An examination of the fierce disputes that arose in Britain in the decades around 1900 concerning patents for electrical power and telecommunications. Late nineteenth-century Britain saw an extraordinary surge in patent disputes over the new technologies of electrical power, lighting, telephony, and radio. These battles played out in the twin tribunals of the courtroom and the press. In Patently Contestable, Stathis Arapostathis and Graeme Gooday examine how Britain's patent laws and associated cultures changed from the 1870s to the 1920s. They consider how patent rights came to be so widely disputed and how the identification of apparently solo heroic inventors was the contingent outcome of patent litigation. Furthermore, they point out potential parallels between the British experience of allegedly patentee-friendly legislation introduced in 1883 and a similar potentially empowering shift in American patent policy in 2011. After explaining the trajectory of an invention from laboratory to Patent Office to the court and the key role of patent agents, Arapostathis and Gooday offer four case studies of patent-centered disputes in Britain. These include the mostly unsuccessful claims against the UK alliance of Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison in telephony; publicly disputed patents for technologies for the generation and distribution of electric power; challenges to Marconi's patenting of wireless telegraphy as an appropriation of public knowledge; and the emergence of patent pools to control the market in incandescent light bulbs.
Linear Algebra: An Inquiry-based Approach is written to give instructors a tool to teach students to develop a mathematical concept from first principles. The Inquiry-based Approach is central to this development. The text is organized around and offers the standard topics expected in a first undergraduate course in linear algebra. In our approach, students begin with a problem and develop the mathematics necessary to describe, solve, and generalize it. Thus students learn a vital skill for the 21st century: the ability to create a solution to a problem. This text is offered to foster an environment that supports the creative process. The twin goals of this textbook are: •Providing opportunities to be creative, •Teaching “ways of thinking” that will make it easier for to be creative. To motivate the development of the concepts and techniques of linear algebra, we include more than two hundred activities on a wide range of problems, from purely mathematical questions, through applications in biology, computer science, cryptography, and more. Table of Contents Introduction and Features For the Student . . . and Teacher Prerequisites Suggested Sequences 1 Tuples and Vectors 2 Systems of Linear Equations 3 Transformations 4 Matrix Algebra 5 Vector Spaces 6 Determinants 7 Eigenvalues and Eigenvectors 8 Decomposition 9 Extras Bibliography Index Bibliography Jeff Suzuki is Associate Professor of Mathematics at Brooklyn College and holds a Ph.D. from Boston University. His research interests include mathematics education, history of mathematics, and the application of mathematics to society and technology. He is a two-time winner of the prestigious Carl B. Allendoerfer Award for expository writing. His publications have appeared in The College Mathematics Journals; Mathematics Magazine; Mathematics Teacher; and the American Mathematical Society's blog on teaching and learning mathematics. His YouTube channel (http://youtube.com/jeffsuzuki1) includes videos on mathematical subjects ranging from elementary arithmetic to linear algebra, cryptography, and differential equations.
Contemporary Perspectives on the History of Philosophy was first published in 1983. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. The authors of the 27 appears in Volume 8, Midwest Studies in Philosophy,have established reputations as historians of philosophy, but their vantage point, here, is from "contemporary perspectives" - they use contemporary analytic skills to examine problems and issues considered by past philosophers. The papers, arranged in historical order, fall into six groups: ancient philosophy (the Pythagoreans, Plato, and Aristotle); the seventeenth-century rationalists (Descartes, Leibniz and Spinoza); the empiricists (Locke, Berkeley, and Hume); Kant; the nineteenth century (Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Mill); and, in conclusion, an essay on Wittgenstein's Tractatus and two broad, retrospective papers entitled "Old Analyses of the Physical World and new Philosophies of Language" and "Moral Crisis and the History of Ethics."
In Thomas Wolfe’sLook Homeward, Angel, Margaret Leonard says, “Never mind about algebra here. That’s for poor folks. There’s no need for algebra where two and two make five.” Moments of mathematical reckoning like this pervade twentieth-century southern literature, says Melanie R. Benson. In fiction by a large, diverse group of authors, including William Faulkner, Anita Loos, William Attaway, Dorothy Allison, and Lan Cao, Benson identifies a calculation-obsessed, anxiety-ridden discourse in which numbers are employed to determine social and racial hierarchies and establish individual worth and identity. This “narcissistic fetish of number” speaks to a tangle of desires and denials rooted in the history of the South, capitalism, and colonialism. No one evades participation in these “disturbing equations,” says Benson, wherein longing for increase, accumulation, and superiority collides with repudiation of the means by which material wealth is attained. Writers from marginalized groups--including African Americans, Native Americans, women, immigrants, and the poor--have deeply internalized and co-opted methods and tropes of the master narrative even as they have struggled to wield new voices unmarked by the discourse of the colonizer. Having nominally emerged from slavery’s legacy, the South is now situated in the agonized space between free market capitalism and social progressivism. Elite southerners work to distance themselves from capitalism’s dehumanizing mechanisms, while the marginalized yearn to realize the uniquely American narrative of accumulation and ascent. The fetish of numbers emerges to signify the futility of both.
Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown (1716-1783) is the iconic figure at the head of the English landscape style, a tradition that has dominated landscape design in the western world. He was widely acclaimed for his genius in his own day and his influence on the culture of England has arguably been as great as that of Turner, Telford and Wordsworth. Yet, although Brown has had his biographers, his work has generated very little analysis. Brown was prolific; he has had a direct influence on half a million acres of England and Wales. The astonishing scale of his work means that he did not just transform the English countryside, but also our idea of what it is to be English and what England is. His work is everywhere, but goes largely unnoticed. His was such a naturalistic style that all his best work was mistaken for untouched nature. This has made it very difficult to see and understand. Visitors to Brown landscapes do not question the existence of the parkland he created and there has been little professional or academic analysis of his work. This book for the first time looks at the motivation behind Brown’s landscapes and questions their value and structure whilst at the same time placing him within the English landscape tradition. It aims primarily to make landscape legible, to show people where to stand, what to look at and how to see.
Many texts on logic are written with a mathematical emphasis, and focus primarily on the development of a formal apparatus and associated techniques. In other, more philosophical texts, the topic is often presented as an indulgent collection of musings on issues for which technical solutions have long since been devised. What has been missing until now is an attempt to unite the motives underlying both approaches. Paul Hoyningen-Huene’s Formal Logic seeks to find a balance between the necessity of formal considerations and the importance of full reflection and explanation about the seemingly arbitrary steps that occasionally confound even the most serious student of logic. Alex Levine’s artful translation conveys both the content and style of the German edition. Filled with examples, exercises, and a straightforward look at some of the most common problems in teaching the subject, this work is eminently suitable for the classroom.
This book is an homage to Ernest G. McClain and includes the following articles: Jean Le Mee: THE CHALLENGE OF ABUL WAFA; Leon Crickmore: CASTLERIGG: STONE OR TONE CIRCLE? Jay Kappraff: ANCIENT HARMONIC LAW; Sarah Reichart & Vivian Ramalingam: THREE HEPTAGONAL SACRED SPACES; Pétur Halldórsson: PATTERN OF SETTLEMENTS PACED FROM 1-9; Anne Bulckens: THE METONIC CYCLE OF THE PARTHENON; Jay Kappraff and Ernest McClain: THE PROPORTIONAL SYSTEM OF THE PARTHENON; Richard Heath: THE GEODETIC AND MUSICOLOGICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE SHORTER LENGTH OF THE PARTHENON; Richard Heath: ERNEST MCCLAIN'S MUSICOLOGICAL INTERPRETATION OF ANCIENT TEXTS; John Bremer: THE OPENING OF PLATO'S POLITY; Bryan Carr: ONTOLOGY INSIDE-OUT; Babette Babich: THE HALLELUJAH EFFECT; Pete Dello: MCCLAIN'S MATRICES; Richard Dumbrill: SEVEN? YES -- BUT ...; Howard Barry Schatz: THROUGH THE EYES OF PLATO; Gerry Turchetto: MEMORIES OF ERNEST G. MCCLAIN.
This lively and innovative book is about computer code and the legal controls and restrictions on those who write it. The widespread use of personal computers and the Internet have made it possible to release new data or tools instantaneously to virtually the entire world. However, while the digital revolution allows quick and extensive use of these intellectual properties, it also means that their developers face new challenges in retaining their rights as creators. Drawing on a host of examples, Ben Klemens describes and analyzes the intellectual property issues involved in the development of computer software. He focuses on software patents because of their powerful effect on the software market, but he also provides an extensive discussion of how traditional copyright laws can be applied to code. The book concludes with a discussion of recommendations to ease the constraints on software development. This is the first book to confront these problems with serious policy solutions. It is sure to become the standard reference for software developers, those concerned with intellectual property issues, and for policymakers seeking direction. It is critical that public policy on these issues facilitates progress rather than hindering it. There is too much at stake.