The Information
The Information

Author: James Gleick

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2011-03-01

Total Pages: 400

ISBN-13: 0307379574

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

From the bestselling author of the acclaimed Chaos and Genius comes a thoughtful and provocative exploration of the big ideas of the modern era: Information, communication, and information theory. Acclaimed science writer James Gleick presents an eye-opening vision of how our relationship to information has transformed the very nature of human consciousness. A fascinating intellectual journey through the history of communication and information, from the language of Africa’s talking drums to the invention of written alphabets; from the electronic transmission of code to the origins of information theory, into the new information age and the current deluge of news, tweets, images, and blogs. Along the way, Gleick profiles key innovators, including Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace, Samuel Morse, and Claude Shannon, and reveals how our understanding of information is transforming not only how we look at the world, but how we live. A New York Times Notable Book A Los Angeles Times and Cleveland Plain Dealer Best Book of the Year Winner of the PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award

Exile and Cultural Hegemony
Exile and Cultural Hegemony

Author: Sebastiaan Faber

Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 418

ISBN-13: 9780826514226

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

After Francisco Franco's victory in the Spanish Civil War, a great many of the country's intellectuals went into exile in Mexico. During the three and a half decades of Francoist dictatorship, these exiles held that the Republic, not Francoism, represented the authentic culture of Spain. In this environment, as Sebastiaan Faber argues in Exile and Cultural Hegemony, the Spaniards' conception of their role as intellectuals changed markedly over time. The first study of its kind to place the exiles' ideological evolution in a broad historical context, Exile and Cultural Hegemony takes into account developments in both Spanish and Mexican politics from the early 1930s through the 1970s. Faber pays particular attention to the intellectuals' persistent nationalism and misplaced illusions of pan-Hispanist grandeur, which included awkward and ironic overlaps with the rhetoric employed by their enemies on the Francoist right. This embrace of nationalism, together with the intellectuals' dependence on the increasingly authoritarian Mexican regime and the international climate of the Cold War, eventually caused them to abandon the Gramscian ideal of the intellectual as political activist in favor of a more liberal, apolitical stance preferred by, among others, the Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset. With its comprehensive approach to topics integral to Spanish culture, both students of and those with a general interest in twentieth-century Spanish literature, history, or culture will find Exile and Cultural Hegemony a fascinating and groundbreaking work.

EBOOK: Sustaining Change in Universities
EBOOK: Sustaining Change in Universities

Author: Burton Clark

Publisher: McGraw-Hill Education (UK)

Published: 2004-09-16

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 0335224547

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

·What can be done to ensure universities are well positioned to meet the challenges of the fast moving world of the 21st century? This is the central question addressed by Burton R. Clark in this significant new volume which greatly extends the case studies and concepts presented in his 1998 book, Creating Entrepreneurial Universities. The new volume draws on case studies of fourteen proactive institutions in the UK, Europe, Australia, Latin America, Africa, and the United States that extend analysis into the early years of the twenty-first century. The cumulative international coverage underpins a more fully developed conceptual framework offering insight into ways of initiating and sustaining change in universities. This new conceptual framework shifts attention from transformation to sustainability rooted in a constructed steady state of change and a collegial approach to entrepreneurialism. It contains key elements necessary for universities to adapt successfully to the modern world. Lessons for reform can be drawn directly from both the individual case studies and the general framework. Overall the book offers a new form of university organization that is more self-reliant and manages to combine change with continuity, traditional academic values with new managerial values. Essential reading for university administrators, faculty members, students and researchers analysing higher education, and educational policymakers worldwide, this book advocates a highly proactive approach to university change and specifies a new basis for university self- reliance. Burton R. Clark is Allan M. Cartter Professor Emeritus of Higher Education and Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles. During his career, he has taught at five leading US universities: Stanford, Harvard, Berkeley, Yale and UCLA. He has published widely on the nature of university organization and the realistic possibilties of reform, linking research for understanding with research for use.