The Faculty of Useless Knowledge

The Faculty of Useless Knowledge PDF Author: I︠U︡riĭ Osipovich Dombrovskiĭ
Publisher: Harvill Secker
ISBN: 9781846556982
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 512

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Book Description
This important novel, first published in Russian in 1978, reveals a master of the Stalinist era. The Year of Terror, 1937. Zybin, an exiled intellectual and archaeologist in the far province of Alma-Ata, finds himself wrongly accused of a crime during the darkest days of Stalin's reign. Soon, he and his colleagues are caught up in an ambitious Cheka investigator's attempts to set up a show trial to rival those taking place in Moscow. Vivid, courageous and defiant, The Faculty of Useless Knowledge is the crowning achievement by the author of The Keeper of Antiquities and The Dark Lady and draws heavily on autobiographical experience. A masterpiece of anti-totalitarian literature, it stands alongside the works of Solzhenitsyn and Bulgakov in illuminating the chaos, absurdity and bureaucratic labyrinths of Soviet Russia.

The Faculty of Useless Knowledge

The Faculty of Useless Knowledge PDF Author: I︠U︡riĭ Osipovich Dombrovskiĭ
Publisher: Harvill Secker
ISBN: 9781846556982
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 512

Get Book

Book Description
This important novel, first published in Russian in 1978, reveals a master of the Stalinist era. The Year of Terror, 1937. Zybin, an exiled intellectual and archaeologist in the far province of Alma-Ata, finds himself wrongly accused of a crime during the darkest days of Stalin's reign. Soon, he and his colleagues are caught up in an ambitious Cheka investigator's attempts to set up a show trial to rival those taking place in Moscow. Vivid, courageous and defiant, The Faculty of Useless Knowledge is the crowning achievement by the author of The Keeper of Antiquities and The Dark Lady and draws heavily on autobiographical experience. A masterpiece of anti-totalitarian literature, it stands alongside the works of Solzhenitsyn and Bulgakov in illuminating the chaos, absurdity and bureaucratic labyrinths of Soviet Russia.

The Faculty of Useless Knowledge

The Faculty of Useless Knowledge PDF Author: I︠U︡riı̆ Osipovich Dombrovskiı̆
Publisher: Harvill Press
ISBN: 9781860463433
Category : Criminal investigation
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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The Faculty of Useless Knowledge

The Faculty of Useless Knowledge PDF Author: I︠U︡riı̆ Dombrovskiı̆
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 9781860460548
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 548

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The Faculty of Useless Knowledge

The Faculty of Useless Knowledge PDF Author: I͡Uriĭ Osipovich Dombrovskiĭ
Publisher: Harvill Press
ISBN: 9781860460531
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 533

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Book Description
Georgi Zybin, a student of law and humanities, is arrested as an enemy of the people when a high-ranking officer in Stalin's security organization starts a public trial in Alma Ata, similar to those in Moscow

The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge

The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge PDF Author: Abraham Flexner
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691174768
Category : Reference
Languages : en
Pages : 104

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Book Description
A short, provocative book about why "useless" science often leads to humanity's greatest technological breakthroughs A forty-year tightening of funding for scientific research has meant that resources are increasingly directed toward applied or practical outcomes, with the intent of creating products of immediate value. In such a scenario, it makes sense to focus on the most identifiable and urgent problems, right? Actually, it doesn't. In his classic essay "The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge," Abraham Flexner, the founding director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and the man who helped bring Albert Einstein to the United States, describes a great paradox of scientific research. The search for answers to deep questions, motivated solely by curiosity and without concern for applications, often leads not only to the greatest scientific discoveries but also to the most revolutionary technological breakthroughs. In short, no quantum mechanics, no computer chips. This brief book includes Flexner's timeless 1939 essay alongside a new companion essay by Robbert Dijkgraaf, the Institute's current director, in which he shows that Flexner's defense of the value of "the unobstructed pursuit of useless knowledge" may be even more relevant today than it was in the early twentieth century. Dijkgraaf describes how basic research has led to major transformations in the past century and explains why it is an essential precondition of innovation and the first step in social and cultural change. He makes the case that society can achieve deeper understanding and practical progress today and tomorrow only by truly valuing and substantially funding the curiosity-driven "pursuit of useless knowledge" in both the sciences and the humanities.

The Keeper of Antiquities

The Keeper of Antiquities PDF Author: I͡Uriĭ Osipovich Dombrovskiĭ
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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The Death of Expertise

The Death of Expertise PDF Author: Tom Nichols
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190469439
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
Technology and increasing levels of education have exposed people to more information than ever before. These societal gains, however, have also helped fuel a surge in narcissistic and misguided intellectual egalitarianism that has crippled informed debates on any number of issues. Today, everyone knows everything: with only a quick trip through WebMD or Wikipedia, average citizens believe themselves to be on an equal intellectual footing with doctors and diplomats. All voices, even the most ridiculous, demand to be taken with equal seriousness, and any claim to the contrary is dismissed as undemocratic elitism. Tom Nichols' The Death of Expertise shows how this rejection of experts has occurred: the openness of the internet, the emergence of a customer satisfaction model in higher education, and the transformation of the news industry into a 24-hour entertainment machine, among other reasons. Paradoxically, the increasingly democratic dissemination of information, rather than producing an educated public, has instead created an army of ill-informed and angry citizens who denounce intellectual achievement. When ordinary citizens believe that no one knows more than anyone else, democratic institutions themselves are in danger of falling either to populism or to technocracy or, in the worst case, a combination of both. An update to the 2017breakout hit, the paperback edition of The Death of Expertise provides a new foreword to cover the alarming exacerbation of these trends in the aftermath of Donald Trump's election. Judging from events on the ground since it first published, The Death of Expertise issues a warning about the stability and survival of modern democracy in the Information Age that is even more important today.

Slow Professor

Slow Professor PDF Author: Maggie Berg
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442645563
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 126

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Book Description
In The Slow Professor, Maggie Berg and Barbara K. Seeber discuss how adopting the principles of the Slow movement in academic life can counter the erosion of humanistic education.

Burn the Business Plan

Burn the Business Plan PDF Author: Carl J. Schramm
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1476794367
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
Business startup advice from the former president of the Ewing Marion Kaufmann Foundation and cofounder of Global Entrepreneurship Week and StartUp America, this “thoughtful study of ‘how businesses really start, grow, and prosper’...dispels quite a few business myths along the way” (Publishers Weekly). Carl Schramm, the man described by The Economist as “The Evangelist of Entrepreneurship,” has written a myth-busting guide packed with tools and techniques to help you get your big idea off the ground. Schramm believes that entrepreneurship has been misrepresented by the media, business books, university programs, and MBA courses. For example, despite the emphasis on the business plan in most business schools, some of the most successful companies in history—Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and hundreds of others—achieved success before they ever had a business plan. Burn the Business Plan punctures the myth of the cool, tech-savvy twenty-something entrepreneur with nothing to lose and venture capital to burn. In fact most people who start businesses are juggling careers and mortgages just like you. The average entrepreneur is actually thirty-nine years old, and the success rate of entrepreneurs over forty is five times higher than that of those under age thirty. Entrepreneurs who come out of the corporate world often have discovered a need for a product or service and have valuable contacts to help them get started. Filled with stories of successful entrepreneurs who drew on real-life experience rather than academic coursework, Burn the Business Plan is the guide to starting and running a business that will actually work for the rest of us.

Reference Guide to Russian Literature

Reference Guide to Russian Literature PDF Author: Neil Cornwell
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 9781884964107
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 1020

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Book Description
"First Published in 1998, Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company."