It S A World Thing

Topics needed for GSCE Geography (Edexcel specification B).

We have become used to looking at art from a stance of detachment. In order to be objective, we create a “mental space” between ourselves and the objects of our investigation, separating internal and external worlds. This detachment dates back to the early modern period, when researchers in a wide variety of fields tried to describe material objects as “things in themselves”—things, that is, without the admixture of imagination. Generations of scholars have heralded this shift as the Renaissance “discovery” of the observable world. In Poetry in a World of Things, Rachel Eisendrath explores how poetry responded to this new detachment by becoming a repository for a more complex experience of the world. The book focuses on ekphrasis, the elaborate literary description of a thing, as a mode of resistance to this new empirical objectivity. Poets like Petrarch, Spenser, Marlowe, and Shakespeare crafted highly artful descriptions that recovered the threatened subjective experience of the material world. In so doing, these poets reflected on the emergence of objectivity itself as a process that was often darker and more painful than otherwise acknowledged. This highly original book reclaims subjectivity as a decidedly poetic and human way of experiencing the material world and, at the same time, makes a case for understanding art objects as fundamentally unlike any other kind of objects.

Psychoanalytic perspective on what Western philosophers from Socrates to Foucault have called “the art of living.”

What does it mean to be a social being in the ordinary life-world? This clear and compelling introduction to social phenomenology examines the experiential features of the basic things comprising our life-world, namely me, you, abstract others (enemies, communities, and associations), and attributes of the lived-body (emotions, pain, and pleasure). Each of these entities is phenomenologically described, with the aim of reducing reports of personal experiences and other primary documents to the presumed prototypical experience of the thing in question—its ideal essence. Another aim of this study is to sociologically account for how the various entities of the life-world have been accomplished, that is, how the prototypical experiences of the things in question have come to be. By showing the life-world to be our joint project rather than a fixed, unalterable coherency, this volume destabilizes our naive attitude towards the things of the world. Examples are drawn from the author's own research on issues such as violence, religion, health, and race; from classic and contemporary anthropological research; and from the works of some of the most innovative philosophers of the twentieth century. This study actually does phenomenology instead of merely arguing for its necessity and will appeal to both social scientists and philosophers.

Showcasing the diverse ways that IoT can be employed for improvement in many areas of contemporary life, this new volume explores a multitude of IoT applications that provide advanced solutions for real-world problems. The selection of topics includes network on chip as the new paradigm for system on chip integration for maintaining high performance for IoT applications; new router designs to increase speed; and the challenges of wireless underground sensor networks, which have a wide range of applications in military, underground sensing, testing soil traits and moisture content, pollution control and location detection, security, and detection of natural calamities. Various state-of-the-art techniques such as optimization schemes, blockchain, machine learning, orthogonal frequency division multiplexing, etc., are also discussed in the context of cognitive IoT. The volume considers the uses of IoT in agriculture, discussing challenges along with solutions with the help of the latest technical smart tools to uplift the farming community, specifically IoT applications for information gathering to improve yield productivity, food and crop quality and sustainability, monitoring toxic substances and soil properties, etc. The book also covers a broad spectrum of IoT applications in the educational industry along with the challenges associated with them and how to facilitate the use of smart classroom technology. A chapter on IoT in the healthcare industry presents an IoT-based GPS-enabled smart jacket design to monitor heart rate, sugar level, blood pressure, fever, and stress level. The authors also present an IoT-based Peltier air conditioner design that overcomes the limitations of existing HVAC framework, a review of various energy harvesting techniques to generate electrical power from non-conventional power sources with their merits and demerits, and much more.

Nature, money, work, care, food, energy, and lives: these are the seven things that have made our world and will shape its future. In making these things cheap, modern commerce has transformed, governed, and devastated Earth. In A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things, Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore present a new approach to analyzing today's planetary emergencies. Bringing the latest ecological research together with histories of colonialism, indigenous struggles, slave revolts, and other rebellions and uprisings, Patel and Moore demonstrate that throughout history, crises have always prompted fresh strategies to make the world cheap and safe for capitalism. At a time of crisis in all seven cheap things, innovative and systemic thinking is urgently required. This book proposes a radical new way of understanding-and reclaiming-the planet in the turbulent twenty-first century.