Results by title

The radically humanistic essays in Arc of Interference refigure our sense of the real, the ethical, and the political in the face of mounting social and planetary upheavals. Creatively assembled around Arthur Kleinman’s medical anthropological arc and eschewing hegemonic modes of intervention, the essays advance the notion of a care-ful ethnographic praxis of interference. To interfere is to dislodge ideals of naturalness, blast enduring binaries (human/nonhuman, self/other, us/them), and redirect technocratic agendas while summoning relational knowledge and the will to create community. The book’s multiple ethnographic arcs of interference provide a vital conceptual toolkit for today’s world and a badly needed moral perch from which to peer toward just horizons.

Contributors. Vincanne Adams, João Biehl, Davíd Carrasco, Lawrence Cohen, Jean Comaroff, Robert Desjarlais, Paul Farmer, Marcia Inhorn, Janis H. Jenkins, David S. Jones, Salmaan Keshavjee, Arthur Kleinman, Margaret Lock, Adriana Petryna

Unveiling the hidden connections in the network of knowledge

Hermes II: Interference is the second in a series of works by philosopher Michel Serres using Hermes, god of communication, as an archetypal symbolic figure for reflecting on philosophy and the arts and sciences. Serres delves into the concept of interreferentiality, proposing that every node—whether it be knowledge, objects, or people—exists within a network where it both receives and transmits information. He argues against the existence of a dominant center or pole within these networks, emphasizing that each node can temporarily serve as a focal point depending on context.

Serres presents unique insights into topics such as the nature of knowledge, the world of objects, intersubjectivity, the origins of geometry, the interplay of music and background noise, and empiricism. By identifying parallel structures across these areas, Serres unifies them into a comprehensive theoretical framework, revealing hidden connections and potential future influences. Additionally, this work includes a critique of Gaston Bachelard’s The Formation of the Scientific Mind and concludes with an analysis of communication in Hergé’s The Castafiore Emerald.

Hermes II is a unique blend of ancient and modern perspectives, combining rigorous analysis with an optimistic outlook and highlighting the interconnectedness of knowledge and its implications for fostering peaceful relations within the network of life.

This book provides an authoritative account of the current understanding of radar sea clutter, describing its phenomenology, EM scattering and statistical modelling and simulation, and their use in the design of detection systems and the calculation and practical evaluation of radar performance.

Sea Clutter: Scattering, the K Distribution and Radar Performance, 2nd Edition gives an authoritative account of our current understanding of radar sea clutter. Topics covered include the characteristics of radar sea clutter, modelling radar scattering by the ocean surface, statistical models of sea clutter, the simulation of clutter and other random processes, detection of small targets in sea clutter, imaging ocean surface features, radar detection performance calculations, CFAR detection, and the specification and measurement of radar performance. The calculation of the performance of practical radar systems is presented in sufficient detail for the reader to be able to tackle related problems with confidence. In this second edition the contents have been fully updated and reorganised to give better access to the different types of material in the book. Extensive new material has been added on the Doppler characteristics of sea clutter and detection processing; bistatic sea clutter measurements; electromagnetic scattering theory of littoral sea clutter and bistatic sea clutter; the use of models for predicting radar performance; and use of the K distribution in other fields.

The material presented in this book is intended to provide the reader with a practical treatment of Weibull distribution as applied to radar systems.