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Asking About Prices
A New Approach to Understanding Price Stickiness
Alan Blinder
Russell Sage Foundation, 1998
Why do consumer prices and wages adjust so slowly to changes in market conditions? The rigidity or stickiness of price setting in business is central to Keynesian economic theory and a key to understanding how monetary policy works, yet economists have made little headway in determining why it occurs. Asking About Prices offers a groundbreaking empirical approach to a puzzle for which theories abound but facts are scarce. Leading economist Alan Blinder, along with co-authors Elie Canetti, David Lebow, and Jeremy B. Rudd, interviewed a national, multi-industry sample of 200 CEOs, company heads, and other corporate price setters to test the validity of twelve prominent theories of price stickiness. Using everyday language and pertinent scenarios, the carefully designed survey asked decisionmakers how prominently these theoretical concerns entered into their own attitudes and thought processes. Do businesses tend to view the costs of changing prices as prohibitive? Do they worry that lower prices will be equated with poorer quality goods? Are firms more likely to try alternate strategies to changing prices, such as warehousing excess inventory or improving their quality of service? To what extent are prices held in place by contractual agreements, or by invisible handshakes? Asking About Prices offers a gold mine of previously unavailable information. It affirms the widespread presence of price stickiness in American industry, and offers the only available guide to such business details as what fraction of goods are sold by fixed price contract, how often transactions involve repeat customers, and how and when firms review their prices. Some results are surprising: contrary to popular wisdom, prices do not increase more easily than they decrease, and firms do not appear to practice anticipatory pricing, even when they can foresee cost increases. Asking About Prices also offers a chapter-by-chapter review of the survey findings for each of the twelve theories of price stickiness. The authors determine which theories are most popular with actual price setters, how practices vary within different business sectors, across firms of different sizes, and so on. They also direct economists' attention toward a rationale for price stickiness that does not stem from conventional theory, namely a strong reluctance by firms to antagonize or inconvenience their customers. By illuminating how company executives actually think about price setting, Asking About Prices provides an elegant model of a valuable new approach to conducting economic research.
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Composing Music
A New Approach
William Russo
University of Chicago Press, 1988
Aimed at those who have some knowledge of music but not formal training in composition, this concise introduction to composing starts right in with a brief composition exercise, then proceeds step by step through a series of increasingly complex and challenging problems, gradually expanding the student's musical grammar.

"This is a wonderful book for anyone who is developing improvising skills or who would like a fun way to explore music."—Jim Stockford, Co-Evolution Quarterly
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Entering the Watershed
A New Approach To Save America's River Ecosystems
Bob Doppelt, Mary Scurlock, Chris Frissell, and James Karr
Island Press, 1993

Entering the Watershed is the product of a two-year project established by the Pacific Rivers Council to develop new federal riverine protection and restoration policy alternatives. It recommends a comprehensive new approach to river protection based on principles of watershed dynamics, ecosystem function, and conservation biology -- a nationwide, strategic community- and ecosystem-based watershed restoration initiative. The book:

  • describes in detail the existing level of damage to rivers and species
  • analyzes flaws and gaps in existing policy
  • provides the framework necessary to develop new policies
  • outlines the scientific underpinnings and management strategies needed in new policy
  • makes specific policy proposals
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Intermediate Spanish Memory Book
A New Approach to Vocabulary Building
By William F. Harrison and Dorothy Winters Welker
University of Texas Press, 1997

Mnemonics is an age-old device for remembering names, numbers, and many other things. As in the authors' previous Memory Books, the Intermediate Spanish Memory Book makes use of this reliable memory help in a series of mnemonic jingles that are by turns playful, sardonic, touching, and heroic to help both students and independent learners acquire and remember Spanish vocabulary. The 500-plus words in this book represent a more advanced vocabulary than those in the Spanish Memory Book (1990) and the Spanish Memory Book, Junior Edition (1993).

The mnemonic jingles present both the sound of the Spanish word (indicated by syllables in italic type) and its English meaning (given by a word or phrase in boldface type):

merienda: picnic, afternoon tea

Mary, end a boring picnic.
Just say, "I'm going home. I'm sick, Nick."

This innovative approach to vocabulary building is simple, effective, and entertaining.

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A New Approach to Textual Criticism
An Introduction to the Coherence-Based Genealogical Method
Tommy Wasserman
SBL Press, 2017

An essential introduction for scholars and students of New Testament Greek

With the publication of the widely used 28th edition of Nestle-Aland’s Novum Testamentum Graece and the 5th edition of the United Bible Society Greek New Testament, a computer-assisted method known as the Coherence-Based Genealogical Method (CBGM) was used for the first time to determine the most valuable witnesses and establish the initial text. This book offers the first full-length, student-friendly introduction to this important new method. After setting out the method’s history, separate chapters clarify its key concepts, including genealogical coherence, textual flow diagrams, and the global stemma. Examples from across the New Testament are used to show how the method works in practice. The result is an essential introduction that will be of interest to students, translators, commentators, and anyone else who studies the Greek New Testament.

Features

  • A clear explanation of how and why the text of the Greek New Testament is changing
  • Step-by-step guidance on how to use the CBGM in textual criticism
  • Diagrams, illustrations, and glossary of key terms
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Performance Standards for Restaurants
A New Approach to Addressing the Obesity Epidemic
Deborah Cohen
RAND Corporation, 2013
This report presents the results of a conference of 38 national experts in nutrition and public health who met to develop performance standards that could guide restaurants toward facilitating healthier choices among consumers and that local communities or states could use as a model for developing and implementing either voluntary or mandatory certification programs.
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Portuguese Memory Book
A New Approach to Vocabulary Building
By William F. Harrison and Dorothy Winters Welker
University of Texas Press, 1996

Mnemonics is an age-old device for remembering names, numbers, and many other things. The Portuguese Memory Book, by William F. Harrison and Dorothy Welker, makes use of this reliable memory help in a series of mnemonic jingles that are by turns playful, sardonic, touching, and heroic to help both students and independent learners acquire and remember Portuguese vocabulary.

The mnemonic jingles present both the sound of the  Portuguese word (indicated by syllables in underlined boldface type) and its English meaning (given by a word or phrase in boldface type):

noite (f.) night

Don't annoy Chihuahuas in the night.
If you ignore their bark, you'll feel their bite.

This innovative approach to vocabulary building is simple, effective, and entertaining. The authors also include a general pronunciation guide to Brazilian Portuguese, particularly to the Carioca dialect of Rio de Janeiro.

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Reducing Toxics
A New Approach To Policy And Industrial Decisionmaking
Edited by Robert Gottlieb
Island Press, 1995
In Reducing Toxics, leading experts address industry, technology, health, and policy issues and explore the potential for pollution prevention at the industry and facility levels. They consider both the regulatory and institutional settings of toxics reduction initiatives, prescribe strategies for developing a prevention framework, and apply these principles in analyzing industry case studies. Among the topics considered are:
  • the evolution of, and limits to, current environmental policy
  • incorporating prevention into production planning and decisionmaking
  • do voluntary programs lead to industry greening or greenwashing?
  • case studies of the chemical, aerosols, radiator repair and electric vehicle industries
  • opportunities for and barriers to pollution prevention
Reducing Toxics offers an analytic framework for defining and understanding different approaches in the toxics area and describes the basis for a new policy and industrial decisionmaking construct.
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Scientific Pluralism Reconsidered
A New Approach to the (Dis)Unity of Science
Stephanie Ruphy
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016
Can we expect our scientific theories to make up a unified structure, or do they form a kind of “patchwork” whose pieces remain independent from each other? Does the proliferation of sometimes-incompatible representations of the same phenomenon compromise the ability of science to deliver reliable knowledge? Is there a single correct way to classify things that science should try to discover, or is taxonomic pluralism here to stay? These questions are at the heart of philosophical debate on the unity or plurality of science, one of the most central issues in philosophy of science today. This book offers a critical overview and a new structure of this debate. It focuses on the methodological, epistemic, and metaphysical commitments of various philosophical attitudes surrounding monism and pluralism, and offers novel perspectives and pluralist theses on scientific methods and objects, reductionism, plurality of representations, natural kinds, and scientific classifications.
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Socialist Feminism
A New Approach
Frieda Afary
Pluto Press, 2022

What is socialist feminism and why is it needed to fight the global rise of authoritarianism and fascism?

Frieda Afary brings the insights gained through her study of feminist philosophy, her international activism, and her work in community education as a public librarian in Los Angeles, offering a bold new vision of an alternative to capitalism, racism, sexism, heterosexism, and alienation.

Socialist Feminism: A New Approach reclaims theories of women’s oppression through a return to humanism, enriched by social reproduction theories, Black feminist intersectionality, abolitionism, queer theories, Marxist-Humanism, and the author’s own experiences as an Iranian American feminist, scholar, and activist.

She looks at global developments in gender relations since the 1980s, the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, the distinct features of twenty-first-century authoritarianism, and current struggles against it, drawing out lessons for revolutionary theorizing, organizing, and international solidarity including the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements.

This book also contains a study guide that transforms it into a useful pedagogical tool for teachers and activists.

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Spanish Memory Book
A New Approach to Vocabulary Building
By William F. Harrison and Dorothy Winters Welker
University of Texas Press, 1990

Using mnemonics is an age-old technique for remembering names, numbers, and many other things. In Spanish Memory Book, William Harrison and Dorothy Welker offer original mnemonic rimes that are by turns amusing, ironic, pathetic, sentimental, and sardonic to help students and independent learners acquire and remember Spanish vocabulary.

Included are mnemonic jingles for 700 of the 2,000 most commonly used Spanish words. Each jingle contains both the sound of the Spanish word and its English meaning. The authors have included a general pronunciation guide to Spanish vowels and consonants.

This innovative approach, which the authors have used successfully with their own students, is simple, effective, and entertaining. In the words of one student, "This book teaches me not only Spanish words but English words as well."

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Spanish Memory Book
A New Approach to Vocabulary Building, Junior Edition
By William F. Harrison and Dorothy Winters Welker
University of Texas Press, 1990

Mnemonics is an age-old technique for remembering names, numbers, and many other things. In Spanish Memory Book, Junior Edition, William Harrison and Dorothy Welker offer onginal mnemonic rimes appropriate in subject matter and skill level for junior high and high school students to help them acquire and remember Spanish vocabulary.

Included are mnemonic jingles for several hundred of the 2,000 most commonly used Spanish words. Each jingle contains both the sound of the Spanish word and its English meaning. The authors have also included a general pronunciation guide to Spanish vowels and consonants.

This innovative approach, which the authors have used successfully with their own students, is simple, effective, and entertaining. In the words of one student, "This book teaches me not only Spanish words but English words as well."

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Time for Change
A New Approach To Environment And Development
Edited by Hal Kane and Linda Starke
Island Press, 1992
The U.S. Citizens Network prepared this guidebook to help American citizens and organizations understand and participate effectively in the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), an unprecedented "Earth Summit," at which heads of state, individuals, and groups from around the world considered how to balance development pressures with an increasingly imperiled global environment.
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Troubled Waters
Developing a New Approach to Maritime and Underwater Cultural Heritage Management in Sub-Saharan Africa
Jonathan Sharfman
Leiden University Press, 2018
This 41th volume of the ASLU series examines perspectives on maritime and underwater cultural heritage (MUCH) in southern Africa and proposes new management approaches to advance protection and public engagement. By redefining the maritime historical narratives in countries that have predominantly interpreted their maritime past through colonial shipwrecks, it is possible to create an environment in which stakeholders become active participants in heritage management. The application of a broad maritime cultural landscape perspective that blurs the lines between the natural and cultural, tangible and intangible, and local and global binaries that are often applied to MUCH, results in a community-driven, relevant approach to heritage management. Appropriate management strategies are supported by balancing western based heritage values with alternative approaches to heritage conservation. Case studies illustrate the evolution and efficacy of this approach
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Using Gramsci
A New Approach
Michele Filippini
Pluto Press, 2016
The notebooks kept by Antonio Gramsci while he was in prison in fascist Italy in the 1920s have been an inspiration to Marxist political thinkers and activists around the world for decades. With Using Gramsci, Michele Filippini teases out a number of previously ignored aspects of Gramsci’s works to create a book that stands apart from previous analyses. While Filippini does examine the aspects of Gramsci’s thought that have long attracted scholars—including his thinking on hegemony, organic intellectuals, and civil society—she foregrounds new concepts, including the individual, crisis, and space and time. The result is a rethinking of Gramsci for our era  that offers a number of promising new ways forward.
 
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