Vagaries Of Value

Pragmatism's founder, C. S. Peirce, initially envisioned philosophy as a means of rationally validating our beliefs and actions. Afterward, William James changed pragmatism into a way of undermining commitment to rational cogency. With the subsequent turn of various contemporary pragmatisms to relativism and subjectivism, such irrational tendencies have become still more prominent. Vagaries of Value aims to create a version of realistic and rationalistic pragmatism that is systemically viable and does justice to traditional pragmatism's salient insights. Nicholas Rescher strives to return pragmatism to its realistic and objectivistic roots in a detailed survey of issues across the whole board of philosophical thought, action, and evaluation. Rescher argues that the crisis of pragmatism created by today's subjective tendencies should be met by adopting not a revisionary, but a reconstructive understanding of pragmatism, keeping close to its Peircean roots. He argues that such a turning does not mitigate against the pragmatic program's practical orientation, but provides an opportunity for sharpening our understanding of how pragmatism can and should be developed.

This book covers the developmental and health problems unique to the adolescent period of life. It focuses on special needs and public health programs for adolescents. It offers deep insight into smoking, violence, teen pregnancy, HIV/AIDS, and other problems, along with intervention and prevention strategies. "Anyone serious about improving adolescent health should read this book. It spans theoretical and developmental constructs, summaries of evidence-based interventions for adolescent risk behaviors, metrics, and policy recommendations." —S. Jean Emans, MD, chief, Division of Adolescent Medicine, and Robert Masland Jr., chair, Adolescent Medicine, Children's Hospital Boston, and professor of pediatrics, Harvard Medical School "This is the one single text that students can use to study adolescent health. It includes contributions from many of the world's most accomplished researchers to provide learners with cutting edge information to make the study of adolescence understandable and applicable in practical settings." —Gary L. Hopkins, MD, DrPH, associate research professor and director, Center for Prevention Research, and director, Center for Media Impact Research, Andrews University "This textbook presents an excellent balance in weighing the evidence from the risk and the resilience literature, incorporating research in racially and ethnically diverse populations." —Renée R. Jenkins, MD, FAAP, professor, Department of Pediatrics and Child Health, Howard University College of Medicine "This is an engaging, thorough, and thought-provoking statement of our knowledge about adolescence. " —Wendy Baldwin, PhD, director, Poverty, Gender, and Youth Program, Population Council

This book, written by global experts, provides a comprehensive and topical analysis on the economics of chocolate. While the main approach is economic analysis, there are important contributions from other disciplines, including psychology, history, government, nutrition, and geography. The chapters are organized around several themes, including the history of cocoa and chocolate -- from cocoa drinks in the Maya empire to the growing sales of Belgian chocolates in China; how governments have used cocoa and chocolate as a source of tax revenue and have regulated chocolate (and defined it by law) to protect consumers' health from fraud and industries from competition; how the poor cocoa producers in developing countries are linked through trade and multinational companies with rich consumers in industrialized countries; and how the rise of consumption in emerging markets (China, India, and Africa) is causing a major boom in global demand and prices, and a potential shortage of the world's chocolate.

A classic textbook that has guided generations of students through the intricacies of property valuation, The Income Approach to Property Valuation remains a keen favourite amongst students and teachers alike. This new edition has been thoroughly revised and updated to meet the increasingly international perspectives of modern Real Estate students. The links between theory and practice are clearly demonstrated throughout, with a range of new international case studies and practice-based examples. The Income Approach to Property Valuation teaches readers: how to analyse market rents and sales prices to derive market evidence to support an opinion of market value; the investment method of valuation and how it is applied in practice; how specific legal factors can impact on market value when they interfere with market forces; what the market and the profession may consider to be the 'right' methodology in today's market place; and how to use spreadsheets in valuation. This extensively revised new edition is perfect both for students on Real Estate courses worldwide and for professional candidates working towards their final assessment of professional competence (APC) for the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, needing to demonstrate a valuation competence at levels 2 and 3.

In Vagaries of Desire, Timo Airaksinen develops a new philosophical account of desire understood as mental state that focuses on a desirable possible world. Literary and philosophical themes, including sexuality, are discussed in terms of their metaphoric and metonymic features.

It is increasingly the case that models of natural phenomena and materials processing systems involve viscous flows with free surfaces. These free boundaries are interfaces of the fluid with either second immiscible fluids or else deformable solid boundaries. The deformation can be due to mechanical displacement or as is the case here, due to phase transformation; the solid can melt or freeze. This volume highlights a broad range of subjects on interfacial phenomena. There is an overview of the mathematical description of viscous free-surface flows, a description of the current understanding of mathematical issues that arise in these models and a discussion of high-order-accuracy boundary-integral methods for the solution of viscous free surface flows. There is the mathematical analysis of particular flows: long-wave instabilities in viscous-film flows, analysis of long-wave instabilities leading to Marangoni convection, and de§ scriptions of the interaction of convection with morphological stability during directional solidification. This book is geared toward anyone with an interest in free-boundary problems, from mathematical analysts to material scientists; it will be useful to applied mathematicians, physicists, and engineers alike.