Why are we here? What is the point of all our efforts? And can our activities and endeavors really bring us true happiness? Rarely in our complex world do we have the opportunity to consider the larger picture, and for those who wish to gain some understanding of the traditional Jewish approach to these and similar questions, the task can be daunting. Uncovering Judaism's Soul provides answers to these basic philosophical questions, and it bases these answers on original Jewish source material. Judaism is complex, and traditional Jewish religious literature is vast-for the uninitiated, the basic answers are difficult to find. Furthermore, the original sources are written in Hebrew and Aramaic, and although English translations exist for many of the better-known works, much has not been translated. With help, however, answers to fundamental questions can be uncovered: Why did God create the universe? What is the purpose of human life? How can a person find fulfillment in life?...

There are countless ways of thinking, feeling, and acting like an ecofeminist. Ecofeminism includes a plurality of perspectives, thriving in dialogue between diverse theories and practices involving ecological and feminist matters of concern. Deepening the dialogue, the contributors in this anthology explore critical and complementary interactions between ecofeminism and other areas of inquiry, including ecocriticism, postcolonialism, geography, environmental law, religion, geoengineering, systems thinking, family therapy, and more. This volume aims to further the cultural and literary theories of ecofeminism by situating them in conversation with other interpretations and analyses of intersections between environment, gender, and culture. This anthology is a unique combination of contemporary, interdisciplinary, and global perspectives in dialogue with ecofeminism, supporting academic and activist efforts to resist oppression and domination and cultivate care and justice.

Recombinant DNA methods are powerful, revolutionary techniques for at least two reasons.
First, they allow the isolation of single genes in large amounts from a pool of thousands or millions of genes. Second, the isolated genes or their regulatory regions can be modified at will and re-introduced into cells for expression at the RNA or protein levels. These attributes help to solve complex biological problems and to produce new and better products in the areas of health, agriculture and industry.
Both volume 154 and 155 include the descriptions of several useful new restriction enzymes and rapid methods for DNA sequence analysis, along with a number of other useful methods.

Currently developed countries pay much more attention to harmfully addictive substances than developing countries. However, the experience of developed countries is very relevant to the developing world since substance abuse is likely to impose a continually increasing burden of disease in this region in the near future. This book extends the frontiers of research on the economics of substance use and abuse in a variety of extremely significant ways. It focuses on the determinants and consequences of the consumption of cigarettes, alcohol, betel quid, and illicit drugs in the United States, Great Britain and Taiwan. The authors use a variety of empirical techniques to examine the roles of price, advertising, risk perception, time preference and forward-looking behaviour in consumption decisions and the effects of these decisions on labour market outcomes, unintended pregnancies and criminal violence. Economic Analysis of Substance Use and Abuse will be required reading for scholars of economic development and health economics.

Leading scientists are identified as much by their ability to communicate ideas and results as by the quality of their research. Ideas and results that are not communicated effectively will not contribute to new knowledge, so it is important that scientists learn to improve their communication skills. There are many types of scientific communication, the principal ones being journal papers and popular science articles, as well as oral and poster presentations at scientific meetings. In each case, the ABC of science communication is that it should be Accurate and Audience adapted, Brief and Clear. presentations so that your message can be transmitted clearly and concisely to the reader or listener. Techniques for improving your writing, literature searching and training students in communication are also discussed. In this revised edition a few more topics have been added, such as electronic submission of manuscripts, writing statistics, and writing research proposals. research results, experienced scientists wanting to make their communications more effective, university students at all levels, and teachers involved in the instruction of communication skills.

National Role Conceptions in a New Millennium examines the transformation of the international system through an examination of the role conceptions adopted by the different global actors. Advancing current role theory scholarship in International Relations, the contributors take as their starting point the question of how international actors are responding to the reordering of the global system. They reflect on the rise of new actors and the reemergence of old rivalries, the decline of established norms, and the unleashing of internal political forces such as nationalism and parochialism. They argue that changes in the international system can impact how states define their roles and act as a variable in both domestic and international role contestations. Further, they examine the redefinition of roles of countries and the international organizations that have been central to the US and western dominated world order, including major powers in the world (the US, Russia, China, Britain etc.) as well as the European Union, NATO, and ASEAN. By looking at international organizations, this text moves beyond the traditional subjects of role theory in the study of international relations, to examine how roles are contested in non-state actors. National Role Conceptions in a New Millennium is the first attempt to delve into the individual motivations of states to seek role transition. As such, it is ideal for those teaching and studying both theory and method in international relations and foreign policy analysis.

Over the course of the past two decades, horror cinema around the globe has become increasingly preoccupied with the concept of loss. Grief in Contemporary Horror Cinema: Screening Loss examines the theme of grief as it represented both indie and mainstream films, including works such as Jennifer Kent's watershed film The Babadook, Juan Antonio Bayona's award-sweeping El orfanato, Ari Aster's genre-straddling Midsommar, and Lars von Trier's visually stunning Melancholia. Analyzing depictions of grief ranging from the intimate grief of a small family to the collective grief of an entire nation, the essays illustrate how these works serve to provide unity, catharsis, and-sometimes-healing.

A Critical Companion to Terry Gilliam provides a fresh, up-to-date exploration of the director's films and artistic practices, ranging from his first film Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975) up until his recently released and latest film The Man Who Killed Don Quixote (2018). This volume presents Gilliam as a director whose films weave an avant-garde cinematic style, imaginative exaggeration, and social critique together. Consequently, while his films can seem artistically chaotic and can, thus, have the effect of frustrating and upsetting the viewer, the essays in this volume show that this is part of a very disciplined creative plan to achieve the defamiliarization of various accepted notions of human and social life.

This book provides a broad analysis of the legacy of the Obama presidency, representing multiple perspectives across the partisan and disciplinary divides. The chapters in this book are grouped into three major legacy categories: domestic policy, foreign policy, and rhetoric. Domestically, the contributors examine the "Obama coalition" and its staying power in the age of Trump, President Obama's legacy regarding the use of executive power, his impact on intergovernmental relations, and his impact on the welfare state and education. On the foreign policy front, the central focus is on whether Obama was in fact much different from his predecessor, what impact he had on the Middle East and Afghanistan, and whether his pivot to Asia yielded the hoped-for results. The contributions in this book also aim to (re-)assess the Obama legacy in light of the subsequent efforts by his successor to undo many of the policies embraced and implemented during the Obama years.

National Role Conceptions in a New Millennium examines the transformation of the international system through an examination of the role conceptions adopted by the different global actors. Advancing current role theory scholarship in International Relations, the contributors take as their starting point the question of how international actors are responding to the reordering of the global system. They reflect on the rise of new actors and the reemergence of old rivalries, the decline of established norms, and the unleashing of internal political forces such as nationalism and parochialism. They argue that changes in the international system can impact how states define their roles and act as a variable in both domestic and international role contestations. Further, they examine the redefinition of roles of countries and the international organizations that have been central to the US and western dominated world order, including major powers in the world (the US, Russia, China, Britain etc.) as well as the European Union, NATO, and ASEAN. By looking at international organizations, this text moves beyond the traditional subjects of role theory in the study of international relations, to examine how roles are contested in non-state actors. National Role Conceptions in a New Millennium is the first attempt to delve into the individual motivations of states to seek role transition. As such, it is ideal for those teaching and studying both theory and method in international relations and foreign policy analysis.

The fields of pharmaceutical economics and health economics/policy are reaching a point of convergence. This is due to both the widespread availability of pharmaceutical treatments, accompanied by broader insurance coverage, and the regulation of prescription drugs in both private and government plans. This book will bridge the gap. We will explore developments in both U.S. and International setting. The system of the U.S. is characterized by a mix of private and government insurance for prescription drugs with the expansion of Medicare Part D. Most other developed countries are characterized by social insurance with either the government as a single payer such as in Canada or Australia, or a national health service as in many other European countries.

This volume contains fi fteen articles, many in Hebrew, by leading scholars. The articles cover a broad range of subjects, from an analysis of biblical narratives as expounded in the midrash and by medieval commentators, through a discussion of Maimonides' attitude towards midrash and an analysis of talmudic aggadah as expounded by oriental scholars, to polemics concerning the attitude to aggadah in the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries, and culminating with an analysis of interpretation of aggadah by latter-day talmudic scholars. There are also articles about the essence of aggadah, its literary conventions and its relation to law, and two articles which deal with a passage in the Passover Haggadah. The participants include: E. Eizenman, N. Ilan, G. Blidstein, Y. Blau, M. Bregman, A. Grossman, H. Davidson, C. Horowitz, O. Viskind-Elper, H. Mak, A. Atzmon, A. Kadari, A. Rozenak, M. Shmidman, and J. Tabory.

The economics of substance use and abuse deals with the consumption of goods that share two properties. First, they are addictive in the sense that an increase in past consumption of the good leads to an increase in current consumption. Second, their consumption harms the consumer and others. This second property makes them of interest from policy, legal, and public health perspectives. The tremendous expansion in research in the economics of substance use and abuse since the early 1980s and the presence of many unresolved issues motivate this volume. While most of the papers are by economists, the disciplines of medicine, political science, and psychology also are represented. Any successful attempt to address substance use must adopt an interdisciplinary perspective. The aim of the volume to cover issues pertaining to individual behavior, social interactions, markets, and politics makes this all the more necessary. Some of the twenty papers in the volume contain new estimates of the price sensitivity of alcohol, cigarettes, marijuana, cocaine, and heroin. Others focus on the effects of consumption on earnings, crime, suicide, and sexually transmitted diseases. Still others address the roles of psychobiology, social interaction, hyperbolic discounting, and peer effects in shaping decisions with regard to the use of harmfully addictive substances. To a larger or lesser extent, all the papers contain implications for policy-making. A number of papers, however, are more directly concerned with policy-making and with the policy-making environment, including evaluations of the costs and benefits of treatment services for abusers. Readers of this volume should gain a much betterunderstanding of what we know and what we still need to know about the economics of substance use and abuse.

Part of a series which focuses on health economics and health services research, this volume discusses topics including cost-benefit evaluations in mental health and the demand for health care for the treatment of mental problems among the elderly.

A collection of new essays treating the most important aspects of the work of the most famous late Romantic, Heinrich Heine. As the most prominent German-Jewish Romantic writer, Heinrich Heine (1797-1856) became a focal point for much of the tension generated by the Jewish assimilation to German culture in a time marked by a growing emphasis on the shared ancestry of the German Volk. As both an ingenious composer of Romantic verse and the originator of modernist German prose, he defied nationalist-Romantic concepts of creative genius that grounded German greatness in an idealist tradition of Dichter und Denker. And as a brash, often reckless champion of freedom and social justice, he challenged not only the reactionary ruling powers of Restoration Germany but also the incipient nationalistideology that would have fateful consequences for the new Germany--consequences he often portended with a prophetic vision born of his own experience. Reaching to the heart of the `German question,' the controversies surrounding Heine have been as intense since his death as they were in his own lifetime, often serving as an acid test for important questions of national and social consciousness. This new volume of essays by scholars from Germany, Britain, Canada, and the United States offers new critical insights on key recurring issues in his work: the symbiosis of German and Jewish culture; emerging nationalism among the European peoples; critical views of Romanticism and modern philosophy; European culture on the threshold to modernity; irony, wit, and self-critique as requisite elements of a modern aesthetic; changing views on teleology and the dialectics of history; and final thoughts and reconsiderations from his last, prolonged years in a sickbed. Contributors: Michael Perraudin, Paul Peters, Roger F. Cook, Willi Goetschel, Gerhard Hoehn, Paul Reitter, Robert C. Holub, Jeffrey Grossman, Anthony Phelan, Joseph A. Kruse, and George F. Peters. Roger F. Cook is Professor of German at the University of Missouri, Columbia.

Obesity, which has increased in most developed countries in the past few decades, is the result of genetics, environment, and individual choices. Economics is useful for studying the individual choices that lead to obesity, explanations for the recent rise in obesity, the treatment options for obesity, and the costs and consequences of obesity for the individual and society.
The papers in this volume, devoted to the economics of obesity, illustrate the wide usefulness of the economic approach. The papers in the first section propose and test economic explanations for food-consumption choices and obesity. In particular, they assess the impact of food quality, access to fast food, food prices, legislation, and other factors on diet, physical activity, and body weight.
Treatments for obesity, specifically bariatric surgery and anti-obesity drugs, are studied in the second section of this volume. The third section is devoted to the labor market impacts of obesity; evidence from fifteen countries is presented and evaluated. The fourth and final section calculates the impact of obesity on hospital costs and examines the externalities imposed by obesity through health insurance.
Taken together, the papers in this volume advance the frontier of knowledge about the causes, implications, and consequences of obesity, and validate the usefulness of the economic approach for studying obesity in particular and medical conditions more generally.
*Studies obesity from an economic perspective
*Proposes economic explanation for food consumption choices, treatment of obesity, and treatment of the condition
*International in scope - provides evidence from 15 countries

FORENSIC CHEMISTRY FUNDAMENTALS strives to help scientists & lawyers, & students, understand how their two disciplines come together for forensic science, in the contexts of analytical chemistry & related science more generally, and the common law systems of Canada, USA, UK, the Commonwealth. In this book, forensics is considered more generally than as only for criminal law; workplace health & safety, and other areas are included. And, two issues of Canadian legal process are argued as essays in the fi nal two chapters.

Human capital is embodied in human beings. It embraces the individual's capacity to perform and enjoy activities that provide money and/or psychic income. Health behaviour affects human capital and is itself affected by the individual's human capital. This volume consists of original theoretical and empirical contributions to our knowledge of the interdependence between Human Capital and Health Behaviour.

Medical technology broadly defined to include all aspects of the process of treating disease (e.g., pharmaceuticals, medical devices, and surgical procedures) is profoundly important for individual health and, consequently, also for general welfare. Advances in medical technology convey the prospect of both improved population health and increased general welfare. However, because of the extensive regulation of the markets for healthcare goods and services, the development and application of medical technologies differs fundamentally from non-medical technological advances. In this volume of the "Advances in Health Economics and Health Services Research" series we present several papers that provide theoretical and empirical evidence about the market for medical technology.

This book is based on the papers presented at the conference on "Mecha nisms of DNA Damage and Repair: Implications for Carcinogenesis and Risk Assessment," held at the National Bureau of Standards on June 2-7, 1985, This volume deals with mechanisms of DNA damage and repair at the molecular level; consequences of unrepaired or misrepaired damage, with major emphasis on carcinogenesis; drugs which bind selectively to altered and potentially damaging DNA sequences; and potential utilization of DNA damage as an endpoint for assessing risks of UV light, ionizing radiations, chemicals, drugs, and hazardous agents in foods. Because the induction of mutations by radiation and genotoxic chemicals has been observed to follow one-hit kinetics in some instances, it is generally assumed that any level of exposure to a DNA-damaging agent may increase the risk of genetic disease or cancer in an exposed population. At the same time, however, there is evidence that although the DNA of living cells is continually damaged by natural background radiation, free radicals, and other naturally occurring processes, most of the damage is normally repaired.

There are countless ways of thinking, feeling, and acting like an ecofeminist. Ecofeminism includes a plurality of perspectives, thriving in dialogue between diverse theories and practices involving ecological and feminist matters of concern. Deepening the dialogue, the contributors in this anthology explore critical and complementary interactions between ecofeminism and other areas of inquiry, including ecocriticism, postcolonialism, geography, environmental law, religion, geoengineering, systems thinking, family therapy, and more. This volume aims to further the cultural and literary theories of ecofeminism by situating them in conversation with other interpretations and analyses of intersections between environment, gender, and culture. This anthology is a unique combination of contemporary, interdisciplinary, and global perspectives in dialogue with ecofeminism, supporting academic and activist efforts to resist oppression and domination and cultivate care and justice.

The World Trade Organization (WTO) Agreement on Agriculture has had a fundamental impact on agricultural policy worldwide. The new WTO agreements will cover agriculture,sanitary and phytosanitary measures, technical barriers to trade and trade in intellectual property rights. This book addresses the interface between the law of international agricultural trade, the emerging legal and economic order for agricultural trade under the auspices of the WTO, and its impact on agricultural policy reform both in the European Union and the USA. With contributions from leading authorities in the appropriate areas.

This collection of Michael Grossman's most important papers adds essential background and depth to his work on economic-based determinants of public health. Grossman organizes his essays into four categories and includes an introduction to each section that addresses the issues covered and the larger stakes of his work. An afterword discusses the effect of Grossman's approach to subsequent research on health economics and the work others have done to advance and extend his innovative perspective. Determinants of Health begins with a section on the theoretical underpinnings and empirical results of Grossman's groundbreaking health economics model, first introduced in the 1970s. It follows with sections on the relationship between health and schooling; determinants of infant health, with a special emphasis on public policies and programs; and the economics of unhealthy behaviors. These essays explain how the economic choices people make influence health and health behaviors. Grossman treats health as a form of human capital, and he shows that public policies and programs that determine the price and availability of key inputs have critical effects on outcomes ranging from birthweight and infant mortality to cigarette smoking, alcohol abuse, illegal drug use, and obesity. Grossman's approach has led to a major stream of literature in the field with contributions by the world's leading health economists, including Joseph Newhouse, Jonathan Gruber, Amy Finkelstein, Michael Greenstone, and David Cutler. His clarity on the economic decisions that lead people to make good or poor health choices is immensely valuable to the debate over how we spend on and legislate health.

It's not how you handle the good times that matters in life. The true test in life is how you handle tragedy, loss, and the challenge of what to do next. Whether you have lost your job or live with the fear of losing your job, this is the book for you. Job loss can be terrifying and paralyzing. But, there is hope. You can overcome a job loss by realizing you are not alone and applying the steps that other effective people have learned. Yes, if you think it, see it, and believe it you too will be successful again. Read the stories of others who have overcome job loss and follow a step-by-step approach to regaining your confidence, empowering yourself, and finding your next career opportunity. A great companion to Dr. Grossman's other books: What's Next Create Your Dream Job With a Plan B and Passion Finding What Energizes Your Career.

A seminal work in health economics, Michael Grossman's The Demand for Health introduced a new theoretical model for determining the health status of the population when first published in 1972. His work uniquely synthesized economic and public health knowledge and catalyzed a vastly influential body of health economics literature. It is well past time to bring this important work back into print. Grossman bases his approach on Gary S. Becker's household production function model and his theory of investment in human capital. Consumers demand health, which can include illness-free days in a given year or life expectancy, and then produce it through the input of medical care services, diet, other market goods and services, and time. Grossman also treats health and knowledge as equal parts of the durable stock of human capital. Consumers therefore have an incentive to invest in health to increase their earnings in the future. From here, Grossman examines complementarities between health capital and other forms of human capital, the most important of which is knowledge capital earned through schooling and its effect on the efficiency of production. He concludes that the rate of return on investing in health by increasing education may exceed the rate of return on investing in health through greater medical care. Higher income may not lead to better health outcomes, as wealth enables the consumption of goods and services with adverse health effects. These are some of the major revelations of Grossman's model, findings that have great relevance as we struggle to understand the links between poverty, education, structural disadvantages, and health.