Grasping The World

First published in 2004, this volume recognises that there is much more to museums than the documenting, monumentalizing, or theme-parking of identity, history and heritage. This landmark anthology aims to make strange the very existence of museums and to plot a critical, historical and ethical understanding of their origins and history. A radical selection of key texts introduces the reader to the intense investigation of the modern European idea of the museum that has taken place over the last fifty years. Texts first published in journals and books are brought together in one volume with up-to-the-minute and specially commissioned pieces by leading administrators, curators and art historians. The selections are organized by key themes that map the evolution of the debate and introduced by Donald Preziosi and Claire Farago, two considerable critics, who write with the edge and enthusiasm of art historians who have spent their lives working with museums. Grasping the World is an invaluable resource for students and teachers of art history and museum studies.

As different societies merge into one global society and face the concomitant crisis of identity, of purpose and interest, social anthropology urgently needs to bring its methodology up to date: new methods are needed to analyse, compare and understand different cultures across space and time. Grasping the Changing World collects papers read at the second biannual EASA conference in Prague in 1992. The conference took place in an extraordinary 'postmodern' setting. With the fall of communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe old certainties and time-honoured concepts had become obsolete; at the same time, anthropology too was in upheaval, and long-established patterns of thought seemed inadequate to grasp the rapidly changing realities. These doubts and tensions are reflected in this collection. The first half of Grasping the Changing World focuses on ways of conceptualising, modelling and perceiving the present, while the second half reassesses the theoretical strength or otherwise of social anthropology as a modern science. Combining methodological rigour and originality, this collection will make invaluable reading for all students of social anthropology, sociology and politics and its methodology as it is applied to the comparison and understanding of societies across space and time.

Distinguishing between tangible user interfaces (TUI) and tangible interactive systems (TISs), this book takes into account not only the user interfaces but also looks at how interaction can be enabled by using digital information through the physical environment. TISs go far beyond the concept of tangible user interfaces, addressing large complex systems in the framework of human-centred design and putting the human at the center of the design process from the start. How can human-centered designers grasp the real world with computers? This question is explored by looking at concepts such as innovation, complexity, flexibility, maturity, stability, sustainability and art to see whether we can assess both physical and figurative tangibility during the design process before product delivery. Concepts like creativity, design thinking and team spirit are fundamental to TIS’s human-centered design, and are presented together with human-systems integration (HSI), agile development and formative evaluations to build a greater understanding of this new area of research. Tangible Interactive Systems would be an essential read to designers, academics and other professionals concerned with product design within HCI, industrial design, virtual engineering and other related areas.

It is now clear that human activity has influenced how the biosphere supports life on Earth, and given rise to a set of connected environmental and social problems. In response to the challenge that these problems present, a series of international conferences and summits led to discussions of sustainable development and the core dilemma of our time: How can we all live well, now and in the future, without compromising the ability of the planet to enable us all to live well? This book identifies the main issues and challenges we now face; it explains the ideas that underpin them and their interconnection, and discusses a range of strategies through which they might be addressed and possibly resolved. These cover things that governments might do, what businesses and large organisations can contribute, and the scope for individuals, families and communities to get involved. This book is for everyone who cares about such challenges, and wants to know more about them.

America stocks its shelves with mass-produced goods but fills its imagination with handmade folk objects. In Pennsylvania, the "back to the city" housing movement causes a conflict of cultures. In Indiana, an old tradition of butchering turtles for church picnics evokes both pride and loathing among residents. In New York, folk-art exhibits raise choruses of adoration and protest. These are a few of the examples Simon Bronner uses to illustrate the ways Americans physically and mentally grasp things. Bronner moves beyond the usual discussions of form and variety in America's folk material culture to explain historical influences on, and the social consequences of, channeling folk culture into a mass society.

By illuminating the conflict-resolving mechanisms inherent in the relationships between democracies, Bruce Russett explains one of the most promising developments of the modern international system: the striking fact that the democracies that it comprises have almost never fought each other.

This book investigates new important applications of the Spatial Grasp Technology (SGT) allowing us to effectively simulate and manage large distributed dynamic systems on semantic and holistic levels. This patented technology, developed for decades and in different countries, is based on a completely different philosophy and model allowing us to directly operate in united distributed physical and virtual spaces and provide system solutions much simpler and more compact than under other approaches. The described applications include basic operations suitable for solving many network-related problems, simulation of such mysterious concept as consciousness so important for the design of advanced intelligent systems, modelling the spread of viruses and distribution of antivirus vaccine, and also implementation of the latest decision-centric and mosaic-based organizational concepts important for modern defence and industrial systems. The described technology version with its Spatial Grasp Language can be implemented even within university environments, with communicating language interpreter copies, potentially numbering millions to billions, easily embedded into any existing systems, including Internet, thus converting the whole world into a powerful symbiotic simulation management engine. The book is oriented on system scientists, application programmers, industry managers, and also university students interested in advanced M.Sc. and Ph.D. projects related to distributed system management.

Grasping Reality addresses the methodology of a sophisticated realistic approach to scientific as well as everyday recognition by using schemes and interpretive constructs to analyze theories and the practice of recognition from a hypothesis-realistic vantage point. An appendix provides an overview regarding a realistic and pragmatic philosophy of technology, including the so-called new information technologies.