Fully covers the Cambridge IGCSE Computer Studies syllabus (0420), offering valuable practical support for students. Written by experienced teachers and examiners of Cambridge IGCSE Computer Studies, this highly illustrated coursebook covers both the theoretical and applied aspects of the course. It includes self-assessment questions and tasks throughout to reinforce learning. It offers clear learning objectives, chapter summaries and plenty of exam practice. The accompanying Student's CD-ROM provides guidance on study skills, revision and exam technique along with revision tests with answers, and exemplar exam answers. Now available in both print and e-book formats. The e-book includes both the print version and materials from the Student CD-ROM.
This classic work provides a richly textured overview of the "whys" and "hows" of brief therapy. The authors identify the central features of effective, time-limited interventions for individuals, couples, families, and groups. Taking a developmental approach to treatment, they explain how brief therapy can help at different times in a patient's life, as changes and transitions bring on new stresses and challenges. A practical framework is provided for selecting and screening patients, rapidly finding a focus for clinical work, and making optimal use of available time. Case examples and extensive transcripts are included to illustrate the use of strategies and techniques drawn from many different psychotherapy perspectives. Throughout, the focus is on creative and efficient ways to help patients build on existing strengths and make desired changes in their interactions with others.
The laws governing commercial motor vehicles are not easy to understand and it can take hours wading through them to find anything. Passing inspection requires a roadmap to which one must commit faithful execution over time. Insights from Inside, written courtesy of the experience of a transportation enforcement officer/CVSA inspector with a background as a licensed mechanic, provides that roadmap, along with tips and cost-saving suggestions for heavy truck drivers, owner/operators, and fleet managers. It also offers maintenance suggestions, insider insight, and strategies on how to pass CVSA Level 1 inspection during roadside stops with a commercial motor vehicle. While the book’s focus is Ontario laws, there’s some policy standardization throughout North America and the same inspection procedure and training for enforcement officers tasked with inspecting commercial motor vehicles, trailers, and buses reigns continent-wide—so its data points are wide ranging. Armed with this book, drivers and fleet operators can know what to expect no matter in what jurisdiction an inspection is performed.
Most of the time, we believe our daily lives to be governed by structures determined from above: laws that dictate our behavior, companies that pay our wages, even climate patterns that determine what we eat or where we live. In contrast, social organization is often a feature of local organization. While those forces may seem beyond individual grasp, we often come together in small communities to change circumstances that would otherwise flatten us. Challenging traditional sociological models of powerful forces, in The Hinge, Gary Alan Fine emphasizes and describes those meso-level collectives, the organizations that bridge our individual interests and the larger structures that shape our lives. Focusing on “tiny publics,” he describes meso-level social collectives as “hinges”: groups that come together to pursue a shared social goal, bridging the individual and the broader society. Understanding these hinges, Fine argues, is crucial to explaining how societies function, creating links between the micro- and macro-orders of society. He draws on historical cases and fieldwork to illustrate how these hinges work and how to describe them. In The Hinge, Fine has given us powerful new theoretical tools for understanding an essential part of our social worlds.
Hardware inaccuracy and imprecision are important considerations when implementing neural algorithms. This book presents a study of synaptic weight noise as a typical fault model for analogue VLSI realisations of MLP neural networks and examines the implications for learning and network performance. The aim of the book is to present a study of how including an imprecision model into a learning scheme as a“fault tolerance hint” can aid understanding of accuracy and precision requirements for a particular implementation. In addition the study shows how such a scheme can give rise to significant performance enhancement.
Crisis in Sociology presents a compelling portrait of sociology's current troubles and proposes a remedy that is likely to inspire controversy. In the authors' view sociology's crisis has deep roots, traceable to the over-ambitious sweep of the discipline's founders. Lopreato and Crippen argue that the most disabling flaw is the failure to discover even a single general law or principle necessary to systematically organize empirical observations, guide inquiry by suggesting falsifiable hypotheses, and form the core of a genuinely cumulative body of knowledge. Crisis in Sociology invites sociologists to consider that participation in the "new social science," exemplified by thriving new fields such as evolutionary psychology, may help to build a vigorous, scientific sociology.
First published in 1993, The Corporate Paradox is the first major, in-depth study of the franchise relationship and how it functions. While past debates have focused on the question: ‘What do bosses do?’, we are now being asked: ‘Who really is the boss?’. Since the late 1970s the emergence of franchising arrangements has been a major part of the wider process of change taking place in the nature of modern business organization. The names of franchise companies are familiar to most people: Coca-Cola, McDonalds, Pepsi cola, Body Shop, to name but a few. But how many people realize that each such outlet is a separate legal entity owned by a local franchisee? Franchising remains, at best, little understood. In this book, Alan Felstead explores who controls what, why and how, setting his discussion within the context of the many current changes affecting traditional contractual bonds between employers and employees, producers and buyers, owners and managers. This is a must read for students of management, organizational studies, marketing, industrial sociology and commercial law.
“Excellent . . . deserves high praise. Mr. Taylor conveys this sprawling continental history with economy, clarity, and vividness.”—Brendan Simms, Wall Street Journal The American Revolution is often portrayed as a high-minded, orderly event whose capstone, the Constitution, provided the nation its democratic framework. Alan Taylor, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, gives us a different creation story in this magisterial history. The American Revolution builds like a ground fire overspreading Britain’s colonies, fueled by local conditions and resistant to control. Emerging from the continental rivalries of European empires and their native allies, the revolution pivoted on western expansion as well as seaboard resistance to British taxes. When war erupted, Patriot crowds harassed Loyalists and nonpartisans into compliance with their cause. The war exploded in set battles like Saratoga and Yorktown and spread through continuing frontier violence. The discord smoldering within the fragile new nation called forth a movement to concentrate power through a Federal Constitution. Assuming the mantle of “We the People,” the advocates of national power ratified the new frame of government. But it was Jefferson’s expansive “empire of liberty” that carried the revolution forward, propelling white settlement and slavery west, preparing the ground for a new conflagration.
The focus of this book is care and compassion within the context of organization and management studies. The book aims to understand how members of an English hospice identify or fail to identify with an organization where issues of life and death take centre stage and explores problems it faces regarding its representation in society.
War and Press Freedom: The Problem of Prerogative Power is a groundbreaking and provocative study of one of the most perplexing civil liberties issues in American history: What authority does or should the government have to control press coverage and commentary in wartime? First Amendment scholar Jeffery A. Smith shows convincingly that no such extraordinary power exists under the Constitution, and that officials have had to rely on claiming the existence of an autocratic "higher law" of survival. Smith carefully surveys the development of statutory restrictions and military regulations for the news media from the ratification of the Bill of Rights in 1791 through the Gulf War of 1991. He concludes that the armed forces can justify refusal to divulge a narrow range of defense secrets, but that imposing other restrictions is unwise, unnecessary, and unconstitutional. In any event, as electronic communication becomes almost impossible to constrain, soldiers and journalists must learn how to respect each other's obligations in a democratic system.
Despite immediate appearances, this book is not primarily a hermeneutical exercise in which the superiority of one interpretation of canonical texts is championed against others. Its origin lies elsewhere, near the overlap of history, psychoanalysis, aesthetics, and social theory of the usual kind. Weber, Pareto, Freud, W. I. Thomas, Max Scheler, Karl Mannheim, and many others of similar stature long ago wondered and wrote much about the interplay between societal rationalization and individual rationality, between collective furor and private psychopathology—in short, about the strange and worrisome union of “character and social structure” (to recall Gerth and Mills). Pondering the history of social thought in this century can lead to the unpleasant realization that such large-scale questions slipped away, especially from sociologists, sometime before World War II. Or, if not entirely lost, they were so transformed in range and rhetoric that a gap opened between contemporary theorizing and its European background. Perhaps this partly explains Weber’s continuing appeal. By dealing with him, one might again broach topics long at odds with “social science” of the last forty years.—From the Preface This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1988.
This book examines the applicability of a relatively new and powerful tool, genetic adaptive neural networks, to the field of option valuation. A genetic adaptive neural network model is developed to price option contracts with futures-style margining. This model is capable of estimating complex, non-linear relationships without having prior knowledge of the specific nature of the relationships. Traditional option pricing models require that the researcher or practitioner specify the distribution of the underlying asset. In addition, the methodology is able to easily accommodate additional inputs(something that cannot be preformed with existing models. Since 1973, options on stock have been traded on organized exchanges in the United States. An option on a stock gives the option owner the right to buy or sell the stock for a pre-set price.. Since the introduction of stock options, the options market has experienced tremendous growth and has spawned even more exotic types of derivative securities. Obviously, valuing these securities is an issue of great importance to investors and hedgers in the financial marketplace. Existing pricing models produce systematic pricing errors and new models have to be developed for options with differing characteristics. The genetic adaptive neural network is found to provide more accurate valuation than a traditional option pricing model when applied to the 3-month Eurodollar futures-option contract traded on the London International Financial Futures and Options Exchange.
Crisis and Change Today provides a solid introduction to Marxist social theory. The work's unique voice is expressed in its Socratic-dialogic approach, structured around forty questions that students have about society and social change. Topics range from theories of history, economics, unemployment, racial oppression, the state, fascism, the collapse of the Soviet bloc, and points of convergence and difference between the dialectical approach and other approaches to social science. The content and tone of the work invites students to evaluate various traditional and current explanations of social institutions and social processes and encourages them to weigh the debates and investigate further. The first edition was very well received (Distinguished Scholarship Award of the Section on Marxist Sociology of the ASA), and the second edition has been thoroughly revised and updated to be relevant for students today. Though the first edition was written during the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the growing gap between the rich and the poor and the economic crisis have generated more interest in using Marxist analysis both as a tool to analyze and understand capitalism and the weaknesses of past Marxist praxis.
Scholars have been puzzling over the "future of the book" since Marshall McLuhan's famous maxim "the medium is the message" in the early 1950s. McLuhan famously argued that electronic media was creating a global village in which books would become obsolete. Such views were ahead of their time, but today they are all too relevant as declining sales, even among classic texts, have become a serious matter in academic publishing.Does anyone still read long and complex works, either from the past or the present? Is the role of a professional reader and reviewer of manuscripts still relevant? Book Matters closely analyses these questions and others. Alan Sica surmises that the concentration span required for studying and discussing complex texts has slipped away, as undergraduate classes are becoming inundated by shorter, easier-to-teach scholarly and literary works. He considers such matters in part from the point of view of a former editor of scholarly journals. In an engaging style, he gives readers succinct analyses of books and ideas that once held the interest of millions of discerning readers, such as Simone de Beavoir's Second Sex and the works of David Graham Phillips and C. Wright Mills, among others.Book Matters is not a nostalgic cry for lost ideas, but instead a stark reminder of just how aware and analytically illuminating certain scholars were prior to the Internet, and how endangered the book is in this era of pixelated communication.
This much-anticipated fifth edition of Exploring Education offers an alternative to traditional foundations texts by combining a point-of-view analysis with primary source readings. Pre- and in-service teachers will find a solid introduction to the foundations disciplines -- history, philosophy, politics, and sociology of education -- and their application to educational issues, including school organization and teaching, curriculum and pedagogic practices, education and inequality, and school reform and improvement. This edition features substantive updates, including additions to the discussion of neo-liberal educational policy, recent debates about teacher diversity, updated data and research, and new selections of historical and contemporary readings. At a time when foundations of education are marginalized in many teacher education programs and teacher education reform pushes scripted approaches to curriculum and instruction, Exploring Education helps teachers to think critically about the "what" and "why" behind the most pressing issues in contemporary education.
Citizens and Paupers explores this contentious history by analyzing and comparing three major programs: the Freedmen's Bureau, the Works Progress Administration, and the present-day system of workfare that arose in the 1990s. Each of these overhauls of the welfare state created new groups of clients, new policies for aiding them, and new disputes over citizenship--conflicts that were entangled in racial politics and of urgent concern for social activists.-.
Winner of the 2022 New-York Historical Society Book Prize in American History A Washington Post and BookPage Best Nonfiction Book of the Year From a Pulitzer Prize–winning historian, the powerful story of a fragile nation as it expands across a contested continent. In this beautifully written history of America’s formative period, a preeminent historian upends the traditional story of a young nation confidently marching to its continent-spanning destiny. The newly constituted United States actually emerged as a fragile, internally divided union of states contending still with European empires and other independent republics on the North American continent. Native peoples sought to defend their homelands from the flood of American settlers through strategic alliances with the other continental powers. The system of American slavery grew increasingly powerful and expansive, its vigorous internal trade in Black Americans separating parents and children, husbands and wives. Bitter party divisions pitted elites favoring strong government against those, like Andrew Jackson, espousing a democratic populism for white men. Violence was both routine and organized: the United States invaded Canada, Florida, Texas, and much of Mexico, and forcibly removed most of the Native peoples living east of the Mississippi. At the end of the period the United States, its conquered territory reaching the Pacific, remained internally divided, with sectional animosities over slavery growing more intense. Taylor’s elegant history of this tumultuous period offers indelible miniatures of key characters from Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth to Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Margaret Fuller. It captures the high-stakes political drama as Jackson and Adams, Clay, Calhoun, and Webster contend over slavery, the economy, Indian removal, and national expansion. A ground-level account of American industrialization conveys the everyday lives of factory workers and immigrant families. And the immersive narrative puts us on the streets of Port-au-Prince, Mexico City, Quebec, and the Cherokee capital, New Echota. Absorbing and chilling, American Republics illuminates the continuities between our own social and political divisions and the events of this formative period.
Social arrangements of society's institutions deflect people's achievement patterns. Some schools take only talented students, others take the rest; within schools, students are separated into ability groups. Firms are in different industries and vary in size. During their educational and work careers, people get sorted into these different locations. Diverging Pathways examines that sorting process and shows how it affects people's achievements. Some locations accelerate achievements, others depress them - in elementary, secondary, and postsecondary school programs, and in the labor force. Most important, some people are consistently in the same kinds of locations, repeatedly advantaged or disadvantaged, especially in school. They end up far apart as adults, due in large part to the cumulative effects of the social arrangements they passed through. Diverging Pathways follows the members of a 1958 British birth cohort for the first twenty-three years of their lives. It presents a detailed picture of their family backgrounds and their school and early labor force experiences and achievements. Besides the cumulative effects of institutional locations, it shows major career differences of men and women, and it describes how the interface between postsecondary education and the labor force alters some of the outcomes of elementary and secondary schooling.
If all politics is local, then so is almost everything else, argues sociologist Gary Alan Fine. We organize our lives by relying on those closest to us—family members, friends, work colleagues, team mates, and other intimates—to create meaning and order. In this thoughtful and wide-ranging book, Fine argues that the basic building blocks of society itself are forged within the boundaries of such small groups, the "tiny publics" necessary for a robust, functioning social order at all levels. Action, meaning, authority, inequality, organization, and institutions all have their roots in small groups. Yet for the past twenty-five years social scientists have tended to ignore the power of groups in favor of an emphasis on organizations, societies, or individuals. Based on over thirty-five years of Fine's own ethnographic research across an array of small groups, Tiny Publics presents a compelling new theory of the pivotal role of small groups in organizing social life. No social system can thrive without flourishing small groups. They provide havens in an impersonal world, where faceless organizations become humanized. Taking examples from such diverse worlds as Little League baseball teams, restaurant workers, high school debate teams, weather forecasters, and political volunteers, Fine demonstrates how each group has its own unique culture, or idioculture—the system of knowledge, beliefs, behavior, and customs that define and hold a group together. With their dense network of relationships, groups serve as important sources of social and cultural capital for their members. The apparently innocuous jokes, rituals, and nicknames prevalent within Little League baseball teams help establish how teams function internally and how they compete with other teams. Small groups also provide a platform for their members to engage in broader social discourse and a supportive environment to begin effecting change in larger institutions. In his studies of mushroom collectors and high school debate teams, Fine demonstrates the importance of stories that group members tell each other about their successes and frustrations in fostering a strong sense of social cohesion. And Fine shows how the personal commitment political volunteers bring to their efforts is reinforced by the close-knit nature of their work, which in turn has the power to change larger groups and institutions. In this way, the actions and debates begun in small groups can eventually radiate outward to affect every level of society. Fine convincingly demonstrates how small groups provide fertile ground for the seeds of civic engagement. Outcomes often attributed to large-scale social forces originate within such small-scale domains. Employing rich insights from both sociology and social psychology, as well as vivid examples from a revealing array of real-work groups, Tiny Publics provides a compelling examination of the importance of small groups and of the rich vitality they bring to social life. A Volume in the Russell Sage Foundation Series on Trust
This is the first book on multivariate analysis to look at large data sets which describes the state of the art in analyzing such data. Material such as database management systems is included that has never appeared in statistics books before.
In this book some of the leading stratification scholars in the U.S. present empirical and theoretical essays about the institutional contexts that shape careers. Building on recent advances in theory, data, and analytic technique, the essays in this volume work toward the goal of identifying and assessing the processes by which a birth cohort is distributed in the stratification system, given their positions of origin in that system. Alan Kerckhoff's introduction situates the studies in this volume within the context of previous stratification research over several generations, making the book an invaluable resource for scholars and graduate students.
This book provides evidence of the significance of a society's structure and normative definitions in giving shape to one part of the life course, examining closely a major period of life course transition, the move from adolescence to adulthood in Great Britain.
The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Political Sociology is a complete reference guide, reflecting the scope and quality of the discipline, and highlighting emerging topics in the field. Global in focus, offering up-to-date topics from an interdisciplinary, international set of scholars addressing key issues concerning globalization, social movements, and citizenship The majority of chapters are new, including those on environmental politics, international terrorism, security, corruption, and human rights Revises and updates all previously published chapters to include new themes and topics in political sociology Provides an overview of scholarship in the field, with chapters working independently and collectively to examine the full range of contributions to political sociology Offers a challenging yet accessible and complete reference guide for students and scholars
Creative Labour provides an insight into the unique employment issues affecting workers in film, television, theatre, arts, music, radio and new media. In the UK alone, more than 1 million people work in the creative industries, generating billions of pounds in exports each year. These workers have to contend with elastic working hours, employment and promotion uncertainty and vigorous competition for each role. Creative Labour offers a contemporary perspective on a fascinating area of study and a rapidly growing area in developed economies. Key benefits: - Grasp the realities of work behind the industry façade - Evaluate real-life case-studies through a flexible, critical mindset - Tailor your management decisions to the needs of creative staff
Sir Robert Atkyns’s Ancient and Present State of Glostershire, which appeared in 1712, was the first published survey of the county. Alan Pilbeam’s Gloucestershire 300 Years Ago is written to celebrate Atkyns’s achievement and to present his information in a more accessible form. Atkyns’s work is critically assessed with reference to other sources and used as a basis for comparison with today’s landscape. Fully illustrated in both colour and black and white, it includes a gazetteer of places to visit and analysis of the spatial pattern of Atkyns’ data. Published to mark with the tercentenary of this important work, Gloucestershire 300 Years Ago is a must-read for anyone interested in the history of the county and in local history more generally.
This handbook synthesises some literature of the last 40 years in 28 chapters. The coverage is split into the following areas : the history and theory of the multinational enterprise; the political and policy environment of international business.
Blum's distinctive form of theoretical inquiry pushes the reader to move beyond conventional ways of thinking about familiar urban issues in answering such fundamental questions as, How does a city exist? How do its inhabitants define their relationship to it? Who is entitled to speak for it? What is its symbolic nature? In what way does the city function as a focus of attempts to resolve social problems such as alienation, participation, and community? In what ways do night and nighttime affect our relationship to it? How is it possible to speak of a city as both exciting and alienating?
Publisher's Note: Products purchased from 3rd Party sellers are not guaranteed by the Publisher for quality, authenticity, or access to any online entitlements included with the product. This extensive title, which combines scientific principles with up-to-date clinical procedures, has been thoroughly updated for the fourteenth edition. You’ll find in-depth material on the biology and pathophysiology of lymphomas, leukemias, platelet destruction, and other hematological disorders as well as the procedures for diagnosing and treating them.
The most profound and enduring social theorist of sociology's classical period, Max Weber speaks as cogently to concerns of the new century as he did to those of the past. In Max Weber and the New Century, Alan Sica demonstrated Weber's preeminent position and lasting vitality within social theory by applying his ideas to a broad range of topics of contemporary concern. Max Weber: A Comprehensive Bibliography is a companion volume that offers some 4,600 bibliographic listings of work on Weber, making it the most complete guide to the literature in English and a testament to the continued vitality of Weber's thought. Sica's work supersedes all previous bibliographical efforts covering the Weber literature, both in the quantity and accuracy of its references, and the clarity and convenience of its format. In order to demonstrate the enormous variety of Weberiana in English, Sica has adopted a liberal criterion for inclusion, rather than a critical one, choosing to mix the best with what may be more routine work. Following a preface in which previous bibliographies and bibliographic problems are discussed, the volume opens with a series of five specialized bibliographies. The first lists Weber's works in English translation. The second lists reviews of Weber's major works including those translated into English, while the third covers reviews of recent books and other work on Weber. The fourth section contains a selection of dissertations and theses relating to Weber or his ideas. The fifth includes primary and secondary sources treating Weber on rationality and rationalization processes. The last and largest section offers a comprehensive Weber bibliography of works in English. This large-scale endeavor attempts to identify with accuracy and completeness the entire universe of Weber scholarship in English. It will be an essential scholarly tool for sociologists, historians, economists, and students of cultural and intellectual history.
Kitchens takes us into the robust, overheated, backstage world of the contemporary restaurant. In this rich, often surprising portrait of the real lives of kitchen workers, Gary Alan Fine brings their experiences, challenges, and satisfactions to colorful life. A new preface updates this riveting exploration of how restaurants actually work, both individually and as part of a larger culinary culture.
Platelets, Second Edition is the definitive current source of state-of-the-art knowledge about platelets and covers the entire field of platelet biology, pathophysiology, and clinical medicine. Recently there has been a rapid expansion of knowledge in both basic biology and the clinical approach to platelet-related diseases including thrombosis and hemorrhage. Novel platelet function tests, drugs, blood bank storage methods, and gene therapies have been incorporated into patient care or are in development. This book draws all this information into a single, comprehensive and authoritative resource. First edition won Best Book in Medical Science Award from the Association of American Publishers Contains fourteen new chapters on topics such as platelet genomics and proteomics, inhibition of platelet function by the endothelium, clinical tests of platelet function, real time in vivo imaging of platelets, and inherited thrombocytopenias A comprehensive full color reference comprising over 70 chapters, 1400 pages, and 16,000 references
The sentencing guidelines written by the U.S. Sentencing Commission for the federal crime courts were designed to lead to uniform the just punishments for convicted criminals. How well did the Commission's judgments about what were just punishments compare to the view of the American public? Using data from a 1994 national household survey, the authors compare the punishments described by the Commission to those desired by the public. Contrary to the frequency claims of excessive leniency on the part of judges that are often asserted by journalists and shapers of opinions, Rossi and Berk find strong correspondence between the median sentences deemed appropriate by the public and the sentences prescribed by the guidelines. Although the authors conclude that the Commission was able to match prescribed punishments closely to the American consensus for most crimes, in one category -- drug trafficking offenses -- the guidelines were much harsher in dealing with offenders. The national survey used a factorial survey as its design strategy, allowing for analysis of a large variety of federal crimes and variations in the social characteristics of convicted felons. A wealth of detail, along with ample graphic and tabular illustrations, extends the book's application to issues of consensus and variations in punitiveness by region and socioeconomic characteristics of respondents.
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