Mit press sep 2013 (3 Ergebnisse)

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - A leading scientist argues that we must consider deploying climate engineering technology to slow the pace of global warming. Climate engineeringwhich could slow the pace of global warming by injecting reflective particles into the upper atmospherehas emerged in recent years as an extremely controversial technology. And for good reason: it carries unknown risks and it may undermine commitments to conserving energy. Some critics also view it as an immoral human breach of the natural world. The latter objection, David Keith argues in A Scientist's Case for Climate Engineering, is groundless; we have been using technology to alter our environment for years. But he agrees that there are large issues at stake. A leading scientist long concerned about climate change, Keith offers no naïve proposal for an easy fix to what is perhaps the most challenging question of our time; climate engineering is no silver bullet. But he argues that after decades during which very little progress has been made in reducing carbon emissions we must put this technology on the table and consider it responsibly. That doesn't mean we will deploy it, and it doesn't mean that we can abandon efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But we must understand fully what research needs to be done and how the technology might be designed and used. This book provides a clear and accessible overview of what the costs and risks might be, and how climate engineering might fit into a larger program for managing climate change.…

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - A memoir and a meditation on individual and class identity, and the forces that keep us locked in political closets.On thinking the matter through, it doesn't seem exaggerated to assert that my coming out of the sexual closet, my desire to assume and assert my homosexuality, coincided within my personal trajectory with my shutting myself up inside what I might call a class closet.--from Returning to ReimsAfter his father dies, Didier Eribon returns to his hometown of Reims and rediscovers the working-class world he had left behind thirty years earlier. For years, Eribon had thought of his father largely in terms of the latter's intolerable homophobia. Yet his father's death provokes new reflection on Eribon's part about how multiple processes of domination intersect in a given life and in a given culture. Eribon sets out to investigate his past, the history of his family, and the trajectory of his own life. His story weaves together a set of remarkable reflections on the class system in France, on the role of the educational system in class identity, on the way both class and sexual identities are formed, and on the recent history of French politics, including the shifting voting patterns of the working classes--reflected by Eribon's own family, which changed its allegiance from the Communist Party to the National Front. Returning to Reims is a remarkable book of sociological inquiry and critical theory, of interest to anyone concerned with the direction of leftist politics in the contemporary world, and to anyone who has ever experienced how sexual identity can clash with other parts of one's identity. A huge success in France since its initial publication in 2009, Returning to Reims received enthusiastic reviews in Le Monde, Libération, L'Express, Les Inrockuptibles, and elsewhere.…

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - An account of architecture's postwar ambition to transform itself into a research-oriented and technologically complex discipline of design expertise.After World War II, a second modernism emerged in architecturean attempt, in architectural scholar Joan Ockman's words, "to transform architecture from a 'soft' aesthetic discipline into a 'hard,' objectively verifiable field of design expertise." Architectural thought was influenced by linguistic, behavioral, computational, mediatic, cybernetic, and other urban and behavioral models, as well as systems-based and artificial intelligence theories. This nearly 1,000-page book examines the "techno-social" turn in architecture, taking MIT's School of Architecture and Planning as its exemplar. In essays and interviews, prominent architectural historians and educators examine the postwar "research-industrial" complex, its attendant cult of expertise, and its influence on life and letters both in America and abroad. Paying particular attention to the ways that technological thought affected the culture of the humanities, the social sciences, and architectural design, the book traces this shift toward complexity as it unfolded, from classroom practices to committee deliberations, from the challenges of research to the vicissitudes of funding. Looking closely at the ways that funded research drew academics towards a "problem-solving" and relevance-seeking mentality and away from the imported Bauhaus model of intuition and aesthetics, the book reveals how linguistics, information sciences, operations research, computer technology, and systems theory became part of architecture's expanded toolkit. This is a history not just of a school of architecture but of the research-oriented era itself. It offers a thoroughgoing exploration of the ways that policies, politics, and pedagogy transformed themselves in accord with the exponential growth of institutional power. …