Download or read book Dissolving Illusions written by Suzanne Humphries and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2013 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Starting in the mid-1800s, there was a steady drop in deaths from all infectious diseases, decreasing to relatively minor levels by the early 1900s. The history of that transformation involves famine, poverty, filth, lost cures, eugenicist doctrine, individual freedoms versus state might, protests and arrests over vaccine refusal, and much more. But the authors shows that vaccines, antibiotics, and other medical interventions are not responsible for the increase in lifespan and the decline in mortality from infectious diseases.
Download or read book The Ultimate Book of Optical Illusions written by Al Seckel and published by Sterling Publishing Company. This book was released on 2006 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contains color and black-and-white illustrations of over three hundred optical illusions, each with brief, explanatory text.
Download or read book Folk Illusions written by K. Brandon Barker and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2019-04-22 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wiggling a pencil so that it looks like it is made of rubber, "stealing" your niece's nose, and listening for the sounds of the ocean in a conch shell– these are examples of folk illusions, youthful play forms that trade on perceptual oddities. In this groundbreaking study, K. Brandon Barker and Claiborne Rice argue that these easily overlooked instances of children's folklore offer an important avenue for studying perception and cognition in the contexts of social and embodied development. Folk illusions are traditionalized verbal and/or physical actions that are performed with the intention of creating a phantasm for one or more participants. Using a cross-disciplinary approach that combines the ethnographic methods of folklore with the empirical data of neuroscience, cognitive science, and psychology, Barker and Rice catalogue over eighty discrete folk illusions while exploring the complexities of embodied perception. Taken together as a genre of folklore, folk illusions show that people, starting from a young age, possess an awareness of the illusory tendencies of perceptual processes as well as an awareness that the distinctions between illusion and reality are always communally formed.
Download or read book Illusions of Emancipation written by Joseph P. Reidy and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2019-01-15 with total page 519 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As students of the Civil War have long known, emancipation was not merely a product of Lincoln's proclamation or of Confederate defeat in April 1865. It was a process that required more than legal or military action. With enslaved people fully engaged as actors, emancipation necessitated a fundamental reordering of a way of life whose implications stretched well beyond the former slave states. Slavery did not die quietly or quickly, nor did freedom fulfill every dream of the enslaved or their allies. The process unfolded unevenly. In this sweeping reappraisal of slavery's end during the Civil War era, Joseph P. Reidy employs the lenses of time, space, and individuals' sense of personal and social belonging to understand how participants and witnesses coped with drastic change, its erratic pace, and its unforeseeable consequences. Emancipation disrupted everyday habits, causing sensations of disorientation that sometimes intensified the experience of reality and sometimes muddled it. While these illusions of emancipation often mixed disappointment with hope, through periods of even intense frustration they sustained the promise that the struggle for freedom would result in victory.
Download or read book Dance to the Tune of Life written by Denis Noble and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book formulates a relativistic theory of biology, challenging the common gene-centred view of organisms.
Download or read book The Illusion of Conscious Will written by Daniel M. Wegner and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2003-08-11 with total page 743 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A novel contribution to the age-old debate about free will versus determinism. Do we consciously cause our actions, or do they happen to us? Philosophers, psychologists, neuroscientists, theologians, and lawyers have long debated the existence of free will versus determinism. In this book Daniel Wegner offers a novel understanding of the issue. Like actions, he argues, the feeling of conscious will is created by the mind and brain. Yet if psychological and neural mechanisms are responsible for all human behavior, how could we have conscious will? The feeling of conscious will, Wegner shows, helps us to appreciate and remember our authorship of the things our minds and bodies do. Yes, we feel that we consciously will our actions, Wegner says, but at the same time, our actions happen to us. Although conscious will is an illusion, it serves as a guide to understanding ourselves and to developing a sense of responsibility and morality. Approaching conscious will as a topic of psychological study, Wegner examines the issue from a variety of angles. He looks at illusions of the will—those cases where people feel that they are willing an act that they are not doing or, conversely, are not willing an act that they in fact are doing. He explores conscious will in hypnosis, Ouija board spelling, automatic writing, and facilitated communication, as well as in such phenomena as spirit possession, dissociative identity disorder, and trance channeling. The result is a book that sidesteps endless debates to focus, more fruitfully, on the impact on our lives of the illusion of conscious will.
Download or read book Fantastic Optical Illusions written by and published by DK Children. This book was released on 2017 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Fantastic Optical Illusions is filled with visual illusions, color tricks, perplexing puzzles, quizzes, and more"--Provided by publisher.
Download or read book Epidemic Illusions written by Eugene T. Richardson and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A physician-anthropologist explores how public health practices--from epidemiological modeling to outbreak containment--help perpetuate global inequities. In Epidemic Illusions, Eugene Richardson, a physician and an anthropologist, contends that public health practices--from epidemiological modeling and outbreak containment to Big Data and causal inference--play an essential role in perpetuating a range of global inequities. Drawing on postcolonial theory, medical anthropology, and critical science studies, Richardson demonstrates the ways in which the flagship discipline of epidemiology has been shaped by the colonial, racist, and patriarchal system that had its inception in 1492.
Download or read book Collective Illusions written by Todd Rose and published by Hachette Go. This book was released on 2022-02-01 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on cutting-edge neuroscience and social psychology research, an acclaimed author demonstrates how so much of our thinking is informed by false assumptions—making us dangerously mistrustful as a society and needlessly unhappy as individuals. The desire to fit in is one of the most powerful, least understood forces in society. Todd Rose believes that as human beings, we continually act against our own best interests because our brains misunderstand what others believe. A complicated set of illusions driven by conformity bias distorts how we see the world around us. From toilet paper shortages to kidneys that get thrown away rather than used for transplants; from racial segregation to the perceived “electability” of women in politics; from bottled water to “cancel culture,” we routinely copy others, lie about what we believe, cling to tribes, and silence people. The question is, Why do we keep believing the lies and hurting ourselves? Todd Rose proves that the answer is hard-wired in our DNA: our brains are more socially dependent than we realize or dare to accept. Most of us would rather be fully in sync with the social norms of our respective groups than be true to who we are. Using originally researched data, Collective Illusions shows us where we get things wrong and, just as important, how we can be authentic in forming opinions while valuing truth. Rose offers a counterintuitive yet empowering explanation for how we can bridge our inference gap, make decisions with a newfound clarity, and achieve fulfillment. **National Bestseller** **Wall Street Journal Bestseller** **Named Amazon's 2022 Best Book of the Year in Business, Leadership, and Science**
Download or read book Ideal Illusions written by James Peck and published by Metropolitan Books. This book was released on 2011-03-15 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From a noted historian and foreign-policy analyst, a groundbreaking critique of the troubling symbiosis between Washington and the human rights movement The United States has long been hailed as a powerful force for global human rights. Now, drawing on thousands of documents from the CIA, the National Security Council, the Pentagon, and development agencies, James Peck shows in blunt detail how Washington has shaped human rights into a potent ideological weapon for purposes having little to do with rights—and everything to do with furthering America's global reach. Using the words of Washington's leaders when they are speaking among themselves, Peck tracks the rise of human rights from its dismissal in the cold war years as "fuzzy minded" to its calculated adoption, after the Vietnam War, as a rationale for American foreign engagement. He considers such milestones as the fight for Soviet dissidents, Tiananmen Square, and today's war on terror, exposing in the process how the human rights movement has too often failed to challenge Washington's strategies. A gripping and elegant work of analysis, Ideal Illusions argues that the movement must break free from Washington if it is to develop a truly uncompromising critique of power in all its forms.
Download or read book The Age of Illusions written by Andrew Bacevich and published by Metropolitan Books. This book was released on 2020-01-07 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A thought-provoking and penetrating account of the post-Cold war follies and delusions that culminated in the age of Donald Trump from the bestselling author of The Limits of Power. When the Cold War ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Washington establishment felt it had prevailed in a world-historical struggle. Our side had won, a verdict that was both decisive and irreversible. For the world’s “indispensable nation,” its “sole superpower,” the future looked very bright. History, having brought the United States to the very summit of power and prestige, had validated American-style liberal democratic capitalism as universally applicable. In the decades to come, Americans would put that claim to the test. They would embrace the promise of globalization as a source of unprecedented wealth while embarking on wide-ranging military campaigns to suppress disorder and enforce American values abroad, confident in the ability of U.S. forces to defeat any foe. Meanwhile, they placed all their bets on the White House to deliver on the promise of their Cold War triumph: unequaled prosperity, lasting peace, and absolute freedom. In The Age of Illusions, bestselling author Andrew Bacevich takes us from that moment of seemingly ultimate victory to the age of Trump, telling an epic tale of folly and delusion. Writing with his usual eloquence and vast knowledge, he explains how, within a quarter of a century, the United States ended up with gaping inequality, permanent war, moral confusion, and an increasingly angry and alienated population, as well, of course, as the strangest president in American history.
Download or read book Ideals and Illusions written by Thomas McCarthy and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These lucid and closely reasoned studies of the thought of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, J�rgen Habermas, and Richard Rorty provide a coherent analysis of major pathways in recent critical theory. They defend a position analogous to Kant's - that ideas of reason are both unavoidable presuppositions of thought that have to be carefully reconstructed and persistent sources of illusions that have to be repeatedly deconstructed.McCarthy examines the critique of impure reason from the complementary viewpoints of the attackers and defenders of Enlightenment rationality. He first analyzes the work of Rorty, Foucault, and Derrida to determine what these radical critics have contributed to our understanding of reason and where they have gone wrong. He explores Habermas's theory of communicative rationality, focusing on the attempt to go beyond hermeneutics, the incorporation of systems theory, the implications of discourse ethics for our understanding of political debate and collective decision making, and the relation of political theology to critical social theory.Thomas McCarthy is Professor of Philosophy at Northwestern University and the editor of The MIT Press series Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought. The analysis and assessment of Habermas's recent work in Ideals and Illusions serves as a sequel to his earlier study The Critical Theory of J�rgen Habermas.
Download or read book Constantine Distorted Illusions written by Kami Garcia and published by DC Comics. This book was released on 2022-09-27 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John Constantine is, and has always been, a magician of the highest caliber-who doesn’t need additional training from any highbrow magician, thank you very much. But a magical apprenticeship in the United States is a good excuse to get out of London…and in Washington, D.C., he can join his best friend’s punk band, Mucous Membrane. When the band begins to dabble in magic, a complicated spell gets out of hand…and the disastrous consequences might be more than Constantine can handle. Join #1 New York Times bestselling author Kami Garcia (Teen Titans: Raven, Beautiful Creatures) and artist Isaac Goodhart (Victor and Nora: A Gotham Love Story) in the most thrilling magical team-up of the year!
Download or read book Illusion or Truth written by Mustafa Hikmet Tosyali and published by Mustafa Hikmet Tosyali. This book was released on 2021-06-09 with total page 51 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A practical guide to find the real freedom in modern age. In this book,you will find the answers to your questions,such as; What is the essence of all ancient religions,teachings and philosophies. What does it really mean "Total Awareness" and how you can reach to it. How to observe the "reality" with a clear perception and mind. How to find out "Meaning of Life". What really is "Matrix" and does it exist. How technology is changing and effecting our life. What is the real "Intelligence" and "Education". Table of Contents of the book include; Observation of Disorder Perception and Duality Dimension of Now Analyzing Money Society Control and Reason Education,Attention,Intelligence Awareness and Instinct The Art of Basketball Reaction and Butterfly Effect Philosophy and Real Religion The System of Your Mind The Meaning of Life and Science Thought and Artificial Intelligence Welcome to Matrix,Version 1.0. Be The Change Choiceless Awareness
Download or read book Horten s Incredible Illusions written by Lissa Evans and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stuart gets a job as a junior curator at the museum where his great-uncle Tony's magical workshop objects are on display and embarks on a new mystery that challenges him to find the great magician's hidden will.
Download or read book Cherished Illusions written by Sarah Stern and published by New Leaf Publishing Group. This book was released on 2004-09 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This first novel from Sarah Stern weaves startling facts about ancient hatreds directed toward the Jewish people with a rich, detailed narrative that readers will find engrossing. Through her supple writing and an imagination rooted in truth-seeking, Stern has crafted a novel for all ages. Blends historical truths with an engaging fictional setting and characters. A fascinating story for anyone interested in the Middle East conflict.
Download or read book Illusions written by Aprilynne Pike and published by Turtleback Books. This book was released on 2012-05 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As her senior year of high school starts, Laurel is just beginning to adjust to Tamani's absence when he suddenly reappears, telling her he must guard her against the returning threat of the trolls that pose a danger both to her and to Avalon, in this third book in the bestselling Wings series.
