Since their discovery more than a decade ago, carbon nanotubes (CNTs) have held scientists and engineers in captive fascination, seated on the verge of enormous breakthroughs in areas such as medicine, electronics, and materials science, to name but a few. Taking a broad look at CNTs and the tools used to study them, Carbon Nanotubes: Properties and Applications comprises the efforts of leading nanotube researchers led by Michael O'Connell, protege of the late father of nanotechnology, Richard Smalley. Each chapter is a self-contained treatise on various aspects of CNT synthesis, characterization, modification, and applications.

The book opens with a general introduction to the basic characteristics and the history of CNTs, followed by discussions on synthesis methods and the growth of "peapod" structures. Coverage then moves to electronic properties and band structures of single-wall nanotubes (SWNTs), magnetic properties, Raman spectroscopy of electronic and chemical behavior, and electromechanical properties and applications in NEMS (nanoelectromechanical systems). Turning to applications, the final sections of the book explore mechanical properties of SWNTs spun into fibers, sidewall functionalization in composites, and using SWNTs as tips for scanning probe microscopes.

Taking a fresh look at this burgeoning field, Carbon Nanotubes: Properties and Applications points the way toward making CNTs commercially viable.

Arguably the single most influential literary work of the European Middle Ages, the "Roman de la Rose" of Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun has traditionally posed a number of difficulties to modern critics, who have viewed its many interruptions and philosophical discussions as signs of a lack of formal organization and a characteristically medieval predilection for encyclopedic summation. In "Fortune's Faces," Daniel Heller-Roazen calls into question these assessments, offering a new and compelling interpretation of the romance as a carefully constructed and far-reaching exploration of the place of fortune, chance, and contingency in literary writing.

Situating the "Romance of the Rose" at the intersection of medieval literature and philosophy, Heller-Roazen shows how the thirteenth-century work invokes and radicalizes two classical and medieval traditions of reflection on language and contingency: that of the Provencal, French, and Italian love poets, who sought to compose their "verses of pure nothing"in a language Dante defined as "without grammar," and that of Aristotle's discussion of "future contingents" as it was received and refined in the logic, physics, theology, and epistemology of Boethius, Abelard, Albert the Great, and Thomas Aquinas.Through a close analysis of the poetic text and a detailed reconstruction of the logical and metaphysical concept of contingency, "Fortune's Faces" charts the transformations that literary structures (such as subjectivity, autobiography, prosopopoeia, allegory, and self-reference) undergo in a work that defines itself as radically contingent. Considered in its full poetic and philosophical dimensions, the "Romance of the Rose" thus acquires an altogether new significance in the history of literature: it appears as a work that incessantly explores its own capacity to be other than it is.

The essays in this book deal with situations or issues in public education which we need to address. While some of these situations seem clear and almost obvious, making the necessary changes and admitting the truth to ourselves is not necessarily going to happen easily. The suggestions for education made here will require that Americans admit certain flaws in the system, some of which involve their own actions and attitudes. They will also have to be willing to make sacrifices for the larger good, such as allowing shifts in power and control. In other words, these changes will require political will, patience, and dedication if they are to be successful. There are many ideas for fixing our schools. They all demand a kind of faith, a promise to withhold judgment for a while until the new strategies are fully tested to decide whether or not they are effective. People can be impatient, wanting instant answers. They can also want assurance of success before every agreeing to allow a change to happen. These attitudes block experimentation and the attempt at change and improvement. Everyone will have to sacrifice, to take a risk, if we are to make real changes in the education system. All constituencies (students, teachers, administrators, parents, community members, institutions of higher education, teacher preparation programs, and unions) should be at the table. What they should be working toward is not their individual agendas or preservation, but the delivery of the best education possible to our youth.

Typically, school curriculum has been viewed through the lens of preparation for the workplace or higher education-both worthy objectives. However, this is not the only lens, and perhaps not even the most powerful one to use, if the goal is to optimize the educational system. Curriculum on the Edge of Survival attempts to define basic aspects of the curriculum when viewed through the larger lens of a school as the principal instrument through which we maintain an effective democracy. In that case, the purpose of education is to prepare our students to take their rightful place as active members of a democracy. This purpose is larger than workplace or college readiness, and in fact subsumes them. Curriculum on the Edge of Survival posits four major starting points for education under the purpose of preparing students for functional membership in a democracy: kindness, thinking, problem solving, and communications. These four foundational elements should be taught in every class, at every level, every day. They form the backbone of a great educational system.

Typically, school curriculum has been viewed through the lens of preparation for the workplace or higher education, both worthy objectives. However, this is not the only lens, and perhaps not even the most powerful one to use, if the goal is to optimize the educational system. Curriculum on the Edge of Survival, 2nd Edition, attempts to define basic aspects of the curriculum when viewed through the larger lens of a school as the principal instrument through which we maintain an effective democracy. In that case, the purpose of education is to prepare our students to take their rightful place as active members of a democracy. This purpose is larger than workplace or college readiness, and in fact subsumes them. The second edition of Curriculum on the Edge of Survival posits four major starting points for education under the purpose of preparing students for functional membership in a democracy: kindness, thinking, problem solving, and communications. These four foundational elements should be taught in every class, at every level, every day. They form the backbone of a great educational system."

Reading philosophy through the lens of Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, Andrea Cavalletti shows why, for two centuries, major philosophers have come to think of vertigo as intrinsically part of philosophy itself. Fear of the void, terror of heights: everyone knows what acrophobia is, and many suffer from it. Before Freud, the so-called "sciences of the mind" reserved a place of honor for vertigo in the domain of mental pathologies. The fear of falling-which is also the fear of giving in to the temptation to let oneself fall-has long been understood as a destabilizing yet intoxicating element without which consciousness itself was inconceivable. Some went so far as to induce it in patients through frightening rotational therapies. In a less cruel but no less radical way, vertigo also staked its claim in philosophy. If Montaigne and Pascal could still consider it a perturbation of reason and a trick of the imagination which had to be subdued, subsequent thinkers stopped considering it an occasional imaginative instability to be overcome. It came, rather, to be seen as intrinsic to reason, such that identity manifests itself as tottering, kinetic, opaque and, indeed, vertiginous. Andrea Cavalletti's stunning book sets this critique of stable consciousness beside one of Hitchcock's most famous thrillers, a drama of identity and its abysses. Hitchcock's brilliant combination of a dolly and a zoom to recreate the effect of falling describes that double movement of "pushing away and bringing closer" which is the habitual condition of the subject and of intersubjectivity. To reach myself, I must see myself from the bottom of the abyss, with the eyes of another. Only then does my "here" flee down there and, from there, attract me. From classical medicine and from the role of imagination in our biopolitical world to the very heart of philosophy, from Hollywood to Heidegger's "being-toward-death," Cavalletti brings out the vertiginous nature of identity.

Software engineering education has a problem: universities and bootcamps teach aspiring engineers to write code, but they leave graduates to teach themselves the countless supporting tools required to thrive in real software companies. Building a Career in Software is the solution, a comprehensive guide to the essential skills that instructors don't need and professionals never think to teach: landing jobs, choosing teams and projects, asking good questions, running meetings, going on-call, debugging production problems, technical writing, making the most of a mentor, and much more. In over a decade building software at companies such as Apple and Uber, Daniel Heller has mentored and managed tens of engineers from a variety of training backgrounds, and those engineers inspired this book with their hundreds of questions about career issues and day-to-day problems. Designed for either random access or cover-to-cover reading, it offers concise treatments of virtually every non-technical challenge you will face in the first five years of your career-as well as a selection of industry-focused technical topics rarely covered in training. Whatever your education or technical specialty, Building a Career in Software can save you years of trial and error and help you succeed as a real-world software professional. What You Will Learn Discover every important nontechnical facet of professional programming as well as several key technical practices essential to the transition from student to professional Build relationships with your employer Improve your communication, including technical writing, asking good questions, and public speaking Who This Book is For Software engineers either early in their careers or about to transition to the professional world; that is, all graduates of computer science or software engineering university programs and all software engineering boot camp participants.

This book, by one of Italy's most important and original contemporary philosophers, represents a broad, general, and ambitious undertaking--nothing less than an attempt to rethink the nature of poetic language and to rearticulate relationships among theology, poetry, and philosophy in a tradition of literature initiated by Dante.
The author presents "literature" as a set of formal or linguistic genres that discuss or develop theological issues at a certain distance from the discourse of theology. This distance begins to appear in Virgil and Ovid, but it becomes decisive in Dante and in his decision to write in the vernacular. His vernacular Italian reaches back through classical allusion to the Latin that was in his day the language of theology, but it does so with a difference. It is no accident that in the "Commedia" Virgil is Dante's guide.
The book opens with a discussion of just how Dante's poem is a "comedy," and it concludes with a discussion of the "ends of poetry" in a variety of senses: enjambment at the ends of lines, the concluding lines of poems, and the end of poetry as a mode of writing this sort of literature. Of course, to have poetry "end" does not mean that people stop writing it, but that literature passes into a period in which it is concerned with its own ending, with its own bounds and limits, historical and otherwise.
Though most of the essays make specific reference to various authors of the Italian literary tradition (including Dante, Polifilo, Pascoli, Delfini, and Caproni), they transcend the confines of Italian literature and engage several other literary and philosophical authors (Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, Boethius, the Provencal poets, Mallarme, and Holderlin, among others).

This book, by one of Italy's most important and original contemporary philosophers, represents a broad, general, and ambitious undertaking--nothing less than an attempt to rethink the nature of poetic language and to rearticulate relationships among theology, poetry, and philosophy in a tradition of literature initiated by Dante.
The author presents "literature" as a set of formal or linguistic genres that discuss or develop theological issues at a certain distance from the discourse of theology. This distance begins to appear in Virgil and Ovid, but it becomes decisive in Dante and in his decision to write in the vernacular. His vernacular Italian reaches back through classical allusion to the Latin that was in his day the language of theology, but it does so with a difference. It is no accident that in the "Commedia" Virgil is Dante's guide.
The book opens with a discussion of just how Dante's poem is a "comedy," and it concludes with a discussion of the "ends of poetry" in a variety of senses: enjambment at the ends of lines, the concluding lines of poems, and the end of poetry as a mode of writing this sort of literature. Of course, to have poetry "end" does not mean that people stop writing it, but that literature passes into a period in which it is concerned with its own ending, with its own bounds and limits, historical and otherwise.
Though most of the essays make specific reference to various authors of the Italian literary tradition (including Dante, Polifilo, Pascoli, Delfini, and Caproni), they transcend the confines of Italian literature and engage several other literary and philosophical authors (Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, Boethius, the Provencal poets, Mallarme, and Holderlin, among others).

Few works of literature are as familiar and beloved as The Arabian Nights. Yet few remain also as unknown. In English, The Arabian Nights is a literary work of relatively recent date-the first versions of the tales appeared in English barely two hundred years ago. The tales are accompanied by a preface, a note on the text, and explanatory annotations. "Contexts" presents three of the oldest witnesses to The Arabian Nights in the Arabic tradition, together in English for the first time: an anonymous ninth-century fragment, Al Mas'udi's Muruj al-Dhahab, and Ibn al-Nadim's The Fihrist. Also included are three related works by the nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers Edgar Allan Poe, Marcel Proust, and Taha Husayn. "Criticism" collects eleven wide-ranging essays on The Arabian Nights' central themes by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Josef Horovitz, Jorge Luis Borges, Francesco Gabrieli, Mia Irene Gerhardt, Tzvetan Todorov, Andras Hamori, Heinz Grotzfield, Jerome W. Clinton, Abdelfattah Kilito, and David Pinault. A Chronology of The Arabian Nights and a Selected Bibliography are also included.

The work of Giorgio Agamben, one of Italy's most important and original philosophers, has been based on an uncommon erudition in classical traditions of philosophy and rhetoric, the grammarians of late antiquity, Christian theology, and modern philosophy. Recently, Agamben has begun to direct his thinking to the constitution of the social and to some concrete, ethico-political conclusions concerning the state of society today, and the place of the individual within it.
In "Homo Sacer, " Agamben aims to connect the problem of pure possibility, potentiality, and power with the problem of political and social ethics in a context where the latter has lost its previous religious, metaphysical, and cultural grounding. Taking his cue from Foucault's fragmentary analysis of biopolitics, Agamben probes with great breadth, intensity, and acuteness the covert or implicit presence of an idea of biopolitics in the history of traditional political theory. He argues that from the earliest treatises of political theory, notably in Aristotle's notion of man as a political animal, and throughout the history of Western thinking about sovereignty (whether of the king or the state), a notion of sovereignty as power over "life" is implicit.
The reason it remains merely implicit has to do, according to Agamben, with the way the sacred, or the idea of sacrality, becomes indissociable from the idea of sovereignty. Drawing upon Carl Schmitt's idea of the sovereign's status as the exception to the rules he safeguards, and on anthropological research that reveals the close interlinking of the sacred and the taboo, Agamben defines the sacred person as one who can be killed and yet not sacrificed--a paradox he sees as operative in the status of the modern individual living in a system that exerts control over the collective "naked life" of all individuals.

An original, elegant, and far-reaching philosophical inquiry into what it means to feel alive. The Inner Touch presents the archaeology of a single sense: the sense of being sentient. Aristotle was perhaps the first to define this faculty when in his treatise On the Soul he identified a sensory power, irreducible to the five senses, by which animals perceive that they are perceiving: the simple "sense," as he wrote, "that we are seeing and hearing." After him, thinkers returned, time and again, to define and redefine this curious sensation. The classical Greek and Roman philosophers as well as the medieval Arabic, Hebrew, and Latin thinkers who followed them all investigated a power they called "the common sense," which one ancient author likened to "a kind of inner touch, by which we are able to grasp ourselves." Their many findings were not lost with the waning of the Middle Ages. From Montaigne and Francis Bacon to Locke, Leibniz, and Rousseau, from nineteenth-century psychiatry and neurology to Proust and Walter Benjamin, the writers and thinkers of the modern period have turned knowingly and unknowing to the terms of older traditions in exploring the perception that every sensitive being possesses of its life. The Inner Touch reconstructs and reconsiders the history of this perception. In twenty-five concise chapters that move freely among ancient, medieval, and modern cultures, Daniel Heller-Roazen investigates a set of exemplary phenomena that have played central roles in philosophical, literary, psychological, and medical accounts of the nature of animal existence. Here sensation and self-sensation, sleeping and waking, aesthetics and anesthetics, perception and apperception, animal nature and human nature, consciousness and unconsciousness, all acquire a new meaning. The Inner Touch proposes an original, elegant, and far-reaching philosophical inquiry into a problem that has never been more pressing: what it means to feel that one is alive.Winner of the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies

A philosophical study of the testimony of the survivors of Auschwitz. In this book the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben looks closely at the literature of the survivors of Auschwitz, probing the philosophical and ethical questions raised by their testimony. "In its form, this book is a kind of perpetual commentary on testimony. It did not seem possible to proceed otherwise. At a certain point, it became clear that testimony contained at its core an essential lacuna; in other words, the survivors bore witness to something it is impossible to bear witness to. As a consequence, commenting on survivors' testimony necessarily meant interrogating this lacuna or, more precisely, attempting to listen to it. Listening to something absent did not prove fruitless work for this author. Above all, it made it necessary to clear away almost all the doctrines that, since Auschwitz, have been advanced in the name of ethics."-Giorgio Agamben

Reading philosophy through the lens of Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, Andrea Cavalletti shows why, for two centuries, major philosophers have come to think of vertigo as intrinsically part of philosophy itself. Fear of the void, terror of heights: everyone knows what acrophobia is, and many suffer from it. Before Freud, the so-called "sciences of the mind" reserved a place of honor for vertigo in the domain of mental pathologies. The fear of falling-which is also the fear of giving in to the temptation to let oneself fall-has long been understood as a destabilizing yet intoxicating element without which consciousness itself was inconceivable. Some went so far as to induce it in patients through frightening rotational therapies. In a less cruel but no less radical way, vertigo also staked its claim in philosophy. If Montaigne and Pascal could still consider it a perturbation of reason and a trick of the imagination which had to be subdued, subsequent thinkers stopped considering it an occasional imaginative instability to be overcome. It came, rather, to be seen as intrinsic to reason, such that identity manifests itself as tottering, kinetic, opaque and, indeed, vertiginous. Andrea Cavalletti's stunning book sets this critique of stable consciousness beside one of Hitchcock's most famous thrillers, a drama of identity and its abysses. Hitchcock's brilliant combination of a dolly and a zoom to recreate the effect of falling describes that double movement of "pushing away and bringing closer" which is the habitual condition of the subject and of intersubjectivity. To reach myself, I must see myself from the bottom of the abyss, with the eyes of another. Only then does my "here" flee down there and, from there, attract me. From classical medicine and from the role of imagination in our biopolitical world to the very heart of philosophy, from Hollywood to Heidegger's "being-toward-death," Cavalletti brings out the vertiginous nature of identity.

This volume constitutes the largest collection of writings by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben hitherto published in any language. With one exception, the fifteen essays, which reflect the wide range of the author's interests, appear in English for the first time.
The essays consider figures in the history of philosophy (such as Plato, Plotinus, Spinoza, and Hegel) and twentieth-century thought (most notably Walter Benjamin, but also Heidegger, Derrida, Deleuze, the historian Aby Warburg, and the linguist J.-C. Milner). They also examine several general topics that have always been of central concern to Agamben: the relation of linguistic and metaphysical categories; messianism in Islamic, Jewish, and Christian theology; and the state and future of contemporary politics. Despite the diversity of the texts collected here, they show a consistent concern for a set of overriding philosophical themes concerning language, history, and potentiality.
In the first part of the book, Agamben brings philosophical texts of Plato and Benjamin, the literary criticism of Max Kommerell, and the linguistic studies of J.-C. Milner to bear upon a question that exposes each discipline to a limit at which the possibility of language itself is at stake. The essays in the second part concern a body of texts that deal with the structure of history and historical reflection, including the idea of the end of history in Jewish and Christian messianism, as well as in Hegel, Benjamin, and Aby Warburg. In the third part, the issues confronted in the first and second parts are shown to be best grasped as issues of potentiality. Agamben argues that language and history are structures of potentiality and can be most fully understood on the basis of the Aristotelian theory of "dynamis" and its medieval elaborations. The fourth part is an extensive essay on Herman Melville's short story "Bartleby, the Scrivener."

The work of Giorgio Agamben, one of Italy's most important and original philosophers, has been based on an uncommon erudition in classical traditions of philosophy and rhetoric, the grammarians of late antiquity, Christian theology, and modern philosophy. Recently, Agamben has begun to direct his thinking to the constitution of the social and to some concrete, ethico-political conclusions concerning the state of society today, and the place of the individual within it.
In "Homo Sacer, " Agamben aims to connect the problem of pure possibility, potentiality, and power with the problem of political and social ethics in a context where the latter has lost its previous religious, metaphysical, and cultural grounding. Taking his cue from Foucault's fragmentary analysis of biopolitics, Agamben probes with great breadth, intensity, and acuteness the covert or implicit presence of an idea of biopolitics in the history of traditional political theory. He argues that from the earliest treatises of political theory, notably in Aristotle's notion of man as a political animal, and throughout the history of Western thinking about sovereignty (whether of the king or the state), a notion of sovereignty as power over "life" is implicit.
The reason it remains merely implicit has to do, according to Agamben, with the way the sacred, or the idea of sacrality, becomes indissociable from the idea of sovereignty. Drawing upon Carl Schmitt's idea of the sovereign's status as the exception to the rules he safeguards, and on anthropological research that reveals the close interlinking of the sacred and the taboo, Agamben defines the sacred person as one who can be killed and yet not sacrificed--a paradox he sees as operative in the status of the modern individual living in a system that exerts control over the collective "naked life" of all individuals.

An intellectually adventurous account of the role of nonpersons that explores their depiction in literature and challenges how they are defined in philosophy, law, and anthropology In thirteen interlocking chapters, Absentees explores the role of the missing in human communities, asking an urgent question: How does a person become a nonperson, whether by disappearance, disenfranchisement, or civil, social, or biological death? Only somebody can become a "nobody," but, as Daniel Heller-Roazen shows, the ways of being a nonperson are as diverse and complex as they are mysterious and unpredictable. Heller-Roazen treats the variously missing persons of the subtitle in three parts: Vanishings, Lessenings, and Survivals. In each section and with multiple transhistorical and transcultural examples, he challenges the categories that define nonpersons in philosophy, ethics, law, and anthropology. Exclusion, infamy, and stigma; mortuary beliefs and customs; children's games and state censuses; ghosts and "dead souls" illustrate the lives of those lacking or denied full personhood. In the archives of fiction, Heller-Roazen uncovers figurations of the missing-from Helen of Argos in Troy or Egypt to Hawthorne's Wakefield, Swift's Captain Gulliver, Kafka's undead hunter Gracchus, and Chamisso's long-lived shadowless Peter Schlemihl. Readers of The Enemy of All and No One's Ways will find a continuation of those books' intense intellectual adventures, with unexpected questions and arguments arising every step of the way. In a unique voice, Heller-Roazen's thought and writing capture the intricacies of the all-too-human absent and absented.

The philosophical genealogy of a remarkable antagonist: the pirate, the key to the contemporary paradigm of the universal foe. The pirate is the original enemy of humankind. As Cicero famously remarked, there are certain enemies with whom one may negotiate and with whom, circumstances permitting, one may establish a truce. But there is also an enemy with whom treaties are in vain and war remains incessant. This is the pirate, considered by ancient jurists considered to be "the enemy of all." In this book, Daniel Heller-Roazen reconstructs the shifting place of the pirate in legal and political thought from the ancient to the medieval, modern, and contemporary periods presenting the philosophical genealogy of a remarkable antagonist. Today, Heller-Roazen argues, the pirate furnishes the key to the contemporary paradigm of the universal foe. This is a legal and political person of exception, neither criminal nor enemy, who inhabits an extra-territorial region. Against such a foe, states may wage extraordinary battles, policing politics and justifying military measures in the name of welfare and security. Heller-Roazen defines the piracy in the conjunction of four conditions: a region beyond territorial jurisdiction; agents who may not be identified with an established state; the collapse of the distinction between criminal and political categories; and the transformation of the concept of war. The paradigm of piracy remains in force today. Whenever we hear of regions outside the rule of law in which acts of "indiscriminate aggression" have been committed "against humanity," we must begin to recognize that these are acts of piracy. Often considered part of the distant past, the enemy of all is closer to us today than we may think. Indeed, he may never have been closer.