How can prospective outsourcing clients prepare their internal organizational workflows to meet the challenges associated with an outsourcing venture with little penalty in time, cost, and effort? Along this guiding question, the author empirically investigates the ways in which several factors of the client company's internal organizational context affect the outcomes of their outsourcing efforts. The investigated factors represent the client's IT capability, the explicit knowledge in form of business process documentation available within the company, and the level of alignment between the client's IT and business domains. Based on qualitative and quantitative empirical data, S. F. Martin demonstrates that each of these client-specific factors has a significant inter-organizational impact, affecting the quality of the relationship between client and provider, the vendor’s performance, and outsourcing success.
This fourth collection by Sebastian Brock focuses on three areas: the christology of the Church of the East, with the argument that the traditional characterisation of this Church as 'Nestorian' is not only unsatisfactory, but also thoroughly misleading; the distinctive phraseology of the invocations to the Holy Spirit in the Syriac liturgical tradition, hearkening back to Jewish roots; and two important early Commentaries on the Liturgy.
Over the past fifteen years countries in Latin America made tremendous progress in strengthening their economies and improving living standards. Although output fell temporarily during the global financial crisis, most economies staged a rapid recovery. However, economic activity across the region has been cooling off and the region is facing a more challenging period ahead. This book argues that Latin America can rise to the challenge, and policymakers in the region are already implementing reforms in education, energy, and other sectors. More is needed, and more is possible, in Latin America’s quest to continue to improve living standards.
This is a unique, extensively illustrated dictionary of terms, people, events, and dates spanning the entire history of medicine. It is a monumental work of scholarship totaling some 700 double-column pages with a large number of rare and exceptional illustrations from many original sources painstakingly compiled over years of far-searching inquiry involving more than 5,000 books and hundreds of journals. It is a major resource of hard-to-find information about notable medical figures, instruments, conditions, procedures, and dates and a storehouse of captivating anecdotes and background material. The book contains a wealth of material for concise historical introductions to a broad range of subjects and is the sine qua non authority on both well and little known facts of medical history. With this single volume-an unprecedented tour de force representing more than 7,000 hours of exhaustive research-clinicians and researchers from all fields of medicine can quickly and easily find authoritative, detailed definitions and descriptions, with dates, of medical terms and of the people and events contributing to the development of medicine from earliest times to the present day. The entries range widely from such as abacterial pyuria to zygote, including Latin and Greek origins of terms, compact biographies with dates, eponymic information of all kinds, and rarely seen drawings and photographs of antique medical instruments and little-known conditions.
Applied machine learning with a solid foundation in theory. Revised and expanded for TensorFlow 2, GANs, and reinforcement learning. Purchase of the print or Kindle book includes a free eBook in the PDF format. Key Features Third edition of the bestselling, widely acclaimed Python machine learning book Clear and intuitive explanations take you deep into the theory and practice of Python machine learning Fully updated and expanded to cover TensorFlow 2, Generative Adversarial Network models, reinforcement learning, and best practices Book Description Python Machine Learning, Third Edition is a comprehensive guide to machine learning and deep learning with Python. It acts as both a step-by-step tutorial, and a reference you'll keep coming back to as you build your machine learning systems. Packed with clear explanations, visualizations, and working examples, the book covers all the essential machine learning techniques in depth. While some books teach you only to follow instructions, with this machine learning book, Raschka and Mirjalili teach the principles behind machine learning, allowing you to build models and applications for yourself. Updated for TensorFlow 2.0, this new third edition introduces readers to its new Keras API features, as well as the latest additions to scikit-learn. It's also expanded to cover cutting-edge reinforcement learning techniques based on deep learning, as well as an introduction to GANs. Finally, this book also explores a subfield of natural language processing (NLP) called sentiment analysis, helping you learn how to use machine learning algorithms to classify documents. This book is your companion to machine learning with Python, whether you're a Python developer new to machine learning or want to deepen your knowledge of the latest developments. What you will learn Master the frameworks, models, and techniques that enable machines to 'learn' from data Use scikit-learn for machine learning and TensorFlow for deep learning Apply machine learning to image classification, sentiment analysis, intelligent web applications, and more Build and train neural networks, GANs, and other models Discover best practices for evaluating and tuning models Predict continuous target outcomes using regression analysis Dig deeper into textual and social media data using sentiment analysis Who this book is for If you know some Python and you want to use machine learning and deep learning, pick up this book. Whether you want to start from scratch or extend your machine learning knowledge, this is an essential resource. Written for developers and data scientists who want to create practical machine learning and deep learning code, this book is ideal for anyone who wants to teach computers how to learn from data.
Leverage benefits of machine learning techniques using Python About This Book Improve and optimise machine learning systems using effective strategies. Develop a strategy to deal with a large amount of data. Use of Python code for implementing a range of machine learning algorithms and techniques. Who This Book Is For This title is for data scientist and researchers who are already into the field of data science and want to see machine learning in action and explore its real-world application. Prior knowledge of Python programming and mathematics is must with basic knowledge of machine learning concepts. What You Will Learn Learn to write clean and elegant Python code that will optimize the strength of your algorithms Uncover hidden patterns and structures in data with clustering Improve accuracy and consistency of results using powerful feature engineering techniques Gain practical and theoretical understanding of cutting-edge deep learning algorithms Solve unique tasks by building models Get grips on the machine learning design process In Detail Machine learning and predictive analytics are becoming one of the key strategies for unlocking growth in a challenging contemporary marketplace. It is one of the fastest growing trends in modern computing, and everyone wants to get into the field of machine learning. In order to obtain sufficient recognition in this field, one must be able to understand and design a machine learning system that serves the needs of a project. The idea is to prepare a learning path that will help you to tackle the real-world complexities of modern machine learning with innovative and cutting-edge techniques. Also, it will give you a solid foundation in the machine learning design process, and enable you to build customized machine learning models to solve unique problems. The course begins with getting your Python fundamentals nailed down. It focuses on answering the right questions that cove a wide range of powerful Python libraries, including scikit-learn Theano and Keras.After getting familiar with Python core concepts, it's time to dive into the field of data science. You will further gain a solid foundation on the machine learning design and also learn to customize models for solving problems. At a later stage, you will get a grip on more advanced techniques and acquire a broad set of powerful skills in the area of feature selection and feature engineering. Style and approach This course includes all the resources that will help you jump into the data science field with Python. The aim is to walk through the elements of Python covering powerful machine learning libraries. This course will explain important machine learning models in a step-by-step manner. Each topic is well explained with real-world applications with detailed guidance.Through this comprehensive guide, you will be able to explore machine learning techniques.
This book of the bestselling and widely acclaimed Python Machine Learning series is a comprehensive guide to machine and deep learning using PyTorch s simple to code framework. Purchase of the print or Kindle book includes a free eBook in PDF format. Key Features Learn applied machine learning with a solid foundation in theory Clear, intuitive explanations take you deep into the theory and practice of Python machine learning Fully updated and expanded to cover PyTorch, transformers, XGBoost, graph neural networks, and best practices Book DescriptionMachine Learning with PyTorch and Scikit-Learn is a comprehensive guide to machine learning and deep learning with PyTorch. It acts as both a step-by-step tutorial and a reference you'll keep coming back to as you build your machine learning systems. Packed with clear explanations, visualizations, and examples, the book covers all the essential machine learning techniques in depth. While some books teach you only to follow instructions, with this machine learning book, we teach the principles allowing you to build models and applications for yourself. Why PyTorch? PyTorch is the Pythonic way to learn machine learning, making it easier to learn and simpler to code with. This book explains the essential parts of PyTorch and how to create models using popular libraries, such as PyTorch Lightning and PyTorch Geometric. You will also learn about generative adversarial networks (GANs) for generating new data and training intelligent agents with reinforcement learning. Finally, this new edition is expanded to cover the latest trends in deep learning, including graph neural networks and large-scale transformers used for natural language processing (NLP). This PyTorch book is your companion to machine learning with Python, whether you're a Python developer new to machine learning or want to deepen your knowledge of the latest developments.What you will learn Explore frameworks, models, and techniques for machines to learn from data Use scikit-learn for machine learning and PyTorch for deep learning Train machine learning classifiers on images, text, and more Build and train neural networks, transformers, and boosting algorithms Discover best practices for evaluating and tuning models Predict continuous target outcomes using regression analysis Dig deeper into textual and social media data using sentiment analysis Who this book is for If you have a good grasp of Python basics and want to start learning about machine learning and deep learning, then this is the book for you. This is an essential resource written for developers and data scientists who want to create practical machine learning and deep learning applications using scikit-learn and PyTorch. Before you get started with this book, you’ll need a good understanding of calculus, as well as linear algebra.
Being and Meaning is a comparative study of the concepts of Being and Language in Bhartrhari and Martin Heidegger, emphasising the universality of their thinking. Language in Bhartrhari's vision is the medium of the self-expression for the Ultimate Reality (Sabdatattva). In Heidegger's thinking language is the Original Utterance (Sage) which Being speaks to man. Being expresses itself in language, and phenomena in the world occur simultaneously with the occurrence of language. Bhartrhari and Heidegger lead one to the belonging togetherness of Being and being beyond all conceptualizing, transcending the bounds of Orient and Occident.
Climate change has taken centre stage in Eurpean and international politics. The fourth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), released in 2007, confirmedthat climate change is on eof the most serious threats to international security and the well-being of human kind. At the European level, climate change has become a major agenda item regularly discussed by the European Council. Internationally, the issue has become one of "high politics". Since 2005, it has been a top priority of the G-8 Summits, and both the UN Security Council and the UN General Assembly have placed it high on their agendas. World leaders are rallying to achieve a new global deal to combat global warming under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Overall, there is hardly any high-level political encounter in which the issue is not discussed. The European Union as established itself as the most ptrominent international leader on the issue. It has been one of the most fervent supporters of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and its Kyoto Protocol, striving to sustain its leadership in the efforts to reach a new global agreement post-2012. The EU has also increasingly underpinned its international leadership position with domestic action. Most prominently, it introduced a greenhouse gas emissions trading scheme in 2005. The Period 2007-2008 saw a major overhaul and leap forward in the development of a renewed EU framework of policy and legislation to address climate change. Most importantly, the new EU climate policies include a set of legislative acts adopted in early 2009 and known as the "climate and energy package" that is designed to acheve the EU's target of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 20% and increasing the share of renewable energies to 20% by 2020. This volume provides a timely overview and assessment of the development of the new EU climate policies with a focus on the new climate and energy package. Are EU climate policies sufficient to meet the environmental, economic and political challenge posed by global climate change? How do international and domestic climate poliies of the EU intereact and are they mutually supportive? What are the prospects for the EU keeping its international leadership in the face of a more engaged US and increasingly assertive emerging economies? In addressing these questions, the volume aims to enhance understanding and contribute to further discussions on the current and potential reole of the EU in the fight against climate change.
In Germany at the turn of the century, Buddhism transformed from an obscure topic, of interest to only a few misfit scholars, into a cultural phenomenon. Many of the foremost authors of the period were profoundly influenced by this rapid rise of Buddhism—among them, some of the best-known names in the German-Jewish canon. Sebastian Musch excavates this neglected dimension of German-Jewish identity, drawing on philosophical treatises, novels, essays, diaries, and letters to trace the history of Jewish-Buddhist encounters up to the start of the Second World War. Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, Leo Baeck, Theodor Lessing, Jakob Wassermann, Walter Hasenclever, and Lion Feuchtwanger are featured alongside other, lesser known figures like Paul Cohen-Portheim and Walter Tausk. As Musch shows, when these thinkers wrote about Buddhism, they were also negotiating their own Jewishness.
with a memoir by William S. Heckscher Erwin Panofsky (1892-1968) was one of the preeminent art historians of the twentieth century. A new translation of his seminal work, Perspective as Symbolic Form, was recently published by Zone Books; now three remarkable essays, one previously unpublished, place Panofsky's genius in a different perspective: What Is Baroque?, Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures,andThe Ideological Antecedents of the Rolls-Royce Radiator. The essays are framed by an introduction by Irving Lavin, Panofsky's successor as Professor of Art History at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, discussing the context of the essays' composition and their significance within Panofsky's oeuvre, and an insightful memoir by Panofsky's former student, close friend, and fellow emigr & e ́, William Heckscher. All three essays reveal unexpected aspects of Panofsky's sensibility, both personal and intellectual. Originally written as lectures for general audiences, they are composed in a lively, informal manner, and are full of charm and wit. The studies concern broadly defined problems of style in art--the visual symptoms endemic to works of a certain period (Baroque), medium (film), or national identity (England)--as opposed to the focus on iconography and subject matter usually associated with Panofsky's "method." The essay on Baroque, which Lavin considers "vintage Panofsky" and which appears here for the first time, and the one on film were written in 1934. The Rolls-Royce piece was written in 1962.
Sebastian Knoll suggests that the successful realization of growth synergies is associated with a selective focus on specific growth opportunities, decentralized cross-business collaboration that motivates productive business unit self-interest, and a corporate management approach that guides and balances this self-interest in an evolutionary fashion.
This book provides a comprehensive overview of stacking faults in crystal structures. Subjects covered include: notations used in representations of close-packed structures; types of faults; methods of detection and measurement such as X-ray diffraction, electron diffraction and other techniques; theoretical models of non-random faulting during phase transitions; specific examples of - close packed structures including, zinc sulphide, silicon carbide and silver iodide.
Hybrid quantum circuits interfacing rare earth spin ensembles with microwave resonators are a promising approach for application as coherent quantum memory and frequency converter. In this thesis, hybrid circuits based on Er and Nd ions doped into Y?SiO? and YAlO? crystals are investigated by optical and on-chip microwave spectroscopy. Coherent strong coupling between the microwave resonator and spin ensemble as well as a multimode memory for weak coherent microwave pulses are demonstrated.
In Everyday Food Practices, Tarunna Sebastian explores the teaching and learning dimensions of people’s food choices and practices as they are played out in their everyday lives and local community. Using multi-sited critical ethnographic methodology, Sebastian followed people on their journeys while planning, shopping, preparing, cooking, and eating food. These journeys reveal that supermarket corporations play a hegemonic role, creating and sustaining class-based diets and cultural dynamics which undermine individual agency. Rebuking corporate hegemony, food education at counter-cultural sites—such as farmers’ markets, food cooperatives, and community gardens—seeks to empower people with knowledge and skills derived from socially and environmentally sustainable food curricula. However, class and ethnicity-based patterns of engagement compromise learning at these sites. Sebastian argues that, by contrast, the embodied experiences of inter-generational, home-based food practices are more effective in teaching sustainable cooking skills and the production of healthy meals.
To enable the fabrication of high performance ultraviolet (UV) light-emitting diodes (LEDs) this work aims at improving the quality of AlN base layers on sapphire substrates. The main issues for UV LEDs are still a limited internal quantum efficiency due to a high amount of threading dislocations along with a limited light extraction efficiency due to total internal reflection at the AlN/sapphire interface. Therefore, high-temperature annealing of AlN/sapphire layers and growth on nanopatterned sapphire substrates were comprehensively investigated. High-temperature annealing was applied to AlN layers of different strain and thickness grown by metalorganic vapour phase epitaxy (MOVPE). The threading dislocation density could be successfully reduced by more than one order of magnitude down to 6 × 108 cm-2. Wave optical simulations of UV LEDs on nanopatterned sapphire substrates (NPSS) were conducted and showed a potential increase in light extraction efficiency compared to a planar substrate. The optimized MOVPE growth process on sapphire nanopillars and sapphire nanoholes resulted in a fully coalesced and atomically smooth AlN surface. The threading dislocation density was reduced to 1 ×109 cm-2 for AlN on both nanopillars and nanoholes. UVC LEDs emitting at 265 nm wavelength were grown on top of the developed templates. Increased internal efficiency was obtained by reduced dislocation density and more efficient light extraction was achieved on NPSS in case of a transparent heterostructure and reflective contacts. Thus, the developed templates yield considerable improvement in light output compared to conventional templates.
What is attention? How does attention shape consciousness? In an approach that engages with foundational topics in the philosophy of mind, the theory of action, psychology, and the neurosciences this book provides a unified and comprehensive answer to both questions. Sebastian Watzl shows that attention is a central structural feature of the mind. The first half of the book provides an account of the nature of attention. Attention is prioritizing, it consists in regulating priority structures. Attention is not another element of the mind, but constituted by structures that organize, integrate, and coordinate the parts of our mind. Attention thus integrates the perceptual and intellectual, the cognitive and motivational, and the epistemic and practical. The second half of the book concerns the relationship between attention and consciousness. Watzl argues that attentional structure shapes consciousness into what is central and what is peripheral. The center-periphery structure of consciousness cannot be reduced to the structure of how the world appears to the subject. What it is like for us thus goes beyond the way the world appears to us. On this basis, a new view of consciousness is offered. In each conscious experience we actively take a stance on the world we appear to encounter. It is in this sense that our conscious experience is our subjective perspective.
This important book makes a significant contribution to the emergent body of public health knowledge by examining debates around the social context of health, including key socio-economic, environmental and cultural factors
The story of Fidel Castro has few parallels in contemporary history. None of the outstanding Third World leaders of the twentieth-century played such a prominent and restless part on the international stage and none survived as head of state for as long. Over almost 50 years, he was one of the most controversial political figures in the world, and his legacy has yet to be fully evaluated. Some of his most cherished plans were realized and are a model for many Third World countries. Yet despite enormous sacrifices by Cubans, his grand vision remains unfulfilled and its continued pursuit is full of risks. The fully revised third edition of this respected political biography provides the first full retrospect of Castro’s remarkable career right up to his illness and withdrawal from power in February 2008, incorporating analysis of: the renewed crackdown on dissidents in Cuba from the mid 1990s on the major geopolitical reconfiguration of Latin America in the late 1990s, and the new Cuban-Venezuelan relationship under Hugo Chavez the Helms Burton Act and the continuing US embargo The Cuban economy in the first decade of the new millennium It also revisits earlier events in Castro’s career, for instance the various assassination plots against him , the Cuban missile crisis and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in the light of documents released by Cuba and the US over the past decade and a half.
While compilers for high-level programming languages are large complex software systems, they have particular characteristics that differentiate them from other software systems. Their functionality is almost completely well-defined - ideally there exist complete precise descriptions of the source and target languages. Additional descriptions of the interfaces to the operating system, programming system and programming environment, and to other compilers and libraries are often available. The book deals with the optimization phase of compilers. In this phase, programs are transformed in order to increase their efficiency. To preserve the semantics of the programs in these transformations, the compiler has to meet the associated applicability conditions. These are checked using static analysis of the programs. In this book the authors systematically describe the analysis and transformation of imperative and functional programs. In addition to a detailed description of important efficiency-improving transformations, the book offers a concise introduction to the necessary concepts and methods, namely to operational semantics, lattices, and fixed-point algorithms. This book is intended for students of computer science. The book is supported throughout with examples, exercises and program fragments.
Statistical analysis of shapes of 3D objects is an important problem with a wide range of applications. This analysis is difficult for many reasons, including the fact that objects differ in both geometry and topology. In this manuscript, we narrow the problem by focusing on objects with fixed topology, say objects that are diffeomorphic to unit spheres, and develop tools for analyzing their geometries. The main challenges in this problem are to register points across objects and to perform analysis while being invariant to certain shape-preserving transformations. We develop a comprehensive framework for analyzing shapes of spherical objects, i.e., objects that are embeddings of a unit sphere in ℝ, including tools for: quantifying shape differences, optimally deforming shapes into each other, summarizing shape samples, extracting principal modes of shape variability, and modeling shape variability associated with populations. An important strength of this framework is that it is elastic: it performs alignment, registration, and comparison in a single unified framework, while being invariant to shape-preserving transformations. The approach is essentially Riemannian in the following sense. We specify natural mathematical representations of surfaces of interest, and impose Riemannian metrics that are invariant to the actions of the shape-preserving transformations. In particular, they are invariant to reparameterizations of surfaces. While these metrics are too complicated to allow broad usage in practical applications, we introduce a novel representation, termed square-root normal fields (SRNFs), that transform a particular invariant elastic metric into the standard L2 metric. As a result, one can use standard techniques from functional data analysis for registering, comparing, and summarizing shapes. Specifically, this results in: pairwise registration of surfaces; computation of geodesic paths encoding optimal deformations; computation of Karcher means and covariances under the shape metric; tangent Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and extraction of dominant modes of variability; and finally, modeling of shape variability using wrapped normal densities. These ideas are demonstrated using two case studies: the analysis of surfaces denoting human bodies in terms of shape and pose variability; and the clustering and classification of the shapes of subcortical brain structures for use in medical diagnosis. This book develops these ideas without assuming advanced knowledge in differential geometry and statistics. We summarize some basic tools from differential geometry in the appendices, and introduce additional concepts and terminology as needed in the individual chapters.
From Sure Start to healthy workplaces, health action zones to community regeneration, this volume makes the leap from research to action." Professor Richard Parish, Chief Executive, The Royal Society for the Promotion of Health What is public health and how has it changed over time? What is the social context of public health and what are the dominant 21st centuryissues? What strategies are in place to address population health? This important book makes a significant contribution to the emergent body of public health knowledge by examining debates around the social context of health, including key socio-economic, environmental and cultural factors. In doing so, the text locates within a social context the theoretical debates and problems surrounding public health, and analyzes the practical public health strategies and solutions that have been developed to address them. The book moves beyond traditional theoretical discourse to include coverage of: The thinking, frameworks and processes that are actively shaping public health in the 21st century Provides tangible examples of public health strategies that have recently been introduced to tackle the social determinants of health The use of media strategies to promote health Public Health is key reading for students undertaking courses in health studies, health promotion, nursing, public health, social policy, social work and sociology. In addition to a wide student readership, the book’s focus on public health action and current practice also makes it highly relevant to professionals. The text brings together a distinguished group of practitioners, social scientists and public health experts who contribute their ideas and research. Contributors: Amanda Amos, Mel Bartley, Linda Bauld, Hannah Bradby, Tarani Chandola, Jeff Collin, Paul Fleming, Colin Fudge, Sebastian Garman, Ben Gidley, Jenny Head, David Hunter, Martin King, Roderick Lawrence, Kelley Lee, Yaojun Li, Mhairi Mackenzie, Alex Marsh, Antony Morgan, Jennie Popay, Graham Scambler, Sasha Scambler, Angela Scriven, Nick Watson.
Develop confident linguists, who appreciate other cultures with this course, based closely around the IB's desired learner profile. This text caters for Language B - students learning Spanish as a second language at Standard and Higher levels. It includes a starter unit to help bridge the gap from pre-16 exams into the distinctive requirements of the IB Diploma. - Builds language skills through carefully crafted tasks and grammar practice - Improves exam performance with activities for all aspects of IB Spanish assessment - Promotes global citizenship and an appreciation of Hispanic culture through stimulus material, including a particular emphasis on the Americas Each copy includes an Audio CD providing tracks for the listening exercises
Reassess medieval literature and the relationship between writers and power in England by arguing that major works commissioned by or written for a succession of Lancastrians--Henry IV, Henry V, Henry VI, and Prince Edward--reveal that John Gower, Thomas Hoccleve, John Lydgate, and John Fortescue were not propagandists.
Definitive English language edition of influential (1494) allegorical classic. Sweeping satire of weaknesses, vices, grotesqueries of the day. Includes 114 royalty-free illustrations.
Moderne Arbeitsmärkte erfordern ein hohes Maß an Flexibilität von Arbeitskräften und insbesondere von Arbeitslosen. Dabei kommt der Bereitschaft zur regionalen Mobilität im Zuge der tiefgreifenden Hartz-Reformen des deutschen Arbeitsmarktes eine zentrale Rolle zu. Vor diesem Hintergrund untersucht diese Forschungsarbeit die Bedeutung überregionaler Mobilität im Stellensuchprozess von Arbeitslosen. Basierend auf innovativen experimentellen Forschungsdesigns, reichhaltigen administrativen und Befragungsdaten und unter Verwendung aktueller ökonometrischer Analysen leistet Sebastian Bähr einen wichtigen Beitrag zur aktuellen Debatte über die Wirkung von Flexibilisierung auf soziale Ungleichheit am Arbeitsmarkt.
This book upends some of the myths that have come to surround the work of the philosopher Theodor W. Adorno – not least amongst them, his supposed fatalism. Sebastian Truskolaski argues that Adorno's writings allow us to address what is arguably the central challenge of modern philosophy: how to picture a world beyond suffering and injustice without, at the same time, betraying its vital impulse. By re-appraising Adorno's writings on politics, philosophy, and art, this book reconstructs this notoriously difficult author's overall project from a radically new perspective (Adorno's famous 'standpoint of redemption'), and brings his central concerns to bear on the problems of today. On the one hand, this means reading Adorno alongside his principal interlocutors (including Kant, Marx and Benjamin). On the other hand, it means asking how his secular brand of social criticism can serve to safeguard the image of a better world – above all, when the invocation of this image occurs alongside Adorno's recurrent reference to the Old Testament ban on making images of God. By reading Adorno in this iconoclastic way, Adorno and the Ban on Images contributes to current debates about Utopia that have come to define political visions across the political spectrum.
Die Studie Johannes XXII., Avignon und Europa widmet sich mit einem innovativen Ansatz einem kontrovers diskutierten Pontifikat und ordnet hierbei anhand der in den päpstlichen Registerserien überlieferten kurialen Korrespondenz klassische Themen, wie die Auseinandersetzung zwischen Kaisertum und Papsttum, in einen europäischen Vergleichshorizont ein. Fallstudien, die von den Britischen Inseln bis zum Mittelmeer reichen, geben daneben den Mechanismen, Strukturen und Akteuren der päpstlichen Politik eine deutliche Kontur, wobei auch die grundsätzliche Rolle des Papsttums im spätmittelalterlichen Europa aus einem neuen Blickwinkel betrachtet wird. By implementing a European approach, the study offers a new view on the controversial pontificate of John XXII. Through examination of the correspondence preserved in the papal registers, classic topics like the dispute between papacy and empire can be interpreted within a broader context while case studies ranging from the British Isles to the Mediterranean reveal the mechanisms and actors of papal politics in late medieval Europe.
The construction of the European Community (EC) has widely been understood as the product of either economic self-interest or dissatisfaction with the nation-state system. In Europe United, Sebastian Rosato challenges these conventional explanations, arguing that the Community came into being because of balance of power concerns. France and the Federal Republic of Germany—the two key protagonists in the story—established the EC at the height of the cold war as a means to balance against the Soviet Union and one another. More generally, Rosato argues that international institutions, whether military or economic, largely reflect the balance of power. In his view, states establish institutions in order to maintain or increase their share of world power, and the shape of those institutions reflects the wishes of their most powerful members. Rosato applies this balance of power theory of cooperation to several other cooperative ventures since 1789, including various alliances and trade pacts, the unifications of Italy and Germany, and the founding of the United States. Rosato concludes by arguing that the demise of the Soviet Union has deprived the EC of its fundamental purpose. As a result, further moves toward political and military integration are improbable, and the economic community is likely to unravel to the point where it becomes a shadow of its former self.
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