‘Few could sustain the glance of his eye, at once fiery and penetrating’ Savaged by critics for its supposed profanity and obscenity, and bought in large numbers by readers eager to see whether it l
With a vast river network and rainforests extending over eight South American countries, the Amazon plays a vital role particularly in maintaining biodiversity and terrestrial carbon storage. Due to its ecological characteristics, the Amazon benefits not only those countries but also the international community at large. However, the Amazon forests are being rapidly cleared with a consequent loss of biodiversity and impact on global climate. This book examines whether international law has an impact on the preservation of the Amazon by inquiring into the forms of cooperation that exist among the Amazon countries, and between them and the international community, and to what extent international cooperation can help protect the Amazon. Given the role of this region in maintaining the balance of the global environment, the book examines whether the Amazon should be granted a special legal status and possible implications in terms of international cooperation.
Issues of scale have become increasingly important to ecologists. This book addresses the structure of regional (large-scale) ecological assemblages or communities, and the influence this has at a loc
In 1928 the physicist Paul Dirac predicted the existence of antimatter in a mirror world, where the electrical charges on particles would be opposite to those of ordinary matter. This mirror world is found, fleetingly, at the quantum level, with positrons the counterpart of electrons, and antiprotons the opposite of protons. This book introduces the world of antimatter without using technical language or equations. The author shows how the quest for symmetry in physics slowly revealed the properties of antimatter. When large particle accelerators came on line, the antimatter debris of collisions provided new clues on its properties. This is a fast-paced and lucid account of how science fiction became fact.
When George and The M an with the Yellow Hat visit the animal shelter, George is delighted to discover a large litter of puppies. At first, George just wants to pet the puppy, but then he wants to hol
This book examines the organization of specialized salt production at Zhongba, one of the most important prehistoric sites in the Three Gorges of China's Yangzi River valley. Rowan K. Flad demonstrates that salt production emerged in the second millennium BCE and developed into a large-scale, intense activity. As the intensity of this activity increased during the early Bronze Age, production became more coordinated, perhaps by an emergent elite who appear to have supported their position of authority by means of divination and the control of ritual knowledge. This study explores evidence of these changes in ceramics, the layout of space at the site and animal remains. It synthesizes the data retrieved from years of excavation, showing not only the evolution of production methods, but also the emergence of social hierarchy in the Three Gorges region over two millennia.
In Inside China's Automobile Factories, Lu Zhang explores the current conditions, subjectivity, and collective actions of autoworkers in the world's largest and fastest-growing automobile manufacturing nation. Based on years of fieldwork and extensive interviews conducted at seven large auto factories in various regions of China, Zhang provides an inside look at the daily factory life of autoworkers and a deeper understanding of the roots of rising labor unrest in the auto industry. Combining original empirical data and sophisticated analysis that moves from the shop floor to national political economy and global industry dynamics, the book develops a multilayered framework for understanding how labor relations in the auto industry and broader social economy can be expected to develop in China in the coming decades.
Rumble, rumble! Here comes the dump truck. Large, colorful photographs and easy-to-read text gives young learners an up-close look at their favorite construction vehicles.
A new sexual revolution is sweeping the country, and college students are on the front lines. Vanessa Grigoriadis dispels the confusion around the topic of sex on campus by embedding at schools large
Oppian's Halieutica is a dazzling five-book Greek didactic poem about the sea and its wily, chaotic inhabitants. This book offers the first sustained reading of the poem as a didactic epic that meditates on the place of human beings within the cosmos at large, and on the lessons we can learn from fish. Using a combination of close reading and wider interpretative lenses, this book examines the literary texture and cultural relevance of the Halieutica by analysing its sophisticated refraction of earlier literary-critical theories and hexameter traditions, its commentary on human-animal relations, and its contribution to imperial Greek literary, political, and cultural debates. The book demonstrates the importance and cultural centrality of this understudied Greek didactic epic; it is written for students and scholars of imperial Greek literature and culture (including the ancient novel), ancient heroic and didactic epics, and those interested in human-animal relations in the ancient wor
Emerging countries are increasingly concerned with improving their competitiveness and productivity. This Element develops a robust econometric methodology, based on controlling for usual unobservable effects at the firm or plant level. By robust empirical results in total factor productivity (TFP), we mean estimating investment climate (IC) elasticities, or semi-elasticities, with equal signs and similar magnitudes for more than ten different competing TFP measures. The key to achieve similar empirical results for several TFP measures is to avoid having a problem omitted variables, achieved through imputation of large proportions of missing observations in relevant variables (i.e. the capital stock). Furthermore through the use of a new concept of aggregate TFP (tfpIC), that measures the associated IC effects on firm´s tfp, we are able to make meaningful cross-country firm´s level productivity comparisons, avoiding the usual problem of comparing 'apples with oranges' that would otherw
In the spring of 2006, millions of Latinos across the country participated in the largest civil rights demonstrations in American history. In this timely and highly anticipated book, Chris Zepeda-Millán analyzes the background, course, and impacts of this unprecedented wave of protests, highlighting their unique local, national, and demographic dynamics. He finds that because of the particular ways the issue of immigrant illegality was racialized, federally proposed anti-immigrant legislation (H.R. 4437) helped transform Latinos' sense of latent group membership into the racial group consciousness that incited their engagement in large-scale collective action. Zepeda-Millán shows how nativist policy threats against disenfranchised undocumented immigrants can provoke a political backlash - on the streets and at the ballot box - from not only 'people without papers', but also naturalized and US-born citizens. Latino Mass Mobilization is an important intervention into contemporary debates
The portal between the Overworld and the real world may have been restored, but Herobrine is still at large?and Stevie knows that a confrontation is inevitable. While Stevie, Alex, and their friends t
Sherri Franks Johnson explores the roles of religious women in the changing ecclesiastical and civic structure of late medieval Bologna, demonstrating how convents negotiated a place in their urban context and in the church at large. During this period Bologna was the most important city in the Papal States after Rome. Using archival records from nunneries in the city, Johnson argues that communities of religious women varied in the extent to which they sought official recognition from the male authorities of religious orders. While some nunneries felt that it was important to their religious life to gain recognition from monks and friars, others were content to remain local and autonomous. In a period often described as an era of decline and the marginalization of religious women, Johnson shows instead that they saw themselves as active participants in their religious orders, in the wider church and in their local communities.
Hamlet on the Couch weaves a close reading of Shakespeare’s Hamlet with a large variety of contemporary psychoanalytic and psychological theory, looking at the interplay of ideas between the two. Haml
Meet nature's greatest engineer! Introduce elementary kids to beavers and their lives in the wild in this North American Spanish translation. Built for swimming and skilled at forming dams, beavers are large rodents with strong, tree-cutting teeth. With STEM-appropriate text, kids explore the animal's appearance, behavior, and habitat alongside gorgeous photography. An end story shares a folk tale from Florida of why beavers slap their tails on water. A great nonfiction resource for Spanish-language learning and bilingual readers. Includes table of contents, index, same-page definitions, and further resources.
Seeking happiness away from her British life, Emma moves to Connecticut, where she renovates a cottage at the side of a handyman single father with whom she plans a future before a twist of fate redef
This is the first history of epiphany as both a phenomenon and a cultural discourse within the Graeco-Roman world. It explores divine manifestations and their representations both in art and in literary, historical and epigraphic accounts. The cultural analysis of epiphany is set within a historical framework that examines its development from the archaic period to the Roman Empire. In particular, a surprisingly large number of the images that have survived from antiquity are not only religious but epiphanically charged. Verity Platt argues that the enduring potential for divine incursions into mortal experience provides a reliable cognitive structure that supports both ancient religion and mythology. At the same time, Graeco-Roman culture exhibits a sophisticated awareness of the difficulties in apprehending deity and representing divine presence, and of the potential for the manmade sign to lead the worshipper back to an unmediated epiphanic encounter.
Designing algorithms to recommend items such as news articles and movies to users is a challenging task in numerous web applications. The crux of the problem is to rank items based on users' responses to different items to optimize for multiple objectives. Major technical challenges are high dimensional prediction with sparse data and constructing high dimensional sequential designs to collect data for user modeling and system design. This comprehensive treatment of the statistical issues that arise in recommender systems includes detailed, in-depth discussions of current state-of-the-art methods such as adaptive sequential designs (multi-armed bandit methods), bilinear random-effects models (matrix factorization) and scalable model fitting using modern computing paradigms like MapReduce. The authors draw upon their vast experience working with such large-scale systems at Yahoo! and LinkedIn, and bridge the gap between theory and practice by illustrating complex concepts with examples
Based on the chance survival of a remarkable cache of documents, India and the Islamic Heartlands recaptures a vanished and forgotten world from the eighteenth century spanning much of today's Middle East and South Asia. Gagan D. S. Sood focuses on ordinary people - traders, pilgrims, bankers, clerics, brokers, and scribes, among others - who were engaged in activities marked by large distances and long silences. By elucidating their everyday lives in a range of settings, from the family household to the polity at large, Sood pieces together the connective tissue of a world that lay beyond the sovereign purview. Recapturing this obscured and neglected world helps us better understand the region during a pivotal moment in its history, and offers new answers to old questions concerning early modern Eurasia and its transition to colonialism.
