Sports surface design is crucial for the successful performance of sports skills and the reduction of injury risk. Surfaces have developed from natural materials such as turf, clay and cinder, to synthetic surfaces such as acrylic tennis courts, artificial turf for soccer and synthetic running tracks, while our understanding of natural turf has developed in terms of properties appropriate for different sports and surface sustainability. This book draws together the very latest research on biomechanical, medical and engineering approaches to the study of sports surfaces. Written by a team of leading international sport scientists, engineers and technologists, the book covers every key aspect of surface development and design, including: surface behaviour surface classification, function, construction and maintenance influence of surfaces on player performance and injury surface test methods and monitoring development of natural turf and synthetic surfaces shoe-turf interaction future developments in sports surface technology. Representing the most comprehensive and up-to-date study of sports surfaces, this book is important reading for all researchers and professionals working in sports technology, sports engineering, biomechanics or sports medicine.

It is now accepted that the world's climate has warmed by about 0.5A DegreesC over the past one hundred years and will continue to warm by as much as 6A DegreesC by the end of the current century. What, however, do such fundamental changes actually mean for life and the economy at the local and regional scales for the industrialized nations? This extensive study represents a state-of-the-art regional assessment of the impacts of climate change in an industrialized European nation. Providing a comprehensive set of tools, techniques and strategies, it explores the potential impacts of climate change upon key landscapes, economic and social sectors.

It is now accepted that the world's climate has warmed by about 0.5A DegreesC over the past one hundred years and will continue to warm by as much as 6A DegreesC by the end of the current century. What, however, do such fundamental changes actually mean for life and the economy at the local and regional scales for the industrialized nations? This extensive study represents a state-of-the-art regional assessment of the impacts of climate change in an industrialized European nation. Providing a comprehensive set of tools, techniques and strategies, it explores the potential impacts of climate change upon key landscapes, economic and social sectors.

Sports surface design is crucial for the successful performance of sports skills and the reduction of injury risk. Surfaces have developed from natural materials such as turf, clay and cinder, to synthetic surfaces such as acrylic tennis courts, artificial turf for soccer and synthetic running tracks, while our understanding of natural turf has developed in terms of properties appropriate for different sports and surface sustainability. This book draws together the very latest research on biomechanical, medical and engineering approaches to the study of sports surfaces. Written by a team of leading international sport scientists, engineers and technologists, the book covers every key aspect of surface development and design, including: surface behaviour surface classification, function, construction and maintenance influence of surfaces on player performance and injury surface test methods and monitoring development of natural turf and synthetic surfaces shoe-turf interaction future developments in sports surface technology. Representing the most comprehensive and up-to-date study of sports surfaces, this book is important reading for all researchers and professionals working in sports technology, sports engineering, biomechanics or sports medicine.

Following Hegel's analysis of art's increasing difficulty to both engage and extricate itself from prosaic reality, Paul Fleming investigates the strategies employed by German literature from 1750 to 1850 for increasingly attuning itself to quotidian life--common heroes, everyday life, non-extraordinary events--while also avoiding all notions of mediocrity. He focuses on three sites of this tension: the average audience (Lessing), the average artist (Goethe and Schiller), and the everyday, or average life (Grillparzer and Stifter).
The book's title, "Exemplarity and Mediocrity," describes both a disjunctive and a conjunctive relation. Read disjunctively, modern art must display the "exemplary originality" (Kant) that only genius can provide and is thus fundamentally opposed to mediocrity as that which does not stand out or lacks distinctiveness; in the conjunctive sense, modern art turns to non-exceptional life in order to transform it--without forsaking its commonness--thereby producing exemplary forms of mediocrity that both represent the non-exceptional and, insofar as they stand outside the group they represent, are something other than mediocre.

In this collection of short meditations on various topics, Hans Blumenberg eschews academic ponderousness and writes in a genre evocative of Montaigne's Essais, Walter Benjamin's Denkbilder, or Adorno's Minima Moralia. Drawing upon an intellectual tradition that ranges from Aesop to Wittgenstein and from medieval theology to astrophysics, he works as a detective of ideas scouring the periphery of intellectual and philosophical history for clues-metaphors, gestures, anecdotes-essential to grasping human finitude. Images of shipwrecks, attempts at ordering the world, and questions of foundations are traced through the work of Goethe, Schopenhauer, Simmel, Husserl, Thomas Mann, and others. The book's reflections culminate in a rereading of the fable "Care Crosses the River" that lies at the center of Heidegger's analysis of Dasein in which the fable's elided Gnostic center is recovered: Care creates the human in its own image, as a reflection of its narcissism. At stake throughout are two inextricable elements of Blumenberg's thought: a theory of nonconceptuality as essential to philosophizing and an exploration of culture understood as humanity's unceasing attempts to relieve itself of the weight of the absolutism of reality.

Peter Szondis pathbreaking work is a succinct and elegant argument for distinguishing between a philosophy of the tragic and the poetics of tragedy espoused by Aristotle. The first of the books two parts consists of a series of commentaries on philosophical and aesthetic texts from twelve thinkers and poets between 1795 and 1915: Schelling, Holderlin, Hegel, Solger, Goethe, Schopenhauer, Vischer, Kierkegaard, Hebbel, Nietzsche, Simmel, and Scheler. The various definitions of tragedy are read not so much in terms of their specific philosophies, but rather in the way their views assist in analyzing tragedies with an aim to establish a general concept of the tragic.
The second part presents exemplary analyses of eight tragedies: Sophocles'"Oedipus Rex," Calderons "Life Is a Dream," Shakespeares "Othello," Gryphius "Leo Armenius," Racines "Phaedra," Schillers "Demetrius," Kleist's "The Schroffenstein Family" and Buchner's "Danton's Death." The readings neither presuppose a concept of the tragic determined by context (as in Hegel's idea of the conflict between two orders of right), nor do they focus exclusively on the texts explicit contents. Instead, they elaborate the dialectical or aporetic structures at the heart of the tragic. The works analyzed represent the four great epochs of tragic poetry: the age of Greek tragedy; the Baroque era in Spain, England, and Germany; French Classicism; and the age of Goethe.

This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book.

The workplace is where almost two thirds of adults spend almost two thirds of their waking time. Though traditional, statutorily-driven approaches to risk management have been demonstrably effective in reducing the number of injuries and sickness in recent years, psychological and physical health issues are still rife in the modern-day workforce. Work-related sickness and injury absence, and the economic cost implications of such, are having a detrimental effect not just on employees and employers, but on the wider community. Written by a team of experts from across academia and practice settings, this engaging new book argues that employer organizations must work collaboratively with employees in order to create working environments that promote health for all. With a sharp focus on applying theory to practice, the book uses real-life examples from areas across the globe to encourage readers to think contextually. Key topics covered include: - Work-life balance, including issues of workload and the 'long hours culture' - The impact of work-related musculoskeletal disorders - The nature, scale and causes of work-related stress - The significance of corporate social responsibility in employee wellness. Aligned with global frameworks, this comprehensive text provides both students and qualified professionals with a solid foundation for practice, and a rich source of material for discussion.

St. Matthew Passion is Hans Blumenberg's sustained and devastating meditation on Jesus's anguished cry on the cross, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" Why did this abandonment happen, what does it mean within the logic of the Gospels, how have believers and nonbelievers understood it, and how does it live on in art? With rare philological acuity and vast historical learning, Blumenberg unfolds context upon context in which this cry has reverberated, from early Christian apologetics and heretics to twentieth-century literature and philosophy. Blumenberg's guide through this unending story of divine abandonment is Johann Sebastian Bach's monumental Matthauspassion, the parabolic mirror that bundled eighteen hundred years of reflection on the fate of the crucified and the only available medium that allows us post-Christian listeners to feel the anguish of those who witnessed the events of the Passion. With interspersed references to writers such as Goethe, Rilke, Kafka, Freud, and Benjamin, Blumenberg gathers evidence to raise the singular question that, in his view, Christian theology has not been able to answer: How can an omnipotent God be so offended by his creatures that he must sacrifice and abandon his own Son?