Download or read book Promise and Peril written by Christopher McKnight Nichols and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2011-08-11 with total page 463 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Spreading democracy abroad or protecting business at home: this book offers a new look at the history of the contest between isolationalism and internationalism that is as current as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and as old as America itself, with profiles of the people, policies, and events that shaped the debate.

Download or read book The Promise and Peril of Things written by Wai-yee Li and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2022-05-17 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner, 2023 Choice Outstanding Academic Title Our relationship with things abounds with paradoxes. People assign value to objects in ways that are often deeply personal or idiosyncratic yet at the same time rooted in specific cultural and historical contexts. How do things become meaningful? How do our connections with the world of things define us? In Ming and Qing China, inquiry into things and their contradictions flourished, and its depth and complexity belie the notion that material culture simply reflects status anxiety or class conflict. Wai-yee Li traces notions of the pleasures and dangers of things in the literature and thought of late imperial China. She explores how aesthetic claims and political power intersect, probes the objective and subjective dimensions of value, and questions what determines authenticity and aesthetic appeal. Li considers core oppositions—people and things, elegance and vulgarity, real and fake, lost and found—to tease out the ambiguities of material culture. With examples spanning the late sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries, she shows how relations with things can both encode and resist social change, political crisis, and personal loss. The Promise and Peril of Things reconsiders major works such as The Plum in the Golden Vase, The Story of the Stone, Li Yu’s writings, and Wu Weiye’s poetry and drama, as well as a host of less familiar texts. It offers new insights into Ming and Qing literary and aesthetic sensibilities, as well as the intersections of material culture with literature, intellectual history, and art history.

Download or read book The Promise and Peril of Credit written by Francesca Trivellato and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-06-08 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How an antisemitic legend gave voice to widespread fears surrounding the expansion of private credit in Western capitalism The Promise and Peril of Credit takes an incisive look at pivotal episodes in the West’s centuries-long struggle to define the place of private finance in the social and political order. It does so through the lens of a persistent legend about Jews and money that reflected the anxieties surrounding the rise of impersonal credit markets. By the close of the Middle Ages, new and sophisticated credit instruments made it easier for European merchants to move funds across the globe. Bills of exchange were by far the most arcane of these financial innovations. Intangible and written in a cryptic language, they fueled world trade but also lured naive investors into risky businesses. Francesca Trivellato recounts how the invention of these abstruse credit contracts was falsely attributed to Jews, and how this story gave voice to deep-seated fears about the unseen perils of the new paper economy. She locates the legend’s earliest version in a seventeenth-century handbook on maritime law and traces its legacy all the way to the work of the founders of modern social theory—from Marx to Weber and Sombart. Deftly weaving together economic, legal, social, cultural, and intellectual history, Trivellato vividly describes how Christian writers drew on the story to define and redefine what constituted the proper boundaries of credit in a modern world increasingly dominated by finance.

Download or read book The Promise and Perils of Populism written by Carlos de la Torre and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2014-12-11 with total page 485 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The O.J. Simpson trial. The Lindbergh kidnapping. The death of Marilyn Monroe. The assassination of the Romanovs. The Atlanta child murders. All controversial cases. All investigated with the latest techniques in forensic science. Nationally respected investigators Joe Nickell and John Fischer explain the science behind the criminal investigations that have captured the nation's attention. Crime Science is the only comprehensive guide to forensics. Without being overly technical or treating scientific techniques superficially, the authors introduce readers to the work of firearms experts, document examiners, fingerprint technicians, medical examiners, and forensic anthropologists. Each topic is treated in a separate chapter, in a clear and understandable style. Nickell and Fisher describe fingerprint classification and autopsies, explain how fibers link victims to their killers, and examine the science underlying DNA profiling and toxicological analysis. From weapons analysis to handwriting samples to shoe and tire impressions, Crime Science outlines the indispensable tools and techniques that investigators use to make sense of a crime scene. Each chapter closes with a study of a well-known case, revealing how the principles of forensic science work in practice.

Download or read book The Promise and Perils of Writing Program Administration written by Theresa Enos and published by Parlor Press LLC. This book was released on 2008-01-26 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Combining formal quantitative research with narrative-based scholarship, THE PROMISE AND PERILS OF WRITING PROGRAM ADMINISTRATION represents multiple voices from faculty balancing between the demands of teaching, writing, and administering writing programs in professional, ethical ways-often under circumstances that can be defined, at best, as difficult. In these pages, junior faculty tell their stories of triumph and trauma, while more firmly established composition scholars reflect upon the changing and challenging profession we all share.

Download or read book China s Peril and Promise written by Chih-p'ing Chou and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 1996-04-15 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: China's Peril and Promise is an advanced Chinese reader in two volumes, prepared for students who would like to enhance their understanding of modern China in general and modern Chinese literature and intellectuals in particular, through reading authentic materials. The selections--which span the twentieth century and include essays, short stories, biographies, and criticism--expose the students not only to a variety of modern Chinese literary genres but also to some of the major substantive issues that modern Chinese intellectuals have faced. Audio and video materials are available for use with this text. For further information, contact the Chinese Linguistics Project, 231 Palmer Hall, Princeton University, Princeton, N.J. 08544. (609-258-4269).

Download or read book Interop written by John Palfrey and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2012-06-05 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Interop, technology experts John Palfrey and Urs Gasser explore the immense importance of interoperability -- the standardization and integration of technology -- and show how this simple principle will hold the key to our success in the coming decades and beyond. The practice of standardization has been facilitating innovation and economic growth for centuries. The standardization of the railroad gauge revolutionized the flow of commodities, the standardization of money revolutionized debt markets and simplified trade, and the standardization of credit networks has allowed for the purchase of goods using money deposited in a bank half a world away. These advancements did not eradicate the different systems they affected; instead, each system has been transformed so that it can interoperate with systems all over the world, while still preserving local diversity. As Palfrey and Gasser show, interoperability is a critical aspect of any successful system -- and now it is more important than ever. Today we are confronted with challenges that affect us on a global scale: the financial crisis, the quest for sustainable energy, and the need to reform health care systems and improve global disaster response systems. The successful flow of information across systems is crucial if we are to solve these problems, but we must also learn to manage the vast degree of interconnection inherent in each system involved. Interoperability offers a number of solutions to these global challenges, but Palfrey and Gasser also consider its potential negative effects, especially with respect to privacy, security, and co-dependence of states; indeed, interoperability has already sparked debates about document data formats, digital music, and how to create successful yet safe cloud computing. Interop demonstrates that, in order to get the most out of interoperability while minimizing its risks, we will need to fundamentally revisit our understanding of how it works, and how it can allow for improvements in each of its constituent parts. In Interop, Palfrey and Gasser argue that there needs to be a nuanced, stable theory of interoperability -- one that still generates efficiencies, but which also ensures a sustainable mode of interconnection. Pointing the way forward for the new information economy, Interop provides valuable insights into how technological integration and innovation can flourish in the twenty-first century.

Download or read book Ecotourism s Promise and Peril written by Daniel T. Blumstein and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-08-22 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Intended as a guide for wildlife managers and ecotourism operators, as well as interested ecotourists, this book addresses the biological principles governing how ecotourism affects wildlife. The introductory chapters focus on four key responses to human visitation—behavioral, physiological, ecological, and evolutionary. Readers will discover ecotourism’s effects on biodiversity in connection with various industries that are habitat or taxonomically specific: fish tourism (including both freshwater and marine), marine mammal tourism, the huge industry centered on terrestrial animals, and the well-studied industry of penguin tourism. Given that the costs and benefits of ecotourism cannot be meaningfully assessed without understanding the human context, particular attention is given to how ecotourism has been used as part of community development. In closing, the book synthesizes the current state of knowledge regarding best practices for reducing human impacts on wildlife. The final chapter highlights key research questions that must be addressed to provide more evidence-based guidelines and policy.

Download or read book Better than Human written by Allen Buchanan and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-07-01 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is it right to use biomedical technologies to make us better than well or even perhaps better than human? Should we view our biology as fixed or should we try to improve on it? College students are already taking cognitive enhancement drugs. The U.S. army is already working to develop drugs and technologies to produce "super soldiers." Scientists already know how to use genetic engineering techniques to enhance the strength and memories of mice and the application of such technologies to humans is on the horizon. In Better Than Human, philosopher-bioethicist Allen Buchanan grapples with the ethical dilemmas of the biomedical enhancement revolution. Biomedical enhancements can make us smarter, have better memories, be stronger, quicker, have more stamina, live much longer, avoid the frailties of aging, and enjoy richer emotional lives. In spite of the benefits that biomedical enhancements may bring, many people instinctively reject them. Some worry that we will lose something important-our appreciation for what we have or what makes human beings distinctively valuable. Others assume that biomedical enhancements will only be available to the rich, with the result that social inequalities will worsen. Buchanan shows that the debate over enhancement has been distorted by false assumptions and misleading rhetoric. To think clearly about enhancement, we have to acknowledge that human nature is a mixed bag and that our species has many "design flaws." We should be open be open to the possibility of becoming better than human, while never underestimating the risks that our attempts to improve may back-fire.

Download or read book Tools and Weapons written by Brad Smith and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2019-09-10 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The instant New York Times bestseller. From Microsoft's president and one of the tech industry's broadest thinkers, a frank and thoughtful reckoning with how to balance enormous promise and existential risk as the digitization of everything accelerates. “A colorful and insightful insiders’ view of how technology is both empowering and threatening us. From privacy to cyberattacks, this timely book is a useful guide for how to navigate the digital future.” —Walter Isaacson Microsoft President Brad Smith operates by a simple core belief: When your technology changes the world, you bear a responsibility to help address the world you have helped create. This might seem uncontroversial, but it flies in the face of a tech sector long obsessed with rapid growth and sometimes on disruption as an end in itself. While sweeping digital transformation holds great promise, we have reached an inflection point. The world has turned information technology into both a powerful tool and a formidable weapon, and new approaches are needed to manage an era defined by even more powerful inventions like artificial intelligence. Companies that create technology must accept greater responsibility for the future, and governments will need to regulate technology by moving faster and catching up with the pace of innovation. In Tools and Weapons, Brad Smith and Carol Ann Browne bring us a captivating narrative from the cockpit of one of the world's largest and most powerful tech companies as it finds itself in the middle of some of the thorniest emerging issues of our time. These are challenges that come with no preexisting playbook, including privacy, cybercrime and cyberwar, social media, the moral conundrums of artificial intelligence, big tech's relationship to inequality, and the challenges for democracy, far and near. While in no way a self-glorifying "Microsoft memoir," the book pulls back the curtain remarkably wide onto some of the company's most crucial recent decision points as it strives to protect the hopes technology offers against the very real threats it also presents. There are huge ramifications for communities and countries, and Brad Smith provides a thoughtful and urgent contribution to that effort.

Download or read book The Promises and Perils of Digital Strategies in Achieving Health Equity written by National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2016-07-22 with total page 83 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Health care is in the midst of a dramatic transformation in the United States. Spurred by technological advances, economic imperatives, and governmental policies, information technologies are rapidly being applied to health care in an effort to improve access, enhance quality, and decrease costs. At the same time, the use of technologies by the consumers of health care is changing how people interact with the health care system and with health information. These changes in health care have the potential both to exacerbate and to diminish the stark disparities in health and well-being that exist among population groups in the United States. If the benefits of technology flow disproportionately to those who already enjoy better coverage, use, and outcomes than disadvantaged groups, heath disparities could increase. But if technologies can be developed and implemented in such a way to improve access and enhance quality for the members of all groups, the ongoing transformation of health care could reduce the gaps among groups while improving health care for all. To explore the potential for further insights into, and opportunities to address, disparities in underserved populations the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine held a workshop in October 2014. The workshop focused on (1) how communities are using digital health technologies to improve health outcomes for racial and ethnic minority populations, (2) how community engagement can improve access to high-quality health information for members of these groups, and (3) on models of successful technology-based strategies to reduce health disparities. This report summarizes the presentations and discussions at the workshop.

Download or read book Shale Oil and Gas written by Vikram Rao and published by RTI Press. This book was released on 2015-08-09 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Promise and the Peril

Download or read book Killing ideas softly written by Ronald A. Beghetto and published by IAP. This book was released on 2013-06-01 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Creativity is a hot topic in education. As such, there is no shortage of insights or suggestions for how teachers might incorporate creativity into their curriculum. Wading through these suggestions can, however, be quite daunting. This is because many of these suggestions imply that teachers need to somehow radically change their approach to teaching, adopt a new curriculum, or add-on to their existing curriculum. Consequently, many teachers feel that such changes are not feasible and may even come at the cost of supporting students’ academic learning. This book provides an alternative. Teachers need not adopt a new curriculum, radically change what they are already doing, or attempt to add more to their already overflowing plate of curricular responsibilities. Rather, teaching for and with creativity is often more about doing what one is already doing, only slightly better. The aim of this book is to help teachers understand how they can make slight changes to their own teaching, which can substantially support the development of students’ creative potential and result in a more creative approach to teaching. The insights and practical suggestions presented in this book represent some of the newest and most promising work being done in the field of creativity studies. This book is unique in that it presents teachers with concrete ideas for how to simultaneously support creativity and learning. A particularly novel feature of this book is that it offers a blend of theoretical insights and vivid classroom examples to illustrate the kinds of opportunities and challenges that teachers face when they attempt to teach for and with creativity. As such, this book will provide teachers, scholars, researchers, and anyone interested in classroom creativity with new directions for future research and educational practice.

Download or read book Virtual Competition written by Ariel Ezrachi and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2016-11-14 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A fascinating book about how platform internet companies (Amazon, Facebook, and so on) are changing the norms of economic competition.” —Fast Company Shoppers with a bargain-hunting impulse and internet access can find a universe of products at their fingertips. But is there a dark side to internet commerce? This thought-provoking exposé invites us to explore how sophisticated algorithms and data-crunching are changing the nature of market competition, and not always for the better. Introducing into the policy lexicon terms such as algorithmic collusion, behavioral discrimination, and super-platforms, Ariel Ezrachi and Maurice E. Stucke explore the resulting impact on competition, our democratic ideals, our wallets, and our well-being. “We owe the authors our deep gratitude for anticipating and explaining the consequences of living in a world in which black boxes collude and leave no trails behind. They make it clear that in a world of big data and algorithmic pricing, consumers are outgunned and antitrust laws are outdated, especially in the United States.” —Science “A convincing argument that there can be a darker side to the growth of digital commerce. The replacement of the invisible hand of competition by the digitized hand of internet commerce can give rise to anticompetitive behavior that the competition authorities are ill equipped to deal with.” —Burton G. Malkiel, Wall Street Journal “A convincing case for the need to rethink competition law to cope with algorithmic capitalism’s potential for malfeasance.” —John Naughton, The Observer

Download or read book The Hype Machine written by Sinan Aral and published by Currency. This book was released on 2020-09-15 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A landmark insider’s tour of how social media affects our decision-making and shapes our world in ways both useful and dangerous, with critical insights into the social media trends of the 2020 election and beyond “The book might be described as prophetic. . . . At least two of Aral’s three predictions have come to fruition.”—New York NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY WIRED • LONGLISTED FOR THE PORCHLIGHT BUSINESS BOOK AWARD Social media connected the world—and gave rise to fake news and increasing polarization. It is paramount, MIT professor Sinan Aral says, that we recognize the outsize effect social media has on us—on our politics, our economy, and even our personal health—in order to steer today’s social technology toward its great promise while avoiding the ways it can pull us apart. Drawing on decades of his own research and business experience, Aral goes under the hood of the most powerful social networks to tackle the critical question of just how much social media actually shapes our choices, for better or worse. He shows how the tech behind social media offers the same set of behavior influencing levers to everyone who hopes to change the way we think and act—from Russian hackers to brand marketers—which is why its consequences affect everything from elections to business, dating to health. Along the way, he covers a wide array of topics, including how network effects fuel Twitter’s and Facebook’s massive growth, the neuroscience of how social media affects our brains, the real consequences of fake news, the power of social ratings, and the impact of social media on our kids. In mapping out strategies for being more thoughtful consumers of social media, The Hype Machine offers the definitive guide to understanding and harnessing for good the technology that has redefined our world overnight.

Download or read book Truth or Consequences written by Millard J. Erickson and published by InterVarsity Press. This book was released on 2009-09-20 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A 2002 Christianity Today Book of the Year! Postmodernism. The term slowly filtered into our vocabularies about three decades ago and now permeates most discussions of the humanities. Those who tout the promises and perils of this twentieth-century intellectual movement have filled many a bookshelf. And in a previous book, Postmodernizing the Faith: Evangelical Responses to the Challenge of Postmodernism, Millard J. Erickson provided his own summary of several evangelical responses--both positive and negative--to the movement. Now in this book Erickson offers his own promised in-depth analysis and constructive response. What are the intellectual roots of postmodernism? Who are its most prominent exponents? What can we learn from their critique of modernism? Where do their assumptions and analyses fail us? Where do we go from here? What might a post-postmodernism look like? Erickson addresses these issues with characteristic discernment, clarity and evenhandedness, neither dismissing the insights of postmodern thought nor succumbing uncritically to its allure. An important book for all who are concerned with commending Christian truth to the culture within which we live.

Download or read book From Dissent to Democracy written by Jonathan C. Pinckney and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-06-10 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Peaceful protest is a strong driver for democratization across the globe. Yet, it doesn't always lead to democratic transition, as seen in the Arab Spring revolutions in Egypt or Yemen. Why do some nonviolent transitions end in democracy while others do not? In From Dissent to Democracy, Jonathan Pinckney systematically examines transitions initiated by nonviolent resistance campaigns and argues that two key factors explain whether or not democracy will follow such efforts. First, a movement must sustain high levels of social mobilization. Second, it must direct that mobilization away from revolutionary "maximalist" goals and tactics and towards support for new institutions. Pinckney tests his theory by presenting a global statistical analysis of all political transitions from 1945-2011 and three case studies from Nepal, Zambia, and Brazil. Original and empirically rigorous, this book provides new insights into the intersection of democratization and nonviolent resistance and gives actionable recommendations for how to encourage democratic transitions.