Search results for ""author michael ward""

Good data, Michael Ward argues, serve to enhance a perception about life as well as to deepen an understanding of reality. This history of the UN's role in fostering international statistics in the postwar period demonstrates how statistics have shaped our understanding of the world. Drawing on well over 40 years of experience working as a statistician and economist in more than two dozen countries around the world, Ward traces the evolution of statistical ideas and how they have responded to the needs of policy while unraveling the question of why certain data were considered important and why other data and concerns were not. The book explores the economic, social, and environmental dimensions of the UN's statistical work and how each dimension has provided opportunities for describing the well-being of the world community. Quantifying the World also reveals some of the missed opportunities for pursuing alternative models.

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For over half a century, scholars have laboured to show that C. S. Lewis's famed but apparently disorganised Chronicles of Narnia have an underlying symbolic coherence, pointing to such possible unifying themes as the seven sacraments, the seven deadly sins, and the seven books of Spenser's Faerie Queene. None of these explanations has won general acceptance and the structure of Narnia's symbolism has remained a mystery. Michael Ward has finally solved the enigma. In Planet Narnia he demonstrates that medieval cosmology, a subject which fascinated Lewis throughout his life, provides the imaginative key to the seven novels. Drawing on the whole range of Lewis's writings (including previously unpublished drafts of the Chronicles), Ward reveals how the Narnia stories were designed to express the characteristics of the seven medieval planets - - Jupiter, Mars, Sol, Luna, Mercury, Venus, and Saturn - - planets which Lewis described as "spiritual symbols of permanent value" and "especially worthwhile in our own generation". Using these seven symbols, Lewis secretly constructed the Chronicles so that in each book the plot-line, the ornamental details, and, most important, the portrayal of the Christ-figure of Aslan, all serve to communicate the governing planetary personality. The cosmological theme of each Chronicle is what Lewis called 'the kappa element in romance', the atmospheric essence of a story, everywhere present but nowhere explicit. The reader inhabits this atmosphere and thus imaginatively gains connaître knowledge of the spiritual character which the tale was created to embody. Planet Narnia is a ground-breaking study that will provoke a major revaluation not only of the Chronicles, but of Lewis's whole literary and theological outlook. Ward uncovers a much subtler writer and thinker than has previously been recognized, whose central interests were hiddenness, immanence, and knowledge by acquaintance.

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Peter, 17 years old, six foot tall and good looking has started to notice a ghostly orb hanging around in his bedroom, at the home he shares with his divorced mum. He resolves to speak to it the next time it appears and just as he is about to fall asleep that evening, the orb appears. He speaks to it and it answers back. The orb turns out to be nothing to do with a spirit but is actually a contact device called a 'Visioner' belonging to an alien ambassador, who has been studying and learning about Peter and his girlfriend Julie for nearly four years. Having decided that Peter was now old enough to understand the situation and mature enough to deal with it, the alien has made contact. After meeting the alien, whom Peter nicknames 'Clix', their friendship begins. Soon after, and having been given his own Visioner which can be used not only to see relatives in the present time but also to see relatives from times gone by and experience the same smells, sounds and sensations as they do, Peter undertakes what turns out to be a harrowing 'trip' to experience the horrors of how his great grandfather lost his life during the Second World War. On his return from that trip, Peter mentions to Clix that he'd noticed another Visioner, a blue orb, which Clix warns belongs to a rogue alien race, on the lookout for suitable gene donors, to strengthen their weakening race. Clix warns that it might affect Julie and allows Peter to let Julie into the secrets of the Visioner. To show Julie how the Visioner works, Peter looks in on her Auntie in Australia, only to find her and her husband at the bedside of their sick daughter, who urgently needs a bone marrow transplant to survive. Julie's family and Peter all undergo blood tests and Julie's mum, who proves to be an exact match, jets off to Australia. The very evening that she leaves for Australia, Julie's younger sister Jeanie is abducted along with her best friend Li-Wei. Through the use of the Visioner, Peter discovers that they, along with numerous other young girls are being held in a hypnotised state inside the rogue alien spacecraft, awaiting the gene harvesting process. So unfolds the race to find and free them before their bodies are violated and possible further harm occurs.

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