A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY295 start with A start with A
The book begins with the Millerites, the nineteenth-century religious sect of Pastor William Miller, who used biblical calculations to predict October 22, 1844 as the date for the Second Advent of Christ. Aveni also examines several other religious and philosophical movements that have centered on apocalyptic themes—Christian millennialism, the New Age movement and the Age of Aquarius, and various other nineteenth- and early twentieth-century religious sects, concluding with a focus on the Maya mystery of 2012 and the contemporary prophets who connected the end of the world as we know it with the overturning of the Maya calendar.
Apocalyptic Anxiety places these seemingly never-ending stories of the world’s end in the context of American history. This fascinating exploration of the deep historical and cultural roots of America’s voracious appetite for apocalypse will appeal to students of American history and the histories of religion and science, as well as lay readers interested in American culture and doomsday prophecies.
Aldana follows three lines of investigation: a reading of the hieroglyphic inscriptions of the Classic period (a.d. 250-900), mathematical analysis to recover Classic Maya astronomical practice, and a historiography of Maya astronomy. Quoted hieroglyphs appear throughout the text for cross-examination. Aldana reveals the social and political context of Maya astronomy by explicating the science and calendrical calculations found in the tablets of the Temple of Inscriptions and the Cross Group from the city of Palenque. He offers a compelling interpretation of an 819-day count, demonstrating its utility as an astronumerological tool that Maya scribes used to simplify complex calculations.
During troubled times in Palenque, Aldana contends, Kan Balam II devised a means to preserve the legitimacy of his ruling dynasty. He celebrated a re-creation of the city as a contemporary analogue of a mythical Creation on three levels: monumental construction for a public audience, artistic patronage for an elite audience, and a secret mathematical astronomical language only for rulers-elect. Discussing all of these efforts, Aldana focuses on the recovery of the secret language and its historical context.
Williams charts the history of inquiry into appetite between 1750 and 1950, as scientific and medical concepts of appetite shifted alongside developments in physiology, natural history, psychology, and ethology. She shows how, in the eighteenth century, trust in appetite was undermined when researchers who investigated ingestion and digestion began claiming that science alone could say which ways of eating were healthy and which were not. She goes on to trace nineteenth- and twentieth-century conflicts over the nature of appetite between mechanists and vitalists, experimentalists and bedside physicians, and localists and holists, illuminating struggles that have never been resolved. By exploring the core disciplines in investigations in appetite and eating, Williams reframes the way we think about food, nutrition, and the nature of health itself..
Panarchy describes the way systems—whether forests, electrical grids, agriculture, coastal surges, public health, or human economies and governance—are part of even larger systems that interact in unpredictable ways. Although humans desire resiliency and stability in our lives to help us understand the world and survive, nothing in nature is permanently stable. How can society anticipate and adjust to the changes we see around us? Where Panarchy proposed a framework to understand how these transformational cycles work and how we might influence them, Applied Panarchy takes the scholarship to the next level, demonstrating how these concepts have been modified and refined. The book shows how panarchy theory intersects with other disciplines, and how it directly influences natural resources management and environmental stewardship.
Intended as a text for graduate courses in environmental sciences and related fields, Applied Panarchy picks up where Panarchy left off, inspiring new generations of scholars, researchers, and professionals to put its ideas to work in practical ways.
There are some twenty-five words for “snow” in the Inupiaq language. Each word denotes a different kind of snow—fresh powder snow, hard pack, soft snow, very wet snow, or just snow. Such fine distinction is reasonable, for over the centuries, Natives of the Arctic have had to rely on their knowledge of the snow to survive. Now Matthew Sturm has prepared an educational children’s book designed to teach a new generation of Arctic residents the importance of Arctic snow cover. Fully illustrated to demonstrate the cycle of the snow cover, Apun covers each phase of the “snow year.” Geared towards grades 3–4, this is a must read for elementary science classes.
There are some twenty-five words for “snow” in the Inupiaq language. Each word denotes a different kind of snow—fresh powder snow, hard pack, soft snow, very wet snow, or just snow. Such fine distinction is reasonable, for over the centuries, Natives of the Arctic have had to rely on their knowledge of the snow to survive. Now Matthew Sturm has prepared an educational children’s book designed to teach a new generation of Arctic residents the importance of Arctic snow cover. Fully illustrated to demonstrate the cycle of the snow cover, Apun covers each phase of the “snow year.” Geared towards grades 3–4, this is a must read for elementary science classes.
This is by far the best and most comprehensive manual and illustrated guide to native and naturalized vascular plants—ferns, conifers, and flowering plants—growing in aquatic and wetland habitats in northeastern North America, from Newfoundland west to Minnesota and south to Virginia and Missouri. Published in two volumes, this long-awaited work completely revises and greatly expands Norman Fassett’s 1940 classic A Manual of Aquatic Plants, yet retains the features that made Fassett’s book so useful.
Features include:
* coverage of 1139 plant species, 1186 taxa, 295 genera, 109 families
* more than 600 pages of illustrations, and illustrations for more than 90% of the taxa
* keys for each species include references to corresponding illustrations
* habitat information, geographical ranges, and synonomy
* a chapter on nuisance aquatic weeds
* glossaries of botanical and habitat terms
* a full index for each volume
Wetland ecologists, botanists, resource managers, public naturalists, and environmentalists concerned with the preservation of wetland areas, which are increasingly threatened, will welcome this clear, workable, and comprehensive guide.
This is by far the best and most comprehensive manual and illustrated guide to native and naturalized vascular plants—ferns, conifers, and flowering plants—growing in aquatic and wetland habitats in northeastern North America, from Newfoundland west to Minnesota and south to Virginia and Missouri. Published in two volumes, this long-awaited work completely revises and greatly expands Norman Fassett’s 1940 classic A Manual of Aquatic Plants, yet retains the features that made Fassett’s book so useful.
Features include:
* coverage of 1139 plant species, 1186 taxa, 295 genera, 109 families
* more than 600 pages of illustrations, and illustrations for more than 90% of the taxa
* keys for each species include references to corresponding illustrations
* habitat information, geographical ranges, and synonomy
* a chapter on nuisance aquatic weeds
* glossaries of botanical and habitat terms
* a full index for each volume
Wetland ecologists, botanists, resource managers, public naturalists, and environmentalists concerned with the preservation of wetland areas, which are increasingly threatened, will welcome this clear, workable, and comprehensive guide.
Focusing on long-term change, this book considers ethnographic literature, archaeological evidence, and environmental data spanning thousands of years of human presence to understand human perception and construction of landscape. The contributors offer cohesive and synthetic studies emphasizing hunter-gatherers and subsistence farmers.
Using landscape as both reality and metaphor, Archaeological Landscapes on the High Plains explores the different and changing ways that people interacted with place in this transitional zone between the Rocky Mountains and the eastern prairies.
The contemporary archaeologists working in this small area have chosen diverse approaches to understand the past and its relationship to the present. Through these ten case studies, this variety is highlighted but leads to a common theme - that the High Plains contains important locales to which people, over generations or millennia, return. Providing both data and theory on a region that has not previously received much attention from archaeologists, especially compared with other regions in North America, this volume is a welcome addition to the literature. Contributors:
o Paul Burnett
o Oskar Burger
o Minette C. Church
o Philip Duke
o Kevin Gilmore
o Eileen Johnson
o Mark D. Mitchell
o Michael R. Peterson
o Lawrence Todd
A material history of haptics technology that raises new questions about the relationship between touch and media
Since the rise of radio and television, we have lived in an era defined increasingly by the electronic circulation of images and sounds. But the flood of new computing technologies known as haptic interfaces—which use electricity, vibration, and force feedback to stimulate the sense of touch—offering an alternative way of mediating and experiencing reality.
In Archaeologies of Touch, David Parisi offers the first full history of these increasingly vital technologies, showing how the efforts of scientists and engineers over the past three hundred years have gradually remade and redefined our sense of touch. Through lively analyses of electrical machines, videogames, sex toys, sensory substitution systems, robotics, and human–computer interfaces, Parisi shows how the materiality of touch technologies has been shaped by attempts to transform humans into more efficient processors of information.
With haptics becoming ever more central to emerging virtual-reality platforms (immersive bodysuits loaded with touch-stimulating actuators), wearable computers (haptic messaging systems like the Apple Watch’s Taptic Engine), and smartphones (vibrations that emulate the feel of buttons and onscreen objects), Archaeologies of Touch offers a timely and provocative engagement with the long history of touch technology that helps us confront and question the power relations underpinning the project of giving touch its own set of technical media.
Scientists have long speculated on the impact of extreme natural catastrophes on human societies. Archeology and Volcanism in Central America provides dramatic evidence of the effects of several volcanic disasters on a major civilization of the Western Hemisphere, that of the Maya.
During the past 2,000 years, four volcanic eruptions have taken place in the Zapotitán Valley of southern El Salvador. One, the devastating eruption of Ilopango around A.D. 300, forced a major migration, pushing the Mayan people north to the Yucatán Peninsula. Although later eruptions did not have long-range implications for cultural change, one of the subsequent eruptions preserved the Cerén site—a Mesoamerican Pompeii where the bodies of the villagers, the palm-thatched roofs of their houses, the pots of food in their pantries, even the corn plants in their fields were preserved with remarkable fidelity.
Throughout 1978, a multidisciplinary team of anthropologists, archeologists, geologists, biologists, and others sponsored by the University of Colorado's Protoclassic Project researched and excavated the results of volcanism in the Zapotitan Valley—a key Mesoamerican site that contemporary political strife has since rendered inaccessible.
The result is an outstanding contribution to our understanding of the impact of volcanic eruptions on early Mayan civilization. These investigations clearly demonstrate that the Maya inhabited this volcanically hazardous valley in order to reap the short-term benefits that the volcanic ash produced—fertile soil, fine clays, and obsidian deposits.
A veteran of thirty years of field research throughout the Granite State, Starbuck revisits some of his own sites, including excavations at the New England Glassworks in Temple, two prehistoric sites on the Merrimack River, the Joseph Hazeltine pottery workshop outside Concord, the Governor Wentworth Estate in Wolfeboro, and his own long-term survey and excavation project at Canterbury Shaker Village. At the same time, though, Starbuck includes the work of other contemporary New Hampshire archeologists, representative sites of "old-timers" whose digs preceded his arrival, and the investigations of avocational diggers.
Starbuck's introduction offers an anecdotal history of archeological research in New Hampshire through the people who shaped it. Part I discusses discoveries that predate white settlement: the Paleo-Indian Period; the Archaic Period; and the Woodland Period. Part II moves from the seventeenth century to the present. Chapters include historical archeology (forts, farms, potters, Shakers); industrial archeology (mills, factories, railroads, dams, and bridges); and nautical archeology (discoveries in the state's lakes and on the seacoast).
In addition to summarizing some of the more interesting finds, Starbuck includes stories about archeologists and the techniques they have used to glean information from the past. Overall, he provides a lively account of what it is like to practice archeology in a small but dynamic New England state.
"A sophisticated study of the colonization of scientific territory—specifically of rival attempts to design the dinosaur—and of the constructive (not just obstructive) role of social pressures in the making of 'lasting contributions' to science. Not least it is a joy to read, perkily irreverent at times and full of nice vignettes and memorable turns of phrase."—Roy Porter, Times Higher Education Supplement
The great mathematician Archimedes, a Sicilian Greek whose machines defended Syracuse against the Romans during the Second Punic War, was killed by a Roman after the city fell, yet it is largely Roman sources, and Greek texts aimed at Roman audiences, that preserve the stories about him. Archimedes' story, Mary Jaeger argues, thus becomes a locus where writers explore the intersection of Greek and Roman culture, and as such it plays an important role in Roman self-definition. Jaeger uses the biography of Archimedes as a hermeneutic tool, providing insight into the construction of the traditional historical narrative about the Roman conquest of the Greek world and the Greek cultural invasion of Rome.
By breaking down the narrative of Archimedes' life and examining how the various anecdotes that comprise it are embedded in their contexts, the book offers fresh readings of passages from both well-known and less-studied authors, including Polybius, Cicero, Livy, Vitruvius, Plutarch, Silius Italicus, Valerius Maximus, Johannes Tzetzes, and Petrarch.
Galileo, Leonardo, Newton, and Tesla revered him: Archimedes of Syracuse—an engineer who single-handedly defied the world’s most powerful army and a mathematician who knew more in 212 BCE than all of Europe would know for the next seventeen centuries. In this bold reimagining, modern polymath Nicholas Nicastro shines a new light on Archimedes’ life and work. Far from the aloof, physically inept figure of historical myth, Archimedes is revealed to be an ambitious, combative, and fiercely competitive man. A genius who challenged an empire, Archimedes emerges in this book as the world’s first fully modern scientist—millennia before his intellectual descendants transformed our world.
In the final decades of the twentieth century, the advent of evolutionary developmental biology (evo-devo) offered a revolutionary new perspective that transformed the classical neo-Darwinian, gene-centered study of evolution. In The Architecture of Evolution, Marco Tamborini demonstrates how this radical innovation was made possible by the largely forgotten study of morphology. Despite the key role morphology played in the development of evolutionary biology since the 1940s, the architecture of organisms was excluded from the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis. And yet, from the beginning of the twentieth century to the 1970s and ’80s, morphologists sought to understand how organisms were built and how organismal forms could be generated and controlled. The generation of organic form was, they believed, essential to understanding the mechanisms of evolution. Tamborini explores how the development of evo-devo and the recent organismal turn in biology involved not only the work of morphologists but those outside the biological community with whom they exchanged their data, knowledge, and practices. Together with architects and engineers, they worked to establish a mathematical and theoretical basis for the study of organic form as a mode of construction, developing and reinterpreting important notions that would play a central role in the development of evolutionary developmental biology in the late 1980s. This book sheds light not only on the interdisciplinary basis for many of the key concepts in current developmental biology but also on contributions to the study of organic form outside the English-speaking world.
"An important, cogently argued, subtle and rich study of a topic of great interest."
--Mieke Bal, University of Amsterdam
"A work of literary studies positioned at the intersection of tradition and innovation. Evelyne Ender's book brings fashionable cultural concerns to bear on traditional literary texts-her superb pedagogical skills lure and guide the reader through the most difficult psychoanalytical concepts."
--Nelly Furman, Cornell University
Evelyne Ender is Professor of French Studies, University of Washington. She is the author of Sexing the Mind: Nineteenth-Century Fictions of Hysteria.
Contributors:
Michel Batisse
William A. Dick-Peddie
Carl N. Hodges
Richard F. Logan
Roy E. Cameron
Clifford S. Christian
Klaus W. Flach
Ronald L. Heathcote
Douglas H. K. Lee
Lawrence K. Lustig
William G. McGinnies
Peveril Meigs
James T. Neal
Daniel A. Okun
Harland I. Padfield
Patricia Paylore
Rayden A. Perry
Roald A. Peterson
Robert L. Raikes
Courtland L. Smith
Guy D. Smith
Andrew Warren
John C. York
In the spirit of Voltaire—and occasionally in the spirit of P. G. Wodehouse—P. B. and J. S. Medawar have crafted for the life sciences a source of reference that is meant for browsing, a book both authoritative and filled with delights. The authors’ breadth of knowledge is encyclopedic— arranged, appropriately enough, from A to Z—but more than that, they illuminate the ideas of biology with wit and intelligence and uncommon good sense. They bridge the chasm in our culture between the technically and the humanistically trained, breaking the code of jargon that limits access to scientific understanding. The Medawars’ special gift is to offer, at the same time, a pleasurable introduction for the layman and a source of new insight for the specialist.
In this book we can find a clear and meaningful definition of interferon, a useful explanation of the immune system, and thoughtful essays on sociobiology, eugenics, and aging. But we also find: “It is a popular fallacy that chewing gum regains its flavor if removed from the mouth and parked, say, under a chair.”
Whether in a serious discussion of cancer or a whimsical reflection on “chicken and egg” imagery in science, the Medawars’ blend of fact, literary allusion, historical anecdote, mythical and folk tradition, and even professional gossip is a rewarding exercise in biology as a humanistic endeavor.
This is a new translation, with introduction, commentary, and an explanatory glossary.
"Sachs's translation and commentary rescue Aristotle's text from the rigid, pedantic, and misleading versions that have until now obscured his thought. Thanks to Sachs's superb guidance, the Physics comes alive as a profound dialectical inquiry whose insights into the enduring questions about nature, cause, change, time, and the 'infinite' are still pertinent today. Using such guided studies in class has been exhilarating both for myself and my students." ––Leon R. Kass, The Committee on Social Thought, University of Chicago
Aristotle’s Physics is the only complete and coherent book we have from the ancient world in which a thinker of the first rank seeks to say something about nature as a whole. For centuries, Aristotle’s inquiry into the causes and conditions of motion and rest dominated science and philosophy. To understand the intellectual assumptions of a powerful world view—and the roots of the Scientific Revolution—reading Aristotle is critical. Yet existing translations of Aristotle’s Physics have made it difficult to understand either Aristotle’s originality or the lasting value of his work.
In this volume in the Masterworks of Discovery series, Joe Sachs provides a new plain-spoken English translation of all of Aristotle’s classic treatise and accompanies it with a long interpretive introduction, a running explication of the text, and a helpful glossary. He succeeds brilliantly in fulfilling the aim of this innovative series: to give the general reader the tools to read and understand a masterwork of scientific discovery.
While early menageries were anything but the centers of conservation that many zoos are today, a concern with wildlife preservation has been an integral component of the modern, professionally run zoo since the nineteenth century. From captive breeding initiatives to rewilding programs, zoos and aquariums have long been at the cutting edge of research and conservation science, sites of impressive new genetic and reproductive techniques. Today, their efforts reach even further beyond recreation, with educational programs, community-based conservation initiatives, and international, collaborative programs designed to combat species extinction and protect habitats at a range of scales. Addressing related topics as diverse as zoo animal welfare, species reintroductions, amphibian extinctions, and whether zoos can truly be “wild,” this book explores the whole range of research and conservation practices that spring from zoos and aquariums while emphasizing the historical, scientific, and ethical traditions that shape these efforts. Also featuring an inspiring foreword by the late George Rabb, president emeritus of the Chicago Zoological Society / Brookfield Zoo, The Ark and Beyond illuminates these institutions’ growing significance to the preservation of global biodiversity in this century.
Thirty-five years later, with Smith retired and Bonar long gone from the park service but still drawing, Bonar’s weathered and battered copy of the atlas was seized by a diverse cadre of amateur admirers motivated by fears of its damage or loss. Their fears were certainly justified; after all, the pages were now jammed to the margins with some 3,500 drawings, and the volume had already survived one accidental dunking in an Ozark stream.
An Arkansas Florilegium brings Smith’s and Bonar’s knowledge and lifelong diligence to the world in this unique mix of art, science, and Arkansas saga.
Hewsen has divided the maps into five sections, each of which begins with a chronology of important dates and a historical introduction to the period. Specialized maps include Ptolemy's second-century map of Armenia, as well as maps of Roman, Cilician, Ottoman, tsarist, and Soviet Armenia. Other maps show the Persian khanate of Erevan, the Caucasian campaigns of World War I, the Armenian Genocide, the Armenian monuments in Turkey and Transcaucasia, the worldwide diaspora, ground plans of selected cities, and plans of the great monastery of Echmiadzin in 1660, 1890, and 1990. The atlas concludes with maps portraying the Karabagh war and the new Armenian Republic, and an extensive bibliography compiles references to the vast historical, ethnological, and travel literature on the region.
The first comprehensive and authoritative atlas of any of the former Soviet republics, this book does not treat Armenia in isolation, but instead sets it within the context of Caucasia as a whole, providing detailed information on neighboring regions such as Georgia and Azerbaijan. Armenia: A Historical Atlas will be an essential reference and an important teaching tool for generations to come.
A richly illustrated, captivating study of army ants, nature’s preeminent social hunters.
A swarm raid is one of nature’s great spectacles. In tropical rainforests around the world, army ants march in groups by the thousands to overwhelm large solitary invertebrates, along with nests of termites, wasps, and other ants. They kill and dismember their prey and carry it back to their nest, where their hungry brood devours it. They are the ultimate social hunters, demonstrating the most fascinating collective behavior.
In Army Ants we see how these insects play a crucial role in promoting and sustaining the biodiversity of tropical ecosystems. The ants help keep prey communities in check while also providing nutrition for other animals. Many species depend on army ants for survival, including a multitude of social parasites, swarm-following birds, and flies. And while their hunting behavior, and the rules that govern it, are clearly impressive, army ants display collective behavior in other ways that are no less dazzling. They build living nests, called bivouacs, using their bodies to protect the queen and larvae. The ants can even construct bridges over open space or obstacles by linking to one another using their feet. These incredible feats happen without central coordination. They are the result of local interactions—self-organization that benefits the society at large.
Through observations, stories, and stunning images, Daniel Kronauer brings these fascinating creatures to life. Army ants may be small, but their collective intelligence and impact on their environment are anything but.
Over sixty percent of all infectious human diseases, including tuberculosis, influenza, cholera, and hundreds more, are shared with other vertebrate animals. Arresting Contagion tells the story of how early efforts to combat livestock infections turned the United States from a disease-prone nation into a world leader in controlling communicable diseases. Alan Olmstead and Paul Rhode show that many innovations devised in the fight against animal diseases, ranging from border control and food inspection to drug regulations and the creation of federal research labs, provided the foundation for modern food safety programs and remain at the heart of U.S. public health policy.
America’s first concerted effort to control livestock diseases dates to the founding of the Bureau of Animal Industry (BAI) in 1884. Because the BAI represented a milestone in federal regulation of commerce and industry, the agency encountered major jurisdictional and constitutional obstacles. Nevertheless, it proved effective in halting the spread of diseases, counting among its early breakthroughs the discovery of Salmonella and advances in the understanding of vector-borne diseases.
By the 1940s, government policies had eliminated several major animal diseases, saving hundreds of thousands of lives and establishing a model for eradication that would be used around the world. Although scientific advances played a key role, government interventions did as well. Today, a dominant economic ideology frowns on government regulation of the economy, but the authors argue that in this case it was an essential force for good.
In the early twentieth century communities made creative use of the new theories of heredity in circulation at the time, including the now largely forgotten mutation theory of Hugo de Vries. Science fiction writers, socialists, feminists, and utopians are among those who seized on the amazing possibilities of rapid and potentially controllable evolution. De Vries’s highly respected scientific theory only briefly captured the attention of the scientific community, but its many fans appropriated it for their own wildly imaginative ends. Writers from H.G. Wells and Edith Wharton to Charlotte Perkins Gilman, J.B.S. Haldane, and Aldous Huxley created a new kind of imaginary future, which Jim Endersby calls the biotopia. It took the ambiguous possibilities of biology—utopian and dystopian—and reimagined them in ways that still influence the public’s understanding of the life sciences. The Arrival of the Fittest recovers the fascinating, long-forgotten origins of ideas that have informed works of fiction from Brave New World to the X-Men movies, all while reflecting on the lessons—positive and negative—that this period might offer us.
" . . . a must for every dyer. The recipes are explicit and detailed as to success and failure."—Mary Frances Davidson
For several thousand years, all dyes were of animal, vegetable, or mineral origin, and many ancient civilizations possessed excellent dye technologies. The first synthetic dye was produced in 1856, and the use of traditional dyes declined rapidly thereafter. By 1915 few non-synthetics were used by industry or craftspeople. The craft revivals of the 1920s explored traditional methods of natural dyeing to some extent, particularly with wool, although the great eighteenth- and nineteenth-century dye manuals, which recorded the older processes, remained largely forgotten.
In The Art and Craft of Natural Dyeing, J. N. Liles consolidates the lore of the older dyers with his own first-hand experience to produce both a history of natural dyes and a practical manual for using pre–synthetic era processes on all the natural fibers--cotton, linen, silk, and wool. A general section on dyeing and mordanting and a glossary introduce the beginner to dye technology. In subsequent chapters, Liles summarizes the traditional dye methods available for each major color group. Scores of recipes provide detailed instructions on how to collect ingredients--flowers, weeds, insects, wood, minerals--prepare the dyevat, troubleshoot, and achieve specific shades.
The book will appeal not only to beginning and veteran dyers but to students of restorations and reconstruction as well as to craftspeople--spinners, quilters, weavers, knitters, and other textile artists--interested in natural dyes for their beauty and historical authenticity.
The Author: J. N. Liles is professor of zoology at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He has taught at Arrowmont School and other regional craft schools and has exhibited his work at the Arrowmont School, the Southern Highland Handicraft Guild Folk Art Center, and the Carol Reece Museum.
Whether you are selling a house, closing a business deal, settling a divorce, arbitrating a labor dispute, or trying to hammer out an international treaty, Howard Raiffa’s new book will measurably improve your negotiating skills.
Although it is a sophisticated self-help book—directed to the lawyer, labor arbitrator, business executive, college dean, diplomat—it is not cynical or Machiavellian: Raiffa emphasizes problems and situations where, with the kinds of skills he aims to develop, disputants can achieve results that are beneficial to all parties concerned. Indeed, he argues that the popular “zero-sum” way of thinking, according to which one side must lose if the other wins, often makes both sides worse off than they would be when bargaining for joint mutual gains.
Using a vast array of specific cases and clear, helpful diagrams, Raiffa not only elucidates the step-by-step processes of negotiation but also translates this deeper understanding into practical guidelines for negotiators and “intervenors.” He examines the mechanics of negotiation in imaginative fashion, drawing on his extensive background in game theory and decision analysis, on his quarter-century of teaching nonspecialists in schools of business and public policy, on his personal experiences as director of an international institute dealing with East/West problems, and on the results of simulated negotiation exercises with hundreds of participants.
There are popular books on the art of winning and scholarly books on the science of negotiation, but this is the first book to bridge the two currents. Shrewd, accessible, and engagingly written, it shows how a little analysis sprinkled with a touch of art can work to the advantage of any negotiator.
This second edition contains:
• the different layouts for film, television, documentary and corporate screenplays
• a detailed analysis of what is required from a premise, an outline, a step outline, a treatment and a first draft
• a simple stage by stage guide to the inevitable re-write
• tips on finding an agent.
This new approach to writing for film and television covers everything from finding an idea to writing a finished screenplay. The author's framework, 'A Creative Matrix', brings together all the elements of screenplay writing - from story, character, theme, and dramatic structure to plot, genre, tone and style in an understandable way that is easy to follow. His analysis includes illustrating what comprises a good thriller, identifying the different types of sit-com, and showing the qualities of a screen romance that both works and convinces.
The author uses examples from across European, American and World Cinema, as well as television, and this revised edition now contains a comprehensive index.
The Art of Being a Parasite is an extensive collection of these and other wonderful and weird stories that illuminate the ecology and evolution of interactions between species. Claude Combes illustrates what it means to be a parasite by considering every stage of its interactions, from invading to reproducing and leaving the host. An accessible and engaging follow-up to Combes's Parasitism, this book will be of interest to both scholars and nonspecialists in the fields of biodiversity, natural history, ecology, public health, and evolution.
Since ancient times people have depended on medical practitioners to enhance life, to treat illness and injuries, and to help reduce pain and suffering. The scientifically based discipline that we know today stands beside diverse traditions, belief systems, and bodies of medical knowledge that have evolved in fascinating ways across cultures and continents. Throughout this history, successive generations have created artistic representations of these varied aspects of medicine, illustrating instruction manuals, documenting treatments, and creating works of art that enable individuals to express their feelings and ideas about medicine, health, and illness. From ancient wall paintings and tomb carvings to sculpture, installations, and digitally created artworks, the results are extraordinary and pay tribute to how medicine has affected our lives and the lives of our ancestors.
Drawing on the remarkable holdings of the Wellcome Collection in London, The Art of Medicine offers a unique gallery of rarely seen paintings, artifacts, drawings, prints, and extracts from manuscripts and manuals to provide a fascinating visual insight into our knowledge of the human body and mind, and how both have been treated with medicine. Julie Anderson, Emm Barnes, and Emma Shackleton take readers on a fascinating visual journey through the history of medical practice, exploring contemporary biomedical images, popular art, and caricature alongside venerable Chinese scrolls, prehistoric Mesoamerican drawings, paintings of the European Renaissance, medieval Persian manuscripts, and more. The result is a rare and remarkable visual account of what it was and is to be human in sickness and health.
The Art, Science, and Magic of the Data Curation Network: A Retrospective on Cross Institutional Collaboration captures the results of a project retrospective meeting and describes the necessary components of the DCN’s sustained collaboration in the hopes that the insights will be of use to other collaborative efforts. In particular, the authors describe the successes of the community and challenges of launching a cross-institutional network. Additionally, this publication details the administrative, tool-based, and trust-based structures necessary for establishing this community, the “radical collaboration” that is the cornerstone of the DCN, and potential future collaborations to address shared challenges in libraries and research data management. This in-depth case study provides an overview of the critical work of launching a collaborative network and transitioning to sustainability. This publication will be of special interest to research librarians, data curators, and anyone interested in academic community building.
This volume develops from the studies published in Roy Ascott's highly successful Reframing Consciousness, documenting the very latest research from those connected with the CAiiA-STAR centre and its associated conferences. Their work embodies artistic and theoretical research in new media and telematics including aspects of artificial life, robotics, technoetics, performance, computer music and intelligent architecture, to growing international acclaim.
In The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin proposed that an ant’s brain, no larger than a pin’s head, must be sophisticated to accomplish all that it does. Yet today many people still find it surprising that insects and other arthropods show behaviors that are much more complex than innate reflexes. They are products of versatile brains which, in a sense, think.
Fascinating in their own right, arthropods provide fundamental insights into how brains process and organize sensory information to produce learning, strategizing, cooperation, and sociality. Nicholas Strausfeld elucidates the evolution of this knowledge, beginning with nineteenth-century debates about how similar arthropod brains were to vertebrate brains. This exchange, he shows, had a profound and far-reaching impact on attitudes toward evolution and animal origins. Many renowned scientists, including Sigmund Freud, cut their professional teeth studying arthropod nervous systems. The greatest neuroanatomist of them all, Santiago Ramón y Cajal—founder of the neuron doctrine—was awed by similarities between insect and mammalian brains.
Writing in a style that will appeal to a broad readership, Strausfeld weaves anatomical observations with evidence from molecular biology, neuroethology, cladistics, and the fossil record to explore the neurobiology of the largest phylum on earth—and one that is crucial to the well-being of our planet. Highly informative and richly illustrated, Arthropod Brains offers an original synthesis drawing on many fields, and a comprehensive reference that will serve biologists for years to come.
Drawing on a wide range of texts, from understudied ethnographic and scientific works to canonical literature and philosophy, Sophie Salvo uncovers the prehistories of the inextricability of gender and language. Taking German discourses on language as her focus, she argues that we are not the inventors but, rather, the inheritors and adaptors of the notion of gender and language’s interrelation. Particularly during the long nineteenth century, ideas about sexual differences shaped how language was understood, classified, and analyzed. As Salvo explains, philosophers asserted the patriarchal origins of language, linguists investigated “women’s languages” and grammatical gender, and literary Modernists imagined “feminine” sign systems, and in doing so they not only deemed sex a necessary category of language but also produced a plethora of gendered tropes and fictions, which they used both to support their claims and delimit their disciplines.
Articulating Difference charts new territory, revealing how gendered conceptions of language make possible the misogynistic logic of exclusion that underlies arguments claiming, for example, that women cannot be great orators or writers. While Salvo focuses on how male scholars aligned language study with masculinity, she also uncovers how women responded by highlighting the contributions of understudied nineteenth-century works on language that women wrote even as they were excluded from academic opportunities.
In Articulating the World, Joseph Rouse argues that the most pressing challenge for advocates of naturalism today is precisely this: to understand how to make sense of a scientific conception of nature as itself part of nature, scientifically understood. Drawing upon recent developments in evolutionary biology and the philosophy of science, Rouse defends naturalism in response to this challenge by revising both how we understand our scientific conception of the world and how we situate ourselves within it.
We imagine that we are both in control of and controlled by our bodies—autonomous and yet automatic. This entanglement, according to David W. Bates, emerged in the seventeenth century when humans first built and compared themselves with machines. Reading varied thinkers from Descartes to Kant to Turing, Bates reveals how time and time again technological developments offered new ways to imagine how the body’s automaticity worked alongside the mind’s autonomy. Tracing these evolving lines of thought, An Artificial History of Natural Intelligence offers a new theorization of the human as a being that is dependent on technology and produces itself as an artificial automaton without a natural, outside origin.
The Arts of the Microbial World explores the significance of fermentation phenomena, both as life processes and as technologies, in Japanese scientific culture. Victoria Lee’s careful study documents how Japanese scientists and skilled workers sought to use the microbe’s natural processes to create new products, from soy-sauce mold starters to MSG, vitamins to statins. In traditional brewing houses as well as in the food, fine chemical, and pharmaceutical industries across Japan, they showcased their ability to deal with the enormous sensitivity and variety of the microbial world.
Charting developments in fermentation science from the turn of the twentieth century, when Japan was an industrializing country on the periphery of the world economy, to 1980 when it had emerged as a global technological and economic power, Lee highlights the role of indigenous techniques in modern science as it took shape in Japan. In doing so, she reveals how knowledge of microbes lay at the heart of some of Japan’s most prominent technological breakthroughs in the global economy.
At a moment when twenty-first-century developments in the fields of antibiotic resistance, the microbiome, and green chemistry suggest that the traditional eradication-based approach to the microbial world is unsustainable, twentieth-century Japanese microbiology provides a new, broader vantage for understanding and managing microbial interactions with society.
Scientists are famous for believing in the proven and peer-accepted, the very ground that pioneering artists often subvert; they recognize correct and incorrect where artists see only true and false. And yet in some individuals, crossover learning provides a remarkable kind of catalyst to innovation that sparks the passion, curiosity, and freedom to pursue--and to realize--challenging ideas in culture, industry, society, and research. This book is an attempt to show how innovation in the "post-Google generation" is often catalyzed by those who cross a conventional line so firmly drawn between the arts and the sciences.
David Edwards describes how contemporary creators achieve breakthroughs in the arts and sciences by developing their ideas in an intermediate zone of human creativity where neither art nor science is easily defined. These creators may innovate in culture, as in the development of new forms of music composition (through use of chaos theory), or, perhaps, through pioneering scientific investigation in the basement of the Louvre. They may innovate in research institutions, society, or industry, too. Sometimes they experiment in multiple environments, carrying a single idea to social, industrial, and cultural fruition by learning to view traditional art-science barriers as a zone of creativity that Edwards calls artscience. Through analysis of original stories of artscience innovation in France, Germany, and the United States, he argues for the development of a new cultural and educational environment, particularly relevant to today's need to innovate in increasingly complex ways, in which artists and scientists team up with cultural, industrial, social, and educational partners.
Stefan Arvidsson traces the evolution of the Aryan idea through the nineteenth century—from its roots in Bible-based classifications and William Jones’s discovery of commonalities among Sanskrit, Latin, and Greek to its use by scholars in fields such as archaeology, anthropology, folklore, comparative religion, and history. Along the way, Arvidsson maps out the changing ways in which Aryans were imagined and relates such shifts to social, historical, and political processes. Considering the developments of the twentieth century, Arvidsson focuses on the adoption of Indo-European scholarship (or pseudoscholarship) by the Nazis and by Fascist Catholics.
A wide-ranging discussion of the intellectual history of the past two centuries, Aryan Idols links the pervasive idea of the Indo-European people to major scientific, philosophical, and political developments of the times, while raising important questions about the nature of scholarship as well.
The essays collected in As the Condor Soars focus on the role that ornithologists have played in research, management, and conservation debates across the state over the past century. Contributors to this volume discuss new developments in the study of birds, from sophisticated tracking devices to the evolving connections between ornithologists and artists. Readers also learn about the important role of citizen scientists in saving our treasured birds. These essays provide hope for species recovery, despite environmental threats, when scientists and the public work together. They also offer to other regions examples of adaptive management learned through these efforts.
This full-color book is beautifully illustrated by noted Oregon Coast artist Ram Papish and includes over eighty stunning photographs donated by some of the state’s finest nature photographers. Fifty capsule biographies of noted Oregon avian scientists round out the inspirational stories about the monumental efforts that have taken shape in recent decades. Accessibly written for scientists and laypeople alike, As the Condor Soars is a gift to everyone who cares about the conservation and restoration of Oregon’s birds.
The Important Plant Areas of Mozambique is based on the Mozambique TIPAs project run in collaboration between Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Mozambique’s Agricultural Research Institute (Instituto de Investigação Agrária de Moçambique – IIAM), and the University Eduardo Mondlane. Drawing on information from the TIPAs database, The Important Plant Areas of Mozambique includes color maps and photographs, site descriptions, and tables to present information on the botanical significance, habitat, and geology of the region. The book will also address conservation issues and ecosystem services to promote Mozambique’s critical plant sites and inform conservation leaders in government, NGOs, universities, and local communities about Mozambique’s threatened habitats.
Ruth Leys’s brilliant, much anticipated history, therefore, is a story of controversy and disagreement. The Ascent of Affect focuses on the post–World War II period, when interest in emotions as an object of study began to revive. Leys analyzes the ongoing debate over how to understand emotions, paying particular attention to the continual conflict between camps that argue for the intentionality or meaning of emotions but have trouble explaining their presence in non-human animals and those that argue for the universality of emotions but struggle when the question turns to meaning. Addressing the work of key figures from across the spectrum, considering the potentially misleading appeal of neuroscience for those working in the humanities, and bringing her story fully up to date by taking in the latest debates, Leys presents here the most thorough analysis available of how we have tried to think about how we feel.
Once upon a time, neuroscience was born. A dazzling array of neurotechnologies emerged that, according to popular belief, have finally begun to unlock the secrets of the brain. But as the brain sciences now extend into all corners of cultural, social, political, and economic life, a yet newer world has taken shape: “neuroculture,” which goes further than ever before to tackle the profound ethical implications we face in consequence.
The Assemblage Brain unveils a major new concept of sense making, one that challenges conventional scientific and philosophical understandings of the brain. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari, Tony D. Sampson calls for a radical critical theory that operates in the interferences between philosophy, science, art, and politics. From this novel perspective the book is structured around two questions: “What can be done to a brain?” and “What can a brain do?” Sampson examines the rise of neuroeconomics in informing significant developments in computer work, marketing, and the neuropharmaceutical control of inattentiveness in the classroom. Moving beyond the neurocapitalist framework, he then reestablishes a place for proto-subjectivity in which biological and cultural distinctions are reintegrated in an understanding of the brain as an assemblage.
The Assemblage Brain unravels the conventional image of thought that underpins many scientific and philosophical accounts of how sense is produced, providing a new view of our current time in which capitalism and the neurosciences endeavor to colonize the brain.
A lively account of how dinosaurs became a symbol of American power and prosperity and gripped the popular imagination during the Gilded Age, when their fossil remains were collected and displayed in museums financed by North America’s wealthiest business tycoons.
Although dinosaur fossils were first found in England, a series of dramatic discoveries during the late 1800s turned North America into a world center for vertebrate paleontology. At the same time, the United States emerged as the world’s largest industrial economy, and creatures like Tyrannosaurus, Brontosaurus, and Triceratops became emblems of American capitalism. Large, fierce, and spectacular, American dinosaurs dominated the popular imagination, making front-page headlines and appearing in feature films.
Assembling the Dinosaur follows dinosaur fossils from the field to the museum and into the commercial culture of North America’s Gilded Age. Business tycoons like Andrew Carnegie and J. P. Morgan made common cause with vertebrate paleontologists to capitalize on the widespread appeal of dinosaurs, using them to project American exceptionalism back into prehistory. Learning from the show-stopping techniques of P. T. Barnum, museums exhibited dinosaurs to attract, entertain, and educate the public. By assembling the skeletons of dinosaurs into eye-catching displays, wealthy industrialists sought to cement their own reputations as generous benefactors of science, showing that modern capitalism could produce public goods in addition to profits. Behind the scenes, museums adopted corporate management practices to control the movement of dinosaur bones, restricting their circulation to influence their meaning and value in popular culture.
Tracing the entwined relationship of dinosaurs, capitalism, and culture during the Gilded Age, Lukas Rieppel reveals the outsized role these giant reptiles played during one of the most consequential periods in American history.
Understanding how ecosystems are assembled -- how the species that make up a particular biological community arrive in an area, survive, and interact with other species -- is key to successfully restoring degraded ecosystems. Yet little attention has been paid to the idea of assembly rules in ecological restoration,
in both the scientific literature and in on-the-ground restoration efforts.
Assembly Rules and Restoration Ecology, edited by Vicky M. Temperton, Richard J. Hobbs, Tim Nuttle, and Stefan Halle, addresses that shortcoming, offering an introduction, overview, and synthesis of the potential role of assembly rules theory in restoration ecology. It brings together information and ideas relating to ecosystem assembly in a restoration context, and includes material from a wide geographic range and a variety of perspectives.
Assembly Rules and Restoration Ecology contributes new knowledge and ideas to the subjects of assembly rules and restoration ecology and represents an important summary of the current status of an emerging field. It combines theoretical and practical aspects of restoration, making it a vital compendium of information and ideas for restoration ecologists, professionals, and practitioners.
Asteroids II is not a sequel, per se, to the 1979 book Asteroids. It offered a fresh treatment intended to stand on its own as a complete description of the current understanding of the field. It was published in December 1989. The work showcased a large international collaboration, a sign of an active and growing discipline.
This collective knowledge, prepared by a team of more than one hundred international authorities on asteroids, includes new insights into asteroid-meteorite connections, possible relationships with comets, and the hazards posed by asteroids colliding with Earth. The book's contents include reports on surveys based on remote observation and summaries of physical properties; results of in situ exploration; studies of dynamical, collisional, cosmochemical, and weathering evolutionary processes; and discussions of asteroid families and the relationships between asteroids and other solar system bodies. Two previous Space Science Series volumes have established standards for research into asteroids. Asteroids III carries that tradition forward in a book that will stand as the definitive source on its subject for the next decade.
Asteroids IV sets the latest scientific foundation upon which all these topics and more will be built upon for the future. Nearly 150 international authorities through more than 40 chapters convey the definitive state of the field by detailing our current astronomical, compositional, geological, and geophysical knowledge of asteroids, as well as their unique physical processes and interrelationships with comets and meteorites. Most importantly, this volume outlines the outstanding questions that will focus and drive researchers and students of all ages toward new advances in the coming decade and beyond.
As environmental, political, and public health crises multiply on Earth, we are also at the dawn of a new space race in which governments team up with celebrity billionaires to exploit the cosmos for human gain. The best-known of these pioneers are selling different visions of the future: while Elon Musk and SpaceX seek to establish a human presence on Mars, Jeff Bezos and Blue Origin work toward moving millions of earthlings into rotating near-Earth habitats. Despite these distinctions, these two billionaires share a core utopian project: the salvation of humanity through the exploitation of space.
In Astrotopia, philosopher of science and religion Mary-Jane Rubenstein pulls back the curtain on the not-so-new myths these space barons are peddling, like growth without limit, energy without guilt, and salvation in a brand-new world. As Rubenstein reveals, we have already seen the destructive effects of this frontier zealotry in the centuries-long history of European colonialism. Much like the imperial project on Earth, this renewed effort to conquer space is presented as a religious calling: in the face of a coming apocalypse, some very wealthy messiahs are offering an other-worldly escape to a chosen few. But Rubenstein does more than expose the values of capitalist technoscience as the product of bad mythologies. She offers a vision of exploring space without reproducing the atrocities of earthly colonialism, encouraging us to find and even make stories that put cosmic caretaking over profiteering.
In Atlas of a Threatened Planet, award-winning book and graphic designer Esther Gonstalla digs into these questions and many more through her attractive and easy-to-understand infographics. Gonstalla is known for breaking complex topics into digestible and memorable pieces in her popular “Our World in 50 Graphics” book series. In this book, she turns her designer’s eye to the most critical threats to our environment, from shrinking glaciers and declining biodiversity to shifting ocean currents. These accessible and fun illustrations will show readers that, although the threats are grave, not all is lost. Changes in technology, infrastructure, and our outlook can still help us protect the places we love.
Atlas of a Threatened Planet will spark your curiosity and invite you to see the Earth in a new way. It is written for all who want to understand the interlocking pieces of our home—and fight for the best ideas and strategies to save it.
Edited by historian Nancy S. Seasholes, this landmark volume captures all aspects of Boston’s past in a series of fifty-seven stunning full-color spreads. Each section features newly created thematic maps that focus on moments and topics in that history. These maps are accompanied by hundreds of historical and contemporary illustrations and explanatory text from historians and other expert contributors. They illuminate a wide range of topics including Boston’s physical and economic development, changing demography, and social and cultural life. In lavishly produced detail, The Atlas of Boston History offers a vivid, refreshing perspective on the development of this iconic American city.
Contributors
Robert J. Allison, Robert Charles Anderson, John Avault, Joseph Bagley, Charles Bahne, Laurie Baise, J. L. Bell, Rebekah Bryer, Aubrey Butts, Benjamin L. Carp, Amy D. Finstein, Gerald Gamm, Richard Garver, Katherine Grandjean, Michelle Granshaw, James Green, Dean Grodzins, Karl Haglund, Ruth-Ann M. Harris, Arthur Krim, Stephanie Kruel, Kerima M. Lewis, Noam Maggor, Dane A. Morrison, James C. O’Connell, Mark Peterson, Marshall Pontrelli, Gayle Sawtelle, Nancy S. Seasholes, Reed Ueda, Lawrence J. Vale, Jim Vrabel, Sam Bass Warner, Jay Wickersham, and Susan Wilson
With an emphasis on the intricate workings of the Gulf, a team of scientists led by Markes E. Johnson and Jorge Ledesma-Vázquez explores how marine invertebrates such as corals and bivalves, as well as certain algae, contribute to the operation of a vast “organic engine” that acts as a significant carbon trap. The Atlas reveals that the role of these organisms in the ecology of the Gulf was greatly underestimated in the past. The organisms that live in these environments (or provide the sediments for beaches and dunes) are mass producers of calcium carbonate. Until now, no book has considered the centrality of calcium carbonate production as it functions today across multiple ecosystems and how it has evolved over time.
An important work of scholarship that also evokes the region’s natural splendor, the Atlas will be of interest to a wide range of scientists, including geologists, paleontologists, marine biologists, ecologists, and conservation biologists.
Oceans drive the world’s climate, nurture marine ecosystems full of aquatic life, and provide shipping lanes that have defined the global economy for centuries. And few realize that half of the world’s population lives in a coastal region within easy reach of one. Yet human activities such as commercial fishing, coastal real estate development, and industrial pollution have taken their toll on the seas. The first book of its kind, The Atlas of Coasts and Oceans documents the fraught relationship between humans and the earth’s largest bodies of water—and outlines the conservation steps needed to protect the marine environment for generations to come.
The Atlas offers a fascinating and often sobering account of how urbanization, climate change, offshore oil drilling, shipping routes, global tourism, and maritime conflict have had a profound impact on the world’s oceans and coasts. Combining text and images in visually engaging, thematically organized map spreads, this volume addresses the ecological, environmental, and economic importance of marine phenomena such as coral reefs, eroding shorelines, hurricanes, and fish populations—and how development threatens to destroy the ultimate source of all life on the “blue planet.” Lavishly illustrated with global and regional maps, from the Arabian Gulf to the Great Barrier Reef, from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean, and all the other major global waterways, The Atlas of Coasts and Oceans will be the definitive companion to any study of its subject for years to come.
This first vegetation atlas for Madagascar, supported by the Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund, has combined vegetation data from fieldwork and satellite images into a map-based information system. The result is a conservation tool which will help Madagascar’s government and people to plan a more sustainable future. This atlas is also of great use to anyone studying or visiting the island.
Presented in both French and English, the atlas gives a brief history of vegetation mapping in Madagascar; the methodology used in compiling these new maps; and detailed descriptions of each vegetation type, illustrated with photographs and diagrams. Trends in deforestation, extent of occurrence and levels of protection are assessed for each vegetation type. Additional information includes roads, trails, rivers, airports, reserves and a full place name index.
The atlas comprises 36 maps in A3 format, all in high resolution colour.
Earlier this year, President Obama declared one of his top priorities to be “making sure that people are able to get enough to eat.” The United States spends about five billion dollars on food aid and related programs each year, but still, both domestically and internationally, millions of people are hungry. In 2006, the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations counted 850 million hungry people worldwide, but as food prices soared, an additional 100 million or more who were vulnerable succumbed to food insecurity.
If hunger were simply a matter of food production, no one would go without. There is more than enough food produced annually to provide every living person with a healthy diet, yet so many suffer from food shortages, unsafe water, and malnutrition every year. That’s because hunger is a complex political, economic, and ecological phenomenon. The interplay of these forces produces a geography of hunger that Thomas J. Bassett and Alex Winter-Nelson illuminate in this empowering book. The Atlas of World Hunger uses a conceptual framework informed by geography and agricultural economics to present a hunger index that combines food availability, household access, and nutritional outcomes into a single tool—one that delivers a fuller understanding of the scope of global hunger, its underlying mechanisms, and the ways in which the goals for ending hunger can be achieved. The first depiction of the geography of hunger worldwide, the Atlas will be an important resource for teachers, students, and anyone else interested in understanding the geography and causes of hunger. This knowledge, the authors argue, is a critical first step toward eliminating unnecessary suffering in a world of plenty.
In Atomic Environments: Nuclear Technologies, the Natural World, and Policymaking, 1945–1960, Neil S. Oatsvall examines how top officials in the Truman and Eisenhower administrations used environmental science to develop nuclear strategy at the beginning of the Cold War. While many people were involved in research and analysis during the period in question, it was at highest levels of executive decision-making where environmental science and nuclear science most clearly combined to shape the nation’s policies.
Oatsvall clearly demonstrates how the natural world and the scientific disciplines that study it became integral parts of nuclear science rather than adversarial fields of knowledge. But while nuclear technologies heavily depended on environmental science to develop, those same technologies frequently caused great harm to the natural world. Moreover, while some individuals expressed real anxieties about the damage wrought by nuclear technologies, policymakers as a class consistently made choices that privileged nuclear boosterism and secrecy, prioritizing institutional values over the lives and living systems that they were ostensibly charged to protect.
By scrutinizing institutional policymaking practices and agendas at the birth of the nuclear age, a constant set of values becomes clear. Oatsvall reveals an emerging technocratic class that routinely valued knowledge about the environment to help create and maintain a nuclear arsenal, despite its existential threat to life on earth and the negative effects many nuclear technologies had on ecosystems and the American people alike. Although policymakers took their charge to protect and advance the welfare of the United States and its people seriously, Atomic Environments demonstrates how they often failed to do so because their allegiance to the US nuclear hierarchy blinded them to the real risks and dangers of the nuclear age.
Akira Mizuta Lippit focuses on historical moments in which such modes of avisuality came into being—the arrival of cinema, which brought imagination to life; psychoanalysis, which exposed the psyche; the discovery of x-rays, which disclosed the inside of the body; and the “catastrophic light” of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which instituted an era of atomic discourses.
With a taut, poetic style, Lippit produces speculative readings of secret and shadow archives and visual structures or phenomenologies of the inside, charting the materiality of what both can and cannot be seen in the radioactive light of the twentieth century.
Akira Mizuta Lippit is professor of cinema, comparative literature, and Japanese culture at the University of Southern California. He is the author of Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife (Minnesota, 2000).
Tracing the alchemical roots of Robert Boyle’s famous mechanical philosophy, Newman shows that alchemy contributed to the mechanization of nature, a movement that lay at the very heart of scientific discovery. Boyle and his predecessors—figures like the mysterious medieval Geber or the Lutheran professor Daniel Sennert—provided convincing experimental proof that matter is made up of enduring particles at the microlevel. At the same time, Newman argues that alchemists created the operational criterion of an “atomic” element as the last point of analysis, thereby contributing a key feature to the development of later chemistry. Atomsand Alchemy thus provokes a refreshing debate about the origins of modern science and will be welcomed—and deliberated—by all who are interested in the development of scientific theory and practice.
If there is one thing we are short on these days, it’s attention. Attention is central to everything we do and think, yet it is mostly an intangible force, an invisible thing that connects us as subjects with the world around us. We pay attention to this or that, let our attention wander—we even stand at attention from time to time—yet rarely do we attend to attention itself. In this book, Gay Watson does just that, musing on attention as one of our most human impulses.
As Watson shows, the way we think about attention is usually through its instrumentality, by what can be achieved if we give something enough of it—say, a crisply written report, a newly built bookcase, or even a satisfied child who has yearned for engagement. Yet in losing ourselves to the objects of our fixation, we often neglect the process of attention itself. Exploring everything from attention’s effects on our neurons to attention deficit disorder, from the mindfulness movement to the relationship between attention and creativity, Watson examines attention in action through many disciplines and ways of life. Along the way, she offers interviews with an astonishing cast of creative people—from composers to poets to artists to psychologists—including John Luther Adams, Stephen Batchelor, Sue Blackmore, Guy Claxton, Edmund de Waal, Rick Hanson, Jane Hirshfield, Wayne Macgregor, Iain McGilchrist, Garry Fabian Miller, Alice and Peter Oswald, Ruth Ozeki, and James Turrell.
A valuable and timely account of something central to our lives yet all too often neglected, this book will appeal to anyone who has felt their attention under threat in the clamors of modern life.
In the past two decades, the familiar experience of attention--the emphasis on a particular mental activity so that it "fills the mind"--has been subjected to much scientific inquiry. David LaBerge now provides a systematic view of the attention process as it occurs in everyday perception, thinking, and action. Drawing from a variety of research methods and findings from cognitive psychology, neurobiology, and computer science, he presents a masterful synthesis of what is understood about attentional processing.
LaBerge explores how we are able to restrict the input of extraneous and confusing information, or prepare to process a future stimulus, in order to take effective action. As well as describing the pathways in the cortex presumed to be involved in attentional processing, he examines the hypothesis that two subcortical structures, the superior colliculus and the thalamus, contain circuit mechanisms that embody an algorithm of attention. In addition, he takes us through various ways of posing the problem, from an information-processing description of how attention works to a consideration of some of the cognitive and behavioral consequences of the brain's computations, such as desiring, judging, imaging, and remembering.
Attentional Processing is a highly sophisticated integration of contributions from several fields of neuroscience. It brings together the latest efforts to solve the puzzle of attention: how it works, how it is modulated, what its benefits are, and how it is expressed in the brain.
The evolutionist Ernst Mayr considered August Weismann “one of the great biologists of all time.” Yet the man who formulated the germ plasm theory—that inheritance is transmitted solely through the nuclei of the egg and sperm cells—has not received an in-depth historical examination. August Weismann reintroduces readers to a towering figure in the life sciences. In this first full-length biography, Frederick Churchill situates Weismann in the swirling intellectual currents of his era and demonstrates how his work paved the way for the modern synthesis of genetics and evolution in the twentieth century.
In 1859 Darwin’s tantalizing new idea stirred up a great deal of activity and turmoil in the scientific world, to a large extent because the underlying biological mechanisms of evolution through natural selection had not yet been worked out. Weismann’s achievement was to unite natural history, embryology, and cell biology under the capacious dome of evolutionary theory. In his major work on the germ plasm (1892), which established the material basis of heredity in the “germ cells,” Weismann delivered a crushing blow to Lamarck’s concept of the inheritance of acquired traits.
In this deeply researched biography, Churchill explains the development of Weismann’s pioneering work based on cytology and embryology and opens up an expanded history of biology from 1859 to 1914. August Weismann is sure to become the definitive account of an extraordinary life and career.
Starting at a basic level, the handbook begins appropriately with matters of immediate concern to someone who hopes to see an auroral display: what causes the aurora, where and when it is most often seen, and how best to capture it on film. Later sections provide a thorough and clear review of all aspects of auroral science, including the mysterious realm of auroral sound. In a concise and readable fashion, the handbook covers what is known about auroras, encompassing overviews of the northern Natives' legends and myths and the several theories geophysicists have produced to explain why auroras behave as they do. The Aurora Watcher's Handbook includes numerous illustrations, ranging from cartoons to color plates and drawings.
"I am confident [this book] will become the aurora watcher's bible for many years to come." (Sky & Telescope)
"This is participatory science at its best!" (Midwest Book Review)
"A delightful book, highly recommended." (CHOICE )
"A complete course for the layman with an interest in the northern lights." (Fairbanks Daily News-Miner)
"[Davis] has written the book in a smooth, how-it-works style, and his presentation is remarkably clear. . . . [He] expended much effort on this book, forming from his lifetime of knowledge a coherent and comprehensible picture of the aurora for the non-specialist." (ARCTIC)
"For a comprehensive guide to the northern lights, read Neil Davis's The Aurora." (Small Press Magazine)
Whether it is used as an icebreaker in conversation or as the subject of serious inquiry, “the weather” is one of the few subjects that everyone talks about. And though we recognize the faces that bring us the weather on television, how government meteorologists and forecasters go about their jobs is rarely scrutinized. Given recent weather-related disasters, it’s time we find out more. In Authors of the Storm, Gary Alan Fine offers an inside look at how meteorologists and forecasters predict the weather.
Based on field observation and interviews at the Storm Prediction Center in Oklahoma, the National Weather Service in Washington, D.C., and a handful of midwestern outlets, Fine finds a supremely hard-working, insular clique of professionals who often refer to themselves as a “band of brothers.” In Fine’s skilled hands, we learn their lingo, how they “read” weather conditions, how forecasts are written, and, of course, how those messages are conveyed to the public. Weather forecasts, he shows, are often shaped as much by social and cultural factors inside local offices as they are by approaching cumulus clouds. By opening up this unique world to us, Authors of the Storm offers a valuable and fascinating glimpse of a crucial profession.
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