Search results for ""experiment""

Science isn’t limited to the classroom – it can be created at home too! Explore the topic of engineering in this fascinating interactive title filled with ideas and experiments fo readers to try themselves. This photographic book of engineering experiments and projects features clear, step-by-step instructions and a fresh, contemporary design, with an emphasis on fun, achievable experiments to give kids hands-on experiences. The science behind each experiment is explained, giving readers the theory behind the practical activities, and diagrams and photos show these fun and easy to recreate experiments in action! Experiments are grouped into chapters, including: Build it or Break It, which looks at how children can recreate the principles of construction in their own homes, Mechanical Marvels, where kids can build their own car, hot-air balloon or submarine out of household objects, Testing Tomorrow, in which kids can learn about coding, green energy and electricity, ... and many more! All experiments are safe and easy for children to carry out, and have clear instructions and advice to help them get bests results and understand the science that underpins the projects. The STEAM Ahead series shows readers that science isn’t limited to the classroom – it can be found out in the garden, cooked up in the kitchen and brought to life with paper and paints! Titles in the series include:STEAM Ahead: Experiment with Kitchen Science STEAM Ahead: Experiment with Outdoor Science ​STEAM Ahead: Experiment with Art STEAM Ahead: Experiment with Engineering

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* SELECTED FOR BARACK OBAMA'S SUMMER READING LIST 2022 * 'Anyone interested in the future of liberal democracy should read this book' ANNE APPLEBAUM ---------- One of our most important political thinkers looks to the greatest challenge of our time: how to live together equally and peacefully in diverse democracies. It’s easy to be pessimistic about the fate of democracy in multi-ethnic societies. At the end of the Second World War, fewer than one in twenty-five people living in the UK were born abroad; now it is one in seven. The history of humankind is a story of us versus them, and the project of diverse democracies is a relatively new one – it is, in other words, a great experiment. How do identity groups with different ideologies and beliefs live together? Is it possible to embark on a democracy with shared values if our values are at odds? Yascha Mounk argues that group identity is both deeply rooted and malleable. No community is beyond conciliation: groups are moving towards cooperation across the world. The Great Experiment offers a profound understanding of the problem behind all our other problems, and genuine hope for our capacity to solve it.

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An award-winning Hong Kong–based architect with decades of experience designing buildings and planning cities in the People’s Republic of China takes us to the Pearl River delta and into the heart of China’s iconic Special Economic Zone, Shenzhen.Shenzhen is ground zero for the economic transformation China has seen in recent decades. In 1979, driven by China’s widespread poverty, Deng Xiaoping supported a bold proposal to experiment with economic policies in a rural borderland next to Hong Kong. The site was designated as the City of Shenzhen and soon after became China’s first Special Economic Zone (SEZ). Four decades later, Shenzhen is a megacity of twenty million, an internationally recognized digital technology hub, and the world’s most successful economic zone. Some see it as a modern miracle city that seemingly came from nowhere, attributing its success solely to centralized planning and Shenzhen’s proximity to Hong Kong. The Chinese government has built hundreds of new towns using the Shenzhen model, yet none has come close to replicating the city’s level of economic success.But is it true that Shenzhen has no meaningful history? That the city was planned on a tabula rasa? That the region’s rural past has had no significant impact on the urban present? Juan Du unravels the myth of Shenzhen and shows us how this world-famous “instant city” has a surprising history—filled with oyster fishermen, villages that remain encased within city blocks, a secret informal housing system—and how it has been catapulted to success as much by the ingenuity of its original farmers as by Beijing’s policy makers. The Shenzhen Experiment is an important story for all rapidly urbanizing and industrializing nations around the world seeking to replicate China’s economic success in the twenty-first century.

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In a series of fascinating essays that explore topics in American politics from the nation's founding to the present day , The Democratic Experiment opens up exciting new avenues for historical research while offering bold claims about the tensions that have animated American public life. Revealing the fierce struggles that have taken place over the role of the federal government and the character of representative democracy, the authors trace the contested and dynamic evolution of the national polity. The contributors, who represent the leading new voices in the revitalized field of American political history, offer original interpretations of the nation's political past by blending methodological insights from the new institutionalism in the social sciences and studies of political culture. They tackle topics as wide-ranging as the role of personal character of political elites in the Early Republic, to the importance of courts in building a modern regulatory state, to the centrality of local political institutions in the late twentieth century. Placing these essays side by side encourages the asking of new questions about the forces that have shaped American politics over time. An unparalleled example of the new political history in action, this book will be vastly influential in the field. In addition to the editors, the contributors are Brian Balogh, Sven Beckert, Rebecca Edwards, Joanne B. Freeman, Richard R. John, Ira Katznelson, James T. Kloppenberg, Matthew D. Lassiter, Thomas J. Sugrue, Michael Vorenberg, and Michael Willrich.

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This manual contains 15 carefully tested practical exercises designed to encourage students to explore the different methods of psychological investigation. All exercises can be carried out with minimum equipment and students are also able to replicate and modify exercises for themselves.

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Addressing the history of the earth in terms of geological process and the resolution of the fossil record, Ronald Martin presents a report on the current state of knowledge on a group of interconnected themes - process, scale and hierarchy, and the methodologies of historical sciences. He examines several questions about geological history: What is the evidence for processes that occur over long periods of geologic history? Why are these long term earth processes significant to the human race? How does one test hypotheses using the fossil record? And what, at the present rate of knowledge, are the limits of that record? As Martin explains, the project of the geologist is to interpret natural phenomena by integrating data into large contexts and constructing a historical narrative. Through the critical examination of these narratives, geologists can determine how the earth evolved into its present state. However, the scale employed in measurement can cause wide variations in the results of any inquiry into geologic process. Martin addresses a wide range of topics, including taphonomy, bioturbation, cycles of carbon dioxide, global cooling, and extinction. He supplements the theatrical framework with explanations of concepts and definitions of key terminology.

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This groundbreaking volume for the Thinking Cinema series focuses on the extent to which contemporary cinema contributes to political and philosophical thinking about the future of Europe's core Enlightenment values. In light of the challenges of globalization, multi-cultural communities and post-nation state democracy, the book interrogates the borders of ethics and politics and roots itself in debates about post-secular, post-Enlightenment philosophy. By defining a cinema that knows that it is no longer a competitor to Hollywood (i.e. the classic self-other construction), Elsaesser also thinks past the kind of self-exoticism or auto-ethnography that is the perpetual temptation of such a co-produced, multi-platform 'national cinema as world cinema'. Discussing key filmmakers and philosophers, like: Claire Denis and Jean-Luc Nancy; Aki Kaurismäki, abjection and Julia Kristeva; Michael Haneke, the paradoxes of Christianity and Slavoj Zizek; Fatih Akin, Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière, Elsaesser is able to approach European cinema and assesses its key questions within a global context. His combination of political and philosophical thinking will surely ground the debate in film philosophy for years to come.

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This unique, up-to-date volume features new essays by prominent economists and psychologists working at the frontiers of the subject. A number of these essays probe beliefs about rationality, consumer behaviour and expectations, while others assess psychological explanations of economic behaviour and the contribution of experimental economics.

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Marcel Duchamp is often viewed as an "artist-engineer-scientist," a kind of rationalist who relied heavily on the ideas of the French mathematician and philosopher Henri Poincare. Yet a complete portrait of Duchamp and his multiple influences draws a different picture. In his 3 Standard Stoppages (1913-1914), a work that uses chance as an artistic medium, we see how far Duchamp subverted scientism in favor of a radical individualistic aesthetic and experimental vision. Unlike the Dadaists, Duchamp did more than dismiss or negate the authority of science. He pushed scientific rationalism to the point where its claims broke down and alternative truths were allowed to emerge. With humor and irony, Duchamp undertook a method of artistic research, reflection, and visual thought that focused less on beauty than on the notion of the "possible." He became a passionate advocate of the power of invention and thinking things that had never been thought before. The 3 Standard Stoppages is the ultimate realization of the play between chance and dimension, visibility and invisibility, high and low art, and art and anti-art. Situating Duchamp firmly within the literature and philosophy of his time, Herbert Molderings recaptures the spirit of a frequently misread artist-and his thrilling aesthetic of chance.

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This activity book helps children to think like an inventor by introducing key engineering concepts in a highly visual and entertaining way. Through fun activities and Harriet Russell’s playful illustrations, it encourages readers to engage with new ideas and think about problems in a creative way. The book explores the six key aspects of engineering that are essential to any successful inventor: problem-finding, designing, making and testing, improving your invention, building techniques and how to find new uses for existing objects. Each spread centres on an open-ended question that introduces a different way of approaching an invention. Activities include making a bridge from toothpicks and mini marshmallows; inventing a way to lift this book without touching it; building a painting robot; designing your own remote control; and harvesting electricity from a banana. At the end of the book is a tinkering lab, which includes paper-based crafts and engineering activities.

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If the twentieth century saw the rise of “Big Science,” then the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were surely an age of thrift. As Simon Werrett’s new history shows, frugal early modern experimenters transformed their homes into laboratories as they recycled, repurposed, repaired, and reused their material possessions to learn about the natural world. Thrifty Science explores this distinctive culture of experiment and demonstrates how the values of the household helped to shape an array of experimental inquiries, ranging from esoteric investigations of glowworms and sour beer to famous experiments such as Benjamin Franklin’s use of a kite to show lightning was electrical and Isaac Newton’s investigations of color using prisms. Tracing the diverse ways that men and women put their material possessions into the service of experiment, Werrett offers a history of practices of recycling and repurposing that are often assumed to be more recent in origin. This thriving domestic culture of inquiry was eclipsed by new forms of experimental culture in the nineteenth century, however, culminating in the resource-hungry science of the twentieth. Could thrifty science be making a comeback today, as scientists grapple with the need to make their research more environmentally sustainable?

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A groundbreaking study examining major literary treatments of the idea of earthly immortality, throwing into relief fascinating instances of human self-awareness over the past three hundred years. The idea of earthly immortality has a tradition in literature dating to the Gilgamesh epic. But what would it mean to attain such immortality? Answers are suggested in novels and plays that explore the theme using varieties of Borges's "rational imagination," often in connection with projections of biology or cybernetics. In this groundbreaking study, Karl S. Guthke examines key works in this vein, throwing into relief fascinating instances of human self-awareness across the last three hundred years. Authors discussed in detail include J. M. Barrie, Calvino, Shaw, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Swift, Aldous Huxley, Walter Besant, Arthur C. Clarke, Wilde, Borges, William Godwin, P. B. and Mary Shelley, Capek, Machado de Assis, Simone de Beauvoir, Martin Amis, Dino Buzzati, Houellebecq, Iris Barry, Saramago, Rushdie, Gabi Gleichmann, and Pascal Mercier. Guthke finds that the fictional triumph over death is only rarely viewed positively, and mostly as a "curse" - for a variety of reasons. Almost always, however, literary experiments with immortality suggest an alternative: the chance to take our limited lifetime into our own hands, shapingit meaningfully and thereby experiencing "a new way of being in the world" (Mercier). The fictional immortals reject this challenge, thus depriving themselves of what makes humans human and life worth living. And what that mightbe is also at least hinted at in the works Guthke analyzes. As a result, an aspect of cultural history comes into view that is revealing and stimulating at a time that is, as Der Spiegel put it in 2014, "obsessed by the invention of immortality." Karl S. Guthke is the Kuno Francke Professor of Germanic Art and Culture, Emeritus, of Harvard University.

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After punk’s arrival in 1976, many art students in the northern English city of Leeds traded their paintbrushes for guitars and synthesizers. In bands ranging from Gang of Four, Soft Cell, and Delta 5 to the Mekons, Scritti Politti, and Fad Gadget, these artists-turned-musicians challenged the limits of what was deemed possible in rock and pop music. Taking avant-garde ideas to the record-buying public, they created Situationist antirock and art punk, penned deconstructed pop ditties about Jacques Derrida, and took the aesthetics of collage and shock to dark, brooding electro-dance music. In No Machos or Pop Stars Gavin Butt tells the fascinating story of the post-punk scene in Leeds, showing how England’s state-funded education policy brought together art students from different social classes to create a fertile ground for musical experimentation. Drawing on extensive interviews with band members, their associates, and teachers, Butt details the groups who wanted to dismantle both art world and music industry hierarchies by making it possible to dance to their art. Their stories reveal the subversive influence of art school in a regional music scene of lasting international significance.

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The landmark 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA), or “Obamacare,” is a topic of great debate in mainstream, academic, and scientific media that generated strong opinions across the political spectrum and our nation. Soon after the enactment of the ACA and the fierce debate that ensued, The Affordable Care Act as a National Experiment was published by Springer in 2014. Now five years later, just finishing an election year in which the ACA was a hotly debated issue, the second edition of this title examines the history, lessons, and impact of this ground-breaking legislation. Now a decade since implementation nationally, the ACA is the largest healthcare policy innovation in the United States in at least 50 years and one of our nation’s largest healthcare experiments ever. The history of public health and medicine shows us that to develop better solutions for important health problems, we must innovate. And when we try a new strategy, we are reminded that to innovate is to experiment. This is the basis of all medical research, public health interventions, and health policy innovations. Moreover, in recent years, there is an increasing emphasis on “translational science,” research that always has an ultimate focus on having real impact on medical care and the public’s health – whether in translating from bench research to the bedside, or from limited clinical use into widespread practice, public health interventions or policy.As with the previous edition, the book opens with a chapter that gives a basic overview of The Affordable Care Act. The second chapter, which previously discussed the objectives of the ACA, now takes a look at the successes, unfinished work and impact of the ACA in the past ten years. The third chapter now ponders the question of whether the ACA has protected patients since its implementation while its previous counterpart gave predictions for the future. The chapters that follow highlight things such as Medicaid expansion and insurance reform under the ACA, the Supreme Court Review of the ACA, social determinants of health, stories of the uninsured and stabilization of the ACA, among others. The book rounds out with a summary of what’s next and the push for universal healthcare followed by an epilogue. Due to the timely nature of the subject matter, some chapters from the previous edition have been dropped and seven new chapters have been added in their place. The remaining seven chapters from the previous edition have also been fully revised and updated. Written by nationally known healthcare policy leaders who were involved directly in the creation and implementation of the ACA, the second edition of The Affordable Care Act as a National Experiment again will examine the history and impact of this ground-breaking legislation as well as recommend priorities, objectives, and next steps for translational research. It is an essential resource for all healthcare providers as well as policy makers and academics.

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The Experiment Must Continue is a beautifully articulated ethnographic history of medical experimentation in East Africa from 1940 through 2014. In it, Melissa Graboyes combines her training in public health and in history to treat her subject with the dual sensitivities of a medical ethicist and a fine historian. She breathes life into the fascinating histories of research on human subjects, elucidating the hopes of the interventionists and the experiences of the putative beneficiaries. Historical case studies highlight failed attempts to eliminate tropical diseases, while modern examples delve into ongoing malaria and HIV/AIDS research. Collectively, these show how East Africans have perceived research differently than researchers do and that the active participation of subjects led to the creation of a hybrid ethical form. By writing an ethnography of the past and a history of the present, Graboyes casts medical experimentation in a new light, and makes the resounding case that we must readjust our dominant ideas of consent, participation, and exploitation. With global implications, this lively book is as relevant for scholars as it is for anyone invested in the place of medicine in society.

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During the 1968 Prague Spring and the Soviet-led invasion and occupation that followed, Czechoslovakia's Army Film studio was responsible for some of the most politically subversive and aesthetically innovative films of the period. Although the studio is remembered primarily as a producer of propaganda and training films, some notable New Wave directors began their careers there, making films that considerably enrich the history of that movement. Alice Lovejoy examines the institutional and governmental roots of postwar Czechoslovak cinema and provides evidence that links the Army Film studio to Czechoslovakia's art cinema. By tracing the studio's unique institutional dimensions and production culture, Lovejoy explores the ways in which the "military avant-garde" engaged in dialogue with a range of global film practices and cultures. (The print version of the book includes a DVD featuring 16 short films produced by the Czechoslovak Ministry of Defense. The additional media files are not available on the eBook.)

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The dominant theme of this book is to introduce the different path planning methods and present some of the most appropriate ones for robotic routing; methods that are capable of running on a variety of robots and are resistant to disturbances; being real-time, being autonomous, and the ability to identify high-risk areas and risk management are the other features that will be mentioned in the introduction of the methods. The introduction of the profound significance of the robots and delineation of the navigation and routing theme is provided in the first chapter of the book. The second chapter is concerned with the subject of routing in unknown environments. In the first part of this chapter, the family of bug algorithms including are described. In the following, several conventional methods are submitted. The last part of this chapter is dedicated to the introduction of two recently developed routing methods. In Chapter 3, routing is reviewed in the known environment in which the robot either utilizes the created maps by extraneous sources or makes use of the sensor in order to prepare the maps from the local environment. The robot path planning relying on the robot vision sensors and applicable computing hardware are concentrated in the fourth chapter. The first part of this chapter deals with routing methods supported mapping capabilities. The second part manages the routing dependent on the vision sensor, typically known as the best sensor, within the routing subject. The movement of two-dimensional robots with two or three degrees of freedom is analyzed within the third part of this chapter. In Chapter 5, the performance of a few of the foremost important routing methods initiating from the second to fourth chapters is conferred regarding the implementation in various environments. The first part of this chapter is engaged in the implementation of the algorithms Bug1, Bug2, and Distbug on the pioneering robot. In the second part, a theoretical technique is planned to boost the robot's performance in line with obstacle collision avoidance. This method, underlying the tangential escape, seeks to proceed with the robot through various obstacles with curved corners. In the third and fourth parts of this chapter, path planning in different environments is preceded in the absence and the presence of danger space. Accordingly, four approaches, named artificial fuzzy potential field, linguistic technique, Markov decision making processes, and fuzzy Markov decision making have been proposed in two following parts and enforced on the Nao humanoid robot.

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This insightful book provides a comprehensive analysis of the nationwide randomised Finnish basic income experiment 2017 to 2018, from planning and implementation through to the end results. It presents the background of the social policy system in which the experiment was implemented and details the narratives of the planning process alongside its constraints, as well as a final evaluation of the results.Empirical chapters analyse the outcomes of the experiment in relation to the employment, health and well-being, in various forms, of the recipients of unconditional income transfer. Phenomenological aspects of living on basic income, based on face-to-face interviews, are also reported, as well as media discourse on the experiment and its results. This thought-provoking book concludes with an examination of the political feasibility of basic income in Finland.Offering important lessons on the planning and implementation of such experiments in a developed welfare state, this unique book will be a vital resource for scholars and students of social policy, welfare economics, basic security and basic income.

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Thomas Wijck’s painted alchemical laboratories were celebrated in his day as "artful" and "ingenious." They fell into obscurity along with their subject, as alchemy came to be viewed as an occult art or a fool’s errand. But these unusual pictures challenge our understanding of early modern alchemy-and of the deeper relationship between chemical workshops and the artists who represented them. The work of artists, like the work of alchemists, contained intellectual-creative and manual-material aspects. Both alchemists and artists claimed a special status owing to their creative powers. Wijck’s formation of an artistic and professional identity around alchemical themes reveals his desire to explore this curious territory, and ultimately to demonstrate art’s superior claims to knowledge and mastery over nature. This book explores one artist’s transformation of alchemy and its materials into a reputation for virtuosity-and what his work can teach us about the experimental early modern world.

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The book describes the natural history of myxoma virus in American rabbits and the history of its introduction into European rabbits at length. The changes in rabbit and virus over the last forty years provide the classical example of coevolution of a virus and its vertebrate host and a paradigmatic model for the understanding of an emerging infectious disease. Rabbit haemorrhagic disease virus has been spreading in Australia for only three years, but in some areas has been very effective. Written by leading world experts in animal virology and the history of medicine.

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The Experiment Must Continue is a beautifully articulated ethnographic history of medical experimentation in East Africa from 1940 through 2014. In it, Melissa Graboyes combines her training in public health and in history to treat her subject with the dual sensitivities of a medical ethicist and a fine historian. She breathes life into the fascinating histories of research on human subjects, elucidating the hopes of the interventionists and the experiences of the putative beneficiaries. Historical case studies highlight failed attempts to eliminate tropical diseases, while modern examples delve into ongoing malaria and HIV/AIDS research. Collectively, these show how East Africans have perceived research differently than researchers do and that the active participation of subjects led to the creation of a hybrid ethical form. By writing an ethnography of the past and a history of the present, Graboyes casts medical experimentation in a new light, and makes the resounding case that we must readjust our dominant ideas of consent, participation, and exploitation. With global implications, this lively book is as relevant for scholars as it is for anyone invested in the place of medicine in society.

Read more less

What happens when the avant-garde grows old? Examining a group of writers and artists who continued the modernist experiment into later life, Scott Herring reveals how their radical artistic principles set out a new path for creative aging.Aging Moderns provides portraits of writers and artists who sought out or employed unconventional methods and collaborations up until the early twenty-first century. Herring finds Djuna Barnes performing the principles of high modernism not only in poetry but also in pharmacy orders and grocery lists. In mystery novels featuring Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas along with modernist souvenir collections, the gay writer Samuel Steward elaborated a queer theory of aging and challenged gay male ageism. The Harlem Renaissance dancer Mabel Hampton dispelled stereotypes about aging through her queer of color performances at the Lesbian Herstory Archives. Herring explores Ivan Albright’s magic realist portraits of elders, Tillie Olsen’s writings on the aging female worker, and the surrealistic works made by Charles Henri Ford and his caregiver Indra Bahadur Tamang at the Dakota apartment building in New York City.Showcasing previously unpublished experimental art and writing, this deeply interdisciplinary book unites new modernist studies, American studies, disability studies, and critical age studies. Aging Moderns rethinks assumptions about literary creativity, the depiction of old age, and the boundaries of modernism.

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This multidisciplinary volume, the first of its kind, presents an account of China's contemporary transformation via one of its most important yet overlooked cities: Shenzhen, located just north of Hong Kong. In recent decades, Shenzhen has transformed from an experimental site for economic reform into a dominant city at the crossroads of the global economy. The first of China's special economic zones, Shenzhen is today a UNESCO City of Design and the hub of China's emerging technology industries. Bringing China studies into dialogue with urban studies, the contributors explore how the post-Mao Chinese appropriation of capitalist logic led to a dramatic remodeling of the Chinese city and collective life in China today. These essays show how urban villages and informal institutions enabled social transformation through cases of public health, labor, architecture, gender, politics, education, and more. Offering scholars and general readers alike an unprecedented look at one of the world's most dynamic metropolises, this collective history uses the urban case study to explore critical problems and possibilities relevant for modern-day China and beyond.

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With Sweden traditionally hailed as a social and economic model, it is no wonder that the Swedish response to the COVID-19 pandemic raised a lot of questions – and eyebrows – around the world. This short book explores Sweden’s unique response to the global pandemic and the strong wave of controversies it triggered. It helps to make sense of the response by defining ‘a Swedish model’ that incorporates the country’s value system, underpinning its politics and administration in relation to, among other things, welfare, democracy, civil liberties and respect for expertise. The book also acts as a case study for understanding the moral and normative ways in which different national approaches to the pandemic have been compared.

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Low energy neutrino astrophysics studies the evolutionary life of the stars via the neutrinos emitted during the quiescent phase (solar neutrinos) and during the explosive death of big mass stars (supernova neutrinos). The neutrino mean free path in matter is about twenty orders of magnitude greater than that of light; therefore neutrinos reaching us can be produced also in deep and high-density levels of stars. Since massless neutrinos are unaffected by their travel in the interstellar space, their energies and arrival directions carry information on the star history. The subject of this thesis is the search for neutrino bursts from galactic stellar gravitational collapses performed in the MACRO experiment, a large area modular detector, operating since autumn 1989.

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Clearly written and free of statistical jargon, this invaluableguide concentrates on the practicalities of statistical analysisfor anyone involved with agricultural research. Each section starts with the key points, giving a quick referenceto the contents and plenty of examples using 'real' data. Successful experiment design starts with a statement of aims. Theauthors guide the reader through planning an experiment, includingdefining objectives, considering treatments, measurements ofinterest and the time and timing of assessments. Advantages anddisadvantages of different experiment designs and the importance ofdata exploration and graphical presentation are covered, as aredata collection, storage, validation and verification. Statisticaltechniques include the t-test, anlaysis of variance, basicregression analysis and non-parametric techniques. Assumptionsinherent to these techniques are clearly identified (bearing inmind the principles and aims) without losing the reader instatistical theory. All of the techniques are illustrated withworked examples and give full interpretation of the results.Formulae are kept to a minimum in the main text, but are given infull in the appendix.

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In this reassessment of one of the figures of early modern science, Rose-Mary Sargent explores Robert Boyle's philosophy of experiment, a central aspect of his life and work that became a model for mid to late 17th century natural philosophers and for those who followed them. Sargent examines the philosophical, legal, experimental, and religious traditions - among them English common law, alchemy, medicine, and Christianity - that played a part in shaping Boyle's experimental thought and practice. The roots of his philosophy in his early life and education, in his religious ideals and in the work of his predecessors - particularly Bacon, Descartes and Galileo - are explored, as are the possible influences of his social and intellectual circle. Drawing on a range of Boyle's published works, as well as on his unpublished notebooks and manuscripts, Sargent shows how these diverse influences were transformed and incorporated into Boyle's views on, and practice of, experiment.

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Ever wondered if your intentions, prayers or wishes have a real, calculable effect on the world? Here, from Lynne McTaggart, groundbreaking author of ‘The Field’, comes riveting accounts of scientific investigations and real case histories with evidence that we are all connected and our intentions can be harnessed as a collective force for good. For the last 40 years renegade scientists, experimenting with the limits of quantum physics, have made seemingly impossible discoveries. 1966: a lie-detector expert accidentally discovers that plants can read thoughts. 1982: meditating Buddhist monks in the Himalayas turn their bodies into a human furnace. 1994: a psychologist's experiments reveal a stream of light flowing from healers during healing. These events form part of an extraordinary scientific story and revolutionary discovery - that thought is a thing that affects other things. In The Intention Experiment, Lynne McTaggart, author of the international bestseller The Field, joins forces with a team of international, renowned scientists to test the effects of focused group intention on scientifically quantifiable targets - animal, plant and human. The Intention Experiment is a truly revolutionary book that invites you, the reader, to take part in the greatest intention experiment in history. The results of McTaggart's 'global laboratory' started with the focused intention that made a geranium leaf glow to evidence to show that group intention is powerful enough to affect targets more than 5000 miles away and may even affect global warming. These remarkable results prove human thought and intention has the power to focus our lives, heal our illnesses, clean up our communities and improve the planet. This book also shows you how to harness that power to make changes in your own life.

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What happens when the avant-garde grows old? Examining a group of writers and artists who continued the modernist experiment into later life, Scott Herring reveals how their radical artistic principles set out a new path for creative aging.Aging Moderns provides portraits of writers and artists who sought out or employed unconventional methods and collaborations up until the early twenty-first century. Herring finds Djuna Barnes performing the principles of high modernism not only in poetry but also in pharmacy orders and grocery lists. In mystery novels featuring Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas along with modernist souvenir collections, the gay writer Samuel Steward elaborated a queer theory of aging and challenged gay male ageism. The Harlem Renaissance dancer Mabel Hampton dispelled stereotypes about aging through her queer of color performances at the Lesbian Herstory Archives. Herring explores Ivan Albright’s magic realist portraits of elders, Tillie Olsen’s writings on the aging female worker, and the surrealistic works made by Charles Henri Ford and his caregiver Indra Bahadur Tamang at the Dakota apartment building in New York City.Showcasing previously unpublished experimental art and writing, this deeply interdisciplinary book unites new modernist studies, American studies, disability studies, and critical age studies. Aging Moderns rethinks assumptions about literary creativity, the depiction of old age, and the boundaries of modernism.

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Since neutrinos interact so weakly with matter, most of their basic properties are still largely unknown. One of the most important issues to be settled concerns their rest mass. We have no idea why neutrinos are so much lighter than their charged lepton partners; no fundamental symmetry in nature requires massless neutrinos. Massive neutrinos are demanded to explain the anomalous counting rate of experiments measuring the solar and the atmospheric neutrino fluxes. The discrepancy between experimental data and theoretical predictions can be accounted for in terms of neutrino oscillations, which would take place only in the case of massive neutrinos. The subject of this thesis is the search for neutrino oscillations in CHOOZ, the first long baseline experiment to explore a neutrino mass region where hints at neutrino oscillations came from the atmospheric neutrino anomaly.

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In 1524, Pope Clement VII gave two condemned criminals to his physician to test a promising new antidote. After each convict ate a marzipan cake poisoned with deadly aconite, one of them received the antidote, and lived—the other died in agony. In sixteenth-century Europe, this and more than a dozen other accounts of poison trials were committed to writing. Alisha Rankin tells their little-known story. At a time when poison was widely feared, the urgent need for effective cures provoked intense excitement about new drugs. As doctors created, performed, and evaluated poison trials, they devoted careful attention to method, wrote detailed experimental reports, and engaged with the problem of using human subjects for fatal tests. In reconstructing this history, Rankin reveals how the antidote trials generated extensive engagement with “experimental thinking” long before the great experimental boom of the seventeenth century and investigates how competition with lower-class healers spurred on this trend.The Poison Trials sheds welcome and timely light on the intertwined nature of medical innovations, professional rivalries, and political power.

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