Armed Servants

Armed Servants
Author: Peter Feaver
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 410
Release: 2009-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780674036772

How do civilians control the military? In the wake of September 11, the renewed presence of national security in everyday life has made this question all the more pressing. In this book, Peter Feaver proposes an ambitious new theory that treats civil-military relations as a principal-agent relationship, with the civilian executive monitoring the actions of military agents, the armed servants of the nation-state. Military obedience is not automatic but depends on strategic calculations of whether civilians will catch and punish misbehavior. This model challenges Samuel Huntington's professionalism-based model of civil-military relations, and provides an innovative way of making sense of the U.S. Cold War and post-Cold War experience--especially the distinctively stormy civil-military relations of the Clinton era. In the decade after the Cold War ended, civilians and the military had a variety of run-ins over whether and how to use military force. These episodes, as interpreted by agency theory, contradict the conventional wisdom that civil-military relations matter only if there is risk of a coup. On the contrary, military professionalism does not by itself ensure unchallenged civilian authority. As Feaver argues, agency theory offers the best foundation for thinking about relations between military and civilian leaders, now and in the future.

Transcend

Transcend
Author: Scott Barry Kaufman
Publisher: TarcherPerigee
Total Pages: 434
Release: 2020
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 0143131206

A bold reimagining of Maslow's famous hierarchy of needs--and new insights for living your most authentic, fulfilled, and connected life. When positive psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman first discovered Maslow's unfinished theory of transcendence, sprinkled throughout a cache of unpublished journals, he felt a deep resonance with his own work and life. In this groundbreaking book, Kaufman picks up where Maslow left off, unraveling the mysteries of his unfinished theory, and integrating these ideas with the latest research on attachment, connection, exploration, love, purpose and other building blocks of a life well lived. Maslow's model provides a roadmap for finding purpose and fulfillment--not by striving for money, success, or "happiness," but by becoming the best version of ourselves, or what Maslow called self-actualization. Transcend reveals a level of human potential that's even higher, which Maslow termed "transcendence." Beyond individual fulfillment, this way of being--which taps into the whole person-- connects us not only to our best self, but also to one another. With never-before-published insights and new research findings, along with thought-provoking examples and personality tests, this empowering book is a manual for self-analysis and nurturing a deeper connection with our highest potential-- and beyond.

Speculative Everything

Speculative Everything
Author: Anthony Dunne
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 235
Release: 2013-12-06
Genre: Design
ISBN: 0262019841

How to use design as a tool to create not only things but ideas, to speculate about possible futures. Today designers often focus on making technology easy to use, sexy, and consumable. In Speculative Everything, Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby propose a kind of design that is used as a tool to create not only things but ideas. For them, design is a means of speculating about how things could be—to imagine possible futures. This is not the usual sort of predicting or forecasting, spotting trends and extrapolating; these kinds of predictions have been proven wrong, again and again. Instead, Dunne and Raby pose “what if” questions that are intended to open debate and discussion about the kind of future people want (and do not want). Speculative Everything offers a tour through an emerging cultural landscape of design ideas, ideals, and approaches. Dunne and Raby cite examples from their own design and teaching and from other projects from fine art, design, architecture, cinema, and photography. They also draw on futurology, political theory, the philosophy of technology, and literary fiction. They show us, for example, ideas for a solar kitchen restaurant; a flypaper robotic clock; a menstruation machine; a cloud-seeding truck; a phantom-limb sensation recorder; and devices for food foraging that use the tools of synthetic biology. Dunne and Raby contend that if we speculate more—about everything—reality will become more malleable. The ideas freed by speculative design increase the odds of achieving desirable futures.

Imaginable

Imaginable
Author: Jane McGonigal
Publisher: Random House
Total Pages: 275
Release: 2022-03-24
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1473598540

World-renowned future forecaster, game designer, and NEW YORK TIMES bestselling author Jane McGonigal gives us the tools to imagine the future without fear. How can we be confident about making plans? How might we feel secure despite the future being unknown? How do we learn to feel at peace with the unexpected? Today it feels more challenging than ever to feel unafraid, hopeful, and equipped to face the future with optimism. How do we map out our lives when it seems impossible to predict what the world will be like next week, let alone next year or next decade? What we need now are strategies to help us recover our confidence and creativity in facing uncertain futures. By learning to think the unthinkable and imagine the unimaginable you can better plan for a future you'd like to see. And by seeing what's coming faster, you can adapt to new challenges, reduce anxiety, and build hope and resilience. 'An accessible, optimistic field guide to the future.'-San Francisco Chronicle 'Jane McGonigal is unusually adept at anticipating events that most of us can't even fathom. In this eye-opening, actionable book, she teaches you how to widen your peripheral vision, extend your imagination farther into the future, and conceive of the inconceivable.' Adam Grant, #1 Bestselling Author of Think Again __________ 'Top 10 innovators to watch' Business Week 10 most powerful women to watch' Forbes 'Top 100 creative people in business' Fast Company

Mobility, Spatiality, and Resistance in Literary and Political Discourse

Mobility, Spatiality, and Resistance in Literary and Political Discourse
Author: Christian Beck
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 327
Release: 2021-11-11
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3030834778

Mobility, Space, and Resistance: Transformative Spatiality in Literary and Political Discourse draws from various disciplines—such as geography, sociology, political science, gender studies, and poststructuralist thought—to posit the productive capabilities of literature in political action and at the same time show how literary art can resist the imposition and domination of oppressive systems of our spatial lives. The various approaches, topics, and types of literature discussed in this volume display a concern for social issues that can be addressed in and through literature. The essays address social injustice, oppression, discrimination, and their spatial representations. While offering interpretations of literature, this collection seeks to show how literary spaces contribute to understanding, changing, or challenging physical spaces of our lived world.

A Thousand Brains

A Thousand Brains
Author: Jeff Hawkins
Publisher: Basic Books
Total Pages: 251
Release: 2021-03-02
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 1541675800

A bestselling author, neuroscientist, and computer engineer unveils a theory of intelligence that will revolutionize our understanding of the brain and the future of AI. For all of neuroscience's advances, we've made little progress on its biggest question: How do simple cells in the brain create intelligence? Jeff Hawkins and his team discovered that the brain uses maplike structures to build a model of the world—not just one model, but hundreds of thousands of models of everything we know. This discovery allows Hawkins to answer important questions about how we perceive the world, why we have a sense of self, and the origin of high-level thought. A Thousand Brains heralds a revolution in the understanding of intelligence. It is a big-think book, in every sense of the word. One of the Financial Times' Best Books of 2021 One of Bill Gates' Five Favorite Books of 2021

Transforming the Future

Transforming the Future
Author: Riel Miller
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 348
Release: 2018-04-27
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 1351047981

People are using the future to search for better ways to achieve sustainability, inclusiveness, prosperity, well-being and peace. In addition, the way the future is understood and used is changing in almost all domains, from social science to daily life. This book presents the results of significant research undertaken by UNESCO with a number of partners to detect and define the theory and practice of anticipation around the world today. It uses the concept of ‘Futures Literacy’ as a tool to define the understanding of anticipatory systems and processes – also known as the Discipline of Anticipation. This innovative title explores: • new topics such as Futures Literacy and the Discipline of Anticipation; • the evidence collected from over 30 Futures Literacy Laboratories and presented in 14 full case studies; • the need and opportunity for significant innovation in human decision-making systems. This book will be of great interest to scholars, researchers, policy-makers and students, as well as activists working on sustainability issues and innovation, future studies and anticipation studies. The Open Access version of this book, available at https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781351047999, has been made available under a Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 IGO (CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 IGO) license.

The Neurology of Religion

The Neurology of Religion
Author: Alasdair Coles
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 319
Release: 2019-11-07
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 1107082609

Examines what can be learnt about the brain mechanisms underlying religious practice from studying people with neurological disorders.

Present Future

Present Future
Author: Guy Perelmuter
Publisher: Greenleaf Book Group
Total Pages: 452
Release: 2021-02-23
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1735424528

Learn from the past. Understand the present. Explore the future. “ . . . Present Future is a fascinating, expert look at the history of the key technological advances affecting life today, and preparation for the exponential leaps yet to come. . . . ” —BILL MARIS, Founder and First CEO of Google Ventures, Founder of Calico, Founder of Section 32 “With the context of an economic historian and the on-the-ground insights of an active technology investor, Perelmuter’s Present Future brings readers to the bleeding edge of the science and technologies poised to revolutionize the 21st century. Comprehensive and yet enthralling, the book is a must-read for anyone who has an intellectual or commercial interest in what the future may hold.” —PETER HEBERT, Co-Founder and Managing Partner, Lux Capital “. . . Perelmuter draws upon his own experiences as a successful tech entrepreneur and investor, and the writings of dozens of other experts, to highlight the most important implications of multiple emerging technologies. Recommended!” —BEN CASNOCHA, Co-Author of the #1 New York Times best seller The Start-up of You ​“A comprehensive survey of action across the entire frontier of advanced technologies is daunting in concept and even more so in execution. Guy Perelmuter has pulled it off, providing an accessible yet historically informed review from the world of algorithms to the world of genomic analysis by way of just about every field of science in between. Most important: He avoids the hype-ridden cheerleading that all too often accompanies accounts of breakthrough innovation. . . ” —BILL JANEWAY, Venture Capitalist, Economist, Author of Doing Capitalism in The Innovation Economy: Reconfiguring the Three-Player Game Between Markets, Speculators and the State