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Books > Science & Mathematics > Science: general issues
Electrostatic accelerators have been at the forefront of modern technology since 1932, when Sir John Cockroft and Ernest Walton developed the first accelerator. Although the electrostatic accelerator field is more than 90 years old, the field and the number of accelerators is growing more rapidly than ever. This book provides an overview of the basic science and technology that underlies the electrostatic accelerator field so it can serve as a reference guide and textbook for accelerator engineers as well as students and researchers who work with electrostatic accelerators.
Amazing Pictures, and Stories of True Ghost Tales in Gloucester, and Rockport, Massachusetts.
An examination of the ways that digital technologies play an increasingly important role in the lives of precarious workers, far beyond the gig economy apps like Uber and Lyft. Over the past three decades, digital technologies like smartphones and laptops have transformed the way we work in the US. At the same time, workers at both ends of the income ladder have experienced rising levels of job insecurity and anxiety about their economic futures. In Left to Our Own Devices, Julia Ticona explores the ways that workers use their digital technologies to navigate insecure and flexible labor markets. Through 100 interviews with high and low-wage precarious workers across the US, she explores the surprisingly similar "digital hustles" they use to find work and maintain a sense of dignity and identity. Ticona then reveals how the digital hustle ultimately reproduces inequalities between workers at either end of polarized labor markets. A moving and accessible look at the intimate consequences of contemporary capitalism, Left to Our Own Devices will be of interest to sociologists, communication and media studies scholars, as well as a general audience of readers interested in digital technologies, inequality, and the future of work in the US.
The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century is the first collective critical study of this important period in intellectual history. The volume is divided into four parts. The first part explores individual philosophers, including Fichte, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Marx, and Nietzsche, amongst other great thinkers of the period. The second addresses key philosophical movements: Idealism, Romanticism, Neo-Kantianism, and Existentialism. The essays in the third part engage with different areas of philosophy that received particular attention at this time, including philosophy of nature, philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, philosophy of history, and hermeneutics. Finally, the contributors turn to discuss central philosophical topics, from skepticism to mat-erialism, from dialectics to ideas of historical and cultural Otherness, and from the reception of antiquity to atheism. Written by a team of leading experts, this Handbook will be an essential resource for anyone working in the area and will lead the direction of future research.
This inquiry into the technical advances that shaped the 20th
century follows the evolutions of all the principal innovations
introduced before 1913 (as detailed in the first volume) as well as
the origins and elaborations of all fundamental 20th century
advances. The history of the 20th century is rooted in amazing
technical advances of 1871-1913, but the century differs so
remarkably from the preceding 100 years because of several
unprecedented combinations. The 20th century had followed on the
path defined during the half century preceding the beginning of
World War I, but it has traveled along that path at a very
different pace, with different ambitions and intents. The new
century's developments elevated both the magnitudes of output and
the spatial distribution of mass industrial production and to new
and, in many ways, virtually incomparable levels. Twentieth century
science and engineering conquered and perfected a number of
fundamental challenges which remained unresolved before 1913, and
which to many critics appeared insoluble. This book is organized in
topical chapters dealing with electricity, engines, materials and
syntheses, and information techniques. It concludes with an
extended examination of contradictory consequences of our admirable
technical progress by confronting the accomplishments and perils of
systems that brought liberating simplicity as well as overwhelming
complexity, that created unprecedented affluence and equally
unprecedented economic gaps, that greatly increased both our
security and fears as well as our understanding and ignorance, and
that provided the means for greater protection of the biosphere
while concurrently undermining some of the keybiophysical
foundations of life on Earth.
Though many separation processes are available for use in todays analytical laboratory, chromatographic methods are the most widely used. The applications of chromatography have grown explosively in the last four decades, owing to the development of new techniques and to the expanding need of scientists for better methods of separating complex mixtures. With its comprehensive, unified approach, this book will greatly assist the novice in need of a reference to chromatographic techniques, as well as the specialist suddenly faced with the need to switch from one technique to another.
Diamonds are almost completely useless but prized above all other gems. Historically they have attracted crimes of passion and awful cold-blooded efficiency, have bedazzled the greatest filmstars and the most opulent courts, and provided the incentive for adventure, destruction and greed on a monumental scale. No one company is more identified with diamonds than the South African based De Beers. Until the collapse of the Iron Curtain they controlled the diamond market. After the collapse, they still controlled it – once they had bought up most of the diamonds emerging from the former Soviet Union. They are secretive, discreet and very, very powerful. A strike in Northern Canada could hardly seem to trouble them. Except that it prefigured a diamond rush in a territory over which they had no influence by prospectors they did not own. And the strike promised enormous riches. Here is the true story of the strike that upset the diamond kings, and with it the history of the world’s most acclaimed diamonds, the process by which they are cut, fashioned, smuggled and stolen, the legends and superstitions that are attached to them, the characters who comprise the great diamond prospectors and, above all, of the shadowy hand of De Beers for whom diamonds are forever.
This book is meant to be a companion volume for the ACS Symposium Series Book entitled Nuts and Bolts of Chemical Education Research. In the Nuts and Bolts book (edited by Diane M. Bunce and Renee Cole), readers were presented with information on how to conduct quality chemical education research. In the Myth book, exemplars of chemical education research are featured. In the cases where the chapter in the book is describing research that has already been published (typically in the Journal of Chemical Education), additional information is provided either in terms of research questions investigated that were not reported in the published article or background information on decisions made in the research that helped the investigation. The main focus of this type of discussion is to engage the reader in the reality of doing chemical education research including a discussion of the authors' motivation. It is expected that these two books could be used as textbooks for graduate chemical education courses showing how to do chemical education research and then providing examples of quality research.
The role of chance changed in the nineteenth century, and American literature changed with it. Long dismissed as a nominal concept, chance was increasingly treated as a natural force to be managed but never mastered. New theories of chance sparked religious and philosophical controversies while revolutionizing the sciences as probabilistic methods spread from mathematics, economics, and sociology to physics and evolutionary biology. Chance also became more visible in everyday life as Americans struggled to control its power through weather forecasting, insurance, game theory, statistics, military science, and financial strategy. Uncertain Chances shows how the rise of chance shaped the way nineteenth-century American writers faced questions of doubt and belief. Poe in his detective fiction critiques probabilistic methods. Melville in Moby-Dick and beyond struggles to vindicate moral action under conditions of chance. Douglass and other African American authors fight against statistical racism. Thoreau learns to appreciate the play between nature's randomness and order. Dickinson works faithfully to render poetically the affective experience of chance-surprise. These and other nineteenth-century writers dramatize the inescapable dangers and wonderful possibilities of chance. Their writings even help to navigate extremes that remain with us today-fundamentalism and relativism, determinism and chaos, terrorism and risk-management, the rational confidence of the Enlightenment and the debilitating doubts of modernity.
Dalton's theory of the atom is generally considered to be what made
the atom a scientifically fruitful concept in chemistry. To be
sure, by Dalton's time the atom had already had a two-millenium
history as a philosophical idea, and corpuscular thought had long
been viable in natural philosophy (that is, in what we would today
call physics).
Emerging technologies present a challenging but fascinating set of ethical, legal and regulatory issues. The articles selected for this volume provide a broad overview of the most influential historical and current thinking in this area and show that existing frameworks are often inadequate to address new technologies - such as biotechnology, nanotechnology, synthetic biology and robotics - and innovative new models are needed. This collection brings together invaluable, innovative and often complementary approaches for overcoming the unique challenges of emerging technology ethics and governance.
In 1687 Isaac Newton ushered in a new scientific era in which laws of nature could be used to predict the movements of matter with almost perfect precision. Newton's physics also posed a profound challenge to our self-understanding, however, for the very same laws that keep airplanes in the air and rivers flowing downhill tell us that it is in principle possible to predict what each of us will do every second of our entire lives, given the early conditions of the universe. Can it really be that even while you toss and turn late at night in the throes of an important decision and it seems like the scales of fate hang in the balance, that your decision is a foregone conclusion? Can it really be that everything you have done and everything you ever will do is determined by facts that were in place long before you were born? This problem is one of the staples of philosophical discussion. It is discussed by everyone from freshman in their first philosophy class, to theoretical physicists in bars after conferences. And yet there is no topic that remains more unsettling, and less well understood. If you want to get behind the facade, past the bare statement of determinism, and really try to understand what physics is telling us in its own terms, read this book. The problem of free will raises all kinds of questions. What does it mean to make a decision, and what does it mean to say that our actions are determined? What are laws of nature? What are causes? What sorts of things are we, when viewed through the lenses of physics, and how do we fit into the natural order? Ismael provides a deeply informed account of what physics tells us about ourselves. The result is a vision that is abstract, alien, illuminating, and-Ismael argues-affirmative of most of what we all believe about our own freedom. Written in a jargon-free style, How Physics Makes Us Free provides an accessible and innovative take on a central question of human existence.
Inspired by the opportunities and challenges presented by rapid advances in the fields of retrieval of chemical and other scientific information, several speakers presented at a symposium, The History of the Future of Chemical Information, on Aug. 20, 2012, at the 244th Meeting of the American Chemical Society in Philadelphia, PA. Storage and retrieval is of undeniable value to the conduct of chemical research. The participants believe that past practices in this field have not only contributed to the increasingly rapid evolution of the field but continue to do so, hence the somewhat unusual title. Even with archival access to several of the presentations, a number of the presenters felt that broader access to this information is of value. Thus, the presenters decided to create an ACS Symposium book based on the topic, with the conviction that it would be valuable to chemists of all disciplines. The past is a moving target depending on the vagaries of technology, economics, politics and how researchers and professionals choose to build on it. The aim of The History of the Future of Chemical Information is to critically examine trajectories in chemistry, information and communication as determined by the authors in the light of current and possible future practices of the chemical information profession. Along with some additional areas primarily related to present and future directions, this collection contains most of the topics covered in the meeting symposium. Most of the original authors agreed to write chapters for this book. Much of the historical and even current material is scattered throughout the literature so the authors strived to gather this information into a discrete source. Faced with the rapid evolution of such aspects as mobile access to information, cloud computing, and public resource production, this book will be not only of interest but provide valuable insight to this rapidly evolving field, both to practitioners within the field of chemical information and chemists everywhere whose need for current and accurate information on chemistry and related fields is increasingly important.
Students taught with inquiry-based methods have been shown to make significant progress in their ability to formulate hypotheses, make proper assumptions, design and execute investigations, understand variables, record data, and synthesize new knowledge. are taught with it. This text presents a series of experiments that are intended to serve as the solid basis for a first-year chemistry or physical sciences course, using an inquiry based approach. Each provides: 1)instructions for an experiment; 2) in-depth teachers notes and 3) a sample lab report.
From the beginnings of industrial capitalism to contemporary
disputes over evolution, nature has long been part of the public
debate over the social good. As such, many natural scientists
throughout American history have understood their work as a
cultural activity contributing to social stability and their field
as a powerful tool for enhancing the quality of American life. In
the late Victorian era, interwar period, and post-war decades,
massive social change, economic collapse and recovery, and the
aftermath of war prompted natural scientists to offer up a
civic-minded natural science concerned with the political
well-being of American society. In Science and the Social Good,
John P. Herron explores the evolving internal and external forces
influencing the design and purpose of American natural science, by
focusing on three representative scientists-geologist Clarence
King, forester Robert Marshall, and biologist Rachel Carson-who
purposefully considered the social outcomes of their work.
By Parallel Reasoning is the first comprehensive philosophical
examination of analogical reasoning in more than forty years
designed to formulate and justify standards for the critical
evaluation of analogical arguments. It proposes a normative theory
with special focus on the use of analogies in mathematics and
science.
Why are rates of conditions like autism, asthma, obesity and allergies exploding at an unprecedented pace? Why are humans living longer, getting smarter and having far fewer children? If Darwin were alive today, how would he explain this new world? Could our children eventually become a different species - or several? In Evolving Ourselves, futurist Juan Enriquez and scientist Steve Gullans take us on a sweeping tour of how humans are changing the course of evolution - sometimes intentionally, sometimes not. It is a chronicle of where our remarkable new capabilities for altering our bodies, other living creatures, and our environment are taking us in the near term, and introduces the possibility that we might cause our own extinction in the long run.
Three-fourths of scientific research in the United States is funded
by special interests. Many of these groups have specific practical
goals, such as developing pharmaceuticals or establishing that a
pollutant causes only minimal harm. For groups with financial
conflicts of interest, their scientific findings often can be
deeply flawed.
In recent decades there has been an explosion in work in the social and physical sciences describing the similarities between human and nonhuman as well as human and non-animal thinking. This work has explicitly decentered the brain as the sole, self-contained space of thought, and it has found thinking to be an activity that operates not only across bodies but also across bodily or cellular membranes, as well as multifaceted organic and inorganic environments. For example, researchers have looked at the replication and spread of slime molds (playfully asking what would happen if they colonized the earth) to suggest that they exhibit 'smart behavior' in the way they move as a potential way of considering the spread of disease across the globe. Other scholars have applied this model of non-human thought to the reach of data mining and global surveillance. In The Biopolitics of Alphabets and Embryos, Ruth Miller argues that these types of phenomena are also useful models for thinking about the growth, reproduction, and spread of political thought and democratic processes. Giving slime, data and unbounded entities their political dues, Miller stresses their thinking power and political significance and thus challenges the anthropocentrism of mainstream democratic theories. Miller emphasizes the non-human as highly organized, systemic and productive of democratic growth and replication. She examines developments such as global surveillance, embryonic stem cell research, and cloning, which have been characterized as threats to the privacy, dignity, and integrity of the rational, maximizing and freedom-loving democratic citizen. By shifting her level of analysis from the politics of self-determining subjects to the realm of material environments and information systems, Miller asks what might happen if these alternative, nonhuman thought processes become the normative thought processes of democratic engagement.
Tools of Chemistry Education Research meets the current need for information on more in-depth resources for those interested in doing chemistry education research. Renowned chemists Diane M. Bunce and Renee S. Cole present this volume as a continuation of the dialogue started in their previous work, Nuts and Bolts of Chemical Education Research. With both volumes, new and experienced researchers will now have a place to start as they consider new research projects in chemistry education. Tools of Chemistry Education Research brings together a group of talented researchers to share their insights and expertise with the broader community. The volume features the contributions of both early career and more established chemistry education researchers, so as to promote the growth and expansion of chemistry education. Drawing on the expertise and insights of junior faculty and more experienced researchers, each author offers unique insights that promise to benefit other practitioners in chemistry education research.
For modern scientists, history often starts with last week's
journals and is regarded as largely a quaint interest compared with
the advances of today. However, this book makes the case that,
measured by major advances, the greatest decade in the history of
brain studies was mid-twentieth century, especially the 1950s. The
first to focus on worldwide contributions in this period, the book
ranges through dozens of astonishing discoveries at all levels of
the brain, from DNA (Watson and Crick), through growth factors
(Hamburger and Levi-Montalcini), excitability (Hodgkin and Huxley),
synapses (Katz and Eccles), dopamine and Parkinson's (Carlsson),
visual processing (Hartline and Kuffler), the cortical column
(Mountcastle), reticular activating system (Morruzzi and Magoun)
and REM sleep (Aserinsky), to stress (Selye), learning (Hebb) and
memory (HM and Milner). The clinical fields are also covered, from
Cushing and Penfield, psychosurgery and brain energy metabolism
(Kety), to most of the major psychoactive drugs in use today
(beginning with Delay and Deniker), and much more. |
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