Producing Power: The Pre-Chernobyl History of the Soviet Nuclear Industry
Author: Sonja D. Schmid The Chernobyl disaster has been variously ascribed to human error, reactor design flaws, and industry mismanagement. Six former Chernobyl employees were convicted of criminal negligence; they defended themselves by pointing to reactor design issues. Other observers blamed the Soviet style of ideologically driven economic and industrial management. In Producing Power, Sonja Schmid draws on interviews with veterans of the Soviet nuclear industry and extensive research in Russian archives as she examines these alternate accounts. Rather than pursue one definitive explanation, she investigates how each of these narratives makes sense in its own way and demonstrates that each implies adherence to a particular set of ideas -- about high-risk technologies, human-machine interactions, organizational methods for ensuring safety and productivity, and even about the legitimacy of the Soviet state. She also shows how these attitudes shaped, and were shaped by, the Soviet nuclear industry from its very beginnings.Schmid explains that Soviet experts established nuclear power as a driving force of social, not just technical, progress. She examines the Soviet nuclear industry's dual origins in weapons and electrification programs, and she traces the emergence of nuclear power experts as a professional community. Schmid also fundamentally reassesses the design choices for nuclear power reactors in the shadow of the Cold War's arms race. Schmid's account helps us understand how and why a complex sociotechnical system broke down. Chernobyl, while unique and specific to the Soviet experience, can also provide valuable lessons for contemporary nuclear projects.
Author: Nancy Neveloff Dubler and Carol B. Liebman
Expanded by two-thirds from the 2004 edition, the new edition features two new role plays, a new chapter on how to write chart notes, and a discussion of new understandings of the role of the clinical ethics consultant. **** Bioethics Mediation offers stories about patients, families, and health care providers enmeshed in conflict as they wrestle with decisions about life and death. It provides guidance for those charged with supporting the patients traditional and religious commitments and personal wishes. Todays medical system, without intervention, privileges those within shared cultures of communication and disadvantages those lacking power and position, such as immigrants, the poor, and nonprofessionals. This book gives clinical ethics consultants, palliative care providers, and physicians, nurses, and other medical staff the tools they need to understand and manage conflict while respecting the values of patients and family members. Conflicts come in different guises, and the key to successful resolution is early identification and intervention. Every bioethics mediator needs to be prepared with skills to listen, level the playing field, identify individual interests, explore options, and help craft a principled resolutiona consensus that identifies a plan aligned with accepted ethical principles, legal stipulations, and moral rules and that charts a clear course of future intervention. The organization of the book makes it ideal for teaching or as a handbook for the practitioner. It includes actual cases, modified to protect the privacy of patients, providers, and institutions; detailed case analyses; tools for step-by-step mediation; techniques for the mediator; sample chart notes; and a set of actual role plays with expert mediator and bioethics commentaries. The role plays include: discharge planning for a dying patient
Author: Judith Buxton-Keenlyside
Reprinted by popular demand, this study of Canadian spinning wheels in the collection of the Canadian Museum of Civilization, demonstrates their broad variation by period, region and manufacturer. The discussion focuses on the wheel-driven spindle but also includes the very popular hand-driven spindle. Both Aboriginal and European spinning traditions are described.
Author: George W. McClure
George McClure offers here a far-reaching analysis of the role of consolation in Italian Renaissance culture, showing how the humanists' interest in despair, and their effort to open up this realm in both social and personal terms, signaled a shift toward a heightened secularization in European thought. Analyzing works by fourteenth-and fifteenth-century writers, from Petrarch to Marsilio Ficino, McClure examines the treatment of such problems as bereavement, fear of death, illness, despair, and misfortune. These writers, who evinced a belief in the legitimacy of secular sadness, tried to forge a wisdom that in their view dealt more realistically with the art of living and dying than did the disputations of scholastic philosophy and theology.Arguing that consolatory concerns helped spur the revival of classical schools of psychological thought, McClure reveals that the humanists sought comfort from once-neglected troves of Stoic, Peripatetic, Epicurean, Platonic, and Christian thought. He contends that the humanists' pursuit of solace and their duty as consolers provided not only a forum but perhaps also an incentive for the articulation of prominent Renaissance themes concerning immortality, the dignity of man, and the sanctity of worldly endeavor.Originally published in 1991.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 paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback 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: Kyle E. Ciani
In Choosing to Care, Kyle E. Ciani examines the long history of interactions between parents and social reformers from diverse backgrounds in the development of social welfare programs, particularly childcare, in San Diego, California. Ciani explores how a variety of peoplefrom destitute parents and tired guardians to benevolent advocates and professional social workersconnected over childcare concerns in a city that experienced tremendous demographic changes caused by urbanization, immigration, and the growth of a local U.S. military infrastructure from 1850 to 1950.Choosing to Care examines four significant areas where San Diegos programs were distinct from, and contributed to, the national childcare agenda: the importance of the transnational U.S.Mexico border relationship in creating effective childcare programs; the development of vocational education to curtail juvenile delinquency; the promotion of nursery school education; and the advancement of an emergency daycare program during the Great Depression and World War II. Ciani shows how children from families in unstable situations, especially children from Native American, Asian, Mexican-descent, African American, and impoverished Anglo families, challenged a social reform system that defined care as both social control and behavioral regulation.Choosing to Care incorporates a broader definition of childcare to include efforts by governmental and organizational bodies and persons to maintain and nurture the physical, mental, and social health and development of minors when parents and guardians cannot do so. It offers a more complex understanding of how multiple avenues and resources established social welfare in San Diego and other West Coast cities.
Author: Niilo Kauppi
Democracy, social resources and political power in the European Union' develops a structural constructivist theory of the European Union and critically analyses, through French and Finnish empirical cases, the political practices that maintain the Union's 'democratic deficit'.
Author: John D. Currey
This book relates the mechanical and structural properties of bone to its function in man and other vertebrates. John Currey, one of the pioneers of modern bone research, reviews existing information in the field and particularly emphasizes the correlation of the structure of bone with its various uses.Originally published in 1984.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 paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback 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: Marie-Laure Ryan
Is there a significant difference between engagement with a game and engagement with a movie or novel? Can interactivity contribute to immersion, or is there a trade-off between the immersive world aspect of texts and their interactive game dimension? As Marie-Laure Ryan demonstrates in Narrative as Virtual Reality 2, the questions raised by the new interactive technologies have their precursors and echoes in pre-electronic literary and artistic traditions. Approaching the idea of virtual reality as a metaphor for total art, Ryan applies the concepts of immersion and interactivity to develop a phenomenology of narrative experience that encompasses reading, watching, and playing. The book weighs traditional literary narratives against the new textual genres made possible by the electronic revolution of the past thirty years, including hypertext, electronic poetry, interactive drama, digital installation art, computer games, and multi-user online worlds like Second Life and World of Warcraft. In this completely revised edition, Ryan reflects on the developments that have taken place over the past fifteen years in terms of both theory and practice and focuses on the increase of narrativity in video games and its corresponding loss in experimental digital literature. Following the cognitive approaches that have rehabilitated immersion as the product of fundamental processes of world-construction and mental simulation, she details the many forms that interactivity has takenor hopes to takein digital texts, from determining the presentation of signs to affecting the level of story.
Author: Tony E. Jackson
The connection between speech and writing in human language has been a matter of philosophical debate since antiquity. By plumbing the depths of this complex relationship, Tony E. Jackson explains how the technology of alphabetic writing has determined the nature of the modern novel. Jacksons analysis begins with the universal human act of oral storytelling. While telling stories is fundamental to human experience, writing is not. Yet the novel, perhaps more than any other literary form, depends on writing. In fact, as Jackson shows quite clearly, it is writing rather than print that most shapes the forms and contents of the genre. Through striking new readings of works by Austen, Mary Shelley, Dickens, Forster, Woolf, Lessing, and McEwan, Jackson reveals how the phenomena of speech and storytelling interact with the technological characteristics of writing. He also explains how those interactions induced the generic changes in the novel from its eighteenth-century beginnings to postmodernism and beyond. His claims, grounded in a contemporary understanding of human cognitive capacities and constraints, offer a fresh interpretive approach to all written literature. An essential text in the study of the written word, The Technology of the Novel provides new insights into the evolving nature of one of the modern world's most popular narrative forms.