Near Human

Near Human PDF Author: Mette N. Svendsen
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 1978818238
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 231

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Book Description
Near Human takes us into the borders of human and animal life. In the animal facility, fragile piglets substitute for humans who cannot be experimented on. In the neonatal intensive care unit, extremely premature infants prompt questions about whether they are too fragile to save or, if they survive, whether they will face a life of severe disability. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork carried out on farms, in animal-based experimental science labs, and in hospitals, Mette N. Svendsen shows that practices of substitution redirect the question of "what it means" to be human to "what it takes" to be human. The near humanness of preterm infants and research piglets becomes an avenue to unravel how neonatal life is imagined, how societal belonging is evaluated, and how the Danish welfare state is forged. This courageous multi-sited and multi-species approach cracks open the complex ethical field of valuating life and making different kinds of pigs and different kinds of humans belong in Denmark.

Near Human

Near Human PDF Author: Mette N. Svendsen
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 1978818238
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 231

Get Book Here

Book Description
Near Human takes us into the borders of human and animal life. In the animal facility, fragile piglets substitute for humans who cannot be experimented on. In the neonatal intensive care unit, extremely premature infants prompt questions about whether they are too fragile to save or, if they survive, whether they will face a life of severe disability. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork carried out on farms, in animal-based experimental science labs, and in hospitals, Mette N. Svendsen shows that practices of substitution redirect the question of "what it means" to be human to "what it takes" to be human. The near humanness of preterm infants and research piglets becomes an avenue to unravel how neonatal life is imagined, how societal belonging is evaluated, and how the Danish welfare state is forged. This courageous multi-sited and multi-species approach cracks open the complex ethical field of valuating life and making different kinds of pigs and different kinds of humans belong in Denmark.

The Singularity Is Near

The Singularity Is Near PDF Author: Ray Kurzweil
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101218886
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 992

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Book Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Celebrated futurist Ray Kurzweil, hailed by Bill Gates as “the best person I know at predicting the future of artificial intelligence,” presents an “elaborate, smart, and persuasive” (The Boston Globe) view of the future course of human development. “Artfully envisions a breathtakingly better world.”—Los Angeles Times “Startling in scope and bravado.”—Janet Maslin, The New York Times “An important book.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer At the onset of the twenty-first century, humanity stands on the verge of the most transforming and thrilling period in its history. It will be an era in which the very nature of what it means to be human will be both enriched and challenged as our species breaks the shackles of its genetic legacy and achieves inconceivable heights of intelligence, material progress, and longevity. While the social and philosophical ramifications of these changes will be profound, and the threats they pose considerable, The Singularity Is Near presents a radical and optimistic view of the coming age that is both a dramatic culmination of centuries of technological ingenuity and a genuinely inspiring vision of our ultimate destiny.

A Brief History of the Human Race

A Brief History of the Human Race PDF Author: Michael Cook
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 9780393052312
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 418

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Book Description
Why has human history been crowded into the last few thousand years? Why has it happened at all? Could it have happened in a radically different way? What should we make of the disproportionate role of the West in shaping the world we currently live in? This witty, intelligent hopscotch through human history addresses these questions and more. Michael Cook sifts the human career on earth for the most telling nuggets and then uses them to elucidate the whole. From the calendars of Mesoamerica and the temple courtesans of medieval India to the intricacies of marriage among an aboriginal Australian tribe, Cook explains the sometimes eccentric variety in human cultural expression. He guides us from the prehistoric origins of human history across the globe through the increasing unification of the world, first by Muslims and then by European Christians in the modern period, illuminating the contingencies that have governed broad historical change. "A smart, literate survey of human life from paleolithic times until 9/11."—Edward Rothstein, The New York Times

Chinook texts

Chinook texts PDF Author: Franz Boas
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : America
Languages : en
Pages : 588

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Book Description


Automatic Religion

Automatic Religion PDF Author: Paul Christopher Johnson
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022674986X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 333

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Book Description
What distinguishes humans from nonhumans? Two common answers—free will and religion—are in some ways fundamentally opposed. Whereas free will enjoys a central place in our ideas of spontaneity, authorship, and deliberation, religious practices seem to involve a suspension of or relief from the exercise of our will. What, then, is agency, and why has it occupied such a central place in theories of the human? Automatic Religion explores an unlikely series of episodes from the end of the nineteenth century, when crucial ideas related to automatism and, in a different realm, the study of religion were both being born. Paul Christopher Johnson draws on years of archival and ethnographic research in Brazil and France to explore the crucial boundaries being drawn at the time between humans, “nearhumans,” and automata. As agency came to take on a more central place in the philosophical, moral, and legal traditions of the West, certain classes of people were excluded as less-than-human. Tracking the circulation of ideas across the Atlantic, Johnson tests those boundaries, revealing how they were constructed on largely gendered and racial foundations. In the process, he reanimates one of the most mysterious and yet foundational questions in trans-Atlantic thought: what is agency?

'And'

'And' PDF Author: Barry Schein
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262035634
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 1035

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Book Description
A bold argument that “and” always means “&,” the truth-functional sentential connective. In this book, Barry Schein argues that “and” is always the sentential logical connective with the same, one, meaning. “And” always means “&,” across the varied constructions in which it is tokened in natural language. Schein examines the constructions that challenge his thesis, and shows that the objections disappear when these constructions are translated into Eventish, a neo-Davidsonian event semantics, and, enlarged with Cinerama Semantics, a vocabulary for spatial orientation and navigation. Besides rescuing “and” from ambiguity, Eventish and Cinerama Semantics solve general puzzles of grammar and meaning unrelated to conjunction, revealing the book's central thesis in the process: aspects of meaning mistakenly attributed to “and” are discovered to reflect neighboring structures previously unseen and unacknowledged. Schein argues that Eventish and Cinerama Semantics offer a fundamental revision to clause structure and what aspects of meaning are represented therein. Eventish is distinguished by four features: supermonadicity, which enlarges verbal decomposition so that every argument relates to its own event; descriptive event anaphora, which replaces simple event variables with silent descriptive pronouns; adverbialization, which interposes adverbials derived from the descriptive content of every DP; and AdrPs, which replace all NPs with Address Phrases that locate what nominals denote within scenes or frames of reference. With 'And,' Schein rehabilitates an old rule of transformational, generative grammar, answering the challenges to it exhaustively and meticulously.

NMC OPINION POLL – AMBAZARI PRABHAG (53)

NMC OPINION POLL – AMBAZARI PRABHAG (53) PDF Author: Dr. Mukul Burghate
Publisher: www.ijcams.com
ISBN:
Category : Antiques & Collectibles
Languages : en
Pages : 1781

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Book Description
An opinion survey like this has been done with an objective to understand the performance, expectations & problems of the citizens at the grass root level. Ambhzari Prabhag was selected for the prpose of this research as it is very varied with respect to area covered & the socio economic characteristics of the voters of this area. The first section of the report consists of project framework & research methodology followed for the research. The Survey was conducted for Ambazari Prabhag on 12237 voters. A voter is a person who is a permanent resident of Ambazari Prabhag & is above 18 years of age. The research objectives are to know local problems, awareness, level of satisfaction, expectations from the corporator & the parameters on which they select the corporator. The primary data from all the clusters was collected with the help of structured questionnaire. The second sections of the report details the socio economic background of the respondents of the Ambazari Prabhag. It gives information on the demographic characteristics of the Ambazari prabhag population, such as age and gender, as well as other socio-demographic variables, including marital status, living arrangements, religion, education class & the size of the family. These variables are important as they would help to correlate the expectations, problems & satisfaction level of the voters from the current administration of NMC in Ambazari Prabhag as well as unfulfilled expectations of the voters. The third section of the report gives the level of the awareness amongst the respondents about the upcoming NMC elections, level of satisfaction with the functioning of the current corporator & reasons for dissatisfaction, if any of the respondents. It also gives the results of the major problems of the respondents in their locality & also lists out the responses for the achievements of the current corporator. The fourth section of the report gives the results for the preferences & expectations of the respondents from the corporator. It give responses for the sought after qualities in the corporator like accessibility, reputation, popularity to name few. The preferred age group, personality traits of the next corporator in the opinion of the respondents is also listed in this section. The last section of the report gives the brief analysis of all the 9 clusters in which Prabhag was divided for the purpose of this survey. It enables to understand all the factors at the micro level & be more specific in conducting further analysis.

Carnivoran Ecology

Carnivoran Ecology PDF Author: Steven W. Buskirk
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192677977
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
These charismatic mammals, which include dogs, cats, hyenas, weasels, mongooses, seals, sea lions and bears, have always held special importance to humans throughout history and continue to do so today. In recent decades, the emergence of new technologies has completely transformed our knowledge of how carnivorans interact with their environments and consequently reshaped our view of carnivoran ecology. This unique synthesis uses examples from a diverse and expanding carnivoran literature, drawing from all carnivoran families and spanning the world's oceans and continents, to produce a clearly written and richly illustrated book that reviews our current state of knowledge of carnivoran ecology. It addresses all levels of biological organization and function, from genes to enzymes, organisms, populations, and ecosystems. Special attention is given to how carnivoran species interact with their prey, each other, and humans. There is an emphasis on community interactions and their importance in carnivoran evolution, showing how evolutionary constraints (morphological, physiological, and behavioral) structure communities today. The book's approach is strongly comparative, contrasting herbivores with carnivores, predators with scavengers, and cats with dogs. Carnivorans play important roles in many high-profile conservation cases, either as species of concern or agents of endangerment, and their importance is demonstrated in both contexts. Carnivoran Ecology is an accessible advanced textbook aimed principally at senior undergraduate and graduate students taking courses in carnivore ecology, as well as a broad audience of professional academics (especially carnivore and mammalian biologists), researchers, and practitioners working in both governmental and non-governmental organizations. A significant secondary market will exist amongst the large amateur naturalist community including those wishing to explore the ecological and evolutionary links between domestic carnivorans (dogs, cats, ferrets etc.) and their wild counterparts.

The Most Important Scientific Discovery of All Time

The Most Important Scientific Discovery of All Time PDF Author: And the Scientfic Revolution Going on Right Now
Publisher: Strategic Book Publishing
ISBN: 1612044891
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 147

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Book Description
A basic claim of this book is that modern science has found us humans to be much less smart and rational than we have throughout our long history led ourselves to believe we are. Because of this important difference, we humans are much more likely than we think to cause our own nuclear extinction in the near future. Although Ed McGrath has been a college graduate and interested in science most of his life, he majored in other subjects until he decided to become a psychology professor in his early forties. He returned to California State University in Los Angeles and achieved perfect grades in experimental psychology as an undergraduate and for his master's degree. He then successfully fulfilled the course requirements for a Ph.D. at the University of California. Discovering that human psychology was not based on much evidence, he also attended anthropology lectures on human evolution, hoping to find improvement potential for psychology. However, one professor warned Ed that he and the five professors on Ed's Ph.D. research committee did not like Ed's reputation for questioning the lack of testable evidence in classes and seminars, and eventually dismissed him from the Ph.D. program.Although Ed was initially disappointed, he found time to inquire into other related modern scientific discoveries. He began to see new and more important relationships among some of these discoveries and his own beliefs. That set of related discoveries eventually became an important component of this book. About the Author: Ed McGrath is a retired property tax expert, assessor and realtor. Originally from New York City, he now lives near Pasadena, California. Publisher's website: http: //SBPRA.com/EdMcGrat

Oil and Gas Program

Oil and Gas Program PDF Author: William Van Horn (M.M.S.)
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Habitat (Ecology)
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
This summary of the United States Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) Oil and Gas Program discusses the effects of exploration for, and development of, oil and gas in the continental shelf areas of the United States, including Alaska, in terms of the physical, biological and socioeconomic environments, including oil spills.