Download or read book The Making of Measure and the Promise of Sameness written by Emanuele Lugli and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2022-05-12 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An interdisciplinary history of standardized measurements. Measurement is all around us—from the circumference of a pizza to the square footage of an apartment, from the length of a newborn baby to the number of miles between neighboring towns. Whether inches or miles, centimeters or kilometers, measures of distance stand at the very foundation of everything we do, so much so that we take them for granted. Yet, this has not always been the case. This book reaches back to medieval Italy to speak of a time when measurements were displayed in the open, showing how such a deceptively simple innovation triggered a chain of cultural transformations whose consequences are visible today on a global scale. Drawing from literary works and frescoes, architectural surveys, and legal compilations, Emanuele Lugli offers a history of material practices widely overlooked by historians. He argues that the public display of measurements in Italy’s newly formed city republics not only laid the foundation for now centuries-old practices of making, but also helped to legitimize local governments and shore up church power, buttressing fantasies of exactitude and certainty that linger to this day. This ambitious, truly interdisciplinary book explains how measurements, rather than being mere descriptors of the real, themselves work as powerful molds of ideas, affecting our notions of what we consider similar, accurate, and truthful.
Download or read book Beyond Measure The Hidden History of Measurement from Cubits to Quantum Constants written by James Vincent and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2022-11-01 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A vibrant account of how measurement has invisibly shaped our world, from ancient civilizations to the modern day. From the cubit to the kilogram, the humble inch to the speed of light, measurement is a powerful tool that humans invented to make sense of the world. In this revelatory work of science and social history, James Vincent dives into its hidden world, taking readers from ancient Egypt, where measuring the annual depth of the Nile was an essential task, to the intellectual origins of the metric system in the French Revolution, and from the surprisingly animated rivalry between metric and imperial, to our current age of the “quantified self.” At every turn, Vincent is keenly attuned to the political consequences of measurement, exploring how it has also been used as a tool for oppression and control. Beyond Measure reveals how measurement is not only deeply entwined with our experience of the world, but also how its history encompasses and shapes the human quest for knowledge.
Download or read book Common Measures written by Joseph Albernaz and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2024-08-20 with total page 487 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What happens to the experience of community when the grounds of communal life collapse? The Romantic period's upheaval cast both traditional communal organizations of life and outgrowths of the new revolutionary age into crisis. In this context, Joseph Albernaz argues that Romantic writers articulate a vital conception of "groundless community," while following this idea through its aesthetic, ecological, political, and philosophical registers into the present. Amidst the violent expropriation of the commons, Romantic writers including the Wordsworths, Clare, Hölderlin, and the revolutionary abolitionist Robert Wedderburn reimagined the forms of their own lives through literature to conceive community as groundless, a disposition toward radically open forms of sharing—including with nonhuman beings—without recourse to any collective identity. Both a poetics and ethics, groundless community names an everyday sociality that surges beneath and against the enclosures of property and identity, binding us to the movements of the earth. Unearthing Romanticism's intersections with the history of communism and the general strike, Albernaz also demonstrates how Romantic literature's communal imagination reverberates through later theories of community in Bataille, Derrida, Nancy, Moten, and others. With sharp close readings, new historical constellations, and innovative theoretical paradigms, Common Measures recasts the relationship of the Romantic period to the basic terms of modernity.
Download or read book Measuring in the Renaissance written by Emanuele Lugli and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-06-30 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the Renaissance, measuring played a critical role in shaping trade, material production (ranging from architecture to tailoring), warfare, legal studies, and even our understanding of the heavens and hell. This study delves into the applications of measuring, with a particular emphasis on the Italian states, and traces its wide-ranging cultural effects. The homogeneization of measurements was endorsed as a means to achieve political unity. The careful retrieval of ancient standards instilled a sense of connection and ownership toward the past. Surveying was fundamental in the process of establishing colonies. This study not only examines the perceived advantages of measuring, but it also highlights the overlooked distorting aspect of this activity. Measuring was not just a neutral quantification process but also a creative one. By suppressing or emphasizing information about the material world, measuring influenced people's perceptions and shaped their ideas about what was possible and what could be accomplished.
Download or read book Martin Folkes 1690 1754 written by Anna Marie Roos and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021 with total page 429 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Martin Folkes (1690-1754): Newtonian, Antiquary, Connoisseur is a cultural and intellectual biography of the only President of both the Royal Society and the Society of Antiquaries. Sir Isaac Newton's protégé, astronomer, mathematician, freemason, art connoisseur, Voltaire's friend and Hogarth's patron, his was an intellectually vibrant world. Folkes was possibly the best-connected natural philosopher and antiquary of his age, an epitome of Enlightenment sociability, and yet he was a surprisingly neglected figure, the long shadow of Newton eclipsing his brilliant disciple. A complex figure, Folkes edited Newton's posthumous works in biblical chronology, yet was a religious skeptic and one of the first members of the gentry to marry an actress. His interests were multidisciplinary, from his authorship of the first complete history of the English coinage, to works concerning ancient architecture, statistical probability, and astronomy. Rich archival material, including Folkes's travel diary, correspondence, and his library and art collections permit reconstruction through Folkes's eyes of what it was like to be a collector and patron, a Masonic freethinker, and antiquarian and virtuoso in the days before 'science' became sub-specialised. Folkes's virtuosic sensibility and possible role in the unification of the Society of Antiquaries and the Royal Society tells against the historiographical assumption that this was the age in which the 'two cultures' of the humanities and sciences split apart, never to be reunited. In Georgian England, antiquarianism and 'science' were considered largely part of the same endeavour.
Download or read book Life Atomic written by Angela N. H. Creager and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013-10-02 with total page 506 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After World War II, the US Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) began mass-producing radioisotopes, sending out nearly 64,000 shipments of radioactive materials to scientists and physicians by 1955. Even as the atomic bomb became the focus of Cold War anxiety, radioisotopes represented the government’s efforts to harness the power of the atom for peace—advancing medicine, domestic energy, and foreign relations. In Life Atomic, Angela N. H. Creager tells the story of how these radioisotopes, which were simultaneously scientific tools and political icons, transformed biomedicine and ecology. Government-produced radioisotopes provided physicians with new tools for diagnosis and therapy, specifically cancer therapy, and enabled biologists to trace molecular transformations. Yet the government’s attempt to present radioisotopes as marvelous dividends of the atomic age was undercut in the 1950s by the fallout debates, as scientists and citizens recognized the hazards of low-level radiation. Creager reveals that growing consciousness of the danger of radioactivity did not reduce the demand for radioisotopes at hospitals and laboratories, but it did change their popular representation from a therapeutic agent to an environmental poison. She then demonstrates how, by the late twentieth century, public fear of radioactivity overshadowed any appreciation of the positive consequences of the AEC’s provision of radioisotopes for research and medicine.
Download or read book Humans at Work written by Anna Tavis and published by Kogan Page Publishers. This book was released on 2022-03-03 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is your organization strategically prepared for the digital and distributed workplace? Technology, data analytics and artificial intelligence already impact how people work and engage with organizations. A dispersed workforce, greater transparency, social change, generational shift and value chain disruptions are driving new behaviors and expectations from the workplace. Together, these trends are shaping a new era of distributed and digitally enabled network of workers where the work comes to workers instead of the workers going to work. In Humans at Work, employee and workplace experience experts Anna Tavis and Stela Lupushor advocate for the adoption of human-centric practices as a critical and necessary part of adapting work and workplaces to the future of work. Outlining the four factors (digitization of work, distributed workplaces, organizational redesign and changing workforce) driving the dramatic changes in the workplace, each chapter provides examples of how innovative companies are building workplace infrastructure and reshaping norms, serving new markets and adopting new technologies. Filled with examples from both start-ups and established companies, Humans at Work is the workplace leader's guide to building a workplace that creates market value by making work more human.
Download or read book Knowing from the Inside written by Tim Ingold and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-02-24 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Knowledge comes from thinking with, from and through things, not just about them. We get to know the world around us from the inside of our being in it. Drawing on the fields of anthropology, art, architecture and education, this book addresses what knowing from the inside means for practices of teaching and learning. If knowledge is not transmitted ready-made, independently of its application in the world, but grows from the crucible of our engagements with people, places and materials, then how can there be such a thing as a curriculum? What forms could it take? And what could it mean to place such disciplines as anthropology, art and architecture at the heart of the curriculum rather than – as at present – on the margins? In addressing these questions, the fifteen distinguished contributors to this volume challenge mainstream thinking about education and the curriculum, and suggest experimental ways to overcome the stultifying effects of current pedagogic practice.
Download or read book Money in the Dutch Republic written by Sebastian Felten and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-03-10 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offers a distinctive history of money as an everyday social technology in the Dutch Republic from 1600 to 1850.
Download or read book Climate in Motion written by Deborah R. Coen and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2018-07-19 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today, predicting the impact of human activities on the earth’s climate hinges on tracking interactions among phenomena of radically different dimensions, from the molecular to the planetary. Climate in Motion shows that this multiscalar, multicausal framework emerged well before computers and satellites. Extending the history of modern climate science back into the nineteenth century, Deborah R. Coen uncovers its roots in the politics of empire-building in central and eastern Europe. She argues that essential elements of the modern understanding of climate arose as a means of thinking across scales in a state—the multinational Habsburg Monarchy, a patchwork of medieval kingdoms and modern laws—where such thinking was a political imperative. Led by Julius Hann in Vienna, Habsburg scientists were the first to investigate precisely how local winds and storms might be related to the general circulation of the earth’s atmosphere as a whole. Linking Habsburg climatology to the political and artistic experiments of late imperial Austria, Coen grounds the seemingly esoteric science of the atmosphere in the everyday experiences of an earlier era of globalization. Climate in Motion presents the history of modern climate science as a history of “scaling”—that is, the embodied work of moving between different frameworks for measuring the world. In this way, it offers a critical historical perspective on the concepts of scale that structure thinking about the climate crisis today and the range of possibilities for responding to it.
Download or read book Air Apparent written by Mark Monmonier and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2000-11-15 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traces the development of the weather map and its ability to make the atmosphere visible and predictable, and examines the interaction and relationship between technology and weather forecasting.
Download or read book Standardization in the Middle Ages written by Line Cecilie Engh, Svein Harald Gullbekk, Hans Jacob Orning and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2024-05-07 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Medieval French Interlocutions written by Jane Gilbert and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2024-06-04 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Specialists in other languages offer perspectives on the widespread use of French in a range of contexts, from German courtly narratives to biblical exegesis in Hebrew. French came into contact with many other languages in the Middle Ages: not just English, Italian and Latin, but also Arabic, Dutch, German, Greek, Hebrew, Irish, Occitan, Sicilian, Spanish and Welsh. Its movement was impelled by trade, pilgrimage, crusade, migration, colonisation and conquest, and its contact zones included Muslim, Jewish and Christian communities, among others. Writers in these contact zones often expressed themselves and their worlds in French; but other languages and cultural settings could also challenge, reframe or even ignore French-users' prestige and self-understanding. The essays collected here offer cross-disciplinary perspectives on the use of French in the medieval world, moving away from canonical texts, well-known controversies and conventional framings. Whether considering theories of the vernacular in Outremer, Marco Polo and the global Middle Ages, or the literary patronage of aristocrats and urban patricians, their interlocutions throw new light on connected and contested literary cultures in Europe and beyond.
Download or read book Seeing Like a State written by James C. Scott and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-17 with total page 462 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “One of the most profound and illuminating studies of this century to have been published in recent decades.”—John Gray, New York Times Book Review Hailed as “a magisterial critique of top-down social planning” by the New York Times, this essential work analyzes disasters from Russia to Tanzania to uncover why states so often fail—sometimes catastrophically—in grand efforts to engineer their society or their environment, and uncovers the conditions common to all such planning disasters. “Beautifully written, this book calls into sharp relief the nature of the world we now inhabit.”—New Yorker “A tour de force.”— Charles Tilly, Columbia University
Download or read book Introduction to Statistics in Metrology written by Stephen Crowder and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-11-30 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides an overview of the application of statistical methods to problems in metrology, with emphasis on modelling measurement processes and quantifying their associated uncertainties. It covers everything from fundamentals to more advanced special topics, each illustrated with case studies from the authors' work in the Nuclear Security Enterprise (NSE). The material provides readers with a solid understanding of how to apply the techniques to metrology studies in a wide variety of contexts. The volume offers particular attention to uncertainty in decision making, design of experiments (DOEx) and curve fitting, along with special topics such as statistical process control (SPC), assessment of binary measurement systems, and new results on sample size selection in metrology studies. The methodologies presented are supported with R script when appropriate, and the code has been made available for readers to use in their own applications. Designed to promote collaboration between statistics and metrology, this book will be of use to practitioners of metrology as well as students and researchers in statistics and engineering disciplines.
Download or read book Bigger Than Life written by Mary Ann Doane and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2021-10-18 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Bigger Than Life Mary Ann Doane examines how the scalar operations of cinema, especially those of the close-up, disturb and reconfigure the spectator's sense of place, space, and orientation. Doane traces the history of scalar transformations from early cinema to the contemporary use of digital technology. In the early years of cinema, audiences regarded the monumental close-up, particularly of the face, as grotesque and often horrifying, even as it sought to expose a character's interiority through its magnification of detail and expression. Today, large-scale technologies such as IMAX and surround sound strive to dissolve the cinematic frame and invade the spectator's space, “immersing” them in image and sound. The notion of immersion, Doane contends, is symptomatic of a crisis of location in technologically mediated space and a reconceptualization of position, scale, and distance. In this way, cinematic scale and its modes of spatialization and despatialization have shaped the modern subject, interpolating them into the incessant expansion of commodification.
Download or read book English Birth Girdles written by Mary Morse and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2024-05-06 with total page 482 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In medieval England, women in labor wrapped birth girdles around their abdomens to protect themselves and their unborn children. These parchment or paper rolls replicated the "girdle relics" of the Virgin Mary and other saints loaned to queens and noblewomen, extending childbirth protection to women of all classes. This book examines the texts and images of nine English birth girdles produced between the reigns of Richard II and Henry VIII. Cultural artifacts of lay devotion within the birthing chamber, the birth girdles offered the solace and promise of faith to the parturient woman and her attendants amid religious dissent, political upheaval, recurring epidemics, and the onset of print.
