Academic

This book critically examines the Western approach to counter-insurgency in the post-colonial era and offers a series of recommendations to address current shortfalls. The author argues that current approaches to countering insurgency rely too heavily on conflicts from the post-World War II years of waning colonialism. Campaigns conducted over half a century ago – Malaya, Aden, and Kenya among them – remain primary sources on which the United States, British, Australian, and other militaries build their guidance for dealing with insurgent threats, this though both the character of those threats and the conflict environment are significantly different than was the case in those earlier years. This book addresses the resulting inconsistencies by offering insights, analysis, and recommendations drawn from campaigns more applicable to counter-insurgency today. Eight post-colonial conflicts; to include Northern Ireland, Sierra Leone, Colombia and Iraq; provide the basis for analysis. All are examples in which counterinsurgents attained or continue to demonstrate considerable progress when taking on enterprises better known for disaster and disappointment. Recommendations resulting from these analyses challenge entrenched beliefs to serve as the impetus for essential change. Rethinking Western Approaches to Counterinsurgency will be of much interest to students of counter-insurgencies, military and strategic studies, security studies and IR in general.

This book provides a pragmatic analysis of presidential language. Pragmatics is concerned with "meaning in context," or the relationship between what we say and what we mean. John Wilson explores the various ways in which U.S. Presidents have used language within specific social contexts to achieve specific objectives. This includes obfuscation, misdirection, the use of metaphor or ambiguity, or in some cases simply lying. He focuses on six presidents: John F. Kennedy, Richard M. Nixon, Ronald W. Reagan, William F. Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack H. Obama. These presidents cover most of the last half of the twentieth century, and the first decade of the twenty first century, and each has been associated with a specific linguistic quality. John F. Kennedy was famed for his quality of oratory, Nixon for his manipulative use of language, Reagan for his gift of telling stories, Clinton for his ability to engage the public and to linguistically turn arguments and descriptions in particular directions. Bush, on the other hand, was famed for his inability to use language appropriately, and Obama returns us to the rhetorical flourishes of early Kennedy. In the case of each president, a range of specific examples are explored in order to highlight the ways in which a pragmatic analysis may provide an insight into presidential language. In many cases, what the president says is not necessarily what the president means.

The first comprehensive guide to modern laboratory planning in ten years to address both construction and operating aspects. Many of the 30 authors are affiliated with the European Association for Sustainable Laboratory Technologies (EGNATON), which has also endorsed this ready reference. This expert team covers the entire lifecycle of a laboratory facility, starting with the site layout and the planning of the building, followed by the planning of such areas as housing for laboratory animals, clean rooms and production facilities. The next section of the book deals with the installation of laboratory equipment, including storage and emergency facilities, while the final parts address safety and sustainability standards applicable to laboratories, as well as facility management and optimization during normal laboratory operation. The relevant norms and standards are cited throughout, and examples from recent construction sites are also presented. Hundreds of photographs and drawings, many in full color, provide visual examples of the design and building concepts. As a result, readers will learn how to construct and maintain efficient and long-serving laboratory spaces with a minimum of maintenance costs and a maximum of safety. An invaluable, practical guide for planners, builders and managers of chemical, biological and medical research laboratories of any size.

The present book aims at describing the phenomenon of superconductivity and high-temperature superconductors discovered by Bednorz and Muller in 1986. The book covers the superconductivity phenomenon, structure of high-Tc superconductors, critical currents, synthesis routes for high Tc materials, superconductivity in cuprates, the proximity effect and SQUIDs, theories of superconductivity and applications of superconductors.

This book bridges the gap between general plasma physics lectures and the real world problems in MHD stability. In order to support the understanding of concepts and their implication, it refers to real world problems such as toroidal mode coupling or nonlinear evolution in a conceptual and phenomenological approach. Detailed mathematical treatment will involve classical linear stability analysis and an outline of more recent concepts such as the ballooning formalism. The book is based on lectures that the author has given to Master and PhD students in Fusion Plasma Physics. Due its strong link to experimental results in MHD instabilities, the book is also of use to senior researchers in the field, i.e. experimental physicists and engineers in fusion reactor science. The volume is organized in three parts. It starts with an introduction to the MHD equations, a section on toroidal equilibrium (tokamak and stellarator), and on linear stability analysis. Starting from there, the ideal MHD stability of the tokamak configuration will be treated in the second part which is subdivided into current driven and pressure driven MHD. This includes many examples with reference to experimental results for important MHD instabilities such as kinks and their transformation to RWMs, infernal modes, peeling modes, ballooning modes and their relation to ELMs. Finally the coverage is completed by a chapter on resistive stability explaining reconnection and island formation. Again, examples from recent tokamak MHD such as sawteeth, CTMs, NTMs and their relation to disruptions are extensively discussed.

Reprint of classic reference work. Over 400 books have been published in the series Classics in Mathematics, many remain standard references for their subject. All books in this series are reissued in a new, inexpensive softcover edition to make them easily accessible to younger generations of students and researchers. "... The book has many good points: clear organization, historical notes and references at the end of every chapter, and an excellent bibliography. The text is well-written, at a level appropriate for the intended audience, and it represents a very good introduction to the basic theory of dynamical systems."

'If people do not believe that mathematics is simple, it is only because they do not realize how complicated life is.' John von Neumann Mathematics can tell you things about the world that can't be learned in any other way. This hugely informative and wonderfully entertaining little book answers one hundred essential questions about existence. It unravels the knotty, clarifies the conundrums and sheds light into dark corners. From winning the lottery, placing bets at the races and escaping from bears to sports, Shakepeare, Google, game theory, drunks, divorce settlements and dodgy accounting; from chaos to infinity and everything in between, 100 Essential Things You Didn't Know You Didn't Know has all the answers!

International development has complex unintended effects on the realities of equity, rights, governance, and conflict in poor countries. Yet the myriad moral questions and quandaries encountered at every turn by development policymakers and practitioners are seldom thought about or articulated in a rigorous fashion. Instead, development specialists are trained to focus on the technocratic aspects of economic aid delivery and to disregard the moral issues raised by the adverse collateral consequences of aid programs for many people, communities, institutions, and environments in the developing countries. Reclaiming Value in International Development is the first book to bridge the divide between ethics and development from the perspective of a seasoned development practitioner who is also a trained ethicist. Schwenke formally enlarges the concept of development to include its moral dimension, to denote beneficial change that alleviates human misery and environmental degradation in poor countries and reinforces universal ethical norms such as human dignity, essential freedoms, social justice, peace, civic virtue, human flourishing, the common good, gender equality, safety and security, and participation and inclusion. She applies this ethically expanded concept to nine key topics in international development: education, leadership, procurement, food security, conflict, urbanization, gender identity and sexual orientation, deliberative participation, and the measurement of ethical performance. Throughout the book, the author draws on her thirty years of experience as a development practitioner in thirty poor countries around the world to give vivid real-life illustrations of the classic moral dilemmas in development ethics and to show how moral reasoning can clarify and resolve them.

A complete guide to two of Texas's most diverse and exciting cities Shows visitors how to have a great time in San Antonio, a multicultural city with a rich history (the Alamo) and lots of contemporary attractions (including over forty golf courses) Reveals San Antonio's most memorable experiences--from a stroll along the San Antonio River to a mariachi mass at Mission San Jose--and offers intriguing side trips to the Texas Hill Country Takes visitors to the best of Austin, the "Live Music Capital of the World," with more than 200 music clubs Explains how to make an Austin visit unforgettable, from visiting the state capital and LBJ Library to listening to blues at Antone's, hiking and biking in city parks, and watching the bats at Congress Avenue Bridge

Synthetic finance revolutionizes materialism such that we can now create wealth in the process of universally distributing it. While financial innovation in global capitalism provided the conditions for the 2008 financial crisis, it has also engineered a set of financial technologies with universal distributive potential. This book explains this possibility and demonstrates how it can be achieved through a rigorous ontological exposition of the radical, nomadic, distributive power of synthetic finance. It also illustrates that Gilles Deleuze is the heterodox political economist who best reveals its profound material capacities. This book articulates an innovative method for the study of finance, fundamentally revaluates political economy as a discipline and practice, and inaugurates a research project from which derivative methodologies and approaches to critical finance can evolve. Of Synthetic Finance actualizes a new kind of heterodox political economy called speculative materialism, and advocates a radical project of speculative materialist financial engineering. Both of these are predicated on the deployment of the latent, nomadic, monstrous capacities of synthetic finance to create and universally distribute risk and cash flow. This book is a must read for anyone interested in critical finance, the financial crisis and the future of political economy.

Culled from forty years of writing by the founder of psychoanalysis, A Primer Of Freudian Psychology introduces Freud's theories on the dynamics and development of the human mind. Hall also provides a brief biography of Sigmund Freud and examines how he arrived at his groundbreaking conclusions. In discussing the elements that form personality, the author explains the pioneer thinker's ideas on defense mechanisms, the channeling of instinctual drives, and the role of sex in male and female maturation. Lucid, illuminating, and instructive, this is an important book for all who seek to understand human behavior, in themselves and others.

In the vein of his bestseller, Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, nationally recognized social critic Jerry Mander researches, discusses, and exposes the momentous and unsolvable environmental and social problems of capitalism. Mander argues that capitalism is no longer a viable system: ?What may have worked in 1900 is calamitous in 2010." Capitalism, utterly dependent on never-ending economic growth, is an impossible absurdity on a finite planet with limited resources. Climate change, together with global food, water, and resource shortages, is only the start. Mander draws attention to capitalism's obsessive need to dominate and undermine democracy, as well as to diminish social and economic equity. Designed to operate free of morality, the system promotes permanent war as a key economic strategy. Worst of all, the problems of capitalism are intrinsic to the form. Many organizations are already anticipating the breakdown of the system and are working to define new hierarchies of democratic values that respect the carrying capacities of the planet.

This book explores the relationship between subjective experience and the cultural, political and historical paradigms in which the individual is embedded. Providing a deep analysis of three compelling case studies of schizophrenia in Turkey, the book considers the ways in which private experience is shaped by collective structures, offering insights into issues surrounding religion, national and ethnic identity and tensions, modernity and tradition, madness, gender and individuality. Chapters draw from cultural psychiatry, medical anthropology, and political theory to produce a model for understanding the inseparability of private experience and collective processes. The book offers those studying political theory a way for conceptualizing the subjective within the political; it offers mental health clinicians and researchers a model for including political and historical realities in their psychological assessments and treatments; and it provides anthropologists with a model for theorizing culture in which psychological experience and political facts become understandable and explainable in terms of, rather than despite each other. Meaning, Madness, and Political Subjectivity provides an original interpretative methodology for analysing culture and psychosis, offering compelling evidence that not only "normal" human experiences, but also extremely "abnormal" experiences such as psychosis are anchored in and shaped by local cultural and political realities.

Envy, irritation, paranoia--in contrast to powerful and dynamic negative emotions like anger, these non-cathartic states of feeling are associated with situations in which action is blocked or suspended. In her examination of the cultural forms to which these affects give rise, Sianne Ngai suggests that these minor and more politically ambiguous feelings become all the more suited for diagnosing the character of late modernity. Along with her inquiry into the aesthetics of unprestigious negative affects such as irritation, envy, and disgust, Ngai examines a racialized affect called "animatedness," and a paradoxical synthesis of shock and boredom called "stuplimity." She explores the politically equivocal work of these affective concepts in the cultural contexts where they seem most at stake, from academic feminist debates to the Harlem Renaissance, from late-twentieth-century American poetry to Hollywood film and network television. Through readings of Herman Melville, Nella Larsen, Sigmund Freud, Alfred Hitchcock, Gertrude Stein, Ralph Ellison, John Yau, and Bruce Andrews, among others, Ngai shows how art turns to ugly feelings as a site for interrogating its own suspended agency in the affirmative culture of a market society, where art is tolerated as essentially unthreatening. Ngai mobilizes the aesthetics of ugly feelings to investigate not only ideological and representational dilemmas in literature--with a particular focus on those inflected by gender and race--but also blind spots in contemporary literary and cultural criticism. Her work maps a major intersection of literary studies, media and cultural studies, feminist studies, and aesthetic theory.

In essays about communities as varied as Alaskan Native, East Indian, Palestinian, Mexican, and African American, oral historians, folklorists, and anthropologists look at how traditional and historical oral narratives live through re-tellings, gaining meaning and significance in repeated performances, from varying contexts, through cultural and historical knowing, and due to tellers' consciousness of their audiences.

Despite the fashionable standing of irony in studies of modern literature and its occasional application to medieval studies in a number of recent works, no sustained analysis of this phenomenon has yet been attempted for medieval literature. Professor Green attempts to fill the most important part of this lacuna by discussing irony in the medieval genre in which it is employed most frequently and with the greatest sophistication, the romance. The approach is therefore directed more towards the genre as such than to any specific example, and, although the book is written primarily from a Germanist's point of view, it also takes into account the romances of Chrétien de Troyes and their German adaptations, various examples from the Tristan tradition in France and Germany, Flamenca as an example from Provence, as well as Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight from England. Proceeding from a working definition of medieval irony and a survey of the signals which may allow us to perceive its presence, Professor Green considers the possibilities, rhetorical and otherwise, of registering irony in courtly literature at large. From this he moves on to discuss the major themes to which irony may be applied (chivalry and love), as well as the ways in which the narrative is organised so as to bring out any ironic implications of these themes. Subsequent chapters are concerned with the various types of irony to be distinguished: verbal irony, irony of the narrator, dramatic irony, the irony of values, and structural irony. A concluding chapter sums up the reasons, aesthetic and social, for the prevalence of irony in this particular genre of medieval literature.

In this poignant book, a renowned historian tells of his youth as an assimilated, anti-religious Jew in Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1939―“the story,” says Peter Gay, “of a poisoning and how I dealt with it.” With his customary eloquence and analytic acumen, Gay describes his family, the life they led, and the reasons they did not emigrate sooner, and he explores his own ambivalent feelings―then and now―toward Germany and the Germans. Gay relates that the early years of the Nazi regime were relatively benign for his family: as a schoolboy at the Goethe Gymnasium he experienced no ridicule or attacks, his father’s business prospered, and most of the family’s non-Jewish friends remained supportive. He devised survival strategies―stamp collecting, watching soccer, and the like―that served as screens to block out the increasingly oppressive world around him. Even before the events of 1938–39, culminating in Kristallnacht, the family was convinced that they must leave the country. Gay describes the bravery and ingenuity of his father in working out this difficult emigration process, the courage of the non-Jewish friends who helped his family during their last bitter months in Germany, and the family’s mounting panic as they witnessed the indifference of other countries to their plight and that of others like themselves. Gay’s account―marked by candor, modesty, and insight―adds an important and curiously neglected perspective to the history of German Jewry.

Focusing on team translation and the production of multilingual editions, and on the difficulties these techniques created for Renaissance translation theory, this book offers a study of textual practices that were widespread in medieval and Renaissance Europe but have been excluded from translation and literary history. The author shows how collaborative and multilingual translation practices challenge the theoretical reflections of translators, who persistently call for a translation text that offers a single, univocal version and maintains unity of style. In order to explore this tension, Bistué discusses multi-version texts, in both manuscript and print, from a diverse variety of genres: the Scriptures, astrological and astronomical treatises, herbals, goliardic poems, pamphlets, the Greek and Roman classics, humanist grammars, geography treatises, pedagogical dialogs, proverb collections, and romances. Her analyses pay careful attention to both European vernaculars and classical languages, including Arabic, which played a central role in the intense translation activity carried out in medieval Spain. Comparing actual translation texts and strategies with the forceful theoretical demands for unity that characterize the reflections of early modern translators, the author challenges some of the assumptions frequently made in translation and literary analysis. The book contributes to the understanding of early modern discourses and writing practices, including the emerging theoretical discourse on translation and the writing of narrative fiction--both of which, as Bistué shows, define themselves against the models of collaborative translation and multi-version texts.

The U.S. government is an ever-more-complex system that few American citizens comprehend in any detail. Even some of its most basic operations, seemingly clear in concept, are in reality intricate and obscure. Although textbooks explain how the government is supposed to work in theory, they don't reveal how it actually works in practice. This book offers a concise and objective explanation of government operations, mapping the federal government's branches, departments, agencies, corporations, and quasi-official bodies―and the bureaucracies that support them. The authors effectively bridge the gap between the government's ideal, balanced structure, laid out in the Constitution, and its actual institutionalized form today, making this a superb resource for students and citizens at large. Coverage of the government's inner workings includes such subjects as executive-branch appointments, domestic and foreign policy development and execution, the federal budget, the legislative process, the Congressional committee system, the drawing of Congressional districts, the levels of the federal judiciary, aides in all three branches, and the various government offices and oversight agencies.

The principal objective of the book is to provide a comprehensive approach to the broad field of optics. The main topics covered are geometrical and physical optics. The main topics covered are geometrical and physical optics, the Fourier transforming property of lenses, and optical information processing (including complex spatial filtering and holography), acoustooptic, and electrooptic effects, principles of lasers and photo-detectors, and some topics from nonlinear optics (such as harmonic generation, phase conjugation, and optical bi-stability)