In this broad condemnation of multiculturalism, the author works to uncover pernicious errors in the arguments of diversity's proponents and to sound a warning against the dire consequences for American culture if the tenets of political correctness are incorporated into our social structure. Schmidt begins by exposing multiculturalism, not as a movement aimed at expanding democratic ideals, but rather as a crypto-Marxist political ideology that seeks to import Marxist concepts into social and cultural institutions. Subsequent chapters then illuminate a number of dismaying trends: a tendency toward historical revisionism in multiculturalist arguments, the sly linguistic maneuvering and limits on speech that characterize political correctness, and the dismantling of the traditional image of the family unit-the primary building block of American society. Schmidt concludes with a rousing admonition to expel from our midst the latter-day Trojan horse that is multiculturalism. Casting a troubled glance over the list of social ills plaguing America today-besieged inner cities, divisive racial politics, diminishing educational standards, and rampant divorce and illegitimacy-we have cause to wonder whether the advocates of multiculturalism represent the solution or the source of the problem. In this rousing condemnation of the multiculturalist agenda, the author fixes an unflinching critical gaze on the subtle deceptions and wrongheaded conclusions at work in the arguments for cultural pluralism, moral relativism, and political correctness. An exhaustive and damning account of multiculturalism's wages and a compelling argument for the importance of traditional American values make this book essential reading for anyone concerned about our country's present plight and future prospects.

An in-depth guide to divestiture for financial and corporate planning executives, this volume offers comprehensive information about divestiture strategies, the rationale for divestiture, the effects on employees and other corporate stakeholders, and the internal management problems that can accompany divestiture proposal and implementation. In addition, the author offers full coverage of the various divestiture techniques including direct sale, spin-offs, employee stock option plans, and leveraged buy-outs. Schmidt demonstrates that divestiture is often the best solution for a corporation faced with the need to raise cash, dispose of properties that do not fit with the firM's overall strategic plan, or remain competitive in today's global markets.

This volume offers an in-depth guide to one technique-- divestiture--which is increasingly a component of financial restructuring plans. Written for the financial and corporate planning executives who must recommend or direct divestiture operations, the book offers comprehensive information about divestiture strategies, the rationale for divestiture, the effects on employees and other corporate stakeholders, and the internal management problems that can accompany divestiture proposal and implementation. In addition, the author offers full coverage of the various divestiture techniques including direct sale, spin-offs, Employee Stock Option Plans (ESOPs) and Leveraged Buy-Outs (LBOs). Schmidt demonstrates that divestiture is often the best solution for a corporation faced with the need to raise cash, dispose of properties that do not fit with the firM's overall strategic plan or show unsatisfactory returns, or remain competitive in today's global markets. His book will be an important resource for anyone involved in the divestiture decisionmaking process.

Schmidt begins by tracing the major acquisition and divestiture activity of the past 30 years. He identifies the business environmental changes and regulatory actions that have fueled the current high level of divestiture activity, examines the political environment of divestiture, and explores the relationship between international expansion and divestiture. Turning to a discussion of the divestiture decision itself, Schmidt addresses such issues as divestiture segment valuation, the effects of divestiture on resources, the managerial implications and the psychological effects of divestiture. Subsequent chapters analyze the considerations that must be taken into account in any divestiture decision and present specific divestiture techniques. In his concluding chapter, Schmidt looks at future trends in corporate divestiture.

The essays in this collection are the outgrowth of a workshop, held in June 1976, on formal approaches to the semantics and pragmatics of natural languages. They document in an astoundingly uniform way the develop ments in the formal analysis of natural languages since the late sixties. The avowed aim of the' workshop was in fact to assess the progress made in the application of formal methods to semantics, to confront different approaches to essentially the same problems on the one hand, and, on the other, to show the way in relating semantic and pragmatic explanations of linguistic phenomena. Several of these papers can in fact be regarded as attempts to close the 'semiotic circle' by bringing together the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic properties of certain constructions in an explanatory framework thereby making it more than obvious that these three components of an integrated linguistic theory cannot be as neatly separated as one would have liked to believe. In other words, not only can we not elaborate a syntactic description of (a fragment of) a language and then proceed to the semantics (as Montague pointed out already forcefully in 1968), we cannot hope to achieve an adequate integrated syntax and semantics without paying heed to the pragmatic aspects of the constructions involved. The behavior of polarity items, 'quantifiers' like any, conditionals or even logical particles like and and or in non-indicative sentences is clear-cut evidence for the need to let each component of the grammar inform the other."

"an entertaining and informative history of the place of fraternal organizations in American culture. Recommended for academic and larger public libraries." Library Journal

"""Start 'Em Right . Keep 'Em Playing" breaks down the basic fundamental skills of softball by incorporating interactive and goal oriented drills and challenges for young children. Not only does this book teach players and parents basic softball skills but the intangible life lessons of respect, accountability, and resiliency.""-Kim Maher, head coach, Purdue Softball, 1996 Olympic Gold Medalist

All too often, children lose interest in playing baseball and softball because of poor coaching practices or too much emphasis on winning instead of having fun. Parent and fifteen-year Little League coach Mike Schmidt will show you how to bring back the joy of the game for kids, parents, and coaches alike.

Schmidt focuses on the all-important basic elements of catching, fielding, throwing, hitting, and base running. He also includes tips and insights into the emotional and psychological aspects of building good players and making a winning team.

Most importantly, you'll learn how to start children on the right path, help them conquer their fears, and make practices at home or on the ball field exciting and fun. Master the art of youth coaching and bring families and communities together for a wonderful athletic experience, year after year.

"Will delight the visual learner. ... For the college student, the general reader, and the merely curious". -- American Reference Book Annual

"Schmidt has filled a large gap. ... Superior quality, wide coverage, and considerable excellence". -- Journal of World History

The volumes of this classic series, now referred to simply as "Zechmeister after its founder, L. Zechmeister, have appeared under the Springer Imprint ever since the series inauguration in 1938. The volumes contain contributions on various topics related to the origin, distribution, chemistry, synthesis, biochemistry, function or use of various classes of naturally occurring substances ranging from small molecules to biopolymers. Each contribution is written by a recognized authority in his field and provides a comprehensive and up-to-date review of the topic in question. Addressed to biologists, technologists, and chemists alike, the series can be used by the expert as a source of information and literature citations and by the non-expert as a means of orientation in a rapidly developing discipline.

This issue of Clinics in Laboratory Medicine will cover Precision Medicine in Practice: Molecular Diagnosis Enabling Precision Therapies. Curated by Dr. Ryan J. Schmidt, this issue is one of four selected each year by the series Consulting Editor, Milenko Tanasijevic. The volume will include articles on: Features of a Comprehensive Precision Medicine Program for Constitutional Genetic Disorders, Establishing a Precision Medicine Center of Excellence for Rare Disease, High-throughput DNA Sequencing for Rare Disease Diagnosis, Enhancing Diagnosis through RNA Sequencing, Interpretation of Rare Genetic Variants, Clinical Bioinformatics, Precision Therapies for Retinal Dystrophy, Precision Therapies for Muscular Dystrophy, Therapeutic Gene Editing, High Throughput Functional Studies of Genetic Variants, and Patient-specific Disease Models.

An intellectual history of America's water management philosophy Humans take more than their geological share of water, but they do not benefit from it equally. This imbalance has created an era of intense water scarcity that affects the security of individuals, states, and the global economy. For many, this brazen water grab and the social inequalities it produces reflect the lack of a coherent philosophy connecting people to the planet. Challenging this view, Jeremy Schmidt shows how water was made a "resource" that linked geology, politics, and culture to American institutions. Understanding the global spread and evolution of this philosophy is now key to addressing inequalities that exist on a geological scale. Water: Abundance, Scarcity, and Security in the Age of Humanity details the remarkable intellectual history of America's water management philosophy. It shows how this philosophy shaped early twentieth-century conservation in the United States, influenced American international development programs, and ultimately shaped programs of global governance that today connect water resources to the Earth system. Schmidt demonstrates how the ways we think about water reflect specific public and societal values, and illuminates the process by which the American approach to water management came to dominate the global conversation about water. Debates over how human impacts on the planet are connected to a new geological epoch-the Anthropocene-tend to focus on either the social causes of environmental crises or scientific assessments of the Earth system. Schmidt shows how, when it comes to water, the two are one and the same. The very way we think about managing water resources validates putting ever more water to use for some human purposes at the expense of others.

This collection of papers published in the last forty years documents the author's journey from philosophy of language to text theory and then to an empirical science of literature, ending with a concept of literary studies as a legitimate part of media culture studies. The main emphasis is placed on communication as a social system. The approach used in the book is strictly interdisciplinary in order to cope with the complexity of the different types of human communication, ranging from everyday talk to literary communication or advertising. Radical Constructivism provides the epistemological basis for this approach - a basis that has undergone important modifications in the course of the author's development.

This text is definitive, scientific, readable, and offers a reference and text for specialist gynecologists, psychiatrists, and psychologists working at a high level in their respective professions. It is an academic text of the highest level being authoritative and comprehensive.
It has the correct balance between the specialties of psychiatry and gynecology and an international team of contributors from Europe, the United States, and the United Kingdom.

This Element explores multi-faceted linkages between feeding and relationship formation based on ethnographic case studies in Morocco, Madagascar, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, and Costa Rica. Research demonstrates that there are many culturally valued ways of feeding children, contradicting the idea of a single universally optimal feeding standard. It demonstrates further that in many parts of the world, feeding plays a central role in bonding and relationship formation, something largely overlooked in current developmental theories. Analysis shows that feeding contributes to relationship formation through what we call proximal, transactional, and distal dimensions. This Element argues that feeding practices can lead to qualitatively distinct forms of relationships. It has important theoretical and practical implications, calling for the expansion of attachment theory to include feeding and body-centered caregiving and significant changes to global interventions currently based on 'responsive feeding.' This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

This book presents a historically situated explanation of the rise of global water governance and the contemporary challenges that global water governance seeks to address. It is particularly concerned with connecting what are often technical issues in water management with the social and political structures that affect how technical and scientific advice affects decisions. Schmidt and Matthews are careful to avoid the pitfalls of setting up opposing binaries, such as 'nature versus culture' or 'private versus public', thereby allowing readers to understand how contests over water governance have been shaped over time and why they will continue to be so. Co-written by an academic and a practitioner, Global Challenges in Water Governance combines the dual concerns for both analytical clarity and practical applicability in a way that is particularly valuable both for educators, researchers, decision-makers, and newcomers to the complexities of water use decisions.

This book covers a significant number of R&D projects, performed mostly after 2000, devoted to the understanding and prevention of performance degradation processes in polymer electrolyte fuel cells (PEFCs). The extent and severity of performance degradation processes in PEFCs were recognized rather gradually. Indeed, the recognition overlapped with a significant number of industrial dem- strations of fuel cell powered vehicles, which would suggest a degree of technology maturity beyond the resaolution of fundamental failure mechanisms. An intriguing question, therefore, is why has there been this apparent delay in addressing fun- mental performance stability requirements. The apparent answer is that testing of the power system under fully realistic operation conditions was one prerequisite for revealing the nature and extent of some key modes of PEFC stack failure. Such modes of failure were not exposed to a similar degree, or not at all, in earlier tests of PEFC stacks which were not performed under fully relevant conditions, parti- larly such tests which did not include multiple on-off and/or high power-low power cycles typical for transportation and mobile power applications of PEFCs. Long-term testing of PEFCs reported in the early 1990s by both Los Alamos National Laboratory and Ballard Power was performed under conditions of c- stant cell voltage, typically near the maximum power point of the PEFC.

Political theorist Wendy Brown has argued recently that contemporary neoliberalism, with its relentless obsession on the economy, has all but undone the tenets of democracy. The focus on maximizing credit scores and capital has, over time, promoted a politics that operates beyond and below the institutional and electoral world, eroding not just the desire for democratic action but even our ability to imagine it. In light of recent politics, it seems we may have reached the apotheosis of this depressing vision. This book is meant to suggest one way of thinking past and out of the current moment, and it does so by looking to a perhaps unlikely figure: Niccolo Machiavelli. The book presents Machiavelli as an anachronistic thinker - a thinker who, deprived of his political community and public identity during his exile from Florence, originated a new approach to democratic theory and practice. In particular he immersed himself in the writings of ancient thinkers and looked to them as models for understanding contemporary problems of corruption, conspiracy, and torture. This book's main contribution is a methodological one: it argues that the power in Machiavelli's work derived from this sort of anachronistic reading, which went against the grain of Renaissance thought. In turn it shows that if we imitate Machiavelli's interpretive method in reading The Prince and Discourses of Livy, we can find in them solutions to the neoliberal problems Brown warns about.

In this volume expert researchers in the field detail many of the methods which are now commonly used to study RNA. These methods are presented as a guidebook to scientists who are experienced with RNA research and want to brush up on a new technique. Written in the highly successful Methods in Molecular Biology series format, chapters include introductions to their respective topics, lists of the necessary materials and reagents, step-by-step, readily reproducible laboratory protocols, and key tips on troubleshooting and avoiding known pitfalls. Thorough and intuitive, RNA-RNA Interactions: Methods and Protocols guides scientists investigating biological systems and studying RNA.