Magic Prague


Book Description

'A superb, haunting, clotted mad masterpiece.'- John Banville, The Observer This unique cultural history attempts to go beyond the tourist clich of Prague as the 'golden city' to bring out all the mystery, ambiguity, gloom, lethargy and hidden fascination of the city on the Vltava. Ripellino slips into the style of melodrama and ghost stories, the anecdotes of the enchanted traveller and the outlandish bad taste of beer-teller tales to bring out the sorcery of the Bohemian capital in a mixture of fact and fiction.




Marx Beyond Marx


Book Description

'Marx Beyond Marx aims toward a reconstruction of Marxist theory, a reconstruction that goes beyond Marx by going back to Marx, an angry Marxism summoned by the real possibility of communism ... In setting the agenda for such a reconstruction, and in clarifying its priorities, this book is a pathbreaking and indispensable work.' Capital and Class




The Revolt of the Unique


Book Description

Our epoch is an epoch of decadence. Bourgeois-christian-plebeian civilization arrived at the dead end of its evolution a long time ago. Democracy has arrived! But under the false splendor of democratic civilization, higher spiritual values have fallen, shattered. Willful strength, barbarous individuality, free art, heroism, genius, poetry have been scorned, mocked, slandered. And not in the name of "I", but of the "collective". Not in the name of "the unique one", but of society. Thus christianity - condemning the primitive and wild force of the virgin instinct - killed the vigorously pagan "concept" of the joy of the earth. Democracy - its offspring - glorified itself making the justification for this crime and reveling in its grim and vulgar enormity. Already we knew it! Christianity had brutally planted the poisoned blade in the healthy, quivering flesh of all humanity; it had goaded a cold wave of darkness with mystically brutal fury to dim the serene and festive exultation of the dionysian spirit of our pagan ancestors. In one cold evening, winter fatally fell upon a warm midday of summer. It was christianity that, substituting the phantasm of "god" for the vibrant reality of "I", declared itself the fierce enemy of the joy of living and avenged itself knavishly on earthly life. With christianity Life was sent to mourn in the frightful abysses of the most bitter renunciations; she was pushed toward the glacier of disavowal and death. And from this glacier of disavowal and death, democracy was born. Thus democracy - the mother of socialism - is the daughter of christianity. Here is your full description. Just read the book, you don't need a description.




The Translation of Children's Literature


Book Description

In the last few decades a number of European scholars have paid an increasing amount of attention to children's literature in translation. This book not only provides a synthetic account of what has been achieved in the field, but also makes us fully aware of all the textual, visual and cultural complexities that translating for children entails.... Students of this subject have had problems in finding a book that attempted an up-to-date and comprehensive review of the field. Gillian Lathey's Reader does just this. Dr Piotr Kuhiwczak, Director, Centre for Translation and Comparative Cultural Studies University of Warwick.




Social Robots


Book Description

Social robotics is a cutting edge research area gathering researchers and stakeholders from various disciplines and organizations. The transformational potential that these machines, in the form of, for example, caregiving, entertainment or partner robots, pose to our societies and to us as individuals seems to be limited by our technical limitations and phantasy alone. This collection contributes to the field of social robotics by exploring its boundaries from a philosophically informed standpoint. It constructively outlines central potentials and challenges and thereby also provides a stable fundament for further research of empirical, qualitative or methodological nature.




Labels of Origin for Food


Book Description

This book seeks to set geographical indications (GIs) in the context of the overall development of today's economies and societies as marked by globalization and the interaction of cultures that this entails. The book is divided into two parts. The first part (chapters 1-6) sets out the findings of a decade of research into GIs in Europe in the global context. The second part (chapters 7-10) is based on the existence of GIs as a sector in itself in the context of globalization. Included in the appendixes are GI case studies in Europe and maps of protected designations of origin and geographical indications (PDOs and PGIs). Also included are a glossary and a subject index.




Socialbots and Their Friends


Book Description

Many users of the Internet are aware of bots: automated programs that work behind the scenes to come up with search suggestions, check the weather, filter emails, or clean up Wikipedia entries. More recently, a new software robot has been making its presence felt in social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter – the socialbot. However, unlike other bots, socialbots are built to appear human. While a weatherbot will tell you if it's sunny and a spambot will incessantly peddle Viagra, socialbots will ask you questions, have conversations, like your posts, retweet you, and become your friend. All the while, if they're well-programmed, you won't know that you're tweeting and friending with a robot. Who benefits from the use of software robots? Who loses? Does a bot deserve rights? Who pulls the strings of these bots? Who has the right to know what about them? What does it mean to be intelligent? What does it mean to be a friend? Socialbots and Their Friends: Digital Media and the Automation of Sociality is one of the first academic collections to critically consider the socialbot and tackle these pressing questions.




Organic Farming, Prototype for Sustainable Agricultures


Book Description

Stakeholders show a growing interest for organic food and farming (OF&F), which becomes a societal component. Rather than questioning whether OF&F outperforms conventional agriculture or not, the main question addressed in this book is how, and in what conditions, OF&F may be considered as a prototype towards sustainable agricultures. The book gathers 25 papers introduced in a first chapter. The first section investigates OF&F production processes and its capacity to benefit from the systems functioning to achieve higher self-sufficiency. The second one proposes an overview of organic performances providing commodities and public goods. The third one focuses on organics development pathways within agri-food systems and territories. As well as a strong theoretical component, this book provides an overview of the new challenges for research and development. It questions the benefits as well as knowledge gaps with a particular emphasis on bottlenecks and lock-in effects at various levels.




Consuming Technologies


Book Description

Consuming Technologies opens for analysis some crucial but rarely examined areas of social, cultural and economic life. At its core is a concern with the complex set of relationships that mark and define the place of the domestic in the modern world, and an explanation of the relationship between the domestic and public spheres as they are mediated by consumption and technology.




Serious Games Development and Applications


Book Description

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second International Conference on Serious Games Development and Applications, SGDA 2011, held in Lisbon, Portugal in September 2011. The 13 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected for publication. Among the topics addressed are virtual reality, computer assisted learning, computer graphics, tutoring systems, e-learning, e-culture, and guiding systems.