Austria in the First Cold War, 1945-55

Austria in the First Cold War, 1945-55
Author: Günter Bischof
Publisher: Palgrave MacMillan
Total Pages: 272
Release: 1999
Genre: Austria
ISBN:

In the first Cold War (1945-55) the superpower struggle over the geostrategically vital and economically depressed Austria could have ended in a divided country (like in Germany), but due to shrewd Austrian diplomacy resulted in a unified and neutralized country.

Understanding the Global Energy Crisis

Understanding the Global Energy Crisis
Author: Richard A. Simmons
Publisher: Purdue University Press
Total Pages: 345
Release: 2014-03-15
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1612493106

We are facing a global energy crisis caused by world population growth, an escalating increase in demand, and continued dependence on fossil-based fuels for generation. It is widely accepted that increases in greenhouse gas concentration levels, if not reversed, will result in major changes to world climate with consequential effects on our society and economy. This is just the kind of intractable problem that Purdue University's Global Policy Research Institute seeks to address in the Purdue Studies in Public Policy series by promoting the engagement between policy makers and experts in fields such as engineering and technology. Major steps forward in the development and use of technology are required. In order to achieve solutions of the required scale and magnitude within a limited timeline, it is essential that engineers be not only technologically-adept but also aware of the wider social and political issues that policy-makers face. Likewise, it is also imperative that policy makers liaise closely with the academic community in order to realize advances. This book is designed to bridge the gap between these two groups, with a particular emphasis on educating the socially-conscious engineers and technologists of the future. In this accessibly-written volume, central issues in global energy are discussed through interdisciplinary dialogue between experts from both North America and Europe. The first section provides an overview of the nature of the global energy crisis approached from historical, political, and sociocultural perspectives. In the second section, expert contributors outline the technology and policy issues facing the development of major conventional and renewable energy sources. The third and final section explores policy and technology challenges and opportunities in the distribution and consumption of energy, in sectors such as transportation and the built environment. The book's epilogue suggests some future scenarios in energy distribution and use.

XXXXX

XXXXX
Author: Xxxxx
Publisher: xxxxx
Total Pages: 477
Release: 2006
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0955066441

xxxxx proposes a radical, new space for artistic exploration, with essential contributions from a diverse range of artists, theorists, and scientists. Combining intense background material, code listings, screenshots, new translation, [the] xxxxx [reader] functions as both guide and manifesto for a thought movement which is radically opposed to entropic contemporary economies. xxxxx traces a clear line across eccentric and wide ranging texts under the rubric of life coding which can well be contrasted with the death drive of cynical economy with roots in rationalism and enlightenment thought. Such philosophy, world as machine, informs its own deadly flipside embedded within language and technology. xxxxx totally unpicks this hiroshimic engraving, offering an dandyish alternative by way of deep examination of software and substance. Life coding is primarily active, subsuming deprecated psychogeography in favour of acute wonderland technology, wary of any assumed transparency. Texts such as Endonomadology, a text from celebrated biochemist and chaos theory pioneer Otto E. Roessler, who features heavily throughout this intense volume, make plain the sadistic nature and active legacy of rationalist thought. At the same time, through the science of endophysics, a physics from the inside elaborated here, a delicate theory of the world as interface is proposed. xxxxx is very much concerned with the joyful elaboration of a new real; software-led propositions which are active and constructive in eviscerating contemporary economic culture. xxxxx embeds Perl Routines to Manipulate London, by way of software artist and Mongrel Graham Harwood, a Universal Dovetailer in the Lisp language from AI researcher Bruno Marchal rewriting the universe as code, and self explanatory Pornographic Coding from plagiarist and author Stewart Home and code art guru Florian Cramer. Software is treated as magical, electromystical, contrasting with the tedious GUI desktop applications and user-led drudgery expressed within a vast ghost-authored literature which merely serves to rehearse again and again the demands of industry and economy. Key texts, which well explain the magic and sheer art of programming for the absolute beginner are published here. Software subjugation is made plain within the very title of media theorist Friedrich Kittler's essay Protected Mode, published in this volume. Media, technology and destruction are further elaborated across this work in texts such as War.pl, Media and Drugs in Pynchon's Second World War, again from Kittler, and Simon Ford's elegant take on J.G Ballard's crashed cars exhibition of 1970, A Psychopathic Hymn. Software and its expansion stand in obvious relation to language. Attacking transparency means examining the prison cell or virus of language; life coding as William Burrough's cutup. And perhaps the most substantial and thorough-going examination is put forward by daring Vienna actionist Oswald Wiener in his Notes on the Concept of the Bio-adapter which has been thankfully unearthed here. Equally, Olga Goriunova's extensive examination of a new Russian literary trend, the online male literature of udaff.com provides both a reexamination of culture and language, and an example of the diversity of xxxxx; a diversity well reflected in background texts ranging across subjects such as Leibniz' monadology, the ur-crash of supreme flaneur Thomas de Quincey and several rewritings of the forensic model of Jack the Ripper thanks to Stewart Home and Martin Howse. xxxxx liberates software from the machinic, and questions the transparency of language, proposing a new world view, a sheer electromysticism which is well explained with reference to the works of Thomas Pynchon in Friedrich Kittler's essay, translated for the first time into English, which closes xxxxx. Further contributors include Hal Abelson, Leif Elggren, Jonathan Kemp, Aymeric Mansoux, and socialfiction.org.

Flood Risk Assessments

Flood Risk Assessments
Author: Andrés Díez-Herrero
Publisher:
Total Pages: 348
Release: 2020-09-09
Genre:
ISBN: 9783039369386

In recent years, a considerable volume of technical literature has been published on flood hazard analysis, and more recently, on flood vulnerability and resilience. Nevertheless, there is still a shortage of scientific studies and practical experience of real flood risk assessment (both social and economic), including hazard, exposure and vulnerability analyses and their integration. As there are so few references available, applications of flood risk assessment to the design of preventive measures and early warning systems, landscape and urban planning, civil protection, insurance systems, and risk-based information and education, cannot reach their full potential development. This is because the research products available, such as hazard data and maps, do not serve to ensure the efficient prioritization of mitigation measures or communities at risk. Meanwhile, flooding is the natural disaster that causes the greatest loss on a global scale, and due to climate change, this situation is expected to continue. The research manuscripts involved in this book try to offer flood risk managers new tools, data and maps to improve risk mitigation, both preventive and corrective. A wide variety of topics have been covered, including: flood risk data sources; techniques and methodologies for flood risk analysis; flood risk mapping; or flood risk analysis calibrations.

Imagine Drowning

Imagine Drowning
Author: Terry Johnson
Publisher: Methuen Drama
Total Pages: 108
Release: 1991-05-13
Genre: Drama
ISBN:

Set in a boarding house on the bleak Cumbrian coast. A journalist disappears while covering a protest at Sellafield. When his wife sets out to find him two weeks later, she stays at the same guesthouse and encounters the same bizarre collection of characters, including the wife of a mass murderer, an ex-astronaut beach bum, and a wheelchair-bound activist.