This book will be useful to anyone who wants to understand the use of quantum theory for the description of physical processes. It is a graduate level text, ideal for independent study, and includes numerous figures, exercises, bibliographical references, and even some computer programs. The first chapters introduce formal tools: the mathematics are precise, but not excessively abstract. The physical interpretation too is rigorous. It makes no use of the uncertainty principle of other ill-defined notions. The central part of the book is devoted to Bell's theorem and to the Kochen-Specker theorem. It is here that quantum phenomena depart most radically from classical physics. There has recently been considerable progress on these issues, and the latest developments have been included. The final chapters discuss further topics of current research: spacetime symmetries, quantum thermodynamics and information theory, semiclassical methods, irreversibility, quantum chaos, and especially the measuring process. In particular, it is shown how modern techniques allow the extraction of more information from a physical system than traditional measurement methods. For physicists, mathematicians and philosophers of science with an interest in the applications and foundations of quantum theory. The volume is suitable as a supplementary graduate textbook.

"Today's babies often make their debut on social media with the very first sonogram. They begin interacting with screens at around four months old. But is this good news or bad news? A wonderful opportunity to connect around the world? Or the first step in creating a generation of addled screen zombies? Many have been quick to declare this the dawn of a neurological and emotional crisis, but solid science on the subject is surprisingly hard to come by. In The Art of Screen Time, Anya Kamenetz--an expert on education and technology, as well as a mother of two young children--takes a refreshingly practical look at the subject. Surveying hundreds of fellow parents on their practices and ideas, and cutting through a thicket of inconclusive studies and overblown claims, she hones a simple message, a riff on Michael Pollan's well-known "food rules": Enjoy Screens. Not too much. Mostly with others. This brief but powerful dictum forms the backbone of a philosophy that will help parents moderate technology in their children's lives, curb their own anxiety, and create room for a happy, healthy family life with and without screens."--Amazon.com.

Covering the how and why of etymology (along with generous helpings of who, what when and where) Word Origins explains the science behind the word histories we take so much for granted. With this book, you'll not only learn the origins of hundreds of words, you'll understand how true word histories are actually uncovered. Part history, part how-to manual, Word Origins draws back the curtain to show how etymologists perform amazing feats of word archaeology.

"Owning the Sun tells the story of one of the most contentious fights in human history: the legal right to control the production of lifesaving medicines. Medical science began as a discipline geared toward the betterment of all human life, but the merging of research with intellectual property and the rise of the pharmaceutical industry warped and eventually undermined its ethical foundations. Since the Second World War, federally funded research has facilitated most major medical breakthroughs, yet these drugs are often wholly controlled by price-gouging corporations with growing international ambitions. Why does the U.S. government fund the development of medical science in the name of the public, only to relinquish exclusive rights to drug companies, and how does such a system impoverish us, weaken our responses to global crises, and, as in the case of AIDS and COVID-19, put the world at risk? Outlining how generations of public health and science advocates have attempted to hold the line against Big Pharma and their allies in government, Alexander Zaitchik's first-in-kind history documents the rise of medical monopoly in the United States and its subsequent globalization. From the controversial arrival of patent-wielding German drug firms in the late nineteenth century, to present-day coordination between industry and philanthropic organizations-including the influential Gates Foundation-that stymie international efforts to vaccinate the world against COVID-19, Owning the Sun tells one of the most important and least understood histories of our time"--

Organizing his work thematically to explore important ideas and trends that have influenced the social sciences since World War II, Daniel Bell charts the rise and fall of major developments in the field and presents a comprehensive survey of the progress of the social sciences over this thirty-five year period. Bell discusses such major advances as the emergence of sotiobiology as an effort to unify social behavior through genetically-based parameters, structuralism, the multiplicity of new paradigms in macroeconomics, and schools of neo-Marxism. Parts I and II of The Social Sciences Since the Second World War originally appeared as yearly installments in the Encyclopaedia Britannica's Great Ideas Today series and are combined for the first time in book form. Dr. Bell has added an introductory essay that reviews the time frame and details his rationale for focusing on specific disciplines. His emphasis throughout is on those synoptic efforts geared at providing a systematic body of theory that set forth some coherent statement about human behavior or social structure. The book concludes with a discussion of the viability of formulating a unified viewof knowledge through the unity of science.

In "Anthropology and social theory" the award-winning anthropologist Sherry B. Ortner draws on her longstanding interest in theories of cultural practice to rethink key concepts of culture, agency, and subjectivity for the social sciences of the twenty-first century. The seven theoretical and interpretive essays in this volume each advocate reconfiguring, rather than abandoning, the concept of culture. Similarly, they all suggest that a theory which depends on the interested action of social beings - specifically practice theory, associated especially with the work of Pierre Bourdieu - requires a more developed notion of human agency and a richer conception of human subjectivity. Ortner shows how social theory must both build upon and move beyond classic practice theory in order to understand the contemporary world. Some of the essays reflect explicitly on theoretical concerns: the relationship between agency and power, the problematic quality of ethnographic studies of resistance, and the possibility of producing an anthropology of subjectivity. Others are ethnographic studies that apply Ortner's theoretical framework. In these, she investigates aspects of social class, looking at the relationship between race and middle-class identity in the United States, the often invisible nature of class as a cultural identity and as an analytical category in social inquiry, and the role that public culture and media play in the creation of the class anxieties of Generation X. Written with Ortner's characteristic lucidity, these essays constitute a major statement about the future of social theory from one of the leading anthropologists of our time.

Edmund Husserl's Origin of Geometry": An Introduction (1962) is Jacques Derrida's earliest published work. In this commentary-interpretation of the famous appendix to Husserl's The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, Derrida relates writing to such key concepts as differing, consciousness, presence, and historicity. Starting from Husserl's method of historical investigation, Derrida gradually unravels a deconstructive critique of phenomenology itself, which forms the foundation for his later criticism of Western metaphysics as a metaphysics of presence. The complete text of Husserl's Origin of Geometry is included.

These essays explore what happens when a skilful economist makes unconventional assumptions. Economic theory has traditionally relied upon a tacit and 'classical' set of assumptions that have gradually acquired a life of their own in defining how economists write and how they justify economic models. Similarly, these assumptions have acquired an autonomous character: they guide the way economists think about the world. In consequence, consideration of alternative assumptions has become taboo. These essays are substantively and stylistically novel because they break these taboos and bring new assumptions into economic theory. The papers apply this adventurous approach to a wide range of issues - from insurance markets and trade in underdeveloped countries to unemployment and discrimination. Some of the essays derive the implications for economic markets of costly asymmetric information. Others explore the findings of other social sciences such as anthropology, psychology and sociology.

In this provocative new book, France’s leading feminist theorist launches a broadside against the way in which feminism has evolved since the 1990s. After the victories of the previous decades, during which women had made some real advances in social and political life, a new sensibility began to emerge in the 1990s which led to a reversal in the hierarchy of values. The cult of victimhood has become widespread and has affected feminism. Women are viewed as defenceless and oppressed, social violence and sexual violence are treated as the same and a finger is pointed at the guilty one: man in all his guises. But by conflating real and false victims, feminism runs the risk of misunderstanding the battles that need to be waged and of losing all credibility with the younger generation, which doesn’t see things see things this way. Preoccupied by putting men on trial, the feminism of the last few years has reactivated old stereotypes and left behind the very battles that have long been its raison d’être – this, argues Badinter, is a dead end. A huge bestseller in France, this book will be essential reading for anyone interested in the changing relations between the sexes and our ways of thinking about sex and gender today.

Published with the aid of a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Contains the only complete English-language text of The Concept of Truth in Formalized Languages. Tarski made extensive corrections and revisions of the original translations for this edition, along with new historical remarks. It includes a new preface and a new analytical index for use by philosophers and linguists as well as by historians of mathematics and philosophy.

Critical Globalization Studies is the first volume to map out a critical approach to the rapidly growing field of gloablization studies. Centrally concerned with global justice, the contributors both scrutinze and recast the subject. As well, the volume serves as a bridge connecting scholars of globalization, the policy world, and the global justice movement. The essays examine a wide range of topics too often left at the margin of globalization studies and in the process raise a host of crucial questions. Unique in its extensive and comprehensive approach, Critical Globalization Studies develops new and important theoretical perspectives on globalization while engaging global social activism. It is an indispenseable guide for both academics and practitioners.

The last quarter of the 20th century was marked by significant growth in youth gang problems across the U.S. Miller and his collaborators have compiled a comprehensive study of the growth of young gang problems in the U.S. from 1970 to 1998. Chapters: an explosion of youth gang problems in the U.S. (scope of the report, terms and definitions, groups not counted as youth gangs, data collection and analysis, data sources, and topics); gang localities in the U.S.: a quarter-century summary; gang cities; gang counties; regional trends in gang cities; trends in size of gang cities; summary and explanations; trend prospects for gang localities; and 1998 update of selected data. Charts and tables.

"A publication of the International Institute of Human Rights, Strasbourg"--Preliminary page.

In this book gender is the lens through which autobiography and biography are scrutinized. The authors show what is revealed when they magnify the gendered aspects of both men’s and women’s writing. The eternal questions of identity, choice, responsibility, happiness, tragedy, and even death are interpreted in terms of gender analysis. The book presents a sequence of studies from the early nineteenth to the late twentieth century that includes individuals such as American poet Anne Sexton and German writers Christa Wolf and Paul Celan, and groups such as nineteenth-century Mexican women and members of the British working class. It extends the paradigm of “self-reflexive” literature to include and highlight the overlap between autobiography and biography, especially in the case of women who often wrote their lives obliquely through the biographies of their famous male relatives, e. g., Adèle Hugo and Anne Thackeray Ritchie. The authors refuse to accept a monolithic conception of gender. The studies of Charles and Mary Lamb, Nadezhda Durova, and John Stuart Mill demonstrate that even in the nineteenth century, a binary gender system is inadequate as a mode of approach to actual life stories.

Displacement, Diaspora, and Geographies of Identity challenges conventional understandings of identity based on notions of nation and culture as bounded or discrete. Through careful examinations of various transnational, hybrid, border, and diasporic forces and practices, these essays push at the edge of cultural studies, postmodernism, and postcolonial theory and raise crucial questions about ethnographic methodology. This volume exemplifies a cross-disciplinary cultural studies and a concept of culture rooted in lived experience as well as textual readings. Anthropologists and scholars from related fields deploy a range of methodologies and styles of writing to blur and complicate conventional dualisms between authors and subjects of research, home and away, center and periphery, and first and third world. Essays discuss topics such as Rai, a North African pop music viewed as westernized in Algeria and as Arab music in France; the place of Sephardic and Palestinian writers within Israel’s Ashkenazic-dominated arts community; and the use and misuse of the concept “postcolonial” as it is applied in various regional contexts. In exploring histories of displacement and geographies of identity, these essays call for the reconceptualization of theoretical binarisms such as modern and postmodern, colonial and postcolonial. It will be of interest to a broad spectrum of scholars and students concerned with postmodern and postcolonial theory, ethnography, anthropology, and cultural studies. Contributors. Norma Alarcón, Edward M. Bruner, Nahum D. Chandler, Ruth Frankenberg, Joan Gross, Dorinne Kondo, Kristin Koptiuch, Smadar Lavie, Lata Mani, David McMurray, Kirin Narayan, Greg Sarris, Ted Swedenburg

"Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907-1972) was a prolific scholar, impassioned theologian, and prominent activist who participated in the black civil rights movement and the campaign against the Vietnam War. He has been hailed as a hero, honored as a visionary, and endlessly quoted as a devotional writer. In this sympathetic, yet critical, examination, Shai Held elicits the overarching themes and unity of Heschel's incisive and insightful thought. Focusing on the idea of transcendence - or the movement from self-centeredness to God-centeredness - Held puts Heschel into dialogue with contemporary Jewish thinkers, Christian theologians, devotional writers, and philosophers of religion"--From publisher's website