Originally published in 1992. This book brings together the work of a number of distinguished international researchers engaged in basic research on beginning reading. Individual chapters address various processes and problems in learning to read - including how acquisition gets underway, the contribution of story listening experiences, what is involved in learning to read words, and how readers represent information about written words in memory. In addition, the chapter contributors consider how phonological, onset-rime, and syntactic awareness contribute to reading acquisition, how learning to spell is involved, how reading ability can be explained as a combination of decoding skill plus listening comprehension skill, and what causes reading difficulties and how to study these causes.
Henri Lefebvre has considerable claims to be the greatest living philosopher. His work spans some sixty years and includes original work on a diverse range of subjects, from dialectical materialism to architecture, urbanism and the experience of everyday life. The Production of Space is his major philosophical work and its translation has been long awaited by scholars in many different fields. The book is a search for a reconciliation between mental space (the space of the philosophers) and real space (the physical and social spheres in which we all live). In the course of his exploration, Henri Lefebvre moves from metaphysical and ideological considerations of the meaning of space to its experience in the everyday life of home and city. He seeks, in other words, to bridge the gap between the realms of theory and practice, between the mental and the social, and between philosophy and reality. In doing so, he ranges through art, literature, architecture and economics, and further provides a powerful antidote to the sterile and obfuscatory methods and theories characteristic of much recent continental philosophy. This is a work of great vision and incisiveness. It is also characterized by its author's wit and by anecdote, as well as by a deftness of style which Donald Nicholson-Smith's sensitive translation precisely captures.
Mathematics forms bridges between knowledge, tradition, and contemporary life. The continuous development and growth of its many branches, both classical and modern, permeates and fertilizes all aspects of applied science and technology, and so has a vital impact on our modern society. The book will focus on these aspects and will benefit from the contribution of several world-famous scientists from mathematics and related sciences, such as: Ralph Abraham, Andrew Crumey, Peter Markowich, Claudio Procesi, Clive Ruggles, Ismail Serageldin, Amin Shokrollahi, Tobias Wallisser.
When, in 1984?86, Richard P. Feynman gave his famous course on computation at the California Institute of Technology, he asked Tony Hey to adapt his lecture notes into a book. Although led by Feynman, the course also featured, as occasional guest speakers, some of the most brilliant men in science at that time, including Marvin Minsky, Charles Bennett, and John Hopfield. Although the lectures are now thirteen years old, most of the material is timeless and presents a ?Feynmanesque? overview of many standard and some not-so-standard topics in computer science such as reversible logic gates and quantum computers.
A History of Communications advances a theory of media that explains the origins and impact of different forms of communication - speech, writing, print, electronic devices and the Internet - on human history in the long term. New media are 'pulled' into widespread use by broad historical trends and these media, once in widespread use, 'push' social institutions and beliefs in predictable directions. This view allows us to see for the first time what is truly new about the Internet, what is not, and where it is taking us.
What is the relationship between cinema and spectator? This is the key question for film theory, and one that Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener put at the center of their insightful and engaging book, now revised from its popular first edition. Every kind of cinema (and every film theory) first imagines an ideal spectator, and then maps certain dynamic interactions between the screen and the spectator’s mind, body and senses. Using seven distinctive configurations of spectator and screen that move progressively from ‘exterior’ to ‘interior’ relationships, the authors retrace the most important stages of film theory from its beginnings to the present—from neo-realist and modernist theories to psychoanalytic, ‘apparatus,’ phenomenological and cognitivist theories, and including recent cross-overs with philosophy and neurology. This new and updated edition of Film Theory: An Introduction through the Senses has been extensively revised and rewritten throughout, incorporating discussion of contemporary films like Her and Gravity, and including a greatly expanded final chapter, which brings film theory fully into the digital age.
It is a little known fact that reading was taught by means of spelling for over 200 years. Today the impact of spelling on reading achievement is not as well appreciated as it once was. The late Dr. Ronald P. Carver did extensive research into the causal relationships between spelling instruction and reading ability. Carver concluded, "One very important way to learn how to pronounce more words accurately is sometimes overlooked, that is, learning to spell more words accurately." (Causes of High and Low Reading Achievement, p. 178). He also notes that "spelling was used to teach reading for almost 200 years, but by the beginning of the 20th century, the tide had so turned that learning to spell was largely seen as incidental to learning to read." Quoting C. A. Perfetti, Carver observed, "practice at spelling should help reading more than practice of reading helps spelling." (p. 179. In June of 2004 Miss Geraldine Rodgers sent me her essay, "Why Noah Webster's Way Was the Right Way." She argued from the history of reading and the psychology of reading that Webster's spelling book method of teaching reading and spelling was superior to all other methods. I was surprised to learn that that Webster, in his 1828 American Dictionary of the English Language, defined a Spelling Book as, " A book for teaching children to spell and read." He also wrote under the entry, Spelling, "To tell the name of letters of a word, with a proper division of syllables, for the purpose of learning the pronunciation. In this manner children learn to read by first spelling the words." You can see that Webster was quite clear about the dual purpose of the spelling books in his day. You can imagine my surprise at the improvement I began to get with my tutoring students when they started working through Webster's Spelling Book. I decided to type up my own edition to use in my private tutoring and my tutoring work at the Odessa Christian School in Odessa, TX, where I teach remedial reading and Spanish. In this edition, I have retained everything in the original 1908 (descendant from the 1829 edition). The only differences relate to formatting. I chose to list the words in rows instead of columns. I also allow the words to divide at the ends of lines. I have found that this works fine for all students. We are teaching students to read and spell by syllables and not by word shapes or context. When reading and spelling are taught by the Spelling Book Method, all guessing at words from shape or context is completely eliminated. The student's total focus is on pronouncing the words correctly, high levels of comprehension are a natural result.
For more than fifteen years, Nomadic Subjects has guided discourse in continental philosophy and feminist theory, exploring the constitution of contemporary subjectivity, especially the concept of difference within European philosophy and political theory. Rosi Braidotti's creative style vividly renders a productive crisis of modernity. From a feminist perspective, she recasts embodiment, sexual difference, and complex concepts through relations to technology, historical events, and popular culture. This thoroughly revised and expanded edition retains all but two of Braidotti's original essays, including her investigations into epistemology's relation to the "woman question;" feminism and biomedical ethics; European feminism; and the possible relations between American feminism and European politics and philosophy. A new piece integrates Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the "becoming-minoritarian" more deeply into modern democratic thought, and a chapter on methodology explains Braidotti's methods while engaging with her critics. A new introduction muses on Braidotti's provocative legacy.
As president of Harvard University, Neil Rudenstine has enjoyed a unique perspective on the state of higher learning. This selection of Rudenstine's talks and writings illuminates many of the ideas and issues that animate higher education today, from the educational importance of diversity to the teaching potential of new technologies.
This book investigates the nature of aesthetic experience and aesthetic objects. Written by leading philosophers, psychologists, literary scholars and semioticians, the book addresses two intertwined issues. The first is related to the phenomenology of aesthetic experience: The understanding of how human beings respond to artworks, how we process linguistic or visual information, and what properties in artworks trigger aesthetic experiences. The examination of the properties of aesthetic experience reveals essential aspects of our perceptual, cognitive, and semiotic capacities. The second issue studied in this volume is related to the ontology of the work of art: Written or visual artworks are a specific type of objects, containing particular kinds of representation which elicit a particular kind of experience. The research question explored is: What properties in artful objects trigger this type of experience, and what characterizes representation in written and visual artworks? The volume sets the scene for state-of-the-art inquiries in the intersection between the psychology and ontology of art. The investigations of the relation between the properties of artworks and the characteristics of aesthetic experience increase our insight into what art is. In addition, they shed light on essential properties of human meaning-making in general.
