Download or read book The Myth of Replacement written by Thomas D. Worthen and published by . This book was released on 1991 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Changes in season, rulership, and human fortune are the stuff of which myth is made. Why should these themes pervade the mythologies of so many cultures? Might they even provide an explanation for seemingly unrelated myths and rituals? What these myths have in common, observes Thomas Worthen, is an ancient awareness that the heavens were subject to irregularities. The movement of stars we now attribute to precession was once a cause for concern about the stability of the world. Worthen here proposes the paradigm of "replacement" to account for the recurrence of common elements in the myths of many peoples. First citing the importance of rotation ritual in cultures as diverse as Buddhist and Gaelic, he draws on Georges Dum�zil's work with the Indo-European Ambrosia Cycle to lay the foundation for his paradigm. He then applies it to South American myths previously explored by Claude L�vi-Strauss, to the Greek myth of Phaethon, and to myths of dynastic replacement about Zeus and his forebears. He further shows show how the replacement paradigm explains a number of semantic puzzles in Indo-European studies, such as the relationship of words for "hammer" and "mill." The Myth of Replacement grandly illustrates the common knowledge of nature held by ancient peoples of the world. It offers scholars new perspectives on previously unconnected material as it provides general readers with a better understanding of the universality of myth.
Download or read book The Replacement written by Melanie Golding and published by HQ. This book was released on 2022-12-29 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'A modern spin on a folk tale where the improbable can happen ... the twists are lovely; dark and deep' The Times 'Golding folds together a folklore-inspired plot with the modern twists and tension of a police procedural novel to create a bitingly unnerving story' Adele Parks, Platinum 'Powerful imagery and captivating characters, this a grabbing book' Magic Radio Book Club 'The most original book you'll read this year' Crime Monthly * * * When a small child is found wandering alone, the local shopkeepers call the authorities immediately. Twenty minutes later, the girl's mother turns up, panicked and distraught. It doesn't take long to clear things up, and mother and daughter are soon reunited and sent on their way. Miles away, the body of a man is discovered, floating in a bathtub, but the most surprising discovery of all is that he isn't dead. Despite his injuries, he is very much alive. Two seemingly unrelated events. But as DS Harper begins to investigate, disturbing connections between the two incidents start to surface, and suddenly it's not clear where the danger truly lies. Harper must find out, and quickly. Because someone, or something, is closing in and she needs to uncover the truth before it's too late... Weaving together the trademark folklore inspiration that readers loved in Little Darlings, with the procedural narrative force of a brilliant mystery, this is the excellent and unnerving new novel from Melanie Golding. * * * Readers are captivated by The Replacement!: I don't think I breathed properly throughout this brilliantly crafted thriller . . . This is by far one of the best psychological thrillers I've read and I was totally engrossed throughout' Reader review, 'A book with so many twists and unexpected outcomes. So unusual but totally gripping. I wanted the book to last forever' Reader review, 'This book is brilliant . . . I love psychological thrillers and stories with myths and folklore [and Melanie] blends the two together [to] create the perfect book in my eyes' Reader review, 'A deliciously dark and creepy tale which will have you addicted' Reader review,
Download or read book Lost Star of Myth and Time written by Walter Cruttenden and published by St. Lynn's Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Myth of Homeland Security written by Marcus Ranum and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2003-11-24 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "As I write this, I'm sitting in a restaurant in a major U.S. airport, eating my breakfast with a plastic knife and fork. I worked up quite an appetite getting here two hours early and shuffling in the block-long lines until I got to the security checkpoint where I could take off my shoes, remove my belt, and put my carry-on luggage through the screening system . "What's going on? It's homeland security. Welcome to the new age of knee-jerk security at any price. Well, I've paid, and you've paid, and we'll all keep paying-but is it going to help? Have we embarked on a massive multibillion-dollar boondoggle that's going to do nothing more than make us feel more secure? Are we paying nosebleed prices for "feel-good" measures? . "This book was painful to write. By nature, I am a problem solver. Professionally I have made my career out of solving complex problems efficiently by trying to find the right place to push hard and make a difference. Researching the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, CIA, INS, the PATRIOT Act, and so forth, one falls into a rabbit's hole of interdependent lameness and dysfunction. I came face to face with the realization that there are gigantic bureaucracies that exist primarily for the sole purpose of prolonging their existence, that the very structure of bureaucracy rewards inefficiency and encourages territorialism and turf warfare."
Download or read book Another Fine Myth written by Robert Asprin and published by Ace. This book was released on 2005 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A magician's apprentice teams up with the demon Aahz and experiences a variety of adventures with many strange, other-worldy characters.
Download or read book Weight written by Jeanette Winterson and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 2010-11-05 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of Atlas and Heracles Atlas knows how it feels to carry the weight of the world; but why, he asks himself, does it have to be carried at all? In Weight — visionary and inventive, yet completely believable and relevant to the questions we ask ourselves every day — Winterson’s skill in turning the familiar on its head to show us a different truth is put to stunning effect. When I was asked to choose a myth to write about, I realized I had chosen already. The story of Atlas holding up the world was in my mind before the telephone call had ended. If the call had not come, perhaps I would never have written the story, but when the call did come, that story was waiting to be written. Rewritten. The recurring language motif of Weight is “I want to tell the story again.” My work is full of Cover Versions. I like to take stories we think we know and record them differently. In the retelling comes a new emphasis or bias, and the new arrangement of the key elements demands that fresh material be injected into the existing text. Weight moves far away from the simple story of Atlas’s punishment and his temporary relief when Hercules takes the world off his shoulders. I wanted to explore loneliness, isolation, responsibility, burden, and freedom too, because my version has a very particular end not found elsewhere. —from Jeanette Winterson’s Foreword to Weight
Download or read book The Myth of Voter Fraud written by Lorraine C. Minnite and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2011-03-15 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Allegations that widespread voter fraud is threatening to the integrity of American elections and American democracy itself have intensified since the disputed 2000 presidential election. The claim that elections are being stolen by illegal immigrants and unscrupulous voter registration activists and vote buyers has been used to persuade the public that voter malfeasance is of greater concern than structural inequities in the ways votes are gathered and tallied, justifying ever tighter restrictions on access to the polls. Yet, that claim is a myth. In The Myth of Voter Fraud, Lorraine C. Minnite presents the results of her meticulous search for evidence of voter fraud. She concludes that while voting irregularities produced by the fragmented and complex nature of the electoral process in the United States are common, incidents of deliberate voter fraud are actually quite rare. Based on painstaking research aggregating and sifting through data from a variety of sources, including public records requests to all fifty state governments and the U.S. Justice Department, Minnite contends that voter fraud is in reality a politically constructed myth intended to further complicate the voting process and reduce voter turnout. She refutes several high-profile charges of alleged voter fraud, such as the assertion that eight of the 9/11 hijackers were registered to vote, and makes the question of voter fraud more precise by distinguishing fraud from the manifold ways in which electoral democracy can be distorted. Effectively disentangling misunderstandings and deliberate distortions from reality, The Myth of Voter Fraud provides rigorous empirical evidence for those fighting to make the electoral process more efficient, more equitable, and more democratic.
Download or read book The Transformation Myth written by Gerald C. Kane and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2021-09-28 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this business bestseller, how companies can adapt in an era of continuous disruption: a guide to responding to such acute crises as COVID-19. Gold Medalist in Business Disruption/Reinvention. When COVID-19 hit, businesses had to respond almost instantaneously--shifting employees to remote work, repairing broken supply chains, keeping pace with dramatically fluctuating customer demand. They were forced to adapt to a confluence of multiple disruptions inextricably linked to a longer-term, ongoing digital disruption. This book shows that companies that use disruption as an opportunity for innovation emerge from it stronger. Companies that merely attempt to "weather the storm" until things go back to normal (or the next normal), on the other hand, miss an opportunity to thrive. The authors, all experts on business and technology strategy, show that transformation is not a one-and-done event, but a continuous process of adapting to a volatile and uncertain environment. Drawing on five years of research into digital disruption--including a series of interviews with business leaders conducted during the COVID-19 crisis--they offer a framework for understanding disruption and tools for navigating it. They outline the leadership traits, business principles, technological infrastructure, and organizational building blocks essential for adapting to disruption, with examples from real-world organizations. Technology, they remind readers, is not an end in itself, but enables the capabilities essential for surviving an uncertain future: nimbleness, scalability, stability, and optionality.
Download or read book The Myth of Pain written by Valerie Gray Hardcastle and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Valerie Gray Hardcastle argues that both professional and lay definitions of pain are wrongheaded -- with consequences for how pain and pain patients are treated, how psychological disorders are understood, and how clinicians define the mind/body relationship. Pain, although very common, is little understood. Worse still, according to Valerie Gray Hardcastle, both professional and lay definitions of pain are wrongheaded -- with consequences for how pain and pain patients are treated, how psychological disorders are understood, and how clinicians define the mind/body relationship. Hardcastle offers a biologically based complex theory of pain processing, inhibition, and sensation and then uses this theory to make several arguments: (1) psychogenic pains do not exist; (2) a general lack of knowledge about fundamental brain function prevents us from distinguishing between mental and physical causes, although the distinction remains useful; (3) most pain talk should be eliminated from both the folk and academic communities; and (4) such a biological approach is useful generally for explaining disorders in pain processing. She shows how her analysis of pain can serve as a model for the analysis of other psychological disorders and suggests that her project be taken as a model for the philosophical analysis of disorders in psychology, psychiatry, and neuroscience.
Download or read book The Myth of Artificial Intelligence written by Erik J. Larson and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2021-04-06 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Artificial intelligence has always inspired outlandish visions—that AI is going to destroy us, save us, or at the very least radically transform us. Erik Larson exposes the vast gap between the actual science underlying AI and the dramatic claims being made for it. This is a timely, important, and even essential book.” —John Horgan, author of The End of Science Many futurists insist that AI will soon achieve human levels of intelligence. From there, it will quickly eclipse the most gifted human mind. The Myth of Artificial Intelligence argues that such claims are just that: myths. We are not on the path to developing truly intelligent machines. We don’t even know where that path might be. Erik Larson charts a journey through the landscape of AI, from Alan Turing’s early work to today’s dominant models of machine learning. Since the beginning, AI researchers and enthusiasts have equated the reasoning approaches of AI with those of human intelligence. But this is a profound mistake. Even cutting-edge AI looks nothing like human intelligence. Modern AI is based on inductive reasoning: computers make statistical correlations to determine which answer is likely to be right, allowing software to, say, detect a particular face in an image. But human reasoning is entirely different. Humans do not correlate data sets; we make conjectures sensitive to context—the best guess, given our observations and what we already know about the world. We haven’t a clue how to program this kind of reasoning, known as abduction. Yet it is the heart of common sense. Larson argues that all this AI hype is bad science and bad for science. A culture of invention thrives on exploring unknowns, not overselling existing methods. Inductive AI will continue to improve at narrow tasks, but if we are to make real progress, we must abandon futuristic talk and learn to better appreciate the only true intelligence we know—our own.
Download or read book The Insanity Hoax written by Judith Schlesinger and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The mad genius is a favorite cultural stereotype, but despite media caricatures, popular expectations, and the extravagant claims of a few, there's no scientific proof that creative people are crazier than anyone else. Drawing on three decades of research, psychologist Judith Schlesinger tracks the myth from its birth in ancient Greece to modern times, showing how it distorts society's view of our most exceptional minds"--Page 4 of cover.
Download or read book The Replacement written by Brenna Yovanoff and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2011-01-06 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Catcher in the Rye meets Edward Scissorhands in this chilling, gothic tale. Mackie Doyle is not one of us. Though he lives in the small town of Gentry, he comes from a world of tunnels and black murky water, a world of living dead girls ruled by a little tattooed princess. He is a Replacement, left in the crib of a human baby sixteen years ago. Now, because of fatal allergies to iron, blood, and consecrated ground, Mackie is fighting to survive in the human world. Mackie would give anything to live among us, to practice on his bass or spend time with his crush, Tate. But when Tate's baby sister goes missing, Mackie is drawn irrevocably into the underworld of Gentry, known as Mayhem. He must face the dark creatures of the Slag Heaps and find his rightful place, in our world, or theirs. Praise for The Replacement: 'I so loved this book' Lauren Kate, bestselling author of Fallen 'Eerie and beautiful' Maggie Stiefvater, bestselling author of Shiver 'This is a dark tale that will totally change any preconceptions you have about fairies' The Sun
Download or read book A Book of Myths written by Jean Lang and published by Jazzybee Verlag. This book was released on 2023-07-11 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A Book of Myths" deals in a most entertaining manner with the mythology of Greece and Rome and many other noted lands. Added to the pleasure of the story there is the lure of the legend and the spell of old ways and customs. Not only many of the most celebrated are retold, but also many of the less well-known tales. The aim of the author, it is stated, has been to simplify for those who are not erudite scholars the stories of mythology, to which constant reference is made not only in classic, but in modern poetry, and to direct the attention of readers to poems which are not already known to them. Included are tales of Prometheus, Pygmalion, Orpheus, Perseus, King Midas, Pan, the Lorelei, Baldur and many more.
Download or read book The Myth of Male Power written by Warren Farrell and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ...lies understanding. This is what bestselling author Warren Farrell discovered when he took a stand against established views of the male role in society, and pursued o course of study to find out who men really are. Here are the eye-opening, heart-rending, and undeniably enlightening results...
Download or read book Google and the Myth of Universal Knowledge written by Ian Wilson and published by ReadHowYouWant.com. This book was released on 2011-08-22 with total page 130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The recent announcement that Google would digitize the holdings of several major libraries sent shock waves through the book industry and academe. Google presented this digital repository as a first step towards a long - dreamed - of universal library, but skeptics were quick to raise a number of concerns about the potential for copyright infrin...
Download or read book The Myth of Disenchantment written by Jason Ananda Josephson Storm and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2017-05-16 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A great many theorists have argued that the defining feature of modernity is that people no longer believe in spirits, myths, or magic. Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm argues that as broad cultural history goes, this narrative is wrong, as attempts to suppress magic have failed more often than they have succeeded. Even the human sciences have been more enchanted than is commonly supposed. But that raises the question: How did a magical, spiritualist, mesmerized Europe ever convince itself that it was disenchanted? Josephson-Storm traces the history of the myth of disenchantment in the births of philosophy, anthropology, sociology, folklore, psychoanalysis, and religious studies. Ironically, the myth of mythless modernity formed at the very time that Britain, France, and Germany were in the midst of occult and spiritualist revivals. Indeed, Josephson-Storm argues, these disciplines’ founding figures were not only aware of, but profoundly enmeshed in, the occult milieu; and it was specifically in response to this burgeoning culture of spirits and magic that they produced notions of a disenchanted world. By providing a novel history of the human sciences and their connection to esotericism, The Myth of Disenchantment dispatches with most widely held accounts of modernity and its break from the premodern past.
Download or read book The Myth of Digital Democracy written by Matthew Hindman and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Matthew Hindman reveals here that, contrary to popular belief, the Internet has done little to broaden political discourse in the United States, but rather that it empowers a small set of elites - some new, but most familiar.
