Summary Off Center

The must-read summary of Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson's book: “Off Center: The Republican Revolution & the Erosion of American Democracy”. This complete summary of "Off Center" by Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, two renowned political science professors, presents their exploration of the dynamics behind America's political shift to the right and their explanation of how the Republican party has maintained control, despite policies which clearly benefit affluent and ideologically extreme people and pay little heed to the broad majority of Americans. Added-value of this summary: • Save time • Understand the American government under the Republican Party • Expand your knowledge of American politics To learn more, read "Off Center" and discover how the Republican Party maintained power and what this means for ordinary Americans.

The use of plastics is widespread. Less widespread, however, is a clear understanding and examination of the many forms of degradation inherent within the very environments these materials must perform. Medical PlasticsùDegradation Resistance & Failure Analysis fills that void. The introductory chapter gives an overview of the medical applications of plastics and the specific performance requirements they need to meet. The following chapters discuss various degrading environments and their effects including environmental stress cracking, effect of body liquids, effect of harsh environments, and various methods of sterilization. The book also discusses the failure of medical devices due to contamination, low temperature, the effects of UV light, migration of formulation components, mechanical stresses, and problems with design and fabrication. Case histories of failures of some common products used in medicine are also provided.

What makes the difference between those who aspire to lead and those who actually do it? What does anyone need to know about themselves and others, in order to be ready to lead? How might society benefit from persons who give time and energy to learn the skills of leadership readiness? This book offers a lifelong resource for persons committed to improving their own personal effectiveness as a key step toward leading--in whatever the context, at whatever level. The concepts and terms in this book become tools that strengthen self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management. Exercises at the end of each chapter stimulate real-life learning, as one practices specific skills that create confidence in being "ready to lead."

This book addresses the analysis of musical sounds from the viewpoint of someone at the intersection between physicists, engineers, piano technicians, and musicians. The study is structured into three parts. The reader is introduced to a variety of waves and a variety of ways of presenting, visualizing, and analyzing them in the first part. A tutorial on the tools used throughout the book accompanies this introduction. The mathematics behind the tools is left to the appendices. Part Two provides a graphical survey of the classical areas of acoustics that pertain to musical instruments: vibrating strings, bars, membranes, and plates. Part Three is devoted almost exclusively to the piano. Several two- and three-dimensional graphical tools are introduced to study various characteristics of pianos: individual notes and interactions among them, the missing fundamental, inharmonicity, tuning visualization, the different distribution of harmonic power for the various zones of the piano keyboard, and potential uses for quality control. These techniques are also briefly applied to other musical instruments studied in earlier parts of the book. For physicists and engineers there are appendices to cover the mathematics lurking beneath the numerous graphs and a brief introduction to MatlabRG which was used to generate these graphs. A website accompanying the book (https://sites.google.com/site/analysisofsoundsandvibrations/) contains: - Matlab® scripts - mp3 files of sounds - references to YouTube videos - and up-to-date results of recent studies

It is now more than fifty years since Sir Wilfrid Le Gros Clark (1932a) published his Arris and Gale lectures on the structure and connections of the thalamus. This authoritative overview came at a time when thalamic studies were passing from a descriptive to an experimental phase and, in his review, Le Gros Clark was able to cover virtually every aspect of the organization and development and much of the comparative anatomy of the thalamus then known. It is also approaching a half-century since A. Earl Walker (1938a) wrote The Primate Thalamus, which was strongly experimental, but with many Clinical in sights, and which he described as "an attempt to elucidate the role of the thalamus in sensation. " The intervening years have seen published a few reports of con ferences on aspects of thalamic organization and function but no monographs comparable to those of Le Gros Clark or Walker. Perhaps this is understandable when one considers, not so much the enormity of the new data that have been added, but rather the emphasis upon individual thalamic nuclei as components of separate functional systems, not all of them sensory. It is probably also true to say that studies in the commoner experimental animals such as the rat, cat, and monkey have been so productive in their own right that there was little interest in making an across-species synthesis.