The Global Auction

For decades, the idea that more education will lead to greater individual and national prosperity has been a cornerstone of developed economies. Challenging this conventional wisdom, 'The Global Auction' forces us to reconsider our deeply held and mistaken views about how the global economy really works and how to thrive in it.

For decades, the idea that more education will lead to greater individual and national prosperity has been a cornerstone of developed economies. Challenging this conventional wisdom, 'The Global Auction' forces us to reconsider our deeply held and mistaken views about how the global economy really works and how to thrive in it.

Chinese Contemporary Art in the Global Auction Market charts the rapid emergence of a multi-million-dollar global market for Chinese Contemporary art by revealing the strategic activities of art world agents in promoting the work of ‘avant-garde’ Chinese artists to a Western audience.

A trailblazing look at the historical emergence of a global field in contemporary art and the diverse ways artists become valued worldwide Prior to the 1980s, the postwar canon of “international” contemporary art was made up almost exclusively of artists from North America and Western Europe, while cultural agents from other parts of the world often found themselves on the margins. The Global Rules of Art examines how this discriminatory situation has changed in recent decades. Drawing from abundant sources—including objective indicators from more than one hundred countries, multiple institutional histories and discourses, extensive fieldwork, and interviews with artists, critics, curators, gallerists, and auction house agents—Larissa Buchholz examines the emergence of a world-spanning art field whose logics have increasingly become defined in global terms. Deftly blending comprehensive historical analyses with illuminating case studies, The Global Rules of Art breaks new ground in its exploration of valuation and how cultural hierarchies take shape in a global context. The book’s innovative global field approach will appeal to scholars in the sociology of art, cultural and economic sociology, interdisciplinary global studies, and anyone interested in the dynamics of global art and culture.

This book contains a selection of higher quality and reviewed papers of the 14th Portuguese Conference on Artificial Intelligence, EPIA 2009, held in Aveiro, Portugal, in October 2009. The 55 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 163 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on artificial intelligence in transportation and urban mobility (AITUM), artificial life and evolutionary algorithms (ALEA), computational methods in bioinformatics and systems biology (CMBSB), computational logic with applications (COLA), emotional and affective computing (EAC), general artificial intelligence (GAI), intelligent robotics (IROBOT), knowledge discovery and business intelligence (KDBI), muli-agent systems (MASTA) social simulation and modelling (SSM), text mining and application (TEMA) as well as web and network intelligence (WNI).

Human capital theory, or the notion that there is a direct relationship between educational investment and individual and national prosperity, has dominated public policy on education and labor for the past fifty years. In The Death of Human Capital?, Phillip Brown, Hugh Lauder, and Sin Yi Cheung argue that the human capital story is one of false promise: investing in learning isn't the road to higher earnings and national prosperity. Rather than abandoning human capital theory, however, the authors redefine human capital in an age of smart machines. They present a new human capital theory that rejects the view that automation and AI will result in the end of waged work, but see the fundamental problem as a lack of quality jobs offering interesting, worthwhile, and rewarding opportunities. A controversial challenge to the reigning ideology, The Death of Human Capital? connects with a growing sense that capitalism is in crisis, felt by students and the wider workforce, shows what's at stake in the new human capital while offering hope for the future.

This latest volume in the World Yearbook of Education Series focuses on educational elites and inequality, focusing particularly on the ways in which established and emergent groups located at the top of the social hierarchy and power structure reproduce, establish or redefine their position. The volume is organized around three main issues: analyzing the way in which parents, students and graduates in positions of social advantage use their assets and capitals in relation to educational strategies, and how these are different for old and new and cultural and economic elites; studying how elite institutions have adapted their strategies to take into account changes in the social structure, in policy and in their institutional environment and exploring the impact of these strategies on educational systems at the national and global levels; mapping the new global dynamics in elite education and how new forms of 'international education' and 'transnational cultural capital' as well as new global educational elite pathways shape elite students’ identities, status and trajectories. Making use of a social and an institutional approach as well as a focus on practices and policies, the volume draws on research conducted on secondary schools and on higher education. In addition, the global contributions within the book allow for a comparison and contrast of situations in different countries. This results in a comprehensive picture of common processes and national differences concerning advantage and excellence and a thorough examination of the impact of globalization on the strategies, identities and trajectories of elite groups and individuals alongside more general cultural and economic processes.