Download or read book The Future of Sustainability written by Marco Keiner and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2006-09-09 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a broad discussion on sustainable development, rethinking and improving its effectiveness as a paradigm of today and tomorrow. Outstanding visionary thinkers and scientists offer their timely assessment on the future prospects of mankind: In what direction are we heading? How can the world become more just and equitable, and how can future development be sustained to adequately address economic, social, and – perhaps most important – environmental issues?

Download or read book Consumer Law and Socioeconomic Development written by Claudia Lima Marques and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-07-14 with total page 472 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book reflects the research output of the Committee on the International Protection of Consumers of the International Law Association (ILA). The Committee was created in 2008, with a mandate to study the role of public and private law to protect consumers, review UN Guidelines, and to model laws, international treaties and national legislations concerning protection and consumer redress. It has been accepted to act as an observer not only when the UNCTAD was updating its guidelines, but also at the Hague Conference on Private International Law. The book includes the contributions of various Committee members in the past few years and is a result of the cooperation between the Committee members and experts from Australia, Brazil, Canada and China. It is divided into three parts: the first part addresses trends and challenges in international protection of consumers, while the second part focuses on financial crises and consumer protection and the third part examines national and regional consumer law issues.

Download or read book Applied Mathematics and Computational Intelligence written by Anna M. Gil-Lafuente and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-03-06 with total page 439 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book gathers selected papers presented at the conference of the Forum for Interdisciplinary Mathematics (FIM), held at Palau Macaya, Barcelona, on 18 to 20 November, 2015. The event was co-organized by the University of Barcelona (Spain), the Spanish Royal Academy of Economic and Financial Sciences (Spain) and the Forum for Interdisciplinary Mathematics (India). This instalment of the conference was presented with the title “Applied Mathematics and Computational Intelligence” and particularly focused on the use of Mathematics and Computational Intelligence techniques in a diverse range of scientific disciplines, as well as their applications in real-world problems. The book presents thirty peer-reviewed research papers, organised into four topical sections: on Mathematical Foundations; Computational Intelligence and Optimization Techniques; Modelling and Simulation Techniques; and Applications in Business and Engineering. This book will be of great interest to anyone working in the area of applied mathematics and computational intelligence and will be especially useful for scientists and graduate students pursuing research in these fields.

Download or read book The Harm in Hate Speech written by Jeremy Waldron and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2012-06-08 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Every liberal democracy has laws or codes against hate speech—except the United States. For constitutionalists, regulation of hate speech violates the First Amendment and damages a free society. Against this absolutist view, Jeremy Waldron argues powerfully that hate speech should be regulated as part of our commitment to human dignity and to inclusion and respect for members of vulnerable minorities. Causing offense—by depicting a religious leader as a terrorist in a newspaper cartoon, for example—is not the same as launching a libelous attack on a group’s dignity, according to Waldron, and it lies outside the reach of law. But defamation of a minority group, through hate speech, undermines a public good that can and should be protected: the basic assurance of inclusion in society for all members. A social environment polluted by anti-gay leaflets, Nazi banners, and burning crosses sends an implicit message to the targets of such hatred: your security is uncertain and you can expect to face humiliation and discrimination when you leave your home. Free-speech advocates boast of despising what racists say but defending to the death their right to say it. Waldron finds this emphasis on intellectual resilience misguided and points instead to the threat hate speech poses to the lives, dignity, and reputations of minority members. Finding support for his view among philosophers of the Enlightenment, Waldron asks us to move beyond knee-jerk American exceptionalism in our debates over the serious consequences of hateful speech.

Download or read book There s No Such Thing As Free Speech written by Stanley Fish and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1994-12-15 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In an era when much of what passes for debate is merely moral posturing--traditional family values versus the cultural elite, free speech versus censorship--or reflexive name-calling--the terms "liberal" and "politically correct," are used with as much dismissive scorn by the right as "reactionary" and "fascist" are by the left--Stanley Fish would seem an unlikely lightning rod for controversy. A renowned scholar of Milton, head of the English Department of Duke University, Fish has emerged as a brilliantly original critic of the culture at large, praised and pilloried as a vigorous debunker of the pieties of both the left and right. His mission is not to win the cultural wars that preoccupy the nation's attention, but rather to redefine the terms of battle. In There's No Such Thing as Free Speech, Fish takes aim at the ideological gridlock paralyzing academic and political exchange in the nineties. In his witty, accessible dissections of the swirling controversies over multiculturalism, affirmative action, canon revision, hate speech, and legal reform, he neatly eviscerates both the conservatives' claim to possession of timeless, transcendent values (the timeless transcendence of which they themselves have conveniently identified), and the intellectual left's icons of equality, tolerance, and non-discrimination. He argues that while conservative ideologues and liberal stalwarts might disagree vehemently on what is essential to a culture, or to a curriculum, both mistakenly believe that what is essential can be identified apart from the accidental circumstances (of time and history) to which the essential is ritually opposed. In the book's first section, which includes the five essays written for Fish's celebrated debates with Dinesh D'Souza (the author and former Reagan White House policy analyst), Fish turns his attention to the neoconservative backlash. In his introduction, Fish writes, "Terms that come to us wearing the label 'apolitical'--'common values', 'fairness', 'merit', 'color blind', 'free speech', 'reason'--are in fact the ideologically charged constructions of a decidedly political agenda. I make the point not in order to level an accusation, but to remove the sting of accusation from the world 'politics' and redefine it as a synonym for what everyone inevitably does." Fish maintains that the debate over political correctness is an artificial one, because it is simply not possible for any party or individual to occupy a position above or beyond politics. Regarding the controversy over the revision of the college curriculum, Fish argues that the point is not to try to insist that inclusion of ethnic and gender studies is not a political decision, but "to point out that any alternative curriculum--say a diet of exclusively Western or European texts--would be no less politically invested." In Part Two, Fish follows the implications of his arguments to a surprising rejection of the optimistic claims of the intellectual left that awareness of the historical roots of our beliefs and biases can allow us, as individuals or as a society, to escape or transcend them. Specifically, he turns to the movement for reform of legal studies, and insists that a dream of a legal culture in which no one's values are slighted or declared peripheral can no more be realized than the dream of a concept of fairness that answers to everyone's notions of equality and jsutice, or a yardstick of merit that is true to everyone's notions of worth and substance. Similarly, he argues that attempts to politicize the study of literature are ultimately misguided, because recharacterizations of literary works have absolutely no impact on the mainstream of political life. He concludes his critique of the academy with "The Unbearable Ugliness of Volvos," an extraordinary look at some of the more puzzing, if not out-and-out masochistic, characteristics of a life in academia. Penetrating, fearless, and brilliantly argued, There's No Such Thing as Free Speech captures the essential Fish. It is must reading for anyone who cares about the outcome of America's cultural wars.

Download or read book Conducting Educational Needs Assessments written by D.L. Stufflebeam and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What goals should be addressed by educational programs? What priorities should be assigned to the different goals? What funds should be allocated to each goal? How can quality services be maintained with declining school enrollments and shrinking revenues? What programs could be cut if necessary? The ebb and flow of the student population, the changing needs of our society and the fluctuation of resources constantly impinge on the education system. Educators must deal with students, communities, and social institutions that are dynamic, resulting in changing needs. It is in the context of attempting to be responsive to these changes, and to the many wishes and needs that schools are asked to address, that needs assessment can be useful. Needs assessment is a process that helps one to identify and examine both values and information. It provides direction for making decisions about programs and resources. It can include such relatively objective procedures as the statistical description and analysis of standardized test data and such subjective procedures as public testimony and values clarification activities. Needs assessment can be a part of community relations, facilities planning and consolidation, program development and evaluation, and resource allocation. Needs assessment thus addresses a xiii XIV PREFACE broad array of purposes and requires that many different kinds of procedures be available for gathering and analyzing information. This book was written with this wide variation of practices in mind.

Download or read book Is There a Right of Freedom of Expression written by Larry Alexander and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2005-06-06 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A sceptical appraisal of the claim that freedom of expression is a human right.

Download or read book Human Ecology written by Gerald G Marten and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2010-09-23 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'The scope and clarity of this book make it accessible and informative to a wide readership. Its messages should be an essential component of the education for all students from secondary school to university... [It] provides a clear and comprehensible account of concepts that can be applied in our individual and collective lives to pursue the promising and secure future to which we all aspire' From the Foreword by Maurice Strong, Chairman of the Earth Council and former Secretary General of the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (Earth Summit) The most important questions of the future will turn on the relationship between human societies and the natural ecosystems on which we all, in the end, depend. The interactions and interdependencies of the social and natural worlds are the focus of growing attention from a wide range of environmental, social and life sciences. Understanding them is critical to achieving the balance involved in sustainable development. Human Ecology: Basic Concepts for Sustainable Development presents an extremely clear and accessible account of this complex range of issues and of the concepts and tools required to understand and tackle them. Extensively supported by graphics and detailed examples, this book makes an excellent introduction for students at all levels, and for general readers wanting to know why and how to respond to the dilemmas we face.

Download or read book Unstable Constitutionalism written by Mark Tushnet and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-09-17 with total page 415 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines constitutional law and practice in five South Asian countries: India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Bangladesh.

Download or read book A New Literacies Sampler written by Michele Knobel and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2007 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The study of new literacies is quickly emerging as a major research field. This book «samples» work in the broad area of new literacies research along two dimensions. First, it samples some typical examples of new literacies - video gaming, fan fiction writing, weblogging, role play gaming, using websites to participate in affinity practices, memes, and other social activities involving mobile technologies. Second, the studies collectively sample from a wide range of approaches potentially available for researching and studying new literacies from a sociocultural perspective. Readers will come away with a rich sense of what new literacies are, and a generous appreciation of how they are being researched.

Download or read book Modernisering en Haar Politieke Gevolgen written by Hans Theodorus Blokland and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2006-01-01 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: People’s capacity to give meaning and direction to social life is an essential dimension of political freedom. Yet many citizens of Western democracies believe that this freedom has become quite restricted. They feel they are at the mercy of anonymous structures and processes over which they have little control, structures and processes that present them with options and realities they might not have chosen if they had any real choice. As a result, political interest declines and political cynicism flourishes. The underlying cause of the powerlessness pervading the current political system could be modernization. Taking the work of Max Weber, Karl Mannheim, and Joseph Schumpeter as a point of departure, Hans Blokland here examines this process. The topics covered are, among others, the meaning of modernization, the forces that drive it, and, especially, the consequences of modernization for the political freedom of citizens to influence the course of their society via democratic politics.

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Environmental Law written by Emma Lees and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-04-25 with total page 1316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Handbook is the first comprehensive account of comparative environmental law. It examines in detail the methodological foundations of the discipline as well as the substance of environmental law across countries from four vantage points: country studies from all continents, responses to common problems (including air pollution, water management, nature conservation, genetically modified organisms, climate change and energy, chemicals, waste), foundational components of environmental law systems (including principles, property rights, administrative and judicial organisation, command-and-control regulation, market mechanisms, informational techniques and liability mechanisms), and common interactions of environmental protection with the broader public, private, and criminal law contexts. The volume brings together the foremost authorities in this field from around the world to provide a concise, self-contained, and technically rigorous account of environmental law as a single overall system.

Download or read book Green Development written by W. M. Adams and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2003-09-02 with total page 472 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This revised and updated new edition retains the clear and powerful argument which characterized the original. It gives a valuable analysis of the theory and practice of sustainable development and suggests that at the start of the new millennium, we should think radically about the challenge of sustainability. Fully revised, this latest edition includes further reading, chapter outlines, chapter summaries and new discussion topics, and explores: the roots of sustainable development thinking and its evolution in the last three decades of the twentieth century the dominant ideas within mainstream sustainable development the nature and diversity of alternative ideas about sustainability the problems of environmental degradation and the environmental impacts of development strategies for building sustainability in development from above and below. Offering a synthesis of theoretical ideas on sustainability based on the industrialized economies of the North and the practical, applied ideas in the South which tend to ignore 'First World' theory, this important text gives a clear discussion of theory and extensive practical insights drawn from Africa, Latin America and Asia.

Download or read book Casino capitalism written by Susan Strange and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2015-12-01 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A classic in the field of political economy, reissued here with a new, incisive introduction. The global financial crisis that Strange predicted in her work has now taken place, and to a large extent is still happening.

Download or read book European Fair Trading Law written by Geraint Howells and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-22 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Unfair Commercial Practices Directive is the most important directive in the field of trade practices to have emerged from the EC but it builds upon European activity which has sought to regulate trade practices on both a sectoral and horizontal level. It is an umbrella provision, which uses general clauses to protect consumers. How effective this approach is and how it relates the existing acquis are fundamental issues for debate. This work provides a critical appraisal of the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive linking discussion of it to general debates about how fair trading should be regulated. It explains how the Directive fits into the existing acquis. It also examines national traditions where these are necessary to explain the European approach, as in the case of general clauses. The book will be a valuable tool for any student of consumer law seeking to understand the thinking behind the directive and how it will affect national laws. It will also influence policy makers by suggesting how the directive should be interpreted and what policy lies behind its formulation. Businesses and their advisers will use the book as a means of understanding the new regulatory climate post-the directive.

Download or read book Technologic Papers of the Bureau of Standards written by United States. National Bureau of Standards and published by . This book was released on 1911 with total page 718 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Advances in Electronics written by L. Marton and published by Marton Press. This book was released on 2007-03 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: PREFACE. THE Author of this very practical treatise on Scotch Loch - Fishing desires clearly that it may be of use to all who had it. He does not pretend to have written anything new, but to have attempted to put what he has to say in as readable a form as possible. Everything in the way of the history and habits of fish has been studiously avoided, and technicalities have been used as sparingly as possible. The writing of this book has afforded him pleasure in his leisure moments, and that pleasure would be much increased if he knew that the perusal of it would create any bond of sympathy between himself and the angling community in general. This section is interleaved with blank shects for the readers notes. The Author need hardly say that any suggestions addressed to the case of the publishers, will meet with consideration in a future edition. We do not pretend to write or enlarge upon a new subject. Much has been said and written-and well said and written too on the art of fishing but loch-fishing has been rather looked upon as a second-rate performance, and to dispel this idea is one of the objects for which this present treatise has been written. Far be it from us to say anything against fishing, lawfully practised in any form but many pent up in our large towns will bear us out when me say that, on the whole, a days loch-fishing is the most convenient. One great matter is, that the loch-fisher is depend- ent on nothing but enough wind to curl the water, -and on a large loch it is very seldom that a dead calm prevails all day, -and can make his arrangements for a day, weeks beforehand whereas the stream- fisher is dependent for a good take on the state of the water and however pleasant and easy it may be for one living near the banks of a good trout stream or river, it is quite another matter to arrange for a days river-fishing, if one is looking forward to a holiday at a date some weeks ahead. Providence may favour the expectant angler with a good day, and the water in order but experience has taught most of us that the good days are in the minority, and that, as is the case with our rapid running streams, -such as many of our northern streams are, -the water is either too large or too small, unless, as previously remarked, you live near at hand, and can catch it at its best. A common belief in regard to loch-fishing is, that the tyro and the experienced angler have nearly the same chance in fishing, -the one from the stern and the other from the bow of the same boat. Of all the absurd beliefs as to loch-fishing, this is one of the most absurd. Try it. Give the tyro either end of the boat he likes give him a cast of ally flies he may fancy, or even a cast similar to those which a crack may be using and if he catches one for every three the other has, he may consider himself very lucky. Of course there are lochs where the fish are not abundant, and a beginner may come across as many as an older fisher but we speak of lochs where there are fish to be caught, and where each has a fair chance. Again, it is said that the boatman has as much to do with catching trout in a loch as the angler. Well, we dont deny that. In an untried loch it is necessary to have the guidance of a good boatman but the same argument holds good as to stream-fishing...