Fonthill, in Wiltshire, is usually associated with the writer and collector William Beckford, who built his Gothic fantasy house Fonthill Abbey at the end of the eight-eenth century. The collapse of the Abbey’s tower in 1825 transformed the name Fonthill into a symbol for over- arching ambition and folly, a sublime ruin. Fonthill is, however, much more than the story …
From the 1890s on, the ground for the reception of the medieval tale Our Lady’s Tumblerin the United States was readied among the elite. Yet the individuals and media involved in the projection of the story in the New World before the cultured public are only loosely comparable to those who from the 1870s on motivated the success of the medieval poem and the fin-de-siècle …
Are microphones and loudspeakers musical instruments?This question is the starting point for my book Between Air and Electricity which tells the story of how microphones and loudspeakers have changed music over the past 100 years through artistic experiments and innovation. It is very common nowadays to have microphones and loudspeakers used on stage next to musicians and conventional musical i…
n 2005, YouTube went live as a quick and easy (and apparently free to use) way of sharing video on the Internet, with other video hosting and streaming services like Imeem, Vimeo, and Blip soon to follow. The rise of online distribution kicked off an interest in DIY video and “user-generated content,” itself a phrase that went mainstream in …
The world was not doing enough for sustainable development, even before the pandemic. The existing gap in financing for the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals has been estimated at around $2.5 trillion.1 Growth in developing and emerging economies was, however, steadily reducing the number of people in extreme poverty. The recession caused by COVID-19 has reversed that process, al…
Now that we are on the threshold of the Anthropocene epoch, how should humans envision and understand their place in the world? Do humans possess the necessary cultural tools to imagine new possibilities and relationships with the natural environment at a time when our material surroundings (the very system that supports us physically and spiritually) is under siege? To answer questions like th…
Equality in the city is an aspiration. Cities have never been equal, equitable or fair. Now, optimum efficiency is celebrated as progress, and reconfigurations of urban spaces are focused on the clean lines of punctual service delivery. Smart cites are controlled cities, where data is the fuel that pumps through the heart. The common denominator in smart city rhetoric is the assumption that org…
Io, come sapete, sono stato Soprintendente di Firenze per poco meno di venti anni, dal 1988 al 2006; e in un periodo così lungo ho avuto rapporti frequenti di amicizia e di collaborazione con Detlef Heikamp, questo tedesco di Bre-ma, cittadino del mondo, che ha scelto Firenze come città della vita e degli studi. Essendo per lui la vita e gli studi una unità inscindibile.Ricordo il 1994, il 2…
Indonesia is no exception. Soon after Suharto’s authoritarian New Order regime came to an end in 1998, Indonesia’s party system entered a new, post-authoritarian era. Political parties, of which there were previ-ously only three because of heavy government regulations, could now form freely. Consequently, a highly competitive multiparty system eme…
Despite progress since the Cold War in reaching negotiated settlements in civil wars, efforts to consolidate peace with effective governance have proven challenging in places as diverse as the Congo, Afghanistan, Haiti, Iraq, Central Africa, and the Middle East. Two decades ago international peacebuilding was understood as a centrally coordinated package of inter-ventions aimed at …
cursory glance at Dutch historiography as it stands today proves this point. Most recently, scholars have homed in on the particularly violent nature of decolonization and its so-called ‘extreme’ properties. On the one hand, this has been occasioned by the demands put forth by survivors and their relatives that former colonial empires reco…
n this dense passage, the narrator begins by recalling his deceased father’s words about justice and personal freedom. Yet for him, the very effort required to voice his father’s advice marks the transience of sensory per-ception and the beginning of memory: it ends in apprehension about the precarity of memory in the passage of time.The story traces the interplay of sense, memo…
Nowadays high performance computing (HPC) clusters are not only deployed in largeresearch centers, but also widely adopted by industries such as chip design and man-ufacture, life sciences, etc. This trend brings more diverse workload patterns to HPCclusters compared with the traditional scientific applications. As those clusters normallyconsists of thousands of nodes, it is common to use resou…
Wireless communication systems come in different shapes and sizes: from radiofrequency (RF) systems we use in everyday life, to underwater acoustic communi-cations (UAC) used where RF attenuation prevents use of radio communications.These two examples are of interest to this case study, as we explored the poten-tial role of reversible computation in improving modern wireless communicationsin th…
The basic elements of many natural and artificial systems have dependencies on each other and call for correlation modeling and analytic methods to study these. The graphs are all around us from different perspective, and in general all the objects in the real world are defined based on their connections with other objects. These connections ca…
ll the research we present in this book took place in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Copenhagen (Datalogisk Institut Københavns Universitet [DIKU]), in Denmark. Thus, our work is situated in Denmark, and since gender is culturally shaped (Butler 1999), providing some contextual information about the Computer Science Department is important. The Univer…
Virtually all fiscal measures can (or have the potential to) influence people’s health, through shaping behaviour, consumption, income and wealth. A subset of fiscal measures, however, can be identified as more directly linked to improving health by targeting behaviours and risks that are known to be strongly associated with health outcomes. Some of these measures, which we define as ‘healt…
There is a longstanding and well-established regional health divide in England: on average, people in the Northern region of England live two years less than those in the rest of the country. These geographical divides were exacerbated by austerity and feelings of being ‘left behind’ are considered to have contributed to the 2016 Brexit vote and spurred the Cons…
Barrows are the most common prehistoric monuments that can still be found in the European landscape today. Once erected as burial markers during prehistory, burial mounds have since served as important anchors in the landscape. Burial mounds built in the 3rd millennium BC were sometimes used to bury the dead until the 1st millennium BC (Bourgeois 2013; Theunissen 199…
Giving Western literature and art many of its most enduring themes and archetypes, Greek mythology and the gods and goddesses at its core are a fundamental part of the popular imagination. At the heart of Greek mythology are exciting stories of drama, action, and adventure featuring gods and goddesses, who, while physically superior to humans, share many of their weaknesses. Readers will be int…
The market today resembles a Leviathan, a great beast growing in accordance with no law outside of the vain rapacity of its uncanny monstrosity, extending its boundaries beyond the nation-state, beyond government intervention, beyond ecologically safe limits and beyond our will to enter into it. It has become properly automatic, functioning for no purpose outside of itsel…
In fact, Oliver Stone’s career was never as outrageously conten-tious as this when it started, neither was it even at the putative height of his artistic and commercial powers in the decade that spanned the late 1980s and early 1990s. From unlikely writ-ing credits for The Hand (1981), which he also directed, Conan the Barbarian (John Milius, 198…
Whether the vocalizer is heard over the radio or the phone, as part of a movie soundtrack or in person—positioned far away and therefore hard to see or speaking right in front of the listener—the foundational question asked in the act of listening to a human voice is Who is this? Who is speaking? Regardless of whether the vocalizer is visible or invisible to the l…
Trabecular meshwork (TM) MIGS procedures and devices are numerous. They aim to eliminate trabecular meshwork resistance in the normal physiological outflow pathway in patients with mild-to-moderate glaucoma and ocular hypertension (OHT). They are indicated in combination with cataract surgery. In patients with chronic primary angle closure, the TM outflow system h…
How is heritage created and re- created, shaped and reshaped, formed, reformed and transformed – or even reborn? Heritage in all its forms endures a lengthy and dynamic journey of emergence, transformation, decline and revival. An object displayed within a museum showcase may have travelled through various places and changed uses more than once before acquiri…
Among what some have described as a domination of dance and chore-ography within the recent performative turn in the museal sector, defini-tions, specificities, and careful framing have often been lacking.5 Various iterations of dance in the gallery have included adaptations of stage-based works for the new context, works made for proscenium theaters located in multi-arts centers (such as t…
his exhibition at the historic Victoria Gallery and Museum, Liverpool, comprises almost entirely of art works in the collection of Theresa Roberts, who is founder and owner of the Jamaica Patty Co. restaurant, based in Covent Garden, London.Theresa Roberts was born in Jamaica to parents who emigrated to the United Kingdom as part of the ‘Windrush Generation’: those who were invited by Briti…
The term ‘bioeconomy’ is commonly met with a sense of uncertaintyregarding its meaning and purpose. In general, there are three differentfields of public and scientific debate about the bioeconomy. NicholasGeorgescu-Roegen (1971) referred to the bioeconomy as a transforma-tional pathway towards a degrowth society. In contrast, the debate about‘biocapitalism’ focuses on the commodificati…
Many children and adults experience considerable difficulty producing or understanding a spoken language despite having adequate hearing levels. Some of these persons may benefit from learning a full and genuine sign language, such as one of the sign languages used by members of a Deaf1 community. They may acquire a substantial vocabulary of signs and learn to combine them into complex s…
Over a decade of dedicated research! Over a year of writing and editing! With the blessings and guidance of a swami , a babaji, and a Sanskrit scholar, Vic DiCara presents you the world's most definitive, simple and completely awesome explanation of the mythology and meaning within the 27 stars of ancient Indian astrology!
From at least 4000 BCE to the death of Cleopatra VII in 30 CE, Egyptian Mythology was the foundation of ancient Egyptian culture. Spanning over large dominions as distant as the Roman Empire and the Greco-Roman realm, Egyptian mythology was a prevailing entity. Goddesses like Isis were worshiped not only by the natives of Egypt but also those of England and Afghanistan.
History, not ideology, holds the key to growth. Brilliantly written and argued, Concrete Economics shows how government has repeatedly reshaped the American economy ever since Alexander Hamilton’s first, foundational redesign. This book does not rehash the sturdy and long-accepted arguments that to thrive, entrepreneurial economies need a broad range of freedoms. Instead, Steve Cohen an…
This book presents a collection of essays discussing a history of the five myths of Dionysus, Narcissus, Prometheus, Marcolf, and Labyrinth in twentieth-century literature. The author traces their transformations against the wider backdrop of Polish and European literature. The book is an excellent, thought-provoking lesson in understanding the signs of contemporary culture and a fascinating jo…
Eunsun Kim was born in North Korea, one of the most secretive and oppressive countries in the modern world. As a child Eunsun loved her country...despite her school field trips to public executions, daily self-criticism sessions, and the increasing gnaw of hunger as the country-wide famine escalated. By the time she was eleven years old, Eunsun's father and grandparents had died of starvatio…
North Korea is a country that continues to make headlines - arousing curiosity and fear in equal measure. The world's most secretive nuclear power, it is a nation that still has Gulag-style prison camps, no internet and bans its people from talking to foreigners without official approval. In this remarkable and eye-opening book, internationally bestselling author Paul French examines in forensi…
Through their emphasis on innovation, Chinese dance practitioners interpret their research to create new forms. The removal of singing or speech in Shao’s sleeve dance choreography represents her obvious departure from xiqu, in which song and speech are usually considered essential to a complete performance. The rhythmical mapping of Shao’s classroom choreography onto e…
Inquisitive semantics is a new semantic framework mainly intended forthe analysis of linguistic information exchange. Information exchangecan be seen as a process of raising and resolving issues. Inquisitivesemantics provides a new formal notion of issues, which makes itpossible to model various concepts that are crucial for the analysis oflinguistic information exchange in a more refined and m…
Research in the fields of conversation analysis, ethnomethodology, and inter-actional linguistics is perhaps closest to the approach taken here, for a few rea-sons. One is that the empirical source of data is recordings of informal interaction.Another is that the units of analysis are not clauses or sentences but moves in con-versational sequences (Wootton 1981;1997;Lindström 2005;Vinkhuyzen &…
This book is a concise narrative of Byzantine history from the time of Constantine the Great (AD 306) to the fall of Constantinople in 1453.
Standard definitions of the word technology pose a challenge for anyone interested in developing a global history of technology.22 Today, “technol-ogy” is strongly associated with smartphones, computers, and other digi-tal, high-tech solutions. In contrast to this connotation, this book embraces every form of technology, from the pejoratively named “low-tech” solu-tions to the often exa…
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…
At least since the historiographical renewal brought about, among others, by the works of Franco Venturi (1973), the events of the century leading to the R isorgimento and the R isorgimento itself have been placed in the context of cultural exchanges involving European and extra-European intellectuals, trav-ellers, politicians and revolutionaries. In this historiographical…
Emic approaches oen run counter to the tendency to abstract poetic forms and how they “work” as strict ideal systems. Instead, emic approaches attend to variation as symptomatic of the potential for exibility that may also have functions or meanings in performance (Foley 2002: 33; see also Kallio, this volume). Emic terms are oen brought into focus for …
In logic, we study properties of sentences, such as truth, falsity, necessity, and contin-gency, relations between sentences, such as entailment and consistency, and practicesinvolving sentences, such as argumentation. However, bysentences, we normallyonly mean sentences of a certain particular kind: declarative sentences—statements,and their counterparts in formal languages.There are princip…
Across anticolonial discourse the mastery of the colonizer over the colo-nies was a practice that was explicitly disavowed, and yet, in their efforts to decolonize, anticolonial thinkers in turn advocated practices of mas-tery—corporeal, linguistic, and intellectual—toward their own liberation. Within anticolonial movements, practices of countermastery were aimed explicitly at defeating col…
Finance has gone farming. Since the financial and food price crises of 2007/ 8, the world has seen a stark rise in financial investments in farmland and agri-cultural production by investment banks, sovereign wealth funds, pension funds, private equity funds, insurance companies, family offices, endowment funds and high- net-worth individuals (HNWIs). Indeed, finance has been …