Traversing Digital Babel: Information, E-Government, and Exchange
Author: Alon Peled The computer systems of government agencies are notoriously complex. New technologies are piled on older technologies, creating layers that call to mind an archaeological dig. Obsolete programming languages and closed mainframe designs offer barriers to integration with other agency systems. Worldwide, these unwieldy systems waste billions of dollars, keep citizens from receiving services, and even -- as seen in interoperability failures on 9/11 and during Hurricane Katrina -- cost lives. In this book, Alon Peled offers a groundbreaking approach for enabling information sharing among public sector agencies: using selective incentives to nudge agencies to exchange information assets. Peled proposes the establishment of a Public Sector Information Exchange (PSIE), through which agencies would trade information. After describing public sector information sharing failures and the advantages of incentivized sharing, Peled examines the U.S. Open Data program, and the gap between its rhetoric and results. He offers examples of creative public sector information sharing in the United States, Australia, Brazil, the Netherlands, and Iceland. Peled argues that information is a contested commodity, and draws lessons from the trade histories of other contested commodities -- including cadavers for anatomical dissection in nineteenth-century Britain. He explains how agencies can exchange information as a contested commodity through a PSIE program tailored to an individual country's needs, and he describes the legal, economic, and technical foundations of such a program. Touching on issues from data ownership to freedom of information, Peled offers pragmatic advice to politicians, bureaucrats, technologists, and citizens for revitalizing critical information flows.
Author: David L. Hardee, Edited by Frank A. Blazich, Jr.
A forgotten account, written in the immediate aftermath of World War II, which vividly portrays the valor, sacrifice, suffering, and liberation of the defenders of Bataan and Corregidor through the eyes of one survivor. The personal memoir of Colonel David L. Hardee, first drafted at sea from April-May 1945 following his liberation from Japanese captivity, is a thorough treatment of his time in the Philippines. A career infantry officer, Hardee fought during the Battle of Bataan as executive officer of the Provisional Air Corps Regiment. Captured in April 1942 after the American surrender on Bataan, Hardee survived the Bataan Death March and proceeded to endure a series of squalid prison camps. A debilitating hernia left Hardee too ill to travel to Japan in 1944, making him one of the few lieutenant colonels to remain in the Philippines and subsequently survive the war. As a primary account written almost immediately after his liberation, Hardees memoir is fresh, vivid, and devoid of decades of faded memories or contemporary influences associated with memoirs written years after an experience. This once-forgotten memoir has been carefully edited, illustrated and annotated to unlock the true depths of Hardees experience as a soldier, prisoner, and liberated survivor of the Pacific War.
Author: William Caferro
John Hawkwood was fourteenth-century Italy's most notorious and successful soldier. A man known for cleverness and daring, he was the most feared mercenary in Renaissance Italy. Born in England, Hawkood began his career in France during the Hundred Years' War and crossed into Italy with the famed White Company in 1361. From that time until his death in 1394, Hawkwood fought throughout the peninsula as a captain of armies in times of war and as a commander of marauding bands during times of peace. He achieved international fame, and his acquaintances included such prominent people as Geoffrey Chaucer, Catherine of Siena, Jean Froissart, and Francis Petrarch. City-states constantly tried to outbid each other for his services, for which he received money, land, and in the case of Florence, citizenshipa most unusual honor for an Englishman. When Hawkwood died, the Florentines buried him with great ceremony in their cathedral, an honor denied their greatest poet, Dante. His final resting place, however, is disputed. Historian William Caferro's ambitious account of Hawkwood is both a biography and a study of warfare and statecraft. Caferro has mined more than twenty archives in England and Italy, creating an authoritative portrait of Hawkwood as an extraordinary military leader, if not always an admirable human being. Caferro's Hawkwood possessed a talent for dissimulation and craft both on the battlefield and at the negotiating table, and, ironically, managed to gain a reputation for honesty while beating his Italian hosts at their own game of duplicity and manipulation. In addition to a thorough account of Hawkwood's life and career, Caferro's study offers a fundamental reassessment of the Italian military situation and of the mercenary system. Hawkwood's career is treated not in isolation but firmly within the context of Italian society, against the backdrop of unfolding crises: famine, plague, popular unrest, and religious schism. Indeed, Hawkwood's life and career offer a unique vantage point from which we can study the economic, social, and political impacts of war.
Author: Lisa L. Ossian
As Americans geared up for World War II, each state responded according to its economy and circumstancesas well as the disposition of its citizens. This book considers the war years in Iowa by looking at activity on different home fronts and analyzing the resilience of Iowans in answering the call to support the war effort. With its location in the center of the country, far from potentially threatened coasts, Iowa was also the center of American isolationismhistorically Republican and resistant to involvement in another European war. Yet Iowans were quick to step up, and Lisa Ossian draws on historical archives as well as on artifacts of popular culture to record the rhetoric and emotion of their support. Ossian shows how Iowans quickly moved from skepticism to overwhelming enthusiasm for the war and answered the call on four fronts: farms, factories, communities, and kitchens. Iowas farmers faced labor and machinery shortages, yet produced record amounts of crops and animalseven at the expense of valuable topsoil. Ordnance plants turned out bombs and machine gun bullets. Meanwhile, communities supported war bond and scrap drives, while housewives coped with rationing, raised Victory gardens, and turned to home canning. The Home Fronts of Iowa, 19391945 depicts real people and their concerns, showing the price paid in physical and mental exhaustion and notes the heavy toll exacted on Iowas sons who fell in battle. Ossian also considers the relevance of such issues as race, class, and genderparticularly the role of women on the home front and the recruitment of both women and blacks for factory worktaking into account a prevalent suspicion of ethnic groups by the states largely homogeneous population. The fact that Iowans could become loyal citizen soldiersforming an Industrial and Defense Commission even before Pearl Harborspeaks not only to the patriotism of these sturdy midwesterners but also to the overall resilience of Americans. In unraveling how Iowans could so overwhelmingly support the war, Ossian digs deep into history to show us the power of emotionand to help us better understand why World War II is consistently remembered as the Good War.
Author: Sheldon S. Wolin
Alexis de Tocqueville may be the most influential political thinker in American history. He also led an unusually active and ambitious career in French politics. In this magisterial book, one of America's most important contemporary theorists draws on decades of research and thought to present the first work that fully connects Tocqueville's political and theoretical lives. In doing so, Sheldon Wolin presents sweeping new interpretations of Tocqueville's major works and of his place in intellectual history. As he traces the origins and impact of Tocqueville's ideas, Wolin also offers a profound commentary on the general trajectory of Western political life over the past two hundred years. Wolin proceeds by examining Tocqueville's key writings in light of his experiences in the troubled world of French politics. He portrays Democracy in America, for example, as a theory of discovery that emerged from Tocqueville's contrasting experiences of America and of France's constitutional monarchy. He shows us how Tocqueville used Recollections to reexamine his political commitments in light of the revolutions of 1848 and the threat of socialism. He portrays The Old Regime and the French Revolution as a work of theoretical history designed to throw light on the Bonapartist despotism he saw around him. Throughout, Wolin highlights the tensions between Tocqueville's ideas and his activities as a politician, arguing that--despite his limited political success--Tocqueville was ''perhaps the last influential theorist who can be said to have truly cared about political life.'' In the course of the book, Wolin also shows that Tocqueville struggled with many of the forces that constrain politics today, including the relentless advance of capitalism, of science and technology, and of state bureaucracy. He concludes that Tocqueville's insights and anxieties about the impotence of politics in a ''postaristocratic'' era speak directly to the challenges of our own ''postdemocratic'' age. A monumental new study of Tocqueville, this is also a rich and provocative work about the past, the present, and the future of democratic life in America and abroad.
Author: Harvey J. Graff
Interdisciplinarityor the interrelationships among distinct fields, disciplines, or branches of knowledge in pursuit of new answers to pressing problemsis one of the most contested topics in higher education today. Some see it as a way to break down the silos of academic departments and foster creative interchange, while others view it as a destructive force that will diminish academic quality and destroy the university as we know it. In Undisciplining Knowledge, acclaimed scholar Harvey J. Graff presents readers with the first comparative and critical history of interdisciplinary initiatives in the modern university. Arranged chronologically, the book tells the engaging story of how various academic fields both embraced and fought off efforts to share knowledge with other scholars. It is a story of myths, exaggerations, and misunderstandings, on all sides. Touching on a wide variety of disciplinesincluding genetic biology, sociology, the humanities, communications, social relations, operations research, cognitive science, materials science, nanotechnology, cultural studies, literary studies, and biosciencesthe book examines the ideals, theories, and practices of interdisciplinarity through comparative case studies. Graff interweaves this narrative with a social, institutional, and intellectual history of interdisciplinary efforts over the 140 years of the modern university, focusing on both its implementation and evolution while exploring substantial differences in definitions, goals, institutional locations, and modes of organization across different areas of focus. Higher education scholars, faculty members, and administrators and will find the books practical advice on building, operating, and avoiding fallacies and errors in interdisciplinary research and education invaluable.
Author: Saint-John Perse
For Perse these lines are brief, but they are as fine as anything he has done. With these words The Times Literary Supplement greeted the publication in France of the last four poems written by the Nobel Prize winner before his death in 1975. This volume provides their French texts with an English translation by Richard Howard, completing the publication in Bollingen Series of the collected poetry of St.-John Perse. Originally published in .The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Author: Bruce F. Berg
Throughout its history, New York City has been challenged by a variety of public health crises. Since the nineteenth centurywhen it became one of the first American cities to develop a comprehensive public health infrastructureNew York has also stood at the forefront of formulating and implementing urban health policy. Healing Gotham examines in depth how the city has responded to five serious contemporary public health threats: childhood lead poisoning, childhood asthma, HIV/AIDS, obesity, and West Nile virus. Bruce F. Berg examines the rise and incidence of each condition in the city while explaining why the array of primary tools utilized by urban policy makersincluding monitoring and surveillance, education, regulations, and the direct provision of serviceshave been successful in controlling public health problems. He also argues that forces such as race and ethnicity, New York Citys relationship to the state and federal government, the promotion of economic development, and the availability of knowledge related to preventing, treating, and managing illness all influence effective public health policy making. By contrasting these five particular cases, this exciting study allows scholars and students to compare public health policy through time and across type. It also helps policy makers understand how best to develop and implement effective public health strategies around the United States.
Weighing as much as 2000 pounds and reaching lengths of over seven feet leatherback turtles are the worlds largest reptile These unusual sea turtles have a thick pliable shell that helps them to withstand great depthsthey can swim down more than one thousand meters below the surface in search of food And what food source sustains these goliaths Their diet consists almost exclusively of jellyfish a meal they crisscross the oceans to find Leatherbacks have been declining in recent decades and some predict they will be gone by the end of this century Why Because of two primary factors human redevelopment of nesting beaches and commercial fishing There are only twentynine index beaches in the world where these turtles nest and there is immense pressure to develop most of them into homes or resorts At the same time longline and gill net fisheries continue to overwhelm waters frequented by leatherbacks In The Leatherback Turtle James R Spotila and Pilar Santidrin Tomillo bring together the worlds leading experts to produce a volume that reveals the biology of the leatherback while focusing a spotlight on the conservation problems and solutions related to the species The book leaves us with options embark on the conservation strategy laid out within its pages and save one of natures most splendid creations or watch yet another magnificent species disappear
Author: C. S. Manegold
Ten Hills Farm tells the powerful saga of five generations of slave owners in colonial New England. Settled in 1630 by John Winthrop--who would later become governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony--Ten Hills Farm was a six-hundred-acre estate just north of Boston. Winthrop, famous for envisioning his 'city on the hill' and lauded as a paragon of justice, owned slaves on that ground and passed the first law in North America condoning slavery. In this mesmerizing narrative, C. S. Manegold exposes how the fates of the land and the families that lived on it were bound to America's most tragic and tainted legacy. Challenging received ideas about America and the Atlantic world, Ten Hills Farm digs deep to bring the story of slavery in the North full circle--from concealment to recovery. Manegold follows the compelling tale from the early seventeenth to the early twenty-first century, from New England, through the South, to the sprawling slave plantations of the Caribbean. John Winthrop, famous for envisioning his city on the hill and lauded as a paragon of justice, owned slaves on that ground and passed the first law in North America condoning slavery. Each successive owner of Ten Hills Farm--from John Usher, who was born into money, to Isaac Royall, who began as a humble carpenter's son and made his fortune in Antigua--would depend upon slavery's profits until the 1780s, when Massachusetts abolished the practice. In time, the land became a city, its questionable past discreetly buried, until now. Challenging received ideas about America and the Atlantic world, Ten Hills Farm digs deep to bring the story of slavery in the North full circle--from concealment to recovery.