At The First Table

"At the First Table demonstrates the ways in which early modern Spaniards used food as a mechanism for the performance and maintenance of social identity"--

Research on European food culture has expanded substantially in recent years, telling us more about food preparation, ingredients, feasting and fasting rituals, and the social and cultural connotations of food. At the First Table demonstrates the ways in which early modern Spaniards used food as a mechanism for the performance of social identity. People perceived themselves and others as belonging to clearly defined categories of gender, status, age, occupation, and religion, and each of these categories carried certain assumptions about proper behavior and appropriate relationships with others. Food choices and dining customs were effective and visible ways of displaying these behaviors in the choreography of everyday life. In contexts from funerals to festivals to their treatment of the poor, Spaniards used food to display their wealth, social connections, religious affiliation, regional heritage, and membership in various groups and institutions and to reinforce perceptions of difference. Research on European food culture has been based largely on studies of England, France, and Italy, but more locally on Spain. Jodi Campbell combines these studies with original research in household accounts, university and monastic records, and municipal regulations to provide a broad overview of Spanish food customs and to demonstrate their connections to identity and social change in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Transplanted Canadian, New Yorker writer and author of Paris to the Moon, Gopnik is publishing this major new work of narrative non-fiction alongside his 2011 Massey Lecture. An illuminating, beguiling tour of the morals and manners of our present food manias, in search of eating's deeper truths, asking "Where do we go from here?" Never before have so many North Americans cared so much about food. But much of our attention to it tends towards grim calculation (what protein is best? how much?); social preening ("I can always score the last reservation at xxxxx"); or graphic machismo ("watch me eat this now"). Gopnik shows we are not the first food fetishists but we are losing sight of a timeless truth, "the table comes first": what goes on around the table matters as much to life as what we put on the table: families come together (or break apart) over the table, conversations across the simplest or grandest board can change the world, pain and romance unfold around it--all this is more essential to our lives than the provenance of any zucchini or the road it travelled to reach us. Whatever dilemmas we may face as omnivores, how not what we eat ultimately defines our society. Gathering people and places drawn from a quarter century's reporting in North America and France, The Table Comes First marks the beginning a new conversation about the way we eat now.

What determines human intelligence? What is its relationship to creativity? Its potential for change? To illuminate some of these questions, J. McVicker Hunt has gathered together a number of essays. This volume contains some of the answers that have been found, but emphasizes that we still need to learn a great deal about developing ways to assess our human resources. We remain. for example, uncertain about what abilities pinpoint intelligence, and the extent to which intellectual ability can predict classroom successw-even the ability to perfrom a job well., Articles in this book show that indications of heritability have nothing to say about the educability of individuals or classes w races. Investigations indicate that there is a great deal more plasticity in the development of behavior and abilities than was presumed by those who believe in predetermined intelligence. They also indicate that knowledge and ability both grow during the early years; knowledge grows throughout life: but the ability to acquire new knowledge and skill declines over time., These areas of developing knowledge are of political as well as social significance. Any attempts to upgrade the abilities of the poor or the disadvantaged must necessarily be concerned with manipulation of the environment. These articles represent the most advanced available information about the relationship of experience, environment and heredity to the development of measurable intelligence.

Encompassing a broad range of forms and sources of data, this textbook introduces data systems through a progressive presentation. Introduction to Data Systems covers data acquisition starting with local files, then progresses to data acquired from relational databases, from REST APIs and through web scraping. It teaches data forms/formats from tidy data to relationally defined sets of tables to hierarchical structure like XML and JSON using data models to convey the structure, operations, and constraints of each data form. The starting point of the book is a foundation in Python programming found in introductory computer science classes or short courses on the language, and so does not require prerequisites of data structures, algorithms, or other courses. This makes the material accessible to students early in their educational career and equips them with understanding and skills that can be applied in computer science, data science/data analytics, and information technology programs as well as for internships and research experiences. This book is accessible to a wide variety of students. By drawing together content normally spread across upper level computer science courses, it offers a single source providing the essentials for data science practitioners. In our increasingly data-centric world, students from all domains will benefit from the “data-aptitude” built by the material in this book.