Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty

Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty

Author: Claudette Michelle Murphy

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2006-02-22

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 9780822336716

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DIVAn account of sick building syndrome and the large number of historical conditions--office worker protests, feminism, ventilation engineering, toxicology, etc.--that coalesced to give this phenomenon real existence./div


Sick Building Syndrome

Sick Building Syndrome

Author: Sabah A. Abdul-Wahab

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2011-05-03

Total Pages: 634

ISBN-13: 3642179193

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This volume throws light on the Sick Building Syndrome in Libraries and other public buildings, and the extent to which it is influenced by the internal environment of libraries. One of the signs of this disease is that the person suffers from a set of symptoms closely related to his/her presence in the building, without the identification of any clear causes, and his/her relief of these symptoms when he/she are out of the building. Hence, the book sheds on the extent to which the interior environment impacts upon the health of the people, and the extent to which this is reflected in their performance. The book can be used for teaching, research, and professional reference. It concludes with the recommendation that is essential to observe environmental dimensions when designing library and public buildings, taking into consideration the expected impact of SBS in library and public buildings on people. The significance of the book derives from the fact that it is the first of its kind to examine the issue of the interior environment and SBS of library and public building worldwide.


Seizing the Means of Reproduction

Seizing the Means of Reproduction

Author: Claudette Michelle Murphy

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2012-11-26

Total Pages: 269

ISBN-13: 0822353369

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In Seizing the Means of Reproduction, Michelle Murphy's initial focus on the alternative health practices developed by radical feminists in the United States during the 1970s and 1980s opens into a sophisticated analysis of the transnational entanglements of American empire, population control, neoliberalism, and late-twentieth-century feminisms. Murphy concentrates on the technoscientific means—the technologies, practices, protocols, and processes—developed by feminist health activists. She argues that by politicizing the technical details of reproductive health, alternative feminist practices aimed at empowering women were also integral to late-twentieth-century biopolitics. Murphy traces the transnational circulation of cheap, do-it-yourself health interventions, highlighting the uneasy links between economic logics, new forms of racialized governance, U.S. imperialism, family planning, and the rise of NGOs. In the twenty-first century, feminist health projects have followed complex and discomforting itineraries. The practices and ideologies of alternative health projects have found their way into World Bank guidelines, state policies, and commodified research. While the particular moment of U.S. feminism in the shadow of Cold War and postcolonialism has passed, its dynamics continue to inform the ways that health is governed and politicized today.


The Economization of Life

The Economization of Life

Author: M. Murphy

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2017-05-18

Total Pages: 201

ISBN-13: 0822373211

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What is a life worth? In the wake of eugenics, new quantitative racist practices that valued life for the sake of economic futures flourished. In The Economization of Life, M. Murphy provocatively describes the twentieth-century rise of infrastructures of calculation and experiment aimed at governing population for the sake of national economy, pinpointing the spread of a potent biopolitical logic: some must not be born so that others might live more prosperously. Resituating the history of postcolonial neoliberal technique in expert circuits between the United States and Bangladesh, Murphy traces the methods and imaginaries through which family planning calculated lives not worth living, lives not worth saving, and lives not worth being born. The resulting archive of thick data transmuted into financialized “Invest in a Girl” campaigns that reframed survival as a question of human capital. The book challenges readers to reject the economy as our collective container and to refuse population as a term of reproductive justice.


Hazards of the Job

Hazards of the Job

Author: Christopher C. Sellers

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 2000-11-09

Total Pages: 350

ISBN-13: 0807864455

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Hazards of the Job explores the roots of modern environmentalism in the early-twentieth-century United States. It was in the workplace of this era, argues Christopher Sellers, that our contemporary understanding of environmental health dangers first took shape. At the crossroads where medicine and science met business, labor, and the state, industrial hygiene became a crucible for molding midcentury notions of corporate interest and professional disinterest as well as environmental concepts of the 'normal' and the 'natural.' The evolution of industrial hygiene illuminates how powerfully battles over knowledge and objectivity could reverberate in American society: new ways of establishing cause and effect begat new predicaments in medicine, law, economics, politics, and ethics, even as they enhanced the potential for environmental control. From the 1910s through the 1930s, as Sellers shows, industrial hygiene investigators fashioned a professional culture that gained the confidence of corporations, unions, and a broader public. As the hygienists moved beyond the workplace, this microenvironment prefigured their understanding of the environment at large. Transforming themselves into linchpins of science-based production and modern consumerism, they also laid the groundwork for many controversies to come.


Office Buildings

Office Buildings

Author: Pranab Kumar Nag

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2018-12-31

Total Pages: 536

ISBN-13: 9811325774

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This book brings together concepts from the building, environmental, behavioural and health sciences to provide an interdisciplinary understanding of office and workplace design. Today, with changes in the world of work and the relentless surge in technology, offices have emerged as the repositories of organizational symbolism, denoted by the spatial design of offices, physical settings and the built environment (architecture, urban locale). Drawing on Euclidian geometry that quantifies space as the distance between two or more points, a body of knowledge on office buildings, the concept of office and office space, and the interrelationships of spatial and behavioural attributes in office design are elucidated. Building and office work-related illnesses, namely sick building syndrome and ailments arising from the indoor environment, and the menace of musculoskeletal disorders are the alarming manifestations that critically affect employee satisfaction, morale and work outcomes. With a focus on office ergonomics, the book brings the discussion on the fundamentals of work design, with emphasis on computer workstation users. Strategic guidance of lighting systems and visual performance in workplaces are directed for better application of ergonomics and improvement in office indoor environment. It discusses the profiles of bioclimatic, indoor air quality, ventilation intervention, lighting and acoustic characteristics in office buildings. Emphasis has been given to the energy performance of buildings, and contemporary perspectives of building sustainability, such as green office building assessment schemes, and national and international building-related standards and codes. Intended for students and professionals from ergonomics, architecture, interior design, as well as construction engineers, health care professionals, and office planners, the book brings a unified overview of the health, safety and environment issues associated with the design of office buildings.


Liberty and Security

Liberty and Security

Author: Conor Gearty

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2013-04-03

Total Pages: 108

ISBN-13: 0745669980

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All aspire to liberty and security in their lives but few people truly enjoy them. This book explains why this is so. In what Conor Gearty calls our 'neo-democratic' world, the proclamation of universal liberty and security is mocked by facts on the ground: the vast inequalities in supposedly free societies, the authoritarian regimes with regular elections, and the terrible socio-economic deprivation camouflaged by cynically proclaimed commitments to human rights. Gearty's book offers an explanation of how this has come about, providing also a criticism of the present age which tolerates it. He then goes on to set out a manifesto for a better future, a place where liberty and security can be rich platforms for everyone's life. The book identifies neo-democracies as those places which play at democracy so as to disguise the injustice at their core. But it is not just the new 'democracies' that have turned 'neo', the so-called established democracies are also hurtling in the same direction, as is the United Nations. A new vision of universal freedom is urgently required. Drawing on scholarship in law, human rights and political science this book argues for just such a vision, one in which the great achievements of our democratic past are not jettisoned as easily as were the socialist ideals of the original democracy-makers.


Surfing Uncertainty

Surfing Uncertainty

Author: Andy Clark

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 425

ISBN-13: 0190217014

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Exciting new theories in neuroscience, psychology, and artificial intelligence are revealing minds like ours as predictive minds, forever trying to guess the incoming streams of sensory stimulation before they arrive. In this up-to-the-minute treatment, philosopher and cognitive scientist Andy Clark explores new ways of thinking about perception, action, and the embodied mind.


Baptized in PCBs

Baptized in PCBs

Author: Ellen Griffith Spears

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 466

ISBN-13: 1469611716

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Baptized in PCBs: Race, Pollution, and Justice in an All-American Town


Preparing for the Psychological Consequences of Terrorism

Preparing for the Psychological Consequences of Terrorism

Author: Institute of Medicine

Publisher: National Academies Press

Published: 2003-08-26

Total Pages: 184

ISBN-13: 0309167922

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The Oklahoma City bombing, intentional crashing of airliners on September 11, 2001, and anthrax attacks in the fall of 2001 have made Americans acutely aware of the impacts of terrorism. These events and continued threats of terrorism have raised questions about the impact on the psychological health of the nation and how well the public health infrastructure is able to meet the psychological needs that will likely result. Preparing for the Psychological Consequences of Terrorism highlights some of the critical issues in responding to the psychological needs that result from terrorism and provides possible options for intervention. The committee offers an example for a public health strategy that may serve as a base from which plans to prevent and respond to the psychological consequences of a variety of terrorism events can be formulated. The report includes recommendations for the training and education of service providers, ensuring appropriate guidelines for the protection of service providers, and developing public health surveillance for preevent, event, and postevent factors related to psychological consequences.