Speculations on Speculation

Speculations on Speculation
Author: James E. Gunn
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
Total Pages: 404
Release: 2005
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9780810849020

Science fiction is a field of literature that has great interest and great controversy among its writers and critics. This book examines the roots, history, development, current status, and future directions of the field through articles contributed by well-respected science fiction writers, teachers, and critics. This book can be used as a textbook for courses in theory as well as courses in science fiction literature and science fiction writing.

Transatlantic Speculations

Transatlantic Speculations
Author: Hannah Catherine Davies
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 280
Release: 2018-11-20
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0231546211

The year 1873 was one of financial crisis. A boom in railway construction had spurred a bull market—but when the boom turned to bust, transatlantic panic quickly became a worldwide economic downturn. In Transatlantic Speculations, Hannah Catherine Davies offers a new lens on the panics of 1873 and nineteenth-century globalization by exploring the ways in which contemporaries experienced a tumultuous period that profoundly challenged notions of economic and moral order. Considering the financial crises of 1873 from the vantage points of Berlin, New York, and Vienna, Davies maps what she calls the dual “transatlantic speculations” of the 1870s: the financial speculation that led to these panics as well as the interpretative speculations that sprouted in their wake. Drawing on a wide variety of sources—including investment manuals, credit reports, business correspondence, newspapers, and legal treatises—she analyzes how investors were prompted to put their money into faraway enterprises, how journalists and bankers created and spread financial information and disinformation, how her subjects made and experienced financial flows, and how responses ranged from policy reform to anti-Semitic conspiracy theories when these flows suddenly were interrupted. Davies goes beyond national frames of analysis to explore international economic entanglement, using the panics’ interconnectedness to shed light on contemporary notions of the world economy. Blending cultural, intellectual, and legal history, Transatlantic Speculations gives vital transnational and comparative perspective on a crucial moment for financial markets, globalization, and capitalism.

The Art Of Speculation

The Art Of Speculation
Author: Philip L. Carret
Publisher: Pickle Partners Publishing
Total Pages: 401
Release: 2015-11-06
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1786256746

Philip L. Carret (1896-1998) was a famed investor and founder of The Pioneer Fund (Fidelity Mutual Trust), one of the first Mutual Funds in the United States. A former Barron’s reporter and WWI aviator, Carret launched the Mutual Trust in 1928 after managing money for his friends and family. The initial effort evolved into Pioneer Investments. He ran the fund for 55 years, during which an investment of $10,000 became $8 million. Warren Buffett said of him that he had “the best long term investment record of anyone I know” He is most famous for the long successful track record he achieved investing in Common Stocks and for being one of Warren Buffett’s role models. This book comprises a series of articles written for Barron’s and published in book form in 1930.—Print Ed.

The Mermaid Girl

The Mermaid Girl
Author: Erika Swyler
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Total Pages: 41
Release: 2016-05-03
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1250118859

From Erika Swyler, author of The Book of Speculation—one of BuzzFeed’s Best Fiction Books of 2015-- a short story of a mermaid who ran away from the circus, and what happened when she started a life on land. Before she was a suburban wife and mother, Paulina Watson was the Mermaid Girl of Carnival Lareille. She traveled everywhere with two boxes: the first with red sequins for the dress she wore as a magician’s assistant, the second with green sequins for her mermaid tail. She'd grown up on wild stories told by wild circus people. Books, she hadn’t had books until she’d found Daniel Watson and stopped moving. The first time Daniel saw her, Paulina was floating in a glass tank, suspended in water that sparkled like it was made from night sky. She has settled down now, living in a house on a cliff on Long Island Sound with Daniel and their young family: six-year-old Simon and his baby sister, Enola. But if you steal the magician’s assistant from a carnival, how can you know if she’ll disappear?

Speculation, Trading, and Bubbles

Speculation, Trading, and Bubbles
Author: José A. Scheinkman
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 137
Release: 2014-07-08
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0231537638

As long as there have been financial markets, there have been bubbles—those moments in which asset prices inflate far beyond their intrinsic value, often with ruinous results. Yet economists are slow to agree on the underlying forces behind these events. In this book José A. Scheinkman offers new insight into the mystery of bubbles. Noting some general characteristics of bubbles—such as the rise in trading volume and the coincidence between increases in supply and bubble implosions—Scheinkman offers a model, based on differences in beliefs among investors, that explains these observations. Other top economists also offer their own thoughts on the issue: Sanford J. Grossman and Patrick Bolton expand on Scheinkman's discussion by looking at factors that contribute to bubbles—such as excessive leverage, overconfidence, mania, and panic in speculative markets—and Kenneth J. Arrow and Joseph E. Stiglitz contextualize Scheinkman's findings.

The Book of Unconformities

The Book of Unconformities
Author: Hugh Raffles
Publisher: Verse Chorus Press
Total Pages: 415
Release: 2022-04-18
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1891241745

From the author of lnsectopedia, a powerful exploration of loss, grief, endurance, and the absences that permeate the present. Unconformities are gaps in the geological record, physical evidence of breaks in time. For Hugh Raffles, these holes in history are also fissures in feeling, knowledge, memory, and understanding. In this endlessly inventive, riveting book, Raffles enters these gaps, drawing together threads of geology, history, literature, philosophy, and ethnography to trace the intimate connections between personal loss and world historical events, and to reveal the force of absence at the core of contemporary life. Through deeply researched explorations of Neolithic stone circles, Icelandic lava, mica from a Nazi concentration camp, petrified whale blubber in Svalbard, the marble prized by Manhattan's Lenape, and a huge Greenlandic meteorite that arrived in New York City along with six Inuit adventurers in 1897, Raffles shows how unconformities unceasingly incite human imagination and investigation yet refuse to conform, heal, or disappear. A journey across eons and continents, The Book of Unconformities is also a journey through stone: this most solid, ancient, and enigmatic of materials, it turns out, is as lively, capricious, willful, and indifferent as time itself.

Speculations V

Speculations V
Author: Ridvan Askin
Publisher:
Total Pages: 474
Release: 2014
Genre: Aesthetics
ISBN: 9780692203163

"Ever since the turn of the century aesthetics has steadily gained momentum as a central field of study across the disciplines. No longer sidelined, aesthetics has grown in confidence. While this recent development brings with it a return to the work of the canonical authors (most notably Baumgarten and Kant), some contemporary scholars reject the traditional focus on epistemology and theorize aesthetics in its ontological connotations. It is according to this shift that speculative realists have proclaimed aesthetics as "first philosophy" and as speculative in nature. With speculative realism aesthetics no longer necessarily implies human agents. This is in alignment with the general speculative realist framework for thinking all kinds of processes, entities, and objects as free from our all-pervasive anthropocentrism, which states, always, that everything is "for us."This special volume of Speculations explores the ramifications of what could be termed the new speculative aesthetics. In doing so, it stages a three-fold encounter: between aesthetics and speculation, between speculative realism and its (possible) precursors, and between speculative realism and art and literature"

Capital Speculations

Capital Speculations
Author: Sarah Luria
Publisher: UPNE
Total Pages: 250
Release: 2006
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 9781584655022

An imaginative analysis of the interplay between rhetoric and physical space in the creation of the nation's capital.

Weird Realism

Weird Realism
Author: Graham Harman
Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
Total Pages: 278
Release: 2012-09-28
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1780999070

As Hölderlin was to Martin Heidegger and Mallarmé to Jacques Derrida, so is H.P. Lovecraft to the Speculative Realist philosophers. Lovecraft was one of the brightest stars of the horror and science fiction magazines, but died in poverty and relative obscurity in the 1930s. In 2005 he was finally elevated from pulp status to the classical literary canon with the release of a Library of America volume dedicated to his work. The impact of Lovecraft on philosophy has been building for more than a decade. Initially championed by shadowy guru Nick Land at Warwick during the 1990s, he was later discovered to be an object of private fascination for all four original members of the twenty-first century Speculative Realist movement. In this book, Graham Harman extracts the basic philosophical concepts underlying the work of Lovecraft, yielding a weird realism capable of freeing continental philosophy from its current soul-crushing impasse. Abandoning pious references by Heidegger to Hölderlin and the Greeks, Harman develops a new philosophical mythology centered in such Lovecraftian figures as Cthulhu, Wilbur Whately, and the rat-like monstrosity Brown Jenkin. The Miskatonic River replaces the Rhine and the Ister, while Hölderlin's Caucasus gives way to Lovecraft's Antarctic mountains of madness.

Speculations

Speculations
Author: Triple Canopy (Firm)
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2015
Genre: Civilization, Modern
ISBN: 9780984734658

In the summer of 2013, Triple Canopy invited more than sixty writers, artists, scientists, activists, economists, and technologists to make bets on the future. Triple Canopy asked: Which future do you want to see realized? How would you describe it? What demands might this future make on the present? These speculations were to be optimistic, even if that optimism were skeptical or dark. They were presented as Speculations ("The future is ______"), a fifty-day series of lectures, discussions, and debates at MoMA PS1, Triple Canopy's contribution to the exhibition "EXPO 1." In subsequent months, Triple Canopy continued the speculations by way of public conversations about climate change and inequality, geoengineering, and the way in which we conceive of and represent nature.This book takes the form of a lexicon that traces the Speculations series' central themes and common terms of discussion, in order to convey the relationship between imagination and action, and the right we all have to shape the future (given the right tools). Triple Canopy considers strategic interventions into the economy ("guaranteed basic income"), political abstractions ("autonomy," "prometheanism"), figments of the imagination ("planetary colonization"), modes of expression ("science fiction"), and useful neologisms ("hedge-fund utilitarians"). Each entry consists of edited excerpts from speculations made by, among others, David Auerbach, Gopal Balakrishnan, Ray Brassier, José Léon Cerillo, Ted Chiang, Jace Clayton, John Crowley, Samuel Delany, Silvia Federici, Rivka Galchen, David Graeber, N. Katherine Hayles, Josh Kline, Benjamin Kunkel, Rachel Kushner, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Mary Mattingly, Naeem Mohaiemen, Evgeny Morozov, Hương Ngô, Trevor Paglen, Ashwin Parameswaran, Srikanth Reddy, David Rieff, Kim Stanley Robinson, Norman Rush, Astra Taylor, and Kathi Weeks.