studies of Income, Poverty and Inequality in Europe: Computing and Graphics in R presents a set of statistical analyses pertinent to the general goals of EU-SILC. The contents of the volume are biased toward computing and statistics, with reduced attention to economics, political and other social sciences. The emphasis is on methods and procedures as opposed to results, because the data from annual surveys made available since publication and in the near future will degrade the novelty of the data used and the results derived in this volume.The aim of this volume is not to propose specific methods of analysis, but to open up the analytical agenda and address the aspects of the key definitions in the subject of poverty assessment that entail nontrivial elements of arbitrariness. The presented methods do not exhaust the range of analyses suitable for EU-SILC, but will stimulate the search for new methods and adaptation of established methods that cater to the identified purposes.

Read more less

When you're writing code alone, you have a lot of leeway. But when you start writing code as part of a team, you need to think harder about the decisions you make. This book will help you do that. When you write code in a team setting, will other developers be able to understand what you did? Did you organize your code in such a way that it's easy to adapt and extend? Will your code survive once you're gone? Maintainable JavaScript doesn't just recommend a set of guidelines, it examines guidelines being used and recommended by others in the industry, so you get a feel for what's common in well-run JavaScript projects. Save a copy of this book now. It's the only resource that focus solely on JavaScript conventions.

Read more less

For developers, content providers and sophisticated power users, Fluidinfo is an online information storage and search platform that supports shared openly writable metadata of any type and about anything. Fluidinfo helps content owners publish product information via a modern writable API, with flexible permissions and their domain name on their data. Developers can create lightweight applications that make data social while letting users personalize and search on anything.

Read more less

Building contract claims for more time on projects represent one of the largest sources of dispute within the industry. However, identifying the causes of delays, and the effects they have on the project, is often difficult and the burden on the party seeking to prove delay is a heavy one. This book provides the construction professional with an analysis of how construction projects become delayed, the practical measures which can be taken to avoid such delays, and how the parties can protect their positions in the face of delays. It goes on to look at the requirements for producing a successful claim. It provides a straightforward guide to the legal issues, and also considers how the effects of delays can most practically be addressed. The Second Edition takes account of new case law since 1999, and has new sections on adjudication, risk allocations and the Society of Construction Law Delay Protocol. Very well received when it was first published, the book is aimed particularly at contractors, project managers and senior surveyors, but will also be of interest to construction lawyers.

Read more less

Up-to-date and thorough coverage of the causes, repercussions, and prevention of dust explosions and fires by one of the most well-respected environmental scientists and worker safety litigation specialists in the world This handy volume is a ready “go to” reference for the chemical engineer, plant manager, process engineer, or chemist working in industrial settings where dust explosions could be a concern, such as the process industries, coal industry, metal industry, and others. Though dust explosions have been around since the Earth first formed, and they have been studied and written about since the 1500s, they are still an ongoing concern and occur almost daily somewhere in the world, from bakeries to fertilizer plants. Dust explosions can have devastating consequences, and, recently, there have been new industrial standards and guidelines that reflect safer, more reasonable methods for dealing with materials to prevent dust explosions and resultant fires. This book not only presents these new developments for engineers and managers, it offers in-depth coverage of the subject, starting with a complete overview of dust—how it forms, when it is in danger of exploding, and how this risk can be mitigated—as well as a general overview of explosions and the environments that foster them. Dust Explosion and Fire Prevention Handbook covers individual industries, such as metal and coal; offers an appendix that outlines best practices for preventing dust explosions and fire and how these risks can be systematically mitigated by these implementations; and incorporates a handy glossary of terms for easy access, not only for the veteran engineer or chemist, but for the student or new hire. This ready reference is one of the most useful texts that an engineer or chemist could have at their side. With so many accidents still occurring in industry today, this must-have volume pinpoints the most common, sure-fire ways for engineers, scientists, and chemists working with these hazardous materials to go about their daily business safely, efficiently, and profitably, with no extraneous tables or theoretical treatises.

Read more less

Much of the evidence—literary, historical, documentary, and pictorial—from ancient Athens is urban in authorship, subject matter, and intended audience. The result has been the assertion of an undifferentiated monolithic "Athenian" citizen regime as often as not identifiably urban in its lifestyle, preoccupations, and attitude. In Rural Athens Under the Democracy, however, Nicholas F. Jones undertakes the first comprehensive attempt to reconstruct on its own terms the world of rural Attica outside the walls during the "classical" fifth and fourth centuries B.C. What he finds is a distinctly nonurban (and nonurbane) order dominated by a traditional, predominantly agrarian society and culture. Jones relies heavily upon the relatively neglected epigraphic record from the rural countryside and villages, as well as posing new questions of the well-known urban writings of Athenian historians, essayists, and philosophers and occasionally following the lead of Hesiod's agrarian poem Works and Days. From these sources he gleans new findings regarding settlement patterns, argues for a heretofore unrecognized system of personal patronage, explores relations between villages and the town of Athens, reconstructs the "Agrarian" Dionysia in several of its more important dimensions, and contrasts the realities of rural Attic culture with their various representations in contemporary literary and philosophical writings by Aristophanes, Xenophon, Plato, and others. Building on Jones's previous publications on the ancient Greek city-state, Rural Athens Under the Democracy presents the first holistic examination of classical extramural Attica. He challenges the received view that ancient Athens in its heyday was marked by a uniform cultural, ideological, and conspicuously citified order and, in place of the perception of things rural as mere deficits in urbanity, proposes that we look at Attica outside the walls in its own right and in positive terms.

Read more less

In Heretics and Colonizers, Nicholas B. Breyfogle explores the dynamic intersection of Russian borderland colonization and popular religious culture. He reconstructs the story of the religious sectarians (Dukhobors, Molokans, and Subbotniks) who settled, either voluntarily or by force, in the newly conquered lands of Transcaucasia in the nineteenth century. By ordering this migration in 1830, Nicholas I attempted at once to cleanse Russian Orthodoxy of heresies and to populate the newly annexed lands with ethnic Slavs who would shoulder the burden of imperial construction. Breyfogle focuses throughout on the lives of the peasant settlers, their interactions with the peoples and environment of the South Caucasus, and their evolving relations with Russian state power. He draws on a wide variety of archival sources, including a large collection of previously unexamined letters, memoirs, and other documents produced by the sectarians that allow him unprecedented insight into the experiences of colonization and religious life. Although the settlers suffered greatly in their early years in hostile surroundings, they in time proved to be not only model Russian colonists but also among the most prosperous of the Empire's peasants. Banished to the empire's periphery, the sectarians ironically came to play indispensable roles in the tsarist imperial agenda. The book culminates with the dramatic events of the Dukhobor pacifist rebellion, a movement that shocked the tsarist government and received international attention. In the early twentieth century, as the Russian state sought to replace the sectarians with Orthodox settlers, thousands of Molokans and Dukhobors immigrated to North America, where their descendants remain to this day.

Read more less

It is now some thirty years since Deligne first proved his general equidistribution theorem, thus establishing the fundamental result governing the statistical properties of suitably "pure" algebro-geometric families of character sums over finite fields (and of their associated L-functions). Roughly speaking, Deligne showed that any such family obeys a "generalized Sato-Tate law," and that figuring out which generalized Sato-Tate law applies to a given family amounts essentially to computing a certain complex semisimple (not necessarily connected) algebraic group, the "geometric monodromy group" attached to that family. Up to now, nearly all techniques for determining geometric monodromy groups have relied, at least in part, on local information. In Moments, Monodromy, and Perversity, Nicholas Katz develops new techniques, which are resolutely global in nature. They are based on two vital ingredients, neither of which existed at the time of Deligne's original work on the subject. The first is the theory of perverse sheaves, pioneered by Goresky and MacPherson in the topological setting and then brilliantly transposed to algebraic geometry by Beilinson, Bernstein, Deligne, and Gabber. The second is Larsen's Alternative, which very nearly characterizes classical groups by their fourth moments. These new techniques, which are of great interest in their own right, are first developed and then used to calculate the geometric monodromy groups attached to some quite specific universal families of (L-functions attached to) character sums over finite fields.

Read more less

The study of exponential sums over finite fields, begun by Gauss nearly two centuries ago, has been completely transformed in recent years by advances in algebraic geometry, culminating in Deligne's work on the Weil Conjectures. It now appears as a very attractive mixture of algebraic geometry, representation theory, and the sheaf-theoretic incarnations of such standard constructions of classical analysis as convolution and Fourier transform. The book is simultaneously an account of some of these ideas, techniques, and results, and an account of their application to concrete equidistribution questions concerning Kloosterman sums and Gauss sums.

Read more less

Riemann introduced the concept of a "local system" on P1-{a finite set of points} nearly 140 years ago. His idea was to study nth order linear differential equations by studying the rank n local systems (of local holomorphic solutions) to which they gave rise. His first application was to study the classical Gauss hypergeometric function, which he did by studying rank-two local systems on P1- {0,1,infinity}. His investigation was successful, largely because any such (irreducible) local system is rigid in the sense that it is globally determined as soon as one knows separately each of its local monodromies. It became clear that luck played a role in Riemann's success: most local systems are not rigid. Yet many classical functions are solutions of differential equations whose local systems are rigid, including both of the standard nth order generalizations of the hypergeometric function, n F n-1's, and the Pochhammer hypergeometric functions. This book is devoted to constructing all (irreducible) rigid local systems on P1-{a finite set of points} and recognizing which collections of independently given local monodromies arise as the local monodromies of irreducible rigid local systems. Although the problems addressed here go back to Riemann, and seem to be problems in complex analysis, their solutions depend essentially on a great deal of very recent arithmetic algebraic geometry, including Grothendieck's etale cohomology theory, Deligne's proof of his far-reaching generalization of the original Weil Conjectures, the theory of perverse sheaves, and Laumon's work on the l-adic Fourier Transform.

Read more less

In 1913, the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston admitted its first patient, Mary Agnes Turner, who suffered from varicose veins in her legs. The surgical treatment she received, under ether anesthesia, was the most advanced available at the time. At the same hospital fifty years later, Nicholas Tilney—then a second-year resident—assisted in the repair of a large aortic aneurysm. The cutting-edge diagnostic tools he used to evaluate the patient’s condition would soon be eclipsed by yet more sophisticated apparatus, including minimally invasive approaches and state-of-the-art imaging technology, which Tilney would draw on in pioneering organ transplant surgery and becoming one of its most distinguished practitioners.In Invasion of the Body, Tilney tells the story of modern surgery and the revolutions that have transformed the field: anesthesia, prevention of infection, professional standards of competency, pharmaceutical advances, and the present turmoil in medical education and health care reform. Tilney uses as his stage the famous Boston teaching hospital where he completed his residency and went on to practice (now called Brigham and Women's). His cast of characters includes clinicians, support staff, trainees, patients, families, and various applied scientists who push the revolutions forward.While lauding the innovations that have brought surgeons' capabilities to heights undreamed of even a few decades ago, Tilney also previews a challenging future, as new capacities to prolong life and restore health run headlong into unsustainable costs. The authoritative voice he brings to the ancient tradition of surgical invasion will be welcomed by patients, practitioners, and policymakers alike.

Read more less

If you're like most developers, you rely heavily on JavaScript to build interactive and quick-responding web applications. The problem is that all of those lines of JavaScript code can slow down your apps. This book reveals techniques and strategies to help you eliminate performance bottlenecks during development. You'll learn how to improve execution time, downloading, interaction with the DOM, page life cycle, and more. Yahoo! frontend engineer Nicholas C. Zakas and five other JavaScript experts -- Ross Harmes, Julien Lecomte, Steven Levithan, Stoyan Stefanov, and Matt Sweeney -- demonstrate optimal ways to load code onto a page, and offer programming tips to help your JavaScript run as efficiently and quickly as possible. You'll learn the best practices to build and deploy your files to a production environment, and tools that can help you find problems once your site goes live. * Identify problem code and use faster alternatives to accomplish the same task * Improve scripts by learning how JavaScript stores and accesses data * Implement JavaScript code so that it doesn't slow down interaction with the DOM * Use optimization techniques to improve runtime performance * Learn ways to ensure the UI is responsive at all times * Achieve faster client-server communication * Use a build system to minify files, and HTTP compression to deliver them to the browser

Read more less

APOLLO'S ARROW offers a riveting account of the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on American society as it unfolded in 2020, and on how the recovery will unfold in the coming years. Drawing on a combination of fascinating case studies and cutting-edge research from a range of scientific disciplines, bestselling author, physician, and sociologist Nicholas Christakis explores what it means to live in a time of plague -- an experience that is paradoxically uncommon to the vast majority of humans who are alive, yet deeply fundamental to our species as a whole.Unleashing new divisions in our society and new opportunities for cooperation, this 21st century pandemic has upended our society in ways that will test, but not vanquish, our already frayed culture's capacity to endure and thrive. Featuring many novel, provocative arguments and vivid examples ranging across medicine, history, sociology, epidemiology, data science, and genetics, APOLLO'S ARROW envisions what happens when the great force of a deadly germ meets the enduring reality of our evolved social nature.

Read more less

There is no shortage of Black characters in Miguel de Cervantes's works, yet there has been a profound silence about the Spanish author's compelling literary construction and cultural codification of Black Africans and sub-Saharan Africa. In Cervantine Blackness, Nicholas R. Jones reconsiders in what sense Black subjects possess an inherent value within Cervantes's cultural purview and literary corpus. In this unflinching critique, Jones charts important new methodological and theoretical terrain, problematizing the ways emphasis on agency has stifled and truncated the study of Black Africans and their descendants in early modern Spanish cultural and literary production. Through the lens of what he calls Cervantine Blackness, Jones challenges the reader to think about the blind faith that has been lent to the idea of agencyand its analogues presence and resistanceas a primary motivation for examining the lives of Black people during this period. Offering a well-crafted and sharp crit

Read more less

Founded as a counterweight to the Communist broadcasters in East Germany, Radio in the American Sector (RIAS) became one of the most successful public information operations conducted against the Soviet Bloc. Cold War on the Airwaves examines the Berlin-based organization's history and influence on the political worldview of the people--and government--on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Nicholas J. Schlosser draws on broadcast transcripts, internal memoranda, listener letters, and surveys by the U.S. Information Agency to profile RIAS. Its mission: to undermine the German Democratic Republic with propaganda that, ironically, gained in potency by obeying the rules of objective journalism. Throughout, Schlosser examines the friction inherent in such a contradictory project and propaganda's role in shaping political culture. He also portrays how RIAS's primarily German staff influenced its outlook and how the organization both competed against its rivals in the GDR and pushed communist officials to alter their methods in order to keep listeners.From the occupation of Berlin through the airlift to the construction of the Berlin Wall, Cold War on the Airwaves offers an absorbing view of how public diplomacy played out at a flashpoint of East-West tension.

Read more less

In 1922 Robert Allerton—described by the Chicago Tribune as the “richest bachelor in Chicago”—met a twenty-two-year-old University of Illinois architecture student named John Gregg, who was twenty-six years his junior. Virtually inseparable from then on, they began publicly referring to one another as father and son within a couple years of meeting. In 1960, after nearly four decades together, and with Robert Allerton nearing ninety, they embarked on a daringly nonconformist move: Allerton legally adopted the sixty-year-old Gregg as his son, the first such adoption of an adult in Illinois history.An Open Secret tells the striking story of these two iconoclasts, locating them among their queer contemporaries and exploring why becoming father and son made a surprising kind of sense for a twentieth-century couple who had every monetary advantage but one glaring problem: they wanted to be together publicly in a society that did not tolerate their love. Deftly exploring the nature of their design, domestic, and philanthropic projects, Nicholas L. Syrett illuminates how viewing the Allertons as both a same-sex couple and an adopted family is crucial to understanding their relationship’s profound queerness. By digging deep into the lives of two men who operated largely as ciphers in their own time, he opens up provocative new lanes to consider the diversity of kinship ties in modern US history.

Read more less

Hitler was one of the few politicians who understood that persuasion was everything, deployed to anchor an entire regime in the confections of imagery, rhetoric and dramaturgy. The Nazis pursued propaganda not just as a tool, an instrument of government, but also as the totality, the raison d'etre, the medium through which power itself was exercised. Moreover, Nicholas O'Shaughnessy argues, Hitler, not Goebbels, was the prime mover in the propaganda regime of the Third Reich - its editor and first author. Under the Reich everything was a propaganda medium, a building-block of public consciousness, from typography to communiques, to architecture, to weapons design. There were groups to initiate rumours and groups to spread graffiti. Everything could be interrogated for its propaganda potential, every surface inscribed with polemical meaning, whether an enemy city's name, an historical epic or the poster on a neighbourhood wall. But Hitler was in no sense an innovator - his ideas were always second- hand.Rather his expertise was as a packager, fashioning from the accumulated mass of icons and ideas, the historic debris, the labyrinths and byways of the German mind, a modern and brilliant political show articulated through deftly managed symbols and rituals. The Reich would have been unthinkable without propaganda - it would not have been the Reich.

Read more less

This book is about snakebite and snake identification in ancient Egypt. The authors--in a remarkable collaboration between the fields of Egyptology, medicine, herpetology, biology and ecology--offer a new examination of the Brooklyn Medical Papyrus, better-known as the Snakebite Papyrus, the first-known treatise on snakebites from antiquity.

Read more less

Much scholarly attention has been paid to the Greek Bible translations employed in the Byzantine Church, whereas those used in the Byzantine synagogue have so far been largely ignored. Nicholas de Lange attempts to remedy this lack by collecting together all the available evidence for such translations from the Cairo Genizah fragments and other manuscript sources, setting it within its context in Byzantine Judaism. He traces the history of the translations over a period of a thousand years and demonstrates the persistence of a certain approach to translation which ultimately goes back to ancient Judaism and has left its mark on the Septuagint and in the Dead Sea Scrolls, as well as in the Rabbinic literature and the Targums. Much attention focuses on the lost translation of Akylas (also known as Aquila) which played a key role in the dissemination of Rabbinic Judaism in the Greek-speaking communities of the Near East and Europe. There are traces also of the Septuagint, something which raises intriguing questions about a continuing Kulturkampf in Byzantium between Hellenism and Rabbinism; might this have implications for the understanding of Byzantine Karaism and Jewish-Christian relations? Byzantine Judaism played a key role in the transmission of Jewish religious culture from the Near East to Western Europe, meaning that this study has wide ramifications. The book is intended as a contribution to Greek Bible studies, Byzantine studies and Jewish studies. Most of the source materials were discovered and published by the author, with this being the first time they have been brought together and studied in book form.

Read more less

Before World War II, Brooklands was the most famous motor racing venue in the world, attracting large and glamorous crowds to its banked circuit to watch races being won and records being broken. This title helps you discover the history of this sporting site, from its heyday as a motoring treasure to its wartime service in aviation production.

Read more less

When thinking of India, it is hard not to think of caste. In academic and common parlance alike, caste has become a central symbol for India, marking it as fundamentally different from other places while expressing its essence. Nicholas Dirks argues that caste is, in fact, neither an unchanged survival of ancient India nor a single system that reflects a core cultural value. Rather than a basic expression of Indian tradition, caste is a modern phenomenon--the product of a concrete historical encounter between India and British colonial rule. Dirks does not contend that caste was invented by the British. But under British domination caste did become a single term capable of naming and above all subsuming India's diverse forms of social identity and organization. Dirks traces the career of caste from the medieval kingdoms of southern India to the textual traces of early colonial archives; from the commentaries of an eighteenth-century Jesuit to the enumerative obsessions of the late-nineteenth-century census; from the ethnographic writings of colonial administrators to those of twentieth-century Indian scholars seeking to rescue ethnography from its colonial legacy. The book also surveys the rise of caste politics in the twentieth century, focusing in particular on the emergence of caste-based movements that have threatened nationalist consensus. Castes of Mind is an ambitious book, written by an accomplished scholar with a rare mastery of centuries of Indian history and anthropology. It uses the idea of caste as the basis for a magisterial history of modern India. And in making a powerful case that the colonial past continues to haunt the Indian present, it makes an important contribution to current postcolonial theory and scholarship on contemporary Indian politics.

Read more less

This is the only English language book on bistatic radar. It starts with James Casper's fine chapter in the first edition of Skolnik's Radar Handbook (1970), capturing previously unpublished work before 1970. It then summarizes and codifies subsequent bistatic radar research and development, especially as catalogued in the special December 1986 IEE journal. It defines and resolves many issues and controversies plaguing bistatic radar, including predicted performance, monostatic equivalence, bistatic radar cross section and resolution, bistatic Doppler, hitchhiking, SAR, ECM/ECCM, and, most importantly, the utility of bistatic radars. The text provides a history of bistatic systems that points out to potential designers, the applications that have worked and the dead-ends not worth pursuing. The text reviews the basic concepts and definitions, and explains the mathematical development of relationships, such as geometry, Ovals of Cassini, dynamic range, isorange and isodoppler contours, target doppler, and clutter doppler spread.

Read more less

On 21 June 1919 the ships of the German High Seas Fleet - interned at Scapa Flow since the Armistice - began to founder, taking their British custodians completely by surprise. In breach of agreed terms, the fleet dramatically scuttled itself, in a well-planned operation that consigned nearly half a million tons, and 54 of 72 ships, to the bottom of the sheltered anchorage in a gesture of Wagnerian proportions. This much is well-known, but even a century after the Grand Scuttle' many questions remain. Was von Reuter, the fleet's commander, acting under orders or was it his own initiative? Why was 21 June chosen? Did the British connive in, or even encourage the action? Could more have been done to save the ships? Was it legally justified? And what were the international ramifications? This new book analyses all these issues, beginning with the fleet mutiny in the last months of the War that precipitated a social revolution in Germany and the eventual collapse of the will to fight. The Armistice terms imposed the humiliation of virtual surrender on the High Seas Fleet, and the conditions under which it was interned are described in detail. Meanwhile the victorious Allies wrangled over the fate of the ships, an issue that threatened the whole peace process. Using much new material from German sources and a host of eye-witness testimonies, the circumstances of the scuttling itself are meticulously reconstructed, while the aftermath for all parties is clearly laid out. The story concludes with the biggest salvage operation in history' and a chapter on the significance of the scuttling to the post-war balance of naval power. Published to coincide with the centenary, this book is an important reassessment of the last great action of the First World War.

Read more less

Contains 20 commonly used verbal reasoning. This work includes over 240 questions. It has a dual format: Multiple Choice and Standard.

Read more less

The variety of the mycological world is far greater than most people imagine. Tens of thousands of fungal species have been described and many more are known only from the abundance of their genes in soil and water. Fungi are hugely important as agents of wood decay in forests, and, as parasites, they have caused the deaths of millions of people by ravaging crops and reshaping natural ecosystems. Fungi perform a variety of essential functions in ecosystems, and are important to both agriculture and biotechnology. Their importance is now becoming better appreciated among scientists, though there is much still to be understood concerning their taxonomy and evolution. This Very Short Introduction highlights the variety and extraordinary natures of fungi, revealing the remarkable facts of fungal biology and the global significance of these enchanting organisms. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

Read more less

In recent decades we have come to realize that the microbial world is hugely diverse, and can be found in the most extreme environments. Fungi, single-celled protists, bacteria, archaea, and the vast array of viruses and sub-viral particles far outnumber plants and animals. Microbes, we now know, play a critical role in ecosystems, in the chemistry of atmosphere and oceans, and within our bodies. The field of microbiology, armed with new techniques from molecular biology, is now one of the most vibrant in the life sciences. In this Very Short Introduction Nicholas P. Money explores not only the traditional methods of microscopy and laboratory culture but also the modern techniques of genetic detection and DNA sequencing, genomic analysis, and genetic manipulation. In turn he demonstrates how advances in microbiology have had a tremendous impact on the areas of medicine, agriculture, and biotechnology. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

Read more less

In the desert sands of southern Jordan lies a once-hidden conflict landscape along the Hejaz Railway. Built at the beginning of the twentieth-century, this narrow-gauge 1,320 km track stretched from Damascus to Medina and served to facilitate participation in the annual Muslim Hajj to Mecca. The discovery and archaeological investigation of an unknown landscape of insurgency and counter-insurgency along this route tells a different story of the origins of modern guerrilla warfare, the exploits of T. E. Lawrence, Emir Feisal, and Bedouin warriors, and the dramatic events of the Arab Revolt of 1916-18. Ten years of research in this prehistoric terrain has revealed sites lost for almost 100 years: vast campsites occupied by railway builders; Ottoman Turkish machine-gun redoubts; Rolls Royce Armoured Car raiding camps; an ephemeral Royal Air Force desert aerodrome; as well as the actual site of the Hallat Ammar railway ambush. This unique and richly illustrated account from Nicholas Saunders tells, in intimate detail, the story of a seminal episode of the First World War and the reshaping of the Middle East that followed.

Read more less

Whether you’re learning alone or attending classes, you’ll find this complete Russian language course for beginners both accessible and indispensable. Designed to provide the student with an excellent command of basic Russian (the equivalent of A’ level standard) the book features thirty lessons punctuated by revision exercises to ensure you have fully understood what you have learned. The emphasis is on acquiring vocabulary, experiencing conversational language and learning useful grammar. The book also includes a vocabulary of 1,500 words and a glossary of grammatical terms.

Read more less

In the sixteenth century, the city-state of Florence failed. In its place the Medicis created a principality, becoming first dukes of Florence and then grand dukes of Tuscany. The Fruit of Liberty analyzes the slow transformations that predated and facilitated the institutional shift from republic to principality, from citizen to subject.

Read more less

La flecha de Apolo ofrece un relato fascinante del impacto que ha tenido la propagación de la pandemia de coronavirus y de cómo se producirá la recuperación en los próximos años. Basándose en grandes epidemias históricas, análisis contemporáneos e investigaciones de vanguardia de una variedad de disciplinas científicas, Nicholas A. Christakis ?médico, sociólogo y experto en salud pública?, examina lo que significa vivir en época de pandemia, una experiencia paradójicamente poco común para la gran mayoría de los seres humanos vivos, pero que es trascendental para nuestra especie.Tras suscitar nuevas divisiones en nuestra sociedad, así como oportunidades para la cooperación, esta pandemia del siglo XXI ha cambiado nuestras vidas de maneras que pondrán a prueba nuestra ya crispada cultura colectiva sin lograr doblegarla. Con argumentos nuevos y sugestivos y ejemplos elocuentes que abarcan la medicina, la historia, la sociología, la epidemiología, la ciencia de los datos y la genética,

Read more less

As the name indicates, KOINON is a journal that encourages contributions to the study of classical numismatics from a wide variety of perspectives. The journal includes papers concerning iconography, die studies, provenance research, forgery analysis, translations of excerpts from antiquarian works, specialized bibliographies, corpora of rare varieties and types, ethical questions on laws and collecting, book reviews, and more. The editorial advisory board is made up of members from all over the world, with a broad range of expertise covering virtually all the major categories of classical numismatics from archaic Greek coinage to late Medieval coinage.

Read more less

This is the first full-scale biography of one of the most elusive and enigmatic painters of our time: the self-proclaimed Count Balthus Klossowski de Rola, whose brilliant, markedly sexualized portraits, especially of young girls, are among the most memorable images in contemporary art. Balthus’s complexities are clarified and his genius understood in this book that derives its immediacy from Nicholas Fox Weber’s long and intense conversations with Balthus himself–who never previously consented to discuss his life and work with a biographer–as well as Weber’s interviews with the artist’s closest associates. This biography was first published by Knopf in 1999 and is now available for the first time from Dalkey Archive Press.

Read more less