Planet U

Planet U places the university at the forefront of the sustainability movement. Questioning the university's ability to equip society to deal with today's serious challenges such as economic growth, democratic citizenship and planetary survival, it calls for a new social movement to take a lead in reforming the university. The book reviews the university's 900-year history from medieval religious philosopher, to Renaissance nation-builder, to its modern function as training grounds for the world's managerial class and the world's largest industry. It examines diverse campus initiatives across North America and Europe and their traditional concerns of green buildings, renewable energy and transportation demand management. But it also demonstrates the promise for social and ecological progress open to the "planetary university" once the university takes its place seriously and discovers its new mission: to create diverse models of local and global innovation centered around tough new questions about what universities -- and their societies -- can achieve: * How might the university help move us to a post-automobile, energy-saving society? * How might universities help refashion the city to be sustainable? * How might universities be governed for sustainability? Lively, engaging and perfectly timed for the UN Decade for Sustainability in Education launched in 2005, Planet U will have wide appeal. Michael M'Gonigle, Professor and Eco-Research Chair of Environmental Law and Policy at the University of Victoria, is a co-founder of Greenpeace International and has published widely on sustainability issues. Justine Starke is a Research Associate in the POLIS Project on Ecological Governance at the University of Victoria.

This book is about models of motion as enunciated by poets, philosophers, storytellers, and early scientists. By using popular literature and philosophy to bring the mechanics of motion alive, blending with equal voice both romantic whimsy and derived equations.

Conventional star atlases are great for locating constellations and individual stars but The Star Atlas Companion goes one step further and describes the physical properties of more than 1,100 stars. With the aid of scale diagrams, the reader can get a real sense of the sizes, shapes, distances, and surface features of many of the stars visible to the naked eye in both the Nothern and Southern Hemispheres. Information on their rotational velocities and periods is given together with their spectral type and luminosity. Binary and multiple star systems are explained in detail. Special mention is made of Barnard's, Kapteyn's, Kepler's, and Van Maanen's Stars and the properties of many open clusters are given. With its emphasis on helping the amateur astronomer gain a better understanding of what they are looking at. The Star Atlas Companion will provide a new dimension to observing the star and is an invaluable supplement to any star atlas.

Advances in Astronomy and Astrophysics, Volume 4 brings together numerous research works on different aspects of astronomy and astrophysics. This volume is composed of five chapters, and starts with a description of objective prism and its application in space observations. The next chapter deals with the possibilities of deriving reliable models of the figure, density distribution, and gravity field of the Moon based on data obtained through Earth-bound telescopes. These topics are followed by a discussion on the ideal partially relativistic, partially degenerate gas in an exact manner. A chapter examines first the effect of exchange of matter on the periods of close binary systems, and then briefly surveys the mechanisms of mass loss, other causes of period changes, and related evolutionary problems. The last chapter looks into the cometary origin of meteorites. This book will prove useful to astronomers and astrophysicists.