Download or read book Invented Worlds written by Ellen Winner and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1982 with total page 454 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Psychologist Ellen Winner studies the creative, nonliteral discourse of children's spontaneous speech, examining how their abilities to use and interpret figurative language change as they grow older, and what such language shows us about the changing feature's of children's minds.
Download or read book Remote Viewing written by Elisabeth Sussman and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New painting and drawing is the subject ofRemote Viewing, which accompanies an exhibition at the Whitney Museum. The book brings together eight artists, some well known, others emerging, all of whom create new worlds that exist somewhere between abstraction and representation. Each of the featured artists-Franz Ackermann, Steve DiBenedetto, Carroll Dunham, Ati Maier, Julie Mehretu, Matthew Ritchie, Alexander Ross, and Terry Winters -is part of a revitalization that has been seen in recent years in contemporary painting and drawing. Their work grapples with the overwhelming abundance of information now present in our lives, information that is historical, scientific, technological, geographical, visual, literary, hallucinogenic, mass-media, or otherwise, and shares a fascination with assertive color, invented form, and the construction of dynamic spaces. The book includes color illustrations of works in the exhibition as well as studio photography of each artist.
Download or read book Inventing Imaginary Worlds written by Michele Root-Bernstein and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2014-06-18 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How can parents, educators, business leaders and policy makers nurture creativity, prepare for inventiveness and stimulate innovation? One compelling answer, this book argues, lies in fostering the invention of imaginary worlds, a.k.a. worldplay. First emerging in middle childhood, this complex form of make-believe draws lifelong energy from the fruitful combustions of play, imagination and creativity. Unfortunately, trends in modern life conspire to break down the synergies of creative play with imaginary worlds. Unstructured playtime in childhood has all but disappeared. Invent-it-yourself make-believe places have all but succumbed in adolescence to ready-made computer games. Adults are discouraged from playing as a waste of time with no relevance to the workplace. Narrow notions of creativity exile the fictive imagination to fantasy arts. And yet, as Michele Root-Bernstein demonstrates by means of historical inquiry, quantitative study and contemporary interview, spontaneous worldplay in childhood develops creative potential, and strategic worldplay in adulthood inspires innovations in the sciences and social sciences as well as the arts and literature. Inventing imaginary worlds develops the skills society needs for inventing the future. For more on Inventing Imaginary Worlds, check out: www.inventingimaginaryworlds.com
Download or read book I Am Radar written by Reif Larsen and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2015-02-24 with total page 699 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Washington Post "[G]randly ambitious... another masterpiece... this genre includes some of the greatest novels of our time, from Pynchon’s V. to David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. That’s the troupe Larsen has decided to join, and I Am Radar is a dazzling performance." The moment just before Radar Radmanovic is born, all of the hospital’s electricity mysteriously fails. The delivery takes place in total darkness. Lights back on, the staff sees a healthy baby boy—with pitch-black skin—born to the stunned white parents. No one understands the uncanny electrical event or the unexpected skin color. “A childbirth is an explosion,” the ancient physician says by way of explanation. “Some shrapnel is inevitable, isn’t it?” A kaleidoscopic novel both heartbreaking and dazzling, Reif Larsen’s I Am Radar begins with Radar’s perplexing birth but rapidly explodes outward, carrying readers across the globe and throughout history, as well as to unknown regions where radio waves and subatomic particles dance to their own design. Spanning this extraordinary range with grace and empathy, humor and courage, I Am Radar is the vessel where a century of conflict and art unite in a mesmerizing narrative whole. Deep in arctic Norway, a cadre of Norwegian schoolteachers is imprisoned during the Second World War. Founding a radical secret society that will hover on the margins of recorded history for decades to come, these schoolteachers steal radioactive material from a hidden Nazi nuclear reactor and use it to stage a surreal art performance on a frozen coastline. This strange society appears again in the aftermath of Cambodia’s murderous Khmer Rouge regime, when another secret performance takes place but goes horrifically wrong. Echoes of this disaster can be heard during the Yugoslavian wars, when an avant-garde puppeteer finds himself trapped inside Belgrade while his brother serves in the genocidal militia that attacks Srebrenica. Decades later, in the war-torn Congo, a disfigured literature professor assembles the largest library in the world even as the country around him collapses. All of these stories are linked by Radar—now a gifted radio operator living in the New Jersey Meadowlands—who struggles with love, a set of hapless parents,and a terrible medical affliction that he has only just begun to comprehend. As I Am Radar accelerates toward its unforgettable conclusion, these divergent strands slowly begin to converge, revealing that beneath our apparent differences, unseen harmonies secretly unite our lives. Drawing on the furthest reaches of quantum physics, forgotten history, and mind-bending art, Larsen’s I Am Radar is a triumph of storytelling at its most primal, elegant, and epic: a breathtaking journey through humanity’s darkest hours only to arrive at a place of shocking wonder and redemption. Cleveland Plain-Dealer "Larsen’s is an extraordinarily lush and verdant imagination, blooming wildly on the borders of the absurd and the riotous, the surreal and the ordinary…Quite unlike any [novel] I’ve read in a long time. One doesn’t consume it; one enters it, as part of a literary enactment… Brilliant…The effort is well-rewarded: It is both maddening and marvelous…I can’t wait to see what he pulls off next."
Download or read book The Invention of Nature written by Andrea Wulf and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2016-10-04 with total page 586 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The acclaimed author of Founding Gardeners reveals the forgotten life of Alexander von Humboldt, the visionary German naturalist whose ideas changed the way we see the natural world—and in the process created modern environmentalism. "Vivid and exciting.... Wulf’s pulsating account brings this dazzling figure back into a dazzling, much-deserved focus.” —The Boston Globe Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) was the most famous scientist of his age, a visionary German naturalist and polymath whose discoveries forever changed the way we understand the natural world. Among his most revolutionary ideas was a radical conception of nature as a complex and interconnected global force that does not exist for the use of humankind alone. In North America, Humboldt’s name still graces towns, counties, parks, bays, lakes, mountains, and a river. And yet the man has been all but forgotten. In this illuminating biography, Andrea Wulf brings Humboldt’s extraordinary life back into focus: his prediction of human-induced climate change; his daring expeditions to the highest peaks of South America and to the anthrax-infected steppes of Siberia; his relationships with iconic figures, including Simón Bolívar and Thomas Jefferson; and the lasting influence of his writings on Darwin, Wordsworth, Goethe, Muir, Thoreau, and many others. Brilliantly researched and stunningly written, The Invention of Nature reveals the myriad ways in which Humboldt’s ideas form the foundation of modern environmentalism—and reminds us why they are as prescient and vital as ever.
Download or read book How the Scots Invented the Modern World written by Arthur Herman and published by Crown. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 482 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exciting account of the origins of the modern world Who formed the first literate society? Who invented our modern ideas of democracy and free market capitalism? The Scots. As historian and author Arthur Herman reveals, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Scotland made crucial contributions to science, philosophy, literature, education, medicine, commerce, and politics—contributions that have formed and nurtured the modern West ever since. Herman has charted a fascinating journey across the centuries of Scottish history. Here is the untold story of how John Knox and the Church of Scotland laid the foundation for our modern idea of democracy; how the Scottish Enlightenment helped to inspire both the American Revolution and the U.S. Constitution; and how thousands of Scottish immigrants left their homes to create the American frontier, the Australian outback, and the British Empire in India and Hong Kong. How the Scots Invented the Modern World reveals how Scottish genius for creating the basic ideas and institutions of modern life stamped the lives of a series of remarkable historical figures, from James Watt and Adam Smith to Andrew Carnegie and Arthur Conan Doyle, and how Scottish heroes continue to inspire our contemporary culture, from William “Braveheart” Wallace to James Bond. And no one who takes this incredible historical trek will ever view the Scots—or the modern West—in the same way again.
Download or read book The Invented Worlds of J R R Tolkien written by John Ronald Reuel Tolkien and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 56 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The exhibition ... [and catalog] represents a collaboration between the Haggerty Museum of Art and the Department of Special Collections and University Archives, Marquette University Archives. The exhibition was held in conjunction with the international conference The lord of the rings, 1954-2004: scholarship in honor of Dr. Richard E. Blackwelder at Marquette University (October 22-23, 2004) ... the aim of the exhibiton is to examine in a scholarly context and for the public the work of J.R.R. Tolkien in the Marquette University collection ... presented with the cooperation of Christopher Tolkien, The J.R.R. Tolkien Estate Limited and The J.R.R. Tolkien Copyright Trust ... Curtis L. Carter, director"--Acknowledgments, p. 4.
Download or read book Tim Berners Lee written by Stephanie Sammartino McPherson and published by Twenty-First Century Books. This book was released on 2009-09-01 with total page 116 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chronicles the life and accomplishments of Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web.
Download or read book Sparks of Genius written by Robert Root-Bernstein and published by HMH. This book was released on 2013-08-26 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discover the cognitive tools that lead to creative thinking and problem-solving with this “well-written and easy-to-follow” guide (Library Journal). Explore the “thinking tools” of extraordinary people, from Albert Einstein and Jane Goodall to Mozart and Virginia Woolf, and learn how you can practice the same imaginative skills to become your creative best. With engaging narratives and examples, Robert and Michèle Root-Bernstein investigate cognitive tools such as observing, recognizing patterns, modeling, playing, and more. Sparks of Genius is “a clever, detailed and demanding fitness program for the creative mind” and a groundbreaking guidebook for anyone interested in imaginative thinking, lifelong learning, and transdisciplinary education (Kirkus Reviews). “How different the painter at the easel and the physicist in the laboratory! Yet the Root-Bernsteins recognize the deep-down similarity of all creative thinking, whether in art or science. They demonstrate this similarity by comparing the accounts that various pioneers and inventors have left of their own creative processes: for Picasso just as for Einstein, for Klee just as for Feynman, the creative impulse always begins in vision, in emotion, in intuition. . . . With a lavishly illustrated chapter devoted to each tool, readers quickly realize just how far the imagination can stretch.” —Booklist “A powerful book . . . Sparks of Genius presents radically different ways of approaching problems.” —American Scientist
Download or read book Worlds Enough written by Elaine Freedgood and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2019-10-15 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book challenges basic assumptions about Victorian fiction, which was not always great, or even good, in the eyes of its critics. It was only in the late 1970s that literary critics constructed a prestigious version of British realism. This title examines criticism of Victorian novels since the 1850s and suggests how we can rethink our practices and perceptions about books we think we know.
Download or read book Designing Virtual Worlds written by Richard A. Bartle and published by New Riders. This book was released on 2004 with total page 768 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This text provides a comprehensive treatment of virtual world design from one of its pioneers. It covers everything from MUDs to MOOs to MMORPGs, from text-based to graphical VWs.
Download or read book Passwords to Paradise written by Nicholas Ostler and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2016-02-23 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." So opens the Gospel of John, an ancient text translated into almost every language, at once a compelling and beguiling metaphor for the Christian story of the Beginning. To further complicate matters, the words we read now are in any number of languages that would have been unknown or unrecognizable at the time of their composition. The gospel may have been originally dictated or written in Aramaic, but our only written source for the story is in Greek. Today, as your average American reader of the New Testament picks up his or her Bible off the shelf, the phrase as it appears has been translated from various linguistic intermediaries before its current manifestation in modern English. How to understand these words then, when so many other translators, languages, and cultures have exercised some level of influence on them? Christian tradition is not unique in facing this problem. All religions--if they have global aspirations--have to change in order to spread their influence, and often language has been the most powerful agent thereof. Passwords to Paradise explores the effects that language difference and language conversion have wrought on the world's great faiths, spanning more than two thousand years. It is an original and intriguing perspective on the history of religion by a master linguistic historian.
Download or read book Hot Light half made Worlds written by Alex Webb and published by Thames & Hudson. This book was released on 1986-01-01 with total page 91 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gathers photographs taken in Haiti, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Egypt, Barbados, India, Zaire, Ivory Coast, Uganda, and Trinidad
Download or read book The Invention of Humanity written by Siep Stuurman and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2017-02-20 with total page 429 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For much of history, strangers were routinely classified as barbarians and inferiors, seldom as fellow human beings. The notion of a common humanity was counterintuitive and thus had to be invented. Siep Stuurman traces evolving ideas of human equality and difference across continents and civilizations from ancient times to the present. Despite humans’ deeply ingrained bias against strangers, migration and cultural blending have shaped human experience from the earliest times. As travelers crossed frontiers and came into contact with unfamiliar peoples and customs, frontier experiences generated not only hostility but also empathy and understanding. Empires sought to civilize their “barbarians,” but in all historical eras critics of empire were able to imagine how the subjected peoples made short shrift of imperial arrogance. Drawing on the views of a global mix of thinkers—Homer, Confucius, Herodotus, the medieval Muslim scholar Ibn Khaldun, the Haitian writer Antenor Firmin, the Filipino nationalist Jose Rizal, and more—The Invention of Humanity surveys the great civilizational frontiers of history, from the interaction of nomadic and sedentary societies in ancient Eurasia and Africa, to Europeans’ first encounters with the indigenous peoples of the New World, to the Enlightenment invention of universal “modern equality.” Against a backdrop of two millennia of thinking about common humanity and equality, Stuurman concludes with a discussion of present-day debates about human rights and the “clash of civilizations.”
Download or read book The Geography of Bliss written by Eric Weiner and published by Random House. This book was released on 2014-10-30 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What makes a nation happy? Is one country's sense of happiness the same as another's? In the last two decades, psychologists and economists have learned a lot about who's happy and who isn't. The Dutch are, the Romanians aren't, and Americans are somewhere in between... After years of going to the world's least happy countries, Eric Weiner, a veteran foreign correspondent, decided to travel and evaluate each country's different sense of happiness and discover the nation that seemed happiest of all. ·He discovers the relationship between money and happiness in tiny and extremely wealthy Qatar (and it's not a good one) ·He goes to Thailand, and finds that not thinking is a contented way of life. ·He goes to the tiny Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan, and discovers they have an official policy of Gross National Happiness! ·He asks himself why the British don't do happiness? In Weiner's quest to find the world's happiest places, he eats rotten Icelandic shark, meditates in Bangalore, visits strip clubs in Bangkok and drinks himself into a stupor in Reykjavik. Full of inspired moments, The Geography of Bliss accomplishes a feat few travel books dare and even fewer achieve: to make you happier.
Download or read book Vortex written by S. J. Kincaid and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2013-07-02 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: S. J. Kincaid has created a fascinating dystopian world for Insignia, her futuristic science-fiction adventure series perfect for fans of Ender's Game. Earth is in the middle of WWIII, a war to determine which governments and corporations will control the resources of the solar system. Teen Tom Raines grew up with nothing—some days without even a roof over his head. Then his exceptional gaming skills earned him a spot in the Intrasolar Forces, the country's elite military training program, and his life completely changed. Now in Vortex, the second book in the series, Tom discovers that the Pentagonal Spire, where he and his friends are being trained as superhuman weapons, is filled with corruption. He is asked to betray his friends—the first real friends he's ever had—for the sake of his country. Will he sacrifice his new life to do what he believes is right?
Download or read book The World Made Meme written by Ryan M. Milner and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2018-04-13 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How memetic media—aggregate texts that are collectively created, circulated, and transformed—become a part of public conversations that shape broader cultural debates. Internet memes—digital snippets that can make a joke, make a point, or make a connection—are now a lingua franca of online life. They are collectively created, circulated, and transformed by countless users across vast networks. Most of us have seen the cat playing the piano, Kanye interrupting, Kanye interrupting the cat playing the piano. In The World Made Meme, Ryan Milner argues that memes, and the memetic process, are shaping public conversation. It's hard to imagine a major pop cultural or political moment that doesn't generate a constellation of memetic texts. Memetic media, Milner writes, offer participation by reappropriation, balancing the familiar and the foreign as new iterations intertwine with established ideas. New commentary is crafted by the mediated circulation and transformation of old ideas. Through memetic media, small strands weave together big conversations. Milner considers the formal and social dimensions of memetic media, and outlines five basic logics that structure them: multimodality, reappropriation, resonance, collectivism, and spread. He examines how memetic media both empower and exclude during public conversations, exploring the potential for public voice despite everyday antagonisms. Milner argues that memetic media enable the participation of many voices even in the midst of persistent inequality. This new kind of participatory conversation, he contends, complicates the traditional culture industries. When age-old gatekeepers intertwine with new ways of sharing information, the relationship between collective participation and individual expression becomes ambivalent. For better or worse—and Milner offers examples of both—memetic media have changed the nature of public conversations.
