
Is it culture, the weather, geography? Perhaps ignorance of what the right policies are? Simply, no. None of these factors is either definitive or destiny. Otherwise, how to explain why Botswana has become one of the fastest growing countries in the world, while other African nations, such as Zimbabwe, the Congo, and Sierra Leone, are mired in poverty and violence? Daron Acemoglu and Jame…

o ‘articulate’ media means to understand them by locating their connections in space and time. Articulating Media offers new approaches to the writing of technology and the technologies of writing by twinning an investigation of language with an attention to location. Where does media theory take place? How should media theory understand its own occupation of the spaces of media? What mater…

Latin America’s long history of showing how racism can co-exist with racial mixture and conviviality offers useful ammunition for strengthening anti-racist stances. This volume asks whether cultural production has a particular role to play within discourses and practices of anti-racism in Latin America and the Caribbean. The contributors analyse music, performance, education, language, film a…

Previously unknown operations and new names continue to surface in the Encyclopedia of Cold War Espionage, Spies, and Secret Operations. This new edition contains updated information on Cold War spying, with over 350 A?Z main entries (over thirty of them new) biographical sketches, and an updated bibliography. In support of the entries the book includes useful tools: a complete chronology of si…

Empire, Colony, Postcolony provides a clear exposition of the historical, political and ideological dimensions of colonialism, imperialism, and postcolonialism, with clear explanations of these categories, which relate their histories to contemporary political issues. The book analyzes major concepts and explains the meaning of key terms. The first book to introduce the main historical and c…
From the author of the national best seller Chaos comes an outstanding biography of one of the most dazzling and flamboyant scientists of the 20th century that "not only paints a highly attractive portrait of Feynman but also . . . makes for a stimulating adventure in the annals of science." (The New York Times).

Gleick's story begins at the turn of the 20th century, with the young H. G. Wells writing and rewriting the fantastic tale that became his first book, an international sensation: The Time Machine. A host of forces were converging to transmute the human understanding of time, some philosophical and some technological - the electric telegraph, the steam railroad, the discovery of buried civilizat…

Virtual Exchange refers to the numerous initiatives and methodologies which engage learners in sustained online collaborative learning and interaction with partners from different cultural backgrounds as part of their study programs and under the guidance of teachers or trained facilitators. This book reports on a large-scale European project, VALIANT (Virtual Innovation and Support Networks fo…
Finance theory is a phrase that encompasses under its umbrella portofolio theory, the capital asset pricing model, call option pricing, and arbitrage pricing theory; in sum, it includes those models most often associated with financial economics. In the late 1960s and early 1970's, the field was most closely associated with the capital asset pricing model (CAPM), as evidenced by the emergence o…
For Jack Welch, it was just another one of those days. A round of meetings at Farfield headquaters in the morning. Back to his office to prepare the charts he would use for his lecture at Crotonville that afternoon. A private lunch in his small dining room off his office with the author and his VP for public relations, Beth Comstock. It is widely watched, of course, because it will mean the end…

The book presents the universal issues of high-level radioactive waste man-agement from the perspective of the German legal system. It covers the entire “life-cycle” of radioactive waste, i.e. from the moment that radio-active material is classified as radioactive waste (Chapter 1), through the period of interim storage (Chapter 2), up to its final disposal (Chapter 3)…

The present volume is a collection of essays aiming to shed new light on different aspects of the role of religion in Bob Dylan’s artistic output. The eight authors are all from Scandinavia, seven from Norway and one from Denmark. Norwegian Dylan-scholars will always remember when Dylan, at a concert in Oslo in 1998, compared Norway to where he grew up in Minnesota: “Well, I…
To be an airline passenger in transit is to move through states without permanently adopting them. The very legal nature of a transit lounge embodies this perfectly. When one is in tran-sit, one does not pass through immigration and enter the legal boundaries of a nation-state. The strange nature of transit is best exemplified by its failures — the case of Mehran Karimi Nas…

This open access book explores how medieval societies conversed about the city and citizen in texts, visual imagery and material culture. It adopts a long-term, interdisciplinary, and cross-cultural perspective, bringing together contributions on the early, high, and later Middle Ages, covering both the medieval East and West, and representing a wide variety of disciplinary angles and sources. …
The knowledge that the African continent gave civilization the Arts and Sciences, Religion and Philosophy is des- tined to produce a change in the mentality both of the White and Black people. 2. There are three persons in the drama of Greek philosophy: (a) Alexander the Great; (b) Aristotle's School and; (c) The Ancient Roman Government who are responsible for a false tradition about Africa an…

In Isaac Asimov’s story, Someday (1956a), two young boys, Nic-colo and Paul, describe a world both clearly past and future for us. On the one hand, their descriptions of technology show the story’s age. Personal computers are run by valves and updated by reels of magnetic tape; there is no internet, no wifi, or cell technology — all the silly and fundamental …

The five-hundredth anniversary of the Protestant Reformation (1517) pro-vides an opportunity to reflect in a new way on the relationship between the Protestants and the Society of Jesus, which was founded twenty-three years later (1540). Before we discuss the Jesuit–Protestant encounter in Africa, which resulted from the colonial expansion of the Catholic and Protestant Eur…

Luck is all around us.1 There is a certain school of cultural anthropology that is intent on tracking the structures, categories and beliefs that recur across all human societies, transcending the profound differences in history and culture that separate them. This school of ambitious universalists – which is by no mean uncontroversial, both within the field of anthropology…

Software is an essential part in various facets of our daily life. Mobility,production, energy supply, economics, and infrastructure, to name only afew examples, strongly depend on software. This software is not always ofhigh quality. Critical issues that arose from poor software quality are evenreported manifold publicly in the press. For example, Denver InternationalAirport opened, delayed, …

A company formed by the young, avowed British imperialist Cecil John Rhodes and his business partner Charles Dunell Rudd, with interests in the diamond mines of the Kimberley and gold mining in the Witwatersrand, became one of the foremost British mining-finance companies in the twentieth century. Emanating from South Africa, the company that Rhodes and Rudd founded, The …

This chapter lays the foundation by covering core concepts, including terminology, that are critical to have fresh in our minds as we learn how to accelerate C++ programs using data parallelism.Data parallelism in C++ enables access to parallel resources in a modern heterogeneous system. A single C++ application can use any combination of devices—including GPUs, CPUs, FPGAs, and AI Applicatio…

The “Psychology of Human Thought” is an “open access” collection of peer-reviewed chapters from all areas of higher cognitive processes. The book is intended to be used as a textbook in courses on higher process, complex cognition, human thought, and related courses. Chapters include concept acquisition, knowledge representation, inductive and deductive reasoning, problem solving, metac…

John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) is a central thinker of the twentieth century, not just an economic theorist and statesman, but also an important figure in economics, philosophy, politics, and culture. In this Very Short Introduction Lord Skidelsky, a renowned biographer of Keynes, explores his ethical and practical philosophy, his monetary thought, and provides an insight into his life and wor…

The massive disorder and economic ruin following the Second World War inevitably predetermined the scope and intensity of the Cold War. But why did it last so long? And what impact did it have on the United States, the Soviet Union, Europe, and the Third World? Finally, how did it affect the broader history of the second half of the twentieth century - what were the human and financial costs? T…

What is capitalism? Is capitalism the same everywhere? Is there an alternative? The word 'capitalism' is one that is heard and used frequently, but what is capitalism really all about, and what does it mean? The book begins by addressing basic issues such as 'what is capital?' before discussing the history and development of capitalism through three detailed and absorbing case studies rangin…

Astrophysics is the physics of the stars, and more widely the physics of the Universe. It enables us to understand the structure and evolution of planetary systems, stars, galaxies, interstellar gas, and the cosmos as a whole. In this Very Short Introduction, the leading astrophysicist James Binney shows how the field of astrophysics has expanded rapidly in the past century, with vast quanti…
Horace's day than with an Englishman of the Middle Ages. Lastly, to read and understand Latin, you need to think clearly; this is a skill which is essential in all academic subjects and, indeed, in the whole of life. It would be wrong to pretend that Latin is easy but we hope our course will make the process of learning it both interesting and enjoyable.

An argument for simplicity from the best-selling authors of Profit from the Core. Is radical reinvention the key to winning in today’s fast-paced world? Not judging by the results of some of the world’s best-performing companies. In Repeatability, Chris Zook and James Allen - leaders of Bain & Company’s influential Strategy practice - warn that complexity is a silent killer of profitab…
It is a basic premise of the Wind and Beyond series that nothing about the historical development of aircraft has ever been linear. On the way to aeronautical “progress”—however one chooses to define the term—there has always been, and always will be, countless twists and turns. And in the end, the entire story could have turned out differently—and still may. It is hoped that not only…
The first two volumes in the Wind and Beyond series and the succeeding four now in preparation all cover the impact of aerodynamic development on the evolution of the airplane in America. As the six-volume series will ultimately demonstrate, just as the airplane is a defining technology of the twentieth century, aerodynamics has been the defining element of the airplane.The forthcoming volumes …
The airplane ranks as one of history’s most ingenious and phenomenal inventions. It has surely been one of the most world-changing. How ideas about aerodynamics first came together and how the science and technology evolved to forge the airplane into the revolutionary machine that it became is the epic story told in this multivolume work, The Wind and Beyond: A Documentary Journey into the Hi…
Extreme longevity has long been a topic of interest to the media and to the broader public. There are many legends of people who set longevity records, with tales of individuals who lived 200, 500, and even 969 years. Unfortunately, it is almost impossible to validate the ages of long-lived individuals until the twentieth century. In the second half of the twentieth century, the nu…
ver the past two decades Latin America has seen an expansion in the publication and consumption of comics. This renaissance is benefiting from transnational dialogues and exchanges: in 2017, for example, the publishing house :e(m)r;, based in Rosario, Argentina, produced a groundbreaking compilation of comics by artists from over 10 Latin American …

The best leaders know how to communicate clearly and persuasively. How do you stack up?If you read nothing else on communicating effectively, read these 10 articles. We’ve combed through hundreds of articles in the Harvard Business Review archive and selected the most important ones to help you express your ideas with clarity and impact?no matter what the situation.
ccording to the statistics provided by Confederation of Danish Industries, 4 bil-lion people around the globe live on less than US$ 2 per day. The low-income market constitutes the majority of the consumers in the countries from Sub-Sa-haran Africa and Asia, and covers parts of Latin America, Eastern Europe and the Caribbean region. Despite the fact that 2.86 billion or 83 % of the Asian …
ABOUT THE SERIES: 'Encyclopedia of World Religions' explores the major religions of the world, emphasising the living faiths & their background. It provides access to the theological concepts, personalities, historical events, institutions, and movements that helped shape the history of each religion and the way it is practiced.
Emptiness is a challenging concept: slippery in definition and elastic in meaning. It implies a total lack of content: people, buildings, objects or markings on a map. In the abstract, emptiness equals nothingness, a perfect void. Yet when one thinks of places on the globe that one might associate with being empty – the Gobi or Sahara deserts, t…

Middle Egyptian introduces the reader to the writing system of ancient Egypt and the language of hieroglyphic texts. It contains twenty-six lessons, exercises (with answers), a list of hieroglyphic signs, and a dictionary. It also includes a series of twenty-five essays on the most important aspects of ancient Egyptian history, society, religion and literature. The combination of grammar lesson…

When discussing being stuck in a "win-win vs. win-lose" debate, most negotiation books focus on face-to-face tactics. Yet, table tactics are only the "first dimension" of David A. Lax and James K. Sebenius' pathbreaking 3-D Negotiation (TM) approach, developed from their decades of doing deals and analyzing great dealmakers. Moves in their "second dimension"?deal design?systematically unlock ec…
Political leaders face two key challenges when they decide to use mili-tary force: winning the war itself, and winning support at home. In the past two decades, the United States has pursued a technological solution to these problems by developing combat drones—weapons that can both selectively target opponents and minimize the costs and risks of combat. In this book, …

Black Women’s Stories of Everyday Racism puts literary narrative theory to work on an urgent real-world problem. The book calls attention to African American women’s everyday experiences with systemic racism and demonstrates how four types of narrative theory can help generate strategies to explain and dismantle that racism. This volume presents fifteen stories told by eight midwestern Afri…
In this second edition of A Dictionary of Diplomacy we have added a considerable number of entries, excluded some which no longer seemed significant, reworked others in the light of further reflection, and corrected a few errors. We would like to thank all of those who offered criticisms of the first edition and suggested new entries for inclusion in this one, notably Lorna Lloyd (who also gav…
hat we might loosely call the indigenous “religious arts” of the late prehistoric Greater Antilles – skillfully crafted, portable artifacts used in ritual practice – exist in a variety of genres in a variety of media. Some of these genres have attracted consid-erable analytical attention by specialists: dujos (ceremonial stools), cohoba stands (for receiving a hallucinogeni…
Humans, represented by members of genus Homo, have been living in Europe for around 1.5 million years. But who were they? How did they survive? In short, what kinds of ‘humans’ were these? These are the fundamental questions addressed, though the lens of the changing seasons, in the pages that follow. But why ask these questions and why should we be interested…
This manuscript encompasses our published and unpublished topological results in neuroscience. Topology, the mathematical branch that assesses objects and their properties preserved through deformations, stretching and twisting, allows the investigation of the most general brain features.
Whatever else people do when they come together—whether they play, fight, make love, or make automobiles—they talk. We live in a world of language. We talk to our friends, our associates, our wives and husbands, our lovers, our teachers, our parents, our rivals, and even our enemies. We talk face-to-face and over all manner of electronic media, and everyone responds with more talk. Hardly a…
Modeling in 3-D is the process of creating a mathematical representation of an object's surfaces. The resulting model is displayed on your screen as a two-dimensional image. Rhino provides tools for creating, displaying, and manipulating these surfaces. Toolbars contain graphical icons for initiating commands. Many toolbar icons have a second command that you can access by right-clicking the ic…