The Transparent Event

-- from endorsements on back cover:"A valuable contribution to those who wrestle with enabling the tradition of faith to come alive within the pluriform, global community.""Scholarly, comprehensively sourced, grounded, readable, and life-addressing."

In New York and Baltimore, police cameras scan public areas twenty-four hours a day. Huge commercial databases track you finances and sell that information to anyone willing to pay. Host sites on the World Wide Web record every page you view, and “smart” toll roads know where you drive. Every day, new technology nibbles at our privacy.Does that make you nervous? David Brin is worried, but not just about privacy. He fears that society will overreact to these technologies by restricting the flow of information, frantically enforcing a reign of secrecy. Such measures, he warns, won't really preserve our privacy. Governments, the wealthy, criminals, and the techno-elite will still find ways to watch us. But we'll have fewer ways to watch them. We'll lose the key to a free society: accountability.The Transparent Society is a call for “reciprocal transparency.” If police cameras watch us, shouldn't we be able to watch police stations? If credit bureaus sell our data, shouldn't we know who buys it? Rather than cling to an illusion of anonymity-a historical anomaly, given our origins in close-knit villages-we should focus on guarding the most important forms of privacy and preserving mutual accountability. The biggest threat to our freedom, Brin warns, is that surveillance technology will be used by too few people, now by too many.A society of glass houses may seem too fragile. Fearing technology-aided crime, governments seek to restrict online anonymity; fearing technology-aided tyranny, citizens call for encrypting all data. Brins shows how, contrary to both approaches, windows offer us much better protection than walls; after all, the strongest deterrent against snooping has always been the fear of being spotted. Furthermore, Brin argues, Western culture now encourages eccentricity-we're programmed to rebel! That gives our society a natural protection against error and wrong-doing, like a body's immune system. But “social T-cells” need openness to spot trouble and get the word out. The Transparent Society is full of such provocative and far-reaching analysis.The inescapable rush of technology is forcing us to make new choices about how we want to live. This daring book reminds us that an open society is more robust and flexible than one where secrecy reigns. In an era of gnat-sized cameras, universal databases, and clothes-penetrating radar, it will be more vital than ever for us to be able to watch the watchers. With reciprocal transparency we can detect dangers early and expose wrong-doers. We can gauge the credibility of pundits and politicians. We can share technological advances and news. But all of these benefits depend on the free, two-way flow of information.

From the potent properties of X rays evoked in Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain to the miniaturized surgical team of the classic science fiction film Fantastic Voyage, the possibility of peering into the inner reaches of the body has engaged the twentieth-century popular and scientific imagination. Drawing on examples that are international in scope, The Transparent Body examines the dissemination of medical images to a popular audience, advancing the argument that medical imaging technologies are the material embodiment of collective desires and fantasies--the most pervasive of which is the ideal of transparency itself. The Transparent Body traces the cultural context and wider social impact of such medical imaging practices as X ray and endoscopy, ultrasound imaging of fetuses, the filming and broadcasting of surgical operations, the creation of plastinated corpses for display as art objects, and the use of digitized cadavers in anatomical study. In the early twenty-first century, the interior of the body has become a pervasive cultural presence - as accessible to the public eye as to the physician's gaze. Jose van Dijck explores the multifaceted interactions between medical images and cultural ideologies that have brought about this situation. The Transparent Body unfolds the complexities involved in medical images and their making, illuminating their uses and meanings both within and outside of medicine. Van Dijck demonstrates the ways in which the ability to render the inner regions of the human body visible - and the proliferation of images of the body's interior in popular media - affect our view of corporeality and our understanding of health and disease. Written in an engaging style that brings thought-provoking cultural intersections vividly to life, The Transparent Body will be of special interest to those in media studies, cultural studies, science and technology studies, medical humanities, and the history of medicine.

Is transparency a necessary condition to build and restore citizen and civil society trust in governance and democracy? Throughout Europe, there is a growing demand for effective forms of citizen engagement and decentralisation in policy-making to increase trust and engage increasingly diverse populations. This volume addresses the relationship between trust and transparency in the context of multi-level governance. Drawing on fieldwork from the UK, France and Germany, this comparative analysis examines different efforts to build trust between key actors involved in decision-making at the sub-national level. It outlines the challenges of delivering this agenda and explores the paradox that trust might require transparency, yet in some instances transparency may undermine trust.

This text uses a case-based approach to share knowledge and techniques on how to operationalize much of the theoretical underpinnings of hospital quality and safety. Written and edited by leaders in healthcare, education, and engineering, these 22 chapters provide insights as to where the field of improvement and safety science is with regards to the views and aspirations of healthcare advocates and patients. Each chapter also includes vignettes to further solidify the theoretical underpinnings and drive home learning. End of chapter commentary by the editors highlight important concepts and connections between various chapters in the text. Patient Safety and Quality Improvement in Healthcare: A Case-Based Approach presents a novel approach towards hospital safety and quality with the goal to help healthcare providers reach zero harm within their organizations.

Adverbs seem to raise unsolvable issues for theories of word-classes, both crosslinguistically and language-internally. The contributions in this volume all address this categorial problem from a variety of formal and functional points of view. In the first part, current definitions of the class for Romance and Germanic languages are being questioned and improved, drawing on data from English, German and Italian. The second part is devoted to adverbial scope in Romance (French, Italian and Brazilian Portuguese), Germanic, Modern Greek and Chinese, under special consideration of modal adverbs, subject-oriented manner adverbs and domain adverbs and adverbials. Syntactic and semantic relationships appear to lay the ground for a robust and fine-grained functional definition of adverbs and adverbials.