‘After reading this book it will be more difficult to ‘do’ the sociology of work and the sociology of the body in the absence of the other. In some quite exquisite ways it throws down a challenge which practitioners in both fields will find difficult to ignore’ – Paul Stewart, former editor of Work, Employment and Society, University of the West of England
This subtle and powerful ethnography examines African healing and its relationship to medical science. Stacey A. Langwick investigates the practices of healers in Tanzania who confront the most intractable illnesses in the region, including AIDS and malaria. She reveals how healers generate new therapies and shape the bodies of their patients as they address devils and parasites, anti-witchcraft medicine, and child immunization. Transcending the dualisms between tradition and science, culture and nature, belief and knowledge, Langwick tells a new story about the materiality of healing and postcolonial politics. This important work bridges postcolonial theory, science, public health, and anthropology.
Fluorescence sensing is a rapidly developing field of research and technology. Its target is nearly the whole world of natural and synthetic compounds being detected in different media including living bodies. The application area range from control of industrial processes to environment monitoring and clinical diagnostics. Among different detection methods fluorescence techniques are distinguished by ultimate sensitivity, high temporal and spatial resolution and versatility that allows not only remote detection of different targets but their imaging within the living cells. The basic mechanism of sensing is the transmission of the signal produced by molecular interaction with the target to fluorescent molecules, nanoparticles and nanocomposites with the detection by devices based on modern electronics and optics. In this interdisciplinary field of research and development the book is primarily intended to be a guide for students and young researchers. It is also addressed to professionals involved in active research and product development serving as a reference for the recent achievements. The users of these products will find description of principles that could allow proper selection of sensors for particular needs. Making a strong link between education, research and product development, this book discusses future directions.
Foraging is fundamental to animal survival and reproduction, yet it is much more than a simple matter of finding food; it is a biological imperative. Animals must find and consume resources to succeed, and they make extraordinary efforts to do so. For instance, pythons rarely eat, but when they do, their meals are largeas much as 60 percent larger than their own bodies. The snakes digestive system is normally dormant, but during digestion metabolic rates can increase fortyfold. A python digesting quietly on the forest floor has the metabolic rate of thoroughbred in a dead heat. This and related foraging processes have broad applications in ecology, cognitive science, anthropology, and conservation biologyand they can be further extrapolated in economics, neurobiology, and computer science.
A fascinating blend of adventure and science, LAST BREATH recreates in heart-stopping detail what happens to our bodies and minds in the perilous last moments of life when an extreme adventure goes awry.
In this book, a modern unified theory of dispersion forces on atoms and bodies is presented which covers a broad range of different aspects and scenarios. Macroscopic quantum electrodynamics is applied within the context of dispersion forces. In contrast to the normal-mode quantum electrodynamics traditionally used to study dispersion forces, the new approach allows to consider realistic material properties including absorption and is flexible enough to be applied to a broad range of geometries. Thus general properties of dispersion forces like their non-additivity and the relation between microscopic and macroscopic dispersion forces are discussed. It is demonstrated how the general results can be used to obtain dispersion forces on atoms in the presence of bodies of various shapes and materials. In particular, nontrivial magnetic properties of the bodies, bodies of irregular shapes, the role of material absorption, and dynamical forces for excited atoms are discussed. This volume 2 deals especially with quantum electrodynamics, dispersion forces, Casimir forces, asymptotic power laws, quantum friction and universal scaling laws. The book gives both the specialist and those new to the field a thorough overview over recent results in the context of dispersion forces. It provides a toolbox for studying dispersion forces in various contexts.
This book looks at the effectiveness of the 1999 restructuring of the UK through the establishment of the Scottish Parliament and the Assemblies for Northern Ireland and Wales, considering the process of devolution and its consequences on the key mechanisms of accounting and democratic accountability. Many of the chapters in this book examine whether devolution is enhancing democratic accountability, or creating a fragmentary state with conflict and tensions between the Westminster government and the devolved bodies.
The first of two books concentrating on the dynamics of slender bodies within or containing axial flow, Fluid-Structure Interaction, Volume 1 covers the fundamentals and mechanisms giving rise to flow-induced vibration, with a particular focus on the challenges associated with pipes conveying fluid.
The volume is devoted to the mechanics of rods, which is a branch of the mechanics of deformable bodies. The main goal of the book is to present systematically theoretical fundamentals of the mechanics of rods as well as numerical methods used for practical purposes. The monograph is concerned with the most general statements of the problems in the mechanics of rods. Various types of external loads that a rod may be subject to are discussed. Advanced techniques that includes vector analyses, linear algebra, and distributions is used in the derivation of linear and nonlinear equilibrium equations. The use of these techniques helps us to make transformations and rearrangements of equations more transparent and compact. Theoretical basics of rods interacting with external and internal flows of fluid and the derivation of the formulas for the hydrodynamic and aerodynamic forces are presented.
The Cyborg Experiments analyzes the challenges posed to corporeality by techology. Taking as their starting point the work of the highly influential performance artists Orlan and Stelarc, the essays in this timely and important collection raise a number of questions in relation to new conceptions of embodiment, identity and otherness in the age of new technologies: Has the body become obsolete? Does transgender challenge traditional ideas of agency? Have we always been cyborgs?In addition to highlighting the playful character of digital aesthetics, the contributors investigate ethical issues concerning the ownership of our bodies and the experiments we perform on them. In this way the book explores how humanism, and ideas of ‘the human’, have been placed under increasing scrutiny as a result of new developments in science, media and communications.Contributors:John Appleby, Rachel Armstrong, Fred Botting, Julie Clarke, Gary Hall, Chris Hables Gray, Meredith Jones, Orlan, Mark Poster, Jay Prosser, E. A. Scheer, Zod Sofia, Stelarc, Scott Wilson, Joanna Zylinska>
This book will show you the essential techniques of text and language processing. Starting with tokenization, stemming, and the WordNet dictionary, you’ll progress to part-of-speech tagging, phrase chunking, and named entity recognition. You’ll learn how various text corpora are organized, as well as how to create your own custom corpus. Then, you’ll move onto text classification with a focus on sentiment analysis. And because NLP can be computationally expensive on large bodies of text, you’ll try a few methods for distributed text processing. Finally, you’ll be introduced to a number of other small but complementary Python libraries for text analysis, cleaning, and parsing.
CMMI for Development describes best practices for the development and maintenance of products and services across their lifecycle. By integrating essential bodies of knowledge, CMMI-DEV provides a single, comprehensive , for organizations to assess their development and maintenance processes and improve performance. Already widely adopted throughout the world for disciplined, high-quality engineering, CMMI-DEV Version 1.3 now accommodates other modern approaches as well, including the use of , methods, Lean Six Sigma, and architecture-centric development.
