The State of the System

The State of the System

Author: Paul W. Bennett

Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP

Published: 2020-09-23

Total Pages: 270

ISBN-13: 0228002273

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Over the last fifty years, Canada's public schools have been absorbed into a modern education system that functions much like Max Weber's infamous iron cage. Crying out for democratic school-level reform, the system is now a centralized, bureaucratic fortress that, every year, becomes softer on standards for students, less accessible to parents, further out of touch with communities, and surprisingly unresponsive to classroom teachers. Exploring the nature of the Canadian education order in all its dimensions, The State of the System explains how public schools came to be so bureaucratic, confronts the critical issues facing kindergarten to grade 12 public schools in all ten provinces, and addresses the need for systemic reform. Going beyond a diagnosis of the stresses, strains, and ills present in the system, Paul Bennett proposes a bold plan to re-engineer schools on a more human scale as the first step in truly reforming public education. In place of school consolidation and managerialism, one-size-fits-all uniformity, limited school choice, and the "success-for-all" curriculum, Bennett advocates for a new set of priorities: decentralize school governance, deprogram education ministries and school districts, listen to parents and teachers, and revitalize local education democracy. Tackling the thorny issues besetting contemporary school systems in Canada, The State of the System issues a clarion call for more responsive, engaged, and accountable public schools.


The Operating System

The Operating System

Author: Eric Laursen

Publisher: AK Press

Published: 2021-05-04

Total Pages: 206

ISBN-13: 1849353883

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What do we mean when we talk about “the State”? Multiple polls show a growing disillusionment with the State and representative government as vehicles for progressive change, and particularly as means to tame capitalism, let alone as a basis for seeing beyond it. In a quick and readable format, Eric Laursen proposes thinking about the State in an entirely new way—not simply as government or legal institutions, but as humanity’s analog to a computer operating system—opening up a new interpretation of the system of governance that emerged in Europe five-hundred years ago and now drives almost every aspect of human society. He also demonstrates powerfully why humanity’s life-and-death challenges—including racism, climate change, and rising economic exploitation—cannot be addressed as long as the State continues to exercise dominion.


The Making of the State Enterprise System in Modern China

The Making of the State Enterprise System in Modern China

Author: Morris L. BIAN

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2009-06-30

Total Pages: 346

ISBN-13: 0674020936

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When, how, and why did the state enterprise system of modern China take shape? The conventional argument is that China borrowed its economic system and development strategy wholesale from the Soviet Union in the 1950s. In an important new interpretation, Bian shows instead that the basic institutional arrangement of state-owned enterprise--bureaucratic governance, management and incentive mechanisms, and the provision of social services and welfare--developed in China during the war years 1937-1945.


A System of the Laws of the State of Connecticut

A System of the Laws of the State of Connecticut

Author: Zephaniah Swift

Publisher: Legare Street Press

Published: 2023-07-18

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781020794094

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This legal book presents a system of the laws of the State of Connecticut in six books. The author, Zephaniah Swift, provides a comprehensive analysis of the state's legal system, highlighting the laws and regulations that govern Connecticut. The book was once owned by John Adams and is part of the Boston Public Library collection. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.


The Information Master

The Information Master

Author: Jacob Soll

Publisher: University of Michigan Press

Published: 2011-08-08

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13: 0472034642

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"Colbert has long been celebrated as Louis XIV's minister of finance, trade, and industry. More recently, he has been viewed as his minister of culture and propaganda. In this lively and persuasive book, Jake Soll has given us a third Colbert, the information manager." ---Peter Burke, University of Cambridge "Jacob Soll gives us a road map drawn from the French state under Colbert. With a stunning attention to detail Colbert used knowledge in the service of enhancing royal power. Jacob Soll's scholarship is impeccable and his story long overdue and compelling." ---Margaret Jacob, University of California, Los Angeles "Nowadays we all know that information is the key to power, and that the masters of information rule the world. Jacob Soll teaches us that Jean-Baptiste Colbert had grasped this principle three and a half centuries ago, and used it to construct a new kind of state. This imaginative, erudite, and powerfully written book re-creates the history of libraries and archives in early modern Europe, and ties them in a novel and convincing way to the new statecraft of Europe's absolute monarchs." ---Anthony Grafton, Princeton University "Brilliantly researched, superbly told, and timely, Soll's story is crucial for the history of the modern state." ---Keith Baker, Stanford University When Louis XIV asked his minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert---the man who was to oversee the building of Versailles and the Royal Academy of Sciences, as well as the navy, the Paris police force, and French industry---to build a large-scale administrative government, Colbert created an unprecedented information system for political power. In The Information Master, Jacob Soll shows how the legacy of Colbert's encyclopedic tradition lies at the very center of the rise of the modern state and was a precursor to industrial intelligence and Internet search engines. Soll's innovative look at Colbert's rise to power argues that his practice of collecting knowledge originated from techniques of church scholarship and from Renaissance Italy, where merchants recognized the power to be gained from merging scholarship, finance, and library science. With his connection of interdisciplinary approaches---regarding accounting, state administration, archives, libraries, merchant techniques, ecclesiastical culture, policing, and humanist pedagogy---Soll has written an innovative book that will redefine not only the history of the reign of Louis XIV and information science but also the study of political and economic history. Jacket illustration: Jean Baptiste Colbert (1619–1683), Philippe de Champaigne, 1655, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of the Wildenstein Foundation, Inc., 1951 (51.34). Photograph © 2003 The Metropolitan Museum of Art.


Control System Design

Control System Design

Author: Bernard Friedland

Publisher: Courier Corporation

Published: 2012-03-08

Total Pages: 530

ISBN-13: 048613511X

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Introduction to state-space methods covers feedback control; state-space representation of dynamic systems and dynamics of linear systems; frequency-domain analysis; controllability and observability; shaping the dynamic response; more. 1986 edition.


States and Power

States and Power

Author: Richard Lachmann

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2013-04-26

Total Pages: 342

ISBN-13: 0745659012

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States over the past 500 years have become the dominant institutions on Earth, exercising vast and varied authority over the economic well-being, health, welfare, and very lives of their citizens. This concise and engaging book explains how power became centralized in states at the expense of the myriad of other polities that had battled one another over previous millennia. Richard Lachmann traces the contested and historically contingent struggles by which subjects began to see themselves as citizens of nations and came to associate their interests and identities with states, and explains why the civil rights and benefits they achieved, and the taxes and military service they in turn rendered to their nations, varied so much. Looking forward, Lachmann examines the future in store for states: will they gain or lose strength as they are buffeted by globalization, terrorism, economic crisis and environmental disaster? This stimulating book offers a comprehensive evaluation of the social science literature that addresses these issues and situates the state at the center of the world history of capitalism, nationalism and democracy. It will be essential reading for scholars and students across the social and political sciences.


Party System Change, the European Crisis and the State of Democracy

Party System Change, the European Crisis and the State of Democracy

Author: Marco Lisi

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-08-06

Total Pages: 315

ISBN-13: 1351377647

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Party systems are crucial elements for the functioning of political systems and representative democracies. With several European countries experiencing significant changes recently, it is necessary to update our knowledge. This volume analyses party system changes in Europe in the 21st century by considering several dimensions such as interparty competition, the cleavage structure, electoral volatility and the emergence of new actors. The book describes the principal continuities and changes in party systems in Europe; analyzes the main explanations for these trends; and assesses the impact of the crisis on the patterns observed. By considering a wide range of Western and Eastern European countries, and focusing on the ‘parameters’ of party system change, this book seeks to fill an important gap in the literature through a comparative analysis of the evolution of party systems in Europe over the last decades. This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of political parties, party systems and politics, electoral behavior as well as more broadly to European politics, comparative politics. political representation and the quality of democracies.


Linear System Theory

Linear System Theory

Author: Frank M. Callier

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2012-12-06

Total Pages: 524

ISBN-13: 1461209579

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This book is the result of our teaching over the years an undergraduate course on Linear Optimal Systems to applied mathematicians and a first-year graduate course on Linear Systems to engineers. The contents of the book bear the strong influence of the great advances in the field and of its enormous literature. However, we made no attempt to have a complete coverage. Our motivation was to write a book on linear systems that covers finite dimensional linear systems, always keeping in mind the main purpose of engineering and applied science, which is to analyze, design, and improve the performance of phy sical systems. Hence we discuss the effect of small nonlinearities, and of perturbations of feedback. It is our on the data; we face robustness issues and discuss the properties hope that the book will be a useful reference for a first-year graduate student. We assume that a typical reader with an engineering background will have gone through the conventional undergraduate single-input single-output linear systems course; an elementary course in control is not indispensable but may be useful for motivation. For readers from a mathematical curriculum we require only familiarity with techniques of linear algebra and of ordinary differential equations.