princeton university press aug 2011 (15 Ergebnisse)

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - Rajan shows how the individual choices that collectively brought about the economic meltdown--made by bankers, government officials, and ordinary homeowners--were rational responses to a flawed global financial order in which the incentives to take on risk are incredibly out of step with the dangers those risks pose. He traces the deepening fault lines in a system overly dependent on American consumption to power the world economy and stave off a global downturn; a system where America's thin social safety net has created tremendous political pressure to keep job creation robust, because jobs are the primary provider of health and other benefits; and where the U.S. financial sector, with its skewed incentives, is the critical but unstable link between an overstimulated America and an underconsuming world.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - Jill Lepore, Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer, offers a careful and concerned look at American history according to the far right, from the 'rant heard round the world,' which launched the Tea Party, to the Texas School Board's adoption of a social-studies curriculum that teaches that the United States was established as a Christian nation. Along the way, she provides rare insight into the eighteenth-century struggle for independence - a history of the Revolution, from the archives. Lepore traces the roots of the far right's reactionary history to the bicentennial in the 1970s, when no one could agree on what story a divided nation should tell about its unruly beginnings. Behind the Tea Party's Revolution, she argues, lies a nostalgic and even heartbreaking yearning for an imagined past - a time less troubled by ambiguity, strife, and uncertainty - a yearning for an America that never was.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - Challenges what our policymakers thought they knew about education and education reform, from how to close the achievement gap in public schools to admission standards for top universities. This book uses statistical evidence to show why some of the widely held beliefs in education today - and the policies that have resulted - are wrong.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - 'By dint of creative and exhaustive research, Mary Dudziak has written an excellent book about a facet of Thurgood Marshall's career that has never before received substantial attention. . . . All students of this great man's life owe a major debt to Professor Dudziak's labors.'--Randall Kennedy, author of Sellout: The Politics of Racial Betrayal.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - How do criminals communicate with each other Unlike the rest of us, people planning crimes can't freely advertise their goods and services, nor can they rely on formal institutions to settle disputes and certify quality. They face uniquely intense dilemmas as they grapple with the basic problems of whom to trust, how to make themselves trusted, and how to handle information without being detected by rivals or police. In this book, one of the world's leading scholars of the mafia ranges from ancient Rome to the gangs of modern Japan, from the prisons of Western countries to terrorist and pedophile rings, to explain how despite these constraints, many criminals successfully stay in business. Diego Gambetta shows that as villains balance the lure of criminal reward against the fear of dire punishment, they are inspired to unexpected feats of subtlety and ingenuity in communication. He uncovers the logic of the often bizarre ways in which inveterate and occasional criminals solve their dilemmas, such as why the tattoos and scars etched on a criminal's body function as lines on a professional résumé, why inmates resort to violence to establish their position in the prison pecking order, and why mobsters are partial to nicknames and imitate the behavior they see in mafia movies. Even deliberate self-harm and the disclosure of their crimes are strategically employed by criminals to convey important messages.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - Amid the fear following 9/11 and other recent terror attacks, it is easy to forget the most important fact about terrorist campaigns: they always come to an end - and often far more quickly than expected. Contrary to what many assume, when it comes to dealing with terrorism it may be more important to understand how it ends than how it begins. Only by understanding the common ways in which terrorist movements have died out or been eradicated in the past can we hope to figure out how to speed the decline of today's terrorist groups, while avoiding unnecessary fears and costly overreactions. In How Terrorism Ends, Audrey Kurth Cronin examines how terrorist campaigns have met their demise over the past two centuries, and applies these enduring lessons to outline a new strategy against al-Qaeda. This book answers questions such as: How long do terrorist campaigns last When does targeting the leadership finish a group When do negotiations lead to the end Under what conditions do groups transition to other forms of violence, such as insurgency or civil war How and when do they succeed or fail, and then disappear.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - With 150 accessible articles written by more than 130 leading experts, this essential reference provides authoritative introductions to some of the most important and talked-about topics in American history and politics, from the founding to today. Abridged from the acclaimed Princeton Encyclopedia of American Political History, this is the only single-volume encyclopedia that provides comprehensive coverage of both the traditional topics of U.S. political history and the broader forces that shape American politics - including economics, religion, social movements, race, class, and gender. Fully indexed and cross-referenced, each entry provides crucial context, expert analysis, informed perspectives, and suggestions for further reading.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - The Soviet Union created a unique form of urban modernity, developing institutions of social provisioning for hundreds of millions of people in small and medium-sized industrial cities spread across a vast territory. After the collapse of socialism these institutions were profoundly shaken - casualties, in the eyes of many observers, of market-oriented reforms associated with neoliberalism and the Washington Consensus. In Post-Soviet Social, Stephen Collier examines reform in Russia beyond the Washington Consensus. He turns attention from the noisy battles over stabilization and privatization during the 1990s to subsequent reforms that grapple with the mundane details of pipes, wires, bureaucratic routines, and budgetary formulas that made up the Soviet social state. Drawing on Michel Foucault's lectures from the late 1970s, Post-Soviet Social uses the Russian case to examine neoliberalism as a central form of political rationality in contemporary societies. The book's basic finding - that neoliberal reforms provide a justification for redistribution and social welfare, and may work to preserve the norms and forms of social modernity - lays the groundwork for a critical revision of conventional understandings of these topics.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - Perhaps no twentieth-century composer has provoked a more varied reaction among the music-loving public than Jean Sibelius (1865-1957). Originally hailed as a new Beethoven by much of the Anglo-Saxon world, he was also widely disparaged by critics more receptive to newer trends in music. At the height of his popular appeal, he was revered as the embodiment of Finnish nationalism and the apostle of a new musical naturalism. Yet he seemingly chose that moment to stop composing altogether, despite living for three more decades. Providing wide cultural contexts, contesting received ideas about modernism, and interrogating notions of landscape and nature, Jean Sibelius and His World sheds new light on the critical position occupied by Sibelius in the Western musical tradition.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - 'This ambitious book provides an elegant and much-needed synthesis to many of the ideas that have come to define the field of complex systems and their applications to nature and society. It makes an important contribution to the field, especially for researchers and students looking for an overview of the literature and entry points for research.'--Luis Bettencourt, Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Santa Fe Institute.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - With the stroke of a pen at the Potsdam Conference following the Allied victory in 1945, Breslau, the largest German city east of Berlin, became the Polish city of Wroclaw. Its more than six hundred thousand inhabitants - almost all of them ethnic Germans - were expelled and replaced by Polish settlers from all parts of prewar Poland. Uprooted examines the long-term psychological and cultural consequences of forced migration in twentieth-century Europe through the experiences of Wroclaw's Polish inhabitants. In this pioneering work, Gregor Thum tells the story of how the city's new Polish settlers found themselves in a place that was not only unfamiliar to them but outright repellent given Wroclaw's Prussian-German appearance and the enormous scope of wartime destruction. The immediate consequences were an unstable society, an extremely high crime rate, rapid dilapidation of the building stock, and economic stagnation.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - 'Peasants under Siege is the most nuanced and multifaceted analysis of this topic to date. It will become an instant classic in East European studies. Kligman and Verdery never take the easy way out or smooth over complexity. Their empirical account of Romanian collectivization offers unparalleled detail about the lived realities of village life in early state socialism. This book was a pleasure to read.'--Lynne Haney, New York University.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - 'Balasko provides a clear, thorough, and completely up-to-date look at the basic economic model of supply and demand, in which values are determined through the interaction of individual preferences, endowments, and technologies. This will be an excellent text for advanced graduate students in economic theory, an introduction for mathematics students with an interest in applications of differential topology, and a must-have reference for researchers in general equilibrium theory.'--Karl Shell, Cornell University.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - Statistical mechanics is one of the most exciting areas of physics today, and it also has applications to subjects as diverse as economics, social behavior, algorithmic theory, and evolutionary biology. Statistical Mechanics in a Nutshell offers the most concise, self-contained introduction to this rapidly developing field. Requiring only a background in elementary calculus and elementary mechanics, this book starts with the basics, introduces the most important developments in classical statistical mechanics over the last thirty years, and guides readers to the very threshold of today's cutting-edge research.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - Intensive research in matrix completions, moments, and sums of Hermitian squares has yielded a multitude of results in recent decades. This book provides a comprehensive account of this quickly developing area of mathematics and applications and gives complete proofs of many recently solved problems. With MATLAB codes and more than 200 exercises, the book is ideal for a special topics course for graduate or advanced undergraduate students in mathematics or engineering, and will also be a valuable resource for researchers. Often driven by questions from signal processing, control theory, and quantum information, the subject of this book has inspired mathematicians from many subdisciplines, including linear algebra, operator theory, measure theory, and complex function theory. In turn, the applications are being pursued by researchers in areas such as electrical engineering, computer science, and physics. The book is self-contained, has many examples, and for the most part requires only a basic background in undergraduate mathematics, primarily linear algebra and some complex analysis. The book also includes an extensive discussion of the literature, with close to 600 references from books and journals from a wide variety of disciplines.