Download or read book The Astronomer s Chair written by Omar W. Nasim and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2021-09-21 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The astronomer’s observing chair as both image and object, and the story it tells about a particular kind of science and a particular view of history. The astronomer’s chair is a leitmotif in the history of astronomy, appearing in hundreds of drawings, prints, and photographs from a variety of sources. Nineteenth-century stargazers in particular seemed eager to display their observing chairs—task-specific, often mechanically adjustable observatory furniture designed for use in conjunction with telescopes. But what message did they mean to send with these images? In The Astronomer’s Chair, Omar W. Nasim considers these specialized chairs as both image and object, offering an original framework for linking visual and material cultures. Observing chairs, Nasim ingeniously argues, showcased and embodied forms of scientific labor, personae, and bodily practice that appealed to bourgeois sensibilities. Viewing image and object as connected parts of moral, epistemic, and visual economies of empire, Nasim shows that nineteenth-century science was represented in terms of comfort and energy, and that “manly” postures of Western astronomers at work in specialized chairs were contrasted pointedly with images of “effete” and cross-legged “Oriental” astronomers. Extending his historical analysis into the twentieth century, Nasim reexamines what he argues to be a famous descendant of the astronomer’s chair: Freud’s psychoanalytic couch, which directed observations not outward toward the stars but inward toward the stratified universe of the psyche. But whether in conjunction with the mind or the heavens, the observing chair was a point of entry designed for specialists that also portrayed widely held assumptions about who merited epistemic access to these realms in the first place. With more than 100 illustrations, many in color; flexibound.
Download or read book Minerva Meets Vulcan Scientific and Technological Literature 1450 1750 written by Wolfgang Lefèvre and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-06-16 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a comprehensive study and account of the co-evolution of technological and scientific literature in the early modern period (1450-1750). It examines the various relationships of these literatures in six areas of knowledge – Architecture, Chemistry, Gunnery, Mechanical Engineering, Mining, and Practical Mathematics – which represent the main types of advanced technological and scientific knowledge of the era. These six fields of technologically advanced knowledge and their interrelations and interactions with learned knowledge are investigated and discussed through a specific lens: by focusing on the technological literature. Among present-day historians of science, it hardly remains controversial that contact and exchange between educated and practical knowledge played a significant role in the development of the natural sciences and technology in early modern Europe. Several paths for such exchange arose from the late Middle Ages onward due to the formation of an economy of knowledge that fostered contacts and exchange between the two worlds. How can this development be adequately described and how, on the basis of such a description, can the significance of this process for the early modern history of knowledge in the West be assessed? These are the overarching questions this book tries to answer. There exists a considerable amount of literature concerning several stations and events in the course of this long development process as well as its various aspects. As meritorious and indispensable as many of these studies are, none of them tried to portray this process as a whole with its most essential branches. What is more, many of them implicitly or explicitly took physics as a model of science, and thus highlighted mechanics and mechanical engineering as the model of all interrelations of practical and learned knowledge. By contrast, this book aims at a more complete portrait of the early modern interrelations and interactions between learned and practical knowledge. It tries to convey a new idea of the variety and disunity of these relations by discussing and comparing altogether six widely different fields of knowledge and practice. The targeted audience of this book is first of all the historians of science and technology. As one of the peer reviewers suggested – the book could very well become a textbook used for teaching the history of science and technology at universities. Furthermore, since the book addresses fundamental aspects of the significance emergence and development of modern science has for the self-image of the West, it can be expected that it will attract the attention and interest of a wider readership than professional historians.
Download or read book Emotions in History Lost and Found written by Ute Frevert and published by Central European University Press. This book was released on 2011-01-01 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Coming to terms with emotions and how they influence human behaviour, seems to be of the utmost importance to societies that are obsessed with everything “neuro.” On the other hand, emotions have become an object of constant individual and social manipulation since “emotional intelligence” emerged as a buzzword of our times. Reflecting on this burgeoning interest in human emotions makes one think of how this interest developed and what fuelled it. From a historian’s point of view, it can be traced back to classical antiquity. But it has undergone shifts and changes which can in turn shed light on social concepts of the self and its relation to other human beings (and nature). The volume focuses on the historicity of emotions and explores the processes that brought them to the fore of public interest and debate.
Download or read book Political Entrepreneurs written by Catherine E. De Vries and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2023-09-26 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How challenger parties, acting as political entrepreneurs, are changing European democracies Challenger parties are on the rise in Europe, exemplified by the likes of Podemos in Spain, the National Rally in France, the Alternative for Germany, or the Brexit Party in Great Britain. Like disruptive entrepreneurs, these parties offer new policies and defy the dominance of established party brands. In the face of these challenges and a more volatile electorate, mainstream parties are losing their grip on power. In this book, Catherine De Vries and Sara Hobolt explore why some challenger parties are so successful and what mainstream parties can do to confront these political entrepreneurs. Drawing analogies with how firms compete, De Vries and Hobolt demonstrate that political change is as much about the ability of challenger parties to innovate as it is about the inability of dominant parties to respond. Challenger parties employ two types of innovation to break established party dominance: they mobilize new issues, such as immigration, the environment, and Euroscepticism, and they employ antiestablishment rhetoric to undermine mainstream party appeal. Unencumbered by government experience, challenger parties adapt more quickly to shifting voter tastes and harness voter disenchantment. Delving into strategies of dominance versus innovation, the authors explain why European party systems have remained stable for decades, but also why they are now increasingly under strain. As challenger parties continue to seek to disrupt the existing order, Political Entrepreneurs shows that their ascendency fundamentally alters government stability and democratic politics.
Download or read book Deliberate Ignorance written by Ralph Hertwig and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2021-03-02 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Psychologists, economists, historians, computer scientists, sociologists, philosophers, and legal scholars explore the conscious choice not to seek information. The history of intellectual thought abounds with claims that knowledge is valued and sought, yet individuals and groups often choose not to know. We call the conscious choice not to seek or use knowledge (or information) deliberate ignorance. When is this a virtue, when is it a vice, and what can be learned from formally modeling the underlying motives? On which normative grounds can it be judged? Which institutional interventions can promote or prevent it? In this book, psychologists, economists, historians, computer scientists, sociologists, philosophers, and legal scholars explore the scope of deliberate ignorance.
Download or read book Particle and Astroparticle Physics written by Utpal Sarkar and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2007-12-03 with total page 544 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From superstring theory to models with extra dimensions to dark matter and dark energy, a range of theoretically stimulating ideas have evolved for physics beyond the standard model. These developments have spawned a new area of physics that centers on the interplay between particle physics and cosmology—astroparticle physics. Providing the necessary theoretical background, Particle and Astroparticle Physics clearly presents the many recent advances that have occurred in these fields. Divided into five parts, the book begins with discussions on group and field theories. The second part summarizes the standard model of particle physics and includes some extensions to the model, such as neutrino masses and CP violation. The next section focuses on grand unified theories and supersymmetry. The book then discusses the general theory of relativity, higher dimensional theories of gravity, and superstring theory. It also introduces various novel ideas and models with extra dimensions and low-scale gravity. The last part of the book deals with astroparticle physics. After an introduction to cosmology, it covers several specialized topics, including baryogenesis, dark matter, dark energy, and brane cosmology. With numerous equations and detailed references, this lucid book explores the new physics beyond the standard model, showing that particle and astroparticle physics will together reveal unique insights in the next era of physics.
Download or read book Planck written by Brandon R. Brown and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2015 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Brown interweaves the voices and writings of Planck, his family, and his contemporaries--with many passages appearing in English for the first time--to create a portrait of a groundbreaking physicist working in the midst of war. Planck spent much of his adult life grappling with the identity crisis of being an influential German with ideas that ran counter to his government. During the later part of his life, he survived bombings and battlefields, surgeries and blood transfusions, all the while performing his influential work amidst a violent and crumbling Nazi bureaucracy. When his son was accused of treason related to a bombing, Planck tried to use his standing as a German 'national treasure,' and wrote direct letters to Hitler to spare his son's life. Brown tells the story of Planck's friendship with the far more outspoken Albert Einstein, and shows how his work fits within the explosion of technology and science that occurred during his life.
Download or read book Empirical Inference written by Bernhard Schölkopf and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-08-23 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book honours the outstanding contributions of Vladimir Vapnik, a rare example of a scientist for whom the following statements hold true simultaneously: his work led to the inception of a new field of research, the theory of statistical learning and empirical inference; he has lived to see the field blossom; and he is still as active as ever. He started analyzing learning algorithms in the 1960s and he invented the first version of the generalized portrait algorithm. He later developed one of the most successful methods in machine learning, the support vector machine (SVM) – more than just an algorithm, this was a new approach to learning problems, pioneering the use of functional analysis and convex optimization in machine learning. Part I of this book contains three chapters describing and witnessing some of Vladimir Vapnik's contributions to science. In the first chapter, Léon Bottou discusses the seminal paper published in 1968 by Vapnik and Chervonenkis that lay the foundations of statistical learning theory, and the second chapter is an English-language translation of that original paper. In the third chapter, Alexey Chervonenkis presents a first-hand account of the early history of SVMs and valuable insights into the first steps in the development of the SVM in the framework of the generalised portrait method. The remaining chapters, by leading scientists in domains such as statistics, theoretical computer science, and mathematics, address substantial topics in the theory and practice of statistical learning theory, including SVMs and other kernel-based methods, boosting, PAC-Bayesian theory, online and transductive learning, loss functions, learnable function classes, notions of complexity for function classes, multitask learning, and hypothesis selection. These contributions include historical and context notes, short surveys, and comments on future research directions. This book will be of interest to researchers, engineers, and graduate students engaged with all aspects of statistical learning.
Download or read book Political Epistemology written by Pietro Daniel Omodeo and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2019-10-14 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is an investigation of the ideological dimensions of the disciplinary discourses on science in line with the scholarly tradition of historical epistemology. It offers a programmatic treatment of the political-epistemological problematic along three entangled lines of inquiry: socio-historical, epistemological and historiographical. The book aims for a meta-level integration of the existing scholarship on the social and cultural history of science in order to consider the ways in which struggles for hegemony have constantly informed scientific discourses. This problematic is of primary relevance for scholars in Science Studies, philosophers, historians and sociologists of science, but would also be relevant for anybody interested in scientific culture and political theory.
Download or read book Self Defence against Non State Actors written by Mary Ellen O'Connell and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-08 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provides a multi-perspective study of the international law on self-defence against non-State actors.
Download or read book Introduction to Carbon Science written by Ian A. S. Edwards and published by Butterworth-Heinemann. This book was released on 2013-10-22 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introduction to Carbon Science deals with various aspects of carbon science, from polymer science and prosthetics to crystallography, carbonization, spectroscopy, and surface science. Topics covered include the mechanisms of formation of isotropic and anisotropic carbons, physical properties of pitch relevant to the fabrication of carbon materials; kinetics and catalysis of carbon gasification; and porosity in carbons and graphites. Carbon fibers, cokes and composites, and coal to coke transformations are also discussed. This book is comprised of nine chapters and begins with an overview of the basic structural features of carbon materials, along with definitions of the various carbon forms encountered in carbon science. The principal techniques for studying the structure of solid carbons are also considered. The reader is then introduced to the mechanisms underlying the formation of isotropic and anisotropic carbons; the physicochemical changes that take place when pitch is pyrolyzed to carbon; and kinetics and catalysis of carbon gasification reactions. The following chapters explore various types of porosity in carbons and graphites; manufacture, properties, structure, and applications of carbon fibers; and mechanical properties of cokes and composites. This text concludes by describing the conversion of coal to coke. This monograph will be of interest to carbon scientists, technologists, and engineers, as well as those entering the field of carbon science for the first time.
Download or read book Norms beyond Empire written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-11-15 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Norms beyond Empire seeks to rethink the relationship between law and empire by emphasizing the role of local normative production. While European imperialism is often viewed as being able to shape colonial law and government to its image, this volume argues that early modern empires could never monolithically control how these processes unfolded. Examining the Iberian empires in Asia, it seeks to look at norms as a means of escaping the often too narrow concept of law and look beyond empire to highlight the ways in which law-making and local normativities frequently acted beyond colonial rule. The ten chapters explore normative production from this perspective by focusing on case studies from China, India, Japan, and the Philippines. Contributors are: Manuel Bastias Saavedra, Marya Svetlana T. Camacho, Luisa Stella de Oliveira Coutinho Silva, Rômulo da Silva Ehalt, Patricia Souza de Faria, Fupeng Li, Miguel Rodrigues Lourenço, Abisai Perez Zamarripa, Marina Torres Trimállez, and Ângela Barreto Xavier.
Download or read book Working with Paper written by Carla Bittel and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2019-06-29 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Working with Paper builds on a growing interest in the materials of science by exploring the gendered uses and meanings of paper tools and technologies, considering how notions of gender impacted paper practices and in turn how paper may have structured knowledge about gender. Through a series of dynamic investigations covering Europe and North America and spanning the early modern period to the twentieth century, this volume breaks new ground by examining material histories of paper and the gendered worlds that made them. Contributors explore diverse uses of paper—from healing to phrenological analysis to model making to data processing—which often occurred in highly gendered, yet seemingly divergent spaces, such as laboratories and kitchens, court rooms and boutiques, ladies’ chambers and artisanal workshops, foundling houses and colonial hospitals, and college gymnasiums and state office buildings. Together, they reveal how notions of masculinity and femininity became embedded in and expressed through the materials of daily life. Working with Paper uncovers the intricate negotiations of power and difference underlying epistemic practices, forging a material history of knowledge in which quotidian and scholarly practices are intimately linked.
Download or read book The Dilemmas of an Upright Man written by J. L. Heilbron and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2000-09-01 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this moving and eloquent portrait, Heilbron describes how the founder of quantum theory rose to the pinnacle of German science. He shows how Planck suffered morally and intellectually as his lifelong habit of service to his country and to physics was confronted by the realities of World War I and the brutalities of the Third Reich.
Download or read book Kernel Methods in Computational Biology written by Bernhard Schölkopf and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A detailed overview of current research in kernel methods and their application to computational biology.
Download or read book The Case for an International Court of Civil Justice written by Maya Steinitz and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An International Court of Civil Justice would give victims of multinationals a day in court while offering corporate defendants a cheaper, fairer litigation alternative.
Download or read book A Bridge over Troubled Waters written by Helene Ruiz Fabri and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-10-12 with total page 482 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Bridge Over Troubled Waters: Dispute Resolution in the Law of International Watercourses and the Law of the Sea offers novel comparative analysis from leading experts on the resolution of disputes concerning international watercourses and the oceans.
