Natures in Translation


Book Description

Understanding the dynamics of British colonialism and the enormous ecological transformations that took place through the mobilization and globalized management of natures. For many critics, Romanticism is synonymous with nature writing, for representations of the natural world appear during this period with a freshness, concreteness, depth, and intensity that have rarely been equaled. Why did nature matter so much to writers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries? And how did it play such an important role in their understanding of themselves and the world? In Natures in Translation, Alan Bewell argues that there is no Nature in the singular, only natures that have undergone transformation through time and across space. He examines how writers—as disparate as Erasmus and Charles Darwin, Joseph Banks, Gilbert White, William Bartram, William Wordsworth, John Clare, and Mary Shelley—understood a world in which natures were traveling and resettling the globe like never before. Bewell presents British natural history as a translational activity aimed at globalizing local natures by making them mobile, exchangeable, comparable, and representable. Bewell explores how colonial writers, in the period leading up to the formulation of evolutionary theory, responded to a world in which new natures were coming into being while others disappeared. For some of these writers, colonial natural history held the promise of ushering in a “cosmopolitan” nature in which every species, through trade and exchange, might become a true “citizen of the world.” Others struggled with the question of how to live after the natures they depended upon were gone. Ultimately, Natures in Translation demonstrates that—far from being separate from the dominant concerns of British imperial culture—nature was integrally bound up with the business of empire.




Emerging Voices in Natural Hazards Research


Book Description

Emerging Voices in Natural Hazards Research provides a synthesis of the most pressing issues in natural hazards research by new professionals. The book begins with an overview of emerging research on natural hazards, such as hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, wildfires, sea-level rise, global warming, climate change, and tornadoes, among others. Remaining sections include topics such as socially vulnerable populations and the cycles of emergency management. Emerging Voices in Natural Hazards Research is intended to serve as a consolidated resource for academics, students, and researchers to learn about the most pressing issues in natural hazard research today. - Provides a platform for readers to keep up-to-date with the interdisciplinary research that new professionals are producing - Covers the multidisciplinary perspectives of the hazards and disasters field - Includes international perspectives from new professionals around the world, including developing countries




Contested Natures


Book Description

Demonstrating that all notions of nature are inextricably entangled in different forms of social life, the text elaborates the many ways in which the apparently natural world has been produced from within particular social practices. These are analyzed in terms of different senses, different times and the production of distinct spaces, including the local, the national and the global. The authors emphasize the importance of cultural understandings of the physical world, highlighting the ways in which these have been routinely misunderstood by academic and policy discourses. They show that popular conceptions of, and attitudes to, nature are often contradictory and that there are no simple ways of prevailing upon people to `




Grounding Urban Natures


Book Description

Case studies from cities on five continents demonstrate the advantages of thinking comparatively about urban environments. The global discourse around urban ecology tends to homogenize and universalize, relying on such terms as “smart cities,” “eco-cities,” and “resilience,” and proposing a “science of cities” based largely on information from the Global North. Grounding Urban Natures makes the case for the importance of place and time in understanding urban environments. Rather than imposing a unified framework on the ecology of cities, the contributors use a variety of approaches across a range of of locales and timespans to examine how urban natures are part of—and are shaped by—cities and urbanization. Grounding Urban Natures offers case studies from cities on five continents that demonstrate the advantages of thinking comparatively about urban environments. The contributors consider the diversity of urban natures, analyzing urban ecologies that range from the coastal delta of New Orleans to real estate practices of the urban poor in Lagos. They examine the effect of popular movements on the meanings of urban nature in cities including San Francisco, Delhi, and Berlin. Finally, they explore abstract urban planning models and their global mobility, examining real-world applications in such cities as Cape Town, Baltimore, and the Chinese “eco-city” Yixing. Contributors Martín Ávila, Amita Baviskar, Jia-Ching Chen, Henrik Ernstson, James Evans, Lisa M. Hoffman, Jens Lachmund, Joshua Lewis, Lindsay Sawyer, Sverker Sörlin, Anne Whiston Spirn, Lance van Sittert, Richard A. Walker




Customer's New Voice


Book Description

Find out how to reap the benefits of motivating and engaging the new, direct customer voice The Customer's New Voice shows businesses how to motivate and transform directly volunteered consumer knowledge into profitable insights, enabling a new echelon of marketing relevancy, customer experience, and personalization. With a deep look at the inner workings of how a modern generation of business innovators are tapping into the fresh opportunities with the customer's new voice, this book describes how businesses are transforming "inference-based" predictions of purchase intent with direct consumer knowledge of their actual intentions and buying context. The result: An untouchable/unprecedented level of offer relevancy, experience, and personalized service levels. Those offers range from the most basic app model of "Give me your physical location, we'll find the best Thai restaurant near you, and give you an instant coupon" to a more complex model such as an Electric utility value proposition: "We'll give you discounts to charge your Prius during certain times to help us optimize our grid efficiency while allowing Toyota to monitor and optimize your battery to enable Toyota's R&D and customer experience enhancement." Forty case studies detail proven approaches for directly engaging the new consumer, showing companies how to take advantage of rapidly evolving personal technology—smart phones, homes, vehicles, wearable technology, and Internet of Things—and the new sharing culture to collect the higher value "intentionally/ discretionarily" shared information. Readers gain access to a robust tool set including templates, checklists, tables, flow diagrams, process maps, and technical data schematics to streamline these new capabilities and accelerate implementation of these transformational techniques. Ninety percent of the data that businesses use to determine what they sell or how to personalize a customer experience results from consumers unintentionally volunteering "indirect" data; however, this type of data has less than 10 percent accuracy. This low effectiveness also necessitates up to 70 percent of a business's cost infrastructure. Direct consumer knowledge is now available and boasts up to 20-50 percent accuracy, yet businesses remain anchored in the old "indirect" competencies. This book helps companies integrate compelling sharing motivators and controls for consumers to feel motivated and safe about directly sharing their product and experience desires, providing the ultimate market advantage. Learn how to catch up to the new digitalized consumer Leverage direct consumer information from current megatrends Navigate privacy's current and future metamorphosis Unlock the untapped value of Big Data's true enabler—Little Data Parsing "incidentally" volunteered data has been stagnant for decades due to the capabilities and expectations of a new generation of enabled consumers The timeless reality is that any level of investment in computing power, data, and analytics will never approach their full ROI potential without interfusing the direct, intentional insights from the consumer. If today's forward-thinking companies want to profitably engage the new consumers, they must learn the secrets of motivating and safeguarding this new potential of customer transparency. The risks of not engaging these new consumer voices? Irrelevancy and Silence. The Customer's New Voice shows businesses how to fulfill the promise and caveat of the new consumer: "If you make my life easier, reward me, and respect my shared information: I will tell you my secrets."




Nurturing Natures


Book Description

This new edition of the bestselling text, Nurturing Natures, provides an indispensable synthesis of the latest scientific knowledge about children’s emotional development. Integrating a wealth of both up-to-date and classical research from areas such as attachment theory, neuroscience, developmental psychology and cross-cultural studies, it weaves these into an accessible, enjoyable text that always keeps in mind children recognisable to academics, practitioners and parents. New to this edition, the book considers transgender issues, same-sex parenting, experiences of black and minority ethnic groups, well-being and the impact of mental health in relation to climate change anxiety. It looks at key developmental stages from life in the womb to the preschool years and right up until adolescence, examining how children develop language, play and memory and moral capacities. Issues of nature and nurture are addressed and the effects of different kinds of early experiences are unpicked, creating a coherent and balanced view of the developing child in context. Nurturing Natures is written by an experienced child therapist who has used a wide array of research from different disciplines to create a highly readable and scientifically trustworthy text. Equipped with key points, questions for consideration, further reading and online video chapter introductions, this book is essential reading for childcare students, teachers, social workers, health visitors, early years practitioners and those training or working in child counselling, psychiatry and mental health. Full of fascinating findings, it provides answers to many of the questions people really want to ask about the human journey from conception into adulthood.




New Visions and New Voices


Book Description

In this book, Clifford Mayes and his associates take archetypal pedagogy—a Jungian approach to teaching and learning—and extend it beyond just the “educational processes” that take place in classrooms, which are those spaces that a culture dedicates to the generation and acquisition of codified scholastic knowledge. It looks at the archetypal dynamics of teaching and learning as fundamental to human existence itself. From the cradle to the grave, we are involved in informing and shaping the worldviews of others, just as they are involved in impacting ours. Deep relationship, an I-Thou relationship not only allows but requires this to be the case so that the discussants can become what Martin Buber called “dialogical partners,” engaged in both mutual critique and mutual affirmation, as they reach knew planes of knowledge and even presence. Such teaching and learning are what Mayes calls “educative acts.” This book explores educative acts in a wide range of venues and concerning a variety of issues.







Elemental Natures


Book Description

Elemental Natures draws together thirty years of poetic practice, with substantial selections from six previous books of poetry, including the sequence “No One Comes For Penelope— ”, a retelling of the end of the Odyssey that teases the reader with conflicting views of time and reality. The essay, “The American Voice”, looks at three iconic American poets, Walt Whitman, Robinson Jeffers, and Robert Lowell, emphasizing an entirely different viewpoint of what is unique to the American voice in poetry, focusing on its largesse, passion, excess, and ability to recover in confronting and making sense of our lives. His poetry is central to his creative output, work variously called “inspiring” “visionary” “vibrant” “post- Keatsian” “passionate” “unabashed by sensuality and feeling”; “a voice beyond epoch ... but rooted in Los Angeles”, dedicated “to the welfare of planet earth”, work variously compared to Browning, Auden, and in its freedom, Pablo Neruda.




Natural Interaction with Robots, Knowbots and Smartphones


Book Description

These proceedings presents the state-of-the-art in spoken dialog systems with applications in robotics, knowledge access and communication. It addresses specifically: 1. Dialog for interacting with smartphones; 2. Dialog for Open Domain knowledge access; 3. Dialog for robot interaction; 4. Mediated dialog (including crosslingual dialog involving Speech Translation); and,5. Dialog quality evaluation. These articles were presented at the IWSDS 2012 workshop.