Download or read book Studies in Irreversibility written by Benjamin Schreier and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2009-10-02 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The premise of Studies in Irreversibility: Texts and Contexts is that there is a big difference between phenomena, practices, processes, and events that are irreversible and those that are reversible, and moreover that this difference and its manifold implications remain underappreciated so long as the analysis of culture continues to anchor itself in an emphasis on the capacities of human agency. If messianic modes posit a future to justify the present, and so interpret the influence of the past, the papers in this collection are devoted to examining the present of experience from the perspective of its uncompromising and irreducible past, finding in irreversibility a key to an interpretation of futurity. Together, these papers outline a method of examining experience as something more—or at least other—than the desire to know it, and in so doing they shed light on the powerful role of normativity in the narratives we construct in and about culture. Through novel analyses from the disciplines of literature, art criticism, history, philosophy, ethnic studies, and ethics, the contributors to this book address key questions about the nature of irreversibility: What differentiates the experience of the irreversible from the experience of the reversible? How is irreversibility recognized? What happens when we acknowledge something to be irreversible? How has society contended with irreversibility, and what sorts of tools exist today to interpret its significance? Wary of impetuously fixing the meaning of a still-elusive concept, this volume collects papers that employ a wide array of methodologies, mindful that no one critical approach may yet have proved itself. Irreversibility is not simply a quality of the texts examined in this volume, nor is it strictly speaking a lens through which otherwise coherent or stable texts are examined; rather, it emerges as a model that brings together texts and the thinking of them. By together outlining a method of examining culture that moves beyond reliance on tropes such as functionalism, teleology, and chance, tropes that have dominated twentieth century cultural analysis, these papers help to inaugurate a new paradigm in the study of culture.

Download or read book Irreversibility and Dissipation in Microscopic Systems written by Édgar Roldán and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-06-13 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After an insightful introductory part on recent developments in the thermodynamics of small systems, the author presents his contribution to a long-standing problem, namely the connection between irreversibility and dissipation. He develops a method based on recent results on fluctuation theorems that is able to estimate dissipation using only information acquired in a single, sufficiently long, trajectory of a stationary nonequilibrium process. This part ends with a remarkable application of the method to the analysis of biological data, in this case, the fluctuations of a hair bundle. The third part studies the energetics of systems that undergo symmetry breaking transitions. These theoretical ideas lead to, among other things, an experimental realization of a Szilard engine using manipulated colloids. This work has the potential for important applications ranging from the analysis of biological media to the design of novel artificial nano-machines.

Download or read book Non Equilibrium Entropy and Irreversibility written by C. Lindblad and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2001-11-30 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The problem of deriving irreversible thermodynamics from the re versible microscopic dynamics has been on the agenda of theoreti cal physics for a century and has produced more papers than can be digested by any single scientist. Why add to this too long list with yet another work? The goal is definitely not to give a gen eral review of previous work in this field. My ambition is rather to present an approach differing in some key aspects from the stan dard treatments, and to develop it as far as possible using rather simple mathematical tools (mainly inequalities of various kinds). However, in the course of this work I have used a large number of results and ideas from the existing literature, and the reference list contains contributions from many different lines of research. As a consequence the reader may find the arguments a bit difficult to follow without some previous exposure to this set of problems.

Download or read book Irreversible Damage written by Abigail Shrier and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2020-06-30 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NAMED A BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE ECONOMIST AND ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF 2021 BY THE TIMES AND THE SUNDAY TIMES "Irreversible Damage . . . has caused a storm. Abigail Shrier, a Wall Street Journal writer, does something simple yet devastating: she rigorously lays out the facts." —Janice Turner, The Times of London Until just a few years ago, gender dysphoria—severe discomfort in one’s biological sex—was vanishingly rare. It was typically found in less than .01 percent of the population, emerged in early childhood, and afflicted males almost exclusively. But today whole groups of female friends in colleges, high schools, and even middle schools across the country are coming out as “transgender.” These are girls who had never experienced any discomfort in their biological sex until they heard a coming-out story from a speaker at a school assembly or discovered the internet community of trans “influencers.” Unsuspecting parents are awakening to find their daughters in thrall to hip trans YouTube stars and “gender-affirming” educators and therapists who push life-changing interventions on young girls—including medically unnecessary double mastectomies and puberty blockers that can cause permanent infertility. Abigail Shrier, a writer for the Wall Street Journal, has dug deep into the trans epidemic, talking to the girls, their agonized parents, and the counselors and doctors who enable gender transitions, as well as to “detransitioners”—young women who bitterly regret what they have done to themselves. Coming out as transgender immediately boosts these girls’ social status, Shrier finds, but once they take the first steps of transition, it is not easy to walk back. She offers urgently needed advice about how parents can protect their daughters. A generation of girls is at risk. Abigail Shrier’s essential book will help you understand what the trans craze is and how you can inoculate your child against it—or how to retrieve her from this dangerous path.

Download or read book Studies in the Statistical Mechanics of Irreversible Processes written by Frank Clinton Andrews and published by . This book was released on 1961 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Handbook of Superconducting Materials written by David A. Cardwell and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 1136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Irreversibility and Aggregate Investment written by Giuseppe Bertola and published by . This book was released on 1991 with total page 52 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Investment is often irreversible, in that installed capital has little or no value unless used in production. In the presence of ongoing uncertainty, an individual firm's irreversible investment policy optimally alternates short bursts of positive gross investment to periods of inaction, when the installed capital stock is allowed to depreciate. The behavior of aggregate investment series is characterized by sluggish, continuous adjustment instead. We argue in this paper that aggregate dynamics should be interpreted in terms of unsynchronized irreversible investment decisions by heterogenous firms, rather than in terms of ad-hoc adjustment cost functions in a representative-agent framework. We propose a closed-form solution for a realistic model of sequential irreversible investment, characterize the aggregate implications of microeconomic irreversibility and idiosyncratic uncertainty, and interpret U.S. data in light of the theoretical results.

Download or read book The Nature of Irreversibility written by H.B. Hollinger and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A dominant feature of our ordinary experience of the world is a sense of irreversible change: things lose form, people grow old, energy dissipates. On the other hand, a major conceptual scheme we use to describe the natural world, molecular dynamics, has reversibility at its core. The need to harmonize conceptual schemes and experience leads to several questions, one of which is the focus of this book. How does irreversibility at the macroscopic level emerge from the reversibility that prevails at the molecular level? Attempts to explain the emergence have emphasized probability, and assigned different probabilities to the forward and reversed directions of processes so that one direction is far more probable than the other. The conclu sion is promising, but the reasons for it have been obscure. In many cases the aim has been to find an explana tion in the nature of probability itself. Reactions to that have been divided: some think the aim is justified while others think it is absurd.

Download or read book Adjustment Costs Irreversibility and Investment Patterns in African Manufacturing written by Mr.Arne Bigsten and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 1999-07-01 with total page 54 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper examines dynamic patterns of investment in Cameroon, Ghana, Kenya, Zambia and Zimbabwe, assessing the consistency of those patterns with different adjustment cost structures. Using survey data on manufactured firms, we document the importance of zero investment episodes and lumpy investment. The proportion of firms experiencing large investment spikes is significant in explaining aggregate manufacturing investment. Taken together, evidence from descriptive statistics, average investment regressions modeling the response to capital imbalance, and transition data analysis indicate that irreversibility is an important factor considered by firms when making investment plans. The picture is not unanimous however, and some explanations for the mixed results are proposed.

Download or read book Irreversibility Uncertainty and Investment written by Robert S. Pindyck and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 1989 with total page 58 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Irreversible investment is especially sensitive to such risk factors as volatile exchange rates and uncertainty about tariff structures and future cash flows. If the goal of macroeconomic policy is to stimulate investment, stability and credibility may be more important than tax incentives or interest rates.

Download or read book Causality and reversibility in irreversible time written by Sergey M. Korotaev and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Nonequilibrium and Irreversibility written by Giovanni Gallavotti and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-06-10 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book concentrates on the properties of the stationary states in chaotic systems of particles or fluids, leaving aside the theory of the way they can be reached. The stationary states of particles or of fluids (understood as probability distributions on microscopic configurations or on the fields describing continua) have received important new ideas and data from numerical simulations and reviews are needed. The starting point is to find out which time invariant distributions come into play in physics. A special feature of this book is the historical approach. To identify the problems the author analyzes the papers of the founding fathers Boltzmann, Clausius and Maxwell including translations of the relevant (parts of) historical documents. He also establishes a close link between treatment of irreversible phenomena in statistical mechanics and the theory of chaotic systems at and beyond the onset of turbulence as developed by Sinai, Ruelle, Bowen (SRB) and others: the author gives arguments intending to support strongly the viewpoint that stationary states in or out of equilibrium can be described in a unified way. In this book it is the "chaotic hypothesis", which can be seen as an extension of the classical ergodic hypothesis to non equilibrium phenomena, that plays the central role. It is shown that SRB - often considered as a kind of mathematical playground with no impact on physical reality - has indeed a sound physical interpretation; an observation which to many might be new and a very welcome insight. Following this, many consequences of the chaotic hypothesis are analyzed in chapter 3 - 4 and in chapter 5 a few applications are proposed. Chapter 6 is historical: carefully analyzing the old literature on the subject, especially ergodic theory and its relevance for statistical mechanics; an approach which gives the book a very personal touch. The book contains an extensive coverage of current research (partly from the authors and his coauthors publications) presented in enough detail so that advanced students may get the flavor of a direction of research in a field which is still very much alive and progressing. Proofs of theorems are usually limited to heuristic sketches privileging the presentation of the ideas and providing references that the reader can follow, so that in this way an overload of this text with technical details could be avoided.

Download or read book Resonances Instability and Irreversibility Volume 99 written by Ilya Prigogine and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2009-09-09 with total page 475 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Resonances, Instability, and Irreversibility: The LiouvilleSpace Extension of Quantum Mechanics T. Petrosky and I. Prigogine Unstable Systems in Generalized Quantum Theory E. C. G. Sudarshan, Charles B. Chiu, and G. Bhamathi Resonances and Dilatation Analyticity in Liouville Space Erkki J. Brandas Time, Irreversibility, and Unstable Systems in QuantumPhysics E. Eisenberg and L. P. Horwitz Quantum Systems with Diagonal Singularity I. Antoniou and Z. Suchanecki Nonadiabatic Crossing of Decaying Levels V. V. and Vl. V. Kocharovsky and S. Tasaki Can We Observe Microscopic Chaos in the Laboratory? Pierre Gaspard Proton Nonlocality and Decoherence in Condensed Matter --Predictions and Experimental Results C. A. Chatzidimitriou-Dreismann "We are at a most interesting moment in the history of science.Classical science emphasized equilibrium, stability, and timereversibility. Now we see instabilities, fluctuations, evolution onall levels of observations. This change of perspective requires newtools, new concepts. This volume invites the reader not to anenumeration of final achievements of contemporary science, but toan excursion to science in the making." --from the Foreword by I.Prigogine What are the dynamical roots of irreversibility? How can past andfuture be distinguished on the fundamental level of description?Are human beings the children of time --or its progenitors? Inrecent years, a growing number of chemists and physicists haveagreed that the solution to the problem of irreversibility requiresan extension of classical and quantum mechanics. There is, however,no consensus on which direction this extension should take toinclude the dynamical description of irreversible processes. Resonances, Instability, and Irreversibility surveys recentattempts --both direct and indirect --to address the problem ofirreversibility. Internationally recognized researchers report ontheir recent studies, which run the gamut from experimental tohighly mathematical. The subject matter of these papers falls intothree categories: classical systems with emphasis on chaos anddynamical instability, resonances and unstable quantum systems, andthe general problem of irreversibility. Presenting the cutting edge of research into some of the mostcompelling questions that face contemporary chemical physics,Resonances, Instability, and Irreversibility is fascinating readingfor professionals and students in every area of the discipline.

Download or read book Advanced Thermodynamics for Engineers written by D. Winterbone and published by Butterworth-Heinemann. This book was released on 1996-11-01 with total page 399 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although the basic theories of thermodynamics are adequately covered by a number of existing texts, there is little literature that addresses more advanced topics. In this comprehensive work the author redresses this balance, drawing on his twenty-five years of experience of teaching thermodynamics at undergraduate and postgraduate level, to produce a definitive text to cover thoroughly, advanced syllabuses. The book introduces the basic concepts which apply over the whole range of new technologies, considering: a new approach to cycles, enabling their irreversibility to be taken into account; a detailed study of combustion to show how the chemical energy in a fuel is converted into thermal energy and emissions; an analysis of fuel cells to give an understanding of the direct conversion of chemical energy to electrical power; a detailed study of property relationships to enable more sophisticated analyses to be made of both high and low temperature plant and irreversible thermodynamics, whose principles might hold a key to new ways of efficiently covering energy to power (e.g. solar energy, fuel cells). Worked examples are included in most of the chapters, followed by exercises with solutions. By developing thermodynamics from an explicitly equilibrium perspective, showing how all systems attempt to reach a state of equilibrium, and the effects of these systems when they cannot, the result is an unparalleled insight into the more advanced considerations when converting any form of energy into power, that will prove invaluable to students and professional engineers of all disciplines.

Download or read book The Irreversibility Premium written by Robert S. Chirinko and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 47 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When investment is irreversible, theory suggests that firms will be 'reluctant to invest.' This reluctance creates a wedge between the discount rate guiding investment decisions and the standard Jorgensonian user cost (adjusted for risk). We use the intertemporal tradeoff between the benefits and costs of changing the capital stock to estimate this wedge, which we label the irreversibility premium. Estimates are based on panel data for the period 1980-2001. The large dataset allows us to estimate the effects of limited resale markets, low depreciation rates, high uncertainty, and negative industry-wide shocks on the irreversibility premium. Our estimates provide a readily interpretable measure of the importance of irreversibility and document that the irreversibility premium is both economically and statistically significant.

Download or read book Glass Transition and Phase Transitions in Food and Biological Materials written by Jasim Ahmed and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2017-02-03 with total page 494 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Glass and State Transitions in Food and Biological Materials describes how glass transition has been applied to food micro-structure, food processing, product development, storage studies, packaging development and other areas. This book has been structured so that readers can initially grasp the basic principles and instrumentation, before moving through the various applications. In summary, the book will provide the “missing link” between food science and material science/polymer engineering. This will allow food scientists to better understand the concept and applications of thermal properties.

Download or read book Investment Uncertainty and Irreversibility in Ghana written by Ms.Catherine A. Pattillo and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 1997-12-01 with total page 37 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Panel data on Ghanaian manufacturing firms are used to test predictions from models of irreversible investment under uncertainty. Information on the entrepreneur’s subjective probability distribution over future demand for the firm’s products is used to construct the expected variance of demand, which is used as a measure of uncertainty. Empirical results support the prediction that firms wait to invest until the marginal revenue product of capital reaches a firm-specific hurdle level. Moreover, higher uncertainty raises the hurdle level that triggers investment, and uncertainty has a negative effect on investment levels that is greater for firms with more irreversible investment.