Imaginary Power, Real Horizons

Imaginary Power, Real Horizons
Author: Richard Gilman-Opalsky
Publisher: AK Press
Total Pages: 214
Release: 2024-07-09
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1849355576

A defense of the radical imagination from a scholar of social movements. Political theorist and philosopher Richard Gilman-Opalsky’s Imaginary Power, Real Horizons is a tribute to the imagination and to its necessity for liberatory struggle. “‘Impractical’ is the name given to anyone who imagines something radically other than what exists,” he writes. However, many things—such as the abolition of slavery—were dismissed as impractical before they came to be. In a warm, plainspoken manner, these essays chart the affects of creativity and utopianism through topics as varied as the cyclical nature of popular movements; the international history of May Day; the experience of teaching political theory and Marxism in contemporary China; and the revolutionary aspirations of Free Jazz. The human imagination is a real, world-creating power, and those who would declare otherwise have a poor understanding of history. Imaginary Power, Real Horizons is a call to action for those who would dare to dream of a society organized by a different logic than capitalism.

Emergent Publics

Emergent Publics
Author: Ian H. Angus
Publisher: Arp Books
Total Pages: 112
Release: 2001
Genre: History
ISBN:

Critical thinker Ian Angus argues for a radical redefinition of democracy. He wrests the concept of democracy away from the notion that a citizen's only real activity is voting, and argues for a real participatory model. This short and accessible book looks at the roots of democratic institutions, showing how they originated in social movements and the forms of communication and interaction within those movements.

Anti-Book

Anti-Book
Author: Nicholas Thoburn
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Total Pages: 383
Release: 2016-12-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1452951993

No, Anti-Book is not a book about books. Not exactly. And yet it is a must for anyone interested in the future of the book. Presenting what he terms “a communism of textual matter,” Nicholas Thoburn explores the encounter between political thought and experimental writing and publishing, shifting the politics of text from an exclusive concern with content and meaning to the media forms and social relations by which text is produced and consumed. Taking a “post-digital” approach in considering a wide array of textual media forms, Thoburn invites us to challenge the commodity form of books—to stop imagining books as transcendent intellectual, moral, and aesthetic goods unsullied by commerce. His critique is, instead, one immersed in the many materialities of text. Anti-Book engages with an array of writing and publishing projects, including Antonin Artaud’s paper gris-gris, Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto, Guy Debord’s sandpaper-bound Mémoires, the collective novelist Wu Ming, and the digital/print hybrid of Mute magazine. Empirically grounded, it is also a major achievement in expressing a political philosophy of writing and publishing, where the materiality of text is interlaced with conceptual production. Each chapter investigates a different form of textual media in concert with a particular concept: the small-press pamphlet as “communist object,” the magazine as “diagrammatic publishing,” political books in the modes of “root” and “rhizome,” the “multiple single” of anonymous authorship, and myth as “unidentified narrative object.” An absorbingly written contribution to contemporary media theory in all its manifestations, Anti-Book will enrich current debates about radical publishing, artists’ books and other new genre and media forms in alternative media, art publishing, media studies, cultural studies, critical theory, and social and political theory.

The Artificial Horizon

The Artificial Horizon
Author: Martin Edward Thomas
Publisher: Melbourne Univ. Publishing
Total Pages: 350
Release: 2004
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780522851519

Martin Thomas takes the reader on a journey through a compelling study of culture, landscape and mythology. For both Aboriginal people and their colonisers, the rugged landscape of the Blue Mountains has stood as an intriguing riddle and a stimulus to the imagination. The author evokes this dramatic and bewildering landscape and leads his readers through the cultural history of the locality in order to probe the 'dreamwork of imperialism'.

Quanta, Galactic Walls, The Cycle of Time, Accross the Event Horizon

Quanta, Galactic Walls, The Cycle of Time, Accross the Event Horizon
Author: Claus Birkholz
Publisher: BookRix
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2021-09-11
Genre: Science
ISBN: 3748794088

Quantum gravity (QG) reduces the infinite number of classical transformations to the finite number of their generators. As a Dirac algebra, they form the basis of a U(2,2) of 4x4=16 pairs of 4 discrete types of quanta. Einstein's General Theory of Relativity (GR) is a defective application of its conformal subgroup SO(2,4). The experiment identifies its CPT extension to a U(4,4) of a complex Lie algebra as a correct description of our universe in the large and the dynamics of quantised particles in the small. Black holes are free of singularities, swallow energy-momentum, and return spacetime. Pseudo-unitarity is the engine of time. Forces prove the "Theory of Everything" (ToE) to be an 8-fold degeneracy of QG, which, like GR, is fully geometrizable. It describes the world of elementary particles with their non-valence structures and flavours, dark energy, dark matter, and the filaments and voids of Galactic Walls. Weak interactions do not break any conservation law. Due to 8x8=2**6, the ToE provides exactly 6 Goldstone particles with spins 2, 1, and 1/2: graviton, photon, 3 left-handed neutrinos, a sterile meson. The graviton separates input from output; as a simulation effect of Young tableaux, antimatter is largely suppressed. QG and ToE attribute all physics solely to the occupation numbers of the ToE quantum types and to our current position in our universe. This way, ToE allows to derive the numerical particle spectrum including masses by theory. According to Bell's superdeterminism, our universe is invariant; there is no free will. Dynamics compares fixed observer positions and identifies local variation as "motion".

Advances and Trends in Optimization with Engineering Applications

Advances and Trends in Optimization with Engineering Applications
Author: Tamas Terlaky
Publisher: SIAM
Total Pages: 730
Release: 2017-04-26
Genre: Mathematics
ISBN: 1611974674

Optimization is of critical importance in engineering. Engineers constantly strive for the best possible solutions, the most economical use of limited resources, and the greatest efficiency. As system complexity increases, these goals mandate the use of state-of-the-art optimization techniques. In recent years, the theory and methodology of optimization have seen revolutionary improvements. Moreover, the exponential growth in computational power, along with the availability of multicore computing with virtually unlimited memory and storage capacity, has fundamentally changed what engineers can do to optimize their designs. This is a two-way process: engineers benefit from developments in optimization methodology, and challenging new classes of optimization problems arise from novel engineering applications. Advances and Trends in Optimization with Engineering Applications reviews 10 major areas of optimization and related engineering applications, providing a broad summary of state-of-the-art optimization techniques most important to engineering practice. Each part provides a clear overview of a specific area and discusses a range of real-world problems. The book provides a solid foundation for engineers and mathematical optimizers alike who want to understand the importance of optimization methods to engineering and the capabilities of these methods.

Applications of Modern Heuristic Optimization Methods in Power and Energy Systems

Applications of Modern Heuristic Optimization Methods in Power and Energy Systems
Author: Kwang Y. Lee
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 896
Release: 2020-04-14
Genre: Science
ISBN: 1119602297

Reviews state-of-the-art technologies in modern heuristic optimization techniques and presents case studies showing how they have been applied in complex power and energy systems problems Written by a team of international experts, this book describes the use of metaheuristic applications in the analysis and design of electric power systems. This includes a discussion of optimum energy and commitment of generation (nonrenewable & renewable) and load resources during day-to-day operations and control activities in regulated and competitive market structures, along with transmission and distribution systems. Applications of Modern Heuristic Optimization Methods in Power and Energy Systems begins with an introduction and overview of applications in power and energy systems before moving on to planning and operation, control, and distribution. Further chapters cover the integration of renewable energy and the smart grid and electricity markets. The book finishes with final conclusions drawn by the editors. Applications of Modern Heuristic Optimization Methods in Power and Energy Systems: Explains the application of differential evolution in electric power systems' active power multi-objective optimal dispatch Includes studies of optimization and stability in load frequency control in modern power systems Describes optimal compliance of reactive power requirements in near-shore wind power plants Features contributions from noted experts in the field Ideal for power and energy systems designers, planners, operators, and consultants, Applications of Modern Heuristic Optimization Methods in Power and Energy Systems will also benefit engineers, software developers, researchers, academics, and students.

Negative Frequency at the Horizon

Negative Frequency at the Horizon
Author: Maxime Jacquet
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 208
Release: 2018-04-26
Genre: Science
ISBN: 331991071X

This book is part of a large and growing body of work on the observation of analogue gravity effects, such as Hawking radiation, in laboratory systems. The book is highly didactic, skillfully navigating between concepts ranging from quantum field theory on curved space-times, nonlinear fibre optics and the theoretical and experimental foundations in the physics of optical analogues to the Event Horizon. It presents a comprehensive field-theoretical framework for these systems, including the kinematics governing the fields. This allows an analytical calculation of the all-important conversion of vacuum fluctuations into Hawking radiation. Based on this, emission spectra are computed, providing unique insights into the emissions from a highly dispersive system. In an experimental part, the book develops a clear and systematic way to experimentally approach the problem and demonstrates the construction of an experimental setup and measurements of unprecedented sensitivity in the search for stimulation of the Hawking effect.

Ethnography

Ethnography
Author: Vincenzo Matera
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 426
Release: 2020-12-04
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3030517209

This volume presents both a historical exploration of ethnography and a thematic discussion of major trends that, over different periods, have oriented and re-oriented research practice. As it overviews ethnography from different geographic and thematic perspectives, it further explores new lines of ethnographic research, including as feminist ethnography and visual research, that uncover non-traditional routes to anthropological knowledge. As the great ethnographer E. E. Evans-Pritchard wrote, “Anyone who is not a complete idiot can do fieldwork... but will [his contribution] be to theoretical, or just to factual knowledge?” As Evans-Pritchard highlights and as this book argues, successful ethnography must be connected to a sophisticated theoretical reflection rooted in social and cultural anthropology.