Praise for the previous edition:
“In order to acquaint a new generation with Fuller, his former architectural partner, Zung, gathers selections [from Fuller’s writings] on topics ranging from education and environment to engineering and the Lord’s Prayer. Admirers of Fuller—such as actress Valerie Harper, author Arthur C. Clarke, and entrepreneur Steve Forbes—introduce each selection. Zung’s anthology traces the development of Fuller’s intellectual life and provides an excellent introduction for a new generation to the life and work of this brilliant thinker.”—Publishers Weekly
“Stimulating and provocative. . . . Like a Francis Bacon charting the course for future generations to pursue, Fuller anticipates the need for the ‘comprehensive designer,’ who would be a ‘synthesis of artist, inventor, mechanic, objective economist, and evolutionary strategist.’ Such a [person], he says, would be an initiator of design, able to anticipate all of man’s needs and provide new and advanced standards of living for a steadily increasing percentage of the world’s population.”—Chicago Tribune
Stalin ordered his execution, but here Peter Palchinsky has the last word. As if rising from an uneasy grave, Palchinsky’s ghost leads us through the miasma of Soviet technology and industry, pointing out the mistakes he condemned in his time, the corruption and collapse he predicted, the ultimate price paid for silencing those who were not afraid to speak out. The story of this visionary engineer’s life and work, as Loren Graham relates it, is also the story of the Soviet Union’s industrial promise and failure.
We meet Palchinsky in pre-Revolutionary Russia, immersed in protests against the miserable lot of laborers in the tsarist state, protests destined to echo ironically during the Soviet worker’s paradise. Exiled from the country, pardoned and welcomed back at the outbreak of World War I, the engineer joined the ranks of the Revolutionary government, only to find it no more open to criticism than the previous regime. His turbulent career offers us a window on debates over industrialization. Graham highlights the harsh irrationalities built into the Soviet system—the world’s most inefficient steel mill in Magnitogorsk, the gigantic and ill-conceived hydroelectric plant on the Dnieper River, the infamously cruel and mislocated construction of the White Sea Canal. Time and again, we see the effects of policies that ignore not only the workers’ and consumers’ needs but also sound management and engineering precepts. And we see Palchinsky’s criticism and advice, persistently given, consistently ignored, continue to haunt the Soviet Union right up to its dissolution in 1991.
The story of a man whose gifts and character set him in the path of history, The Ghost of the Executed Engineer is also a cautionary tale about the fate of an engineering that disregards social and human issues.
Learn how to read and translate technical manuals, research publications, and reference works. This two-volume set is designed to help the intermediate-level learner of Japanese build a technical vocabulary, reinforce understanding of frequently used grammatical patterns, improve reading comprehension, and practice translating technical passages. The glossary in volume 2 clarifies words and phrases that often puzzle beginning readers.
The sample readings on technical topics are drawn from a broad range of specialties, from mathematics and computer science to electronics and polymer science. The initial grammar lesson and the first nine field-specific lessons constitute the common core to be used by all instructors or students. Topics of interest from the remaining thirty-one field-specific lessons may be selected to produce a customized course of study. Intermediate Technical Japanese is designed to fulfill a typical two-semester sequence.
Volume 1 contains:
o information about 600 key kanji
o explanations of 100 important grammatical patterns
o more than 700 scientific or technical essays
o an index of the grammatical patterns.
Volume 2 contains:
o a complete glossary
Learn how to read and translate technical manuals, research publications, and reference works. This two-volume set is designed to help the intermediate-level learner of Japanese build a technical vocabulary, reinforce understanding of frequently used grammatical patterns, improve reading comprehension, and practice translating technical passages. The glossary in volume 2 clarifies words and phrases that often puzzle beginning readers.
The sample readings on technical topics are drawn from a broad range of specialties, from mathematics and computer science to electronics and polymer science. The initial grammar lesson and the first nine field-specific lessons constitute the common core to be used by all instructors or students. Topics of interest from the remaining thirty-one field-specific lessons may be selected to produce a customized course of study. Intermediate Technical Japanese is designed to fulfill a typical two-semester sequence.
Volume 1 contains:
o information about 600 key kanji
o explanations of 100 important grammatical patterns
o more than 700 scientific or technical essays
o an index of the grammatical patterns.
Volume 2 contains:
o a complete glossary
At the dawn of the twentieth century, the US-Mexico border was home to some of the largest and most technologically advanced industrial copper mines. This despite being geographically, culturally, and financially far-removed from traditional urban centers of power. Mining the Borderlands argues that this was only possible because of the emergence of mining engineers—a distinct technocratic class of professionals who connected capital, labor, and expertise.
Mining engineers moved easily between remote mining camps and the upscale parlors of east coast investors. Working as labor managers and technical experts, they were involved in the daily negotiations, which brought private US capital to the southwestern border. The success of the massive capital-intensive mining ventures in the region depended on their ability to construct different networks, serving as intermediaries to groups that rarely coincided.
Grossman argues that this didn’t just lead to bigger and more efficient mines, but served as part of the ongoing project of American territorial and economic expansion. By integrating the history of technical expertise into the history of the transnational mining industry, this in-depth look at borderlands mining explains how American economic hegemony was established in a border region peripheral to the federal governments of both Washington, D.C. and Mexico City.
Beginning in the early 2000s, there was an upsurge of national concern over the state of the science and engineering job market that sparked a plethora of studies, commission reports, and a presidential initiative, all stressing the importance of maintaining American competitiveness in these fields. Science and Engineering Careers in the United States is the first major academic study to probe the issues that underlie these concerns.
This volume provides new information on the economics of the postgraduate science and engineering job market, addressing such topics as the factors that determine the supply of PhDs, the career paths they follow after graduation, and the creation and use of knowledge as it is reflected by the amount of papers and patents produced. A distinguished team of contributors also explores the tensions between industry and academe in recruiting graduates, the influx of foreign-born doctorates, and the success of female doctorates. Science and Engineering Careers in the United States will raise new questions about stimulating innovation and growth in the American economy.
Technocratic Visions examines the context and societal consequences of technologies, technocratic governance, and development in Mexico, home of the first professional engineering school in the Americas. Contributors focus on the influential role of engineers, especially civil engineers, but also mining engineers, military engineers, architects, and other infrastructural and mechanical technicians. During the mid-nineteenth century, a period of immense upheaval and change domestically and globally, troubled governments attempted to expand and modernize Mexico’s engineering programs while resisting foreign invasion and adapting new Western technologies to existing precolonial and colonial foundations. The Mexican Revolution in 1910 greatly expanded technocratic practices as state agents attempted to control popular unrest and unify disparate communities via science, education, and infrastructure. Within this backdrop of political unrest, Technocratic Visions describes engineering sites as places both praised and protested, where personal, local, national, and global interests combined into new forms of societal creation; and as places that became centers of contests over representation, health, identity, and power. With an eye on contextualizing current problems stemming from Mexico’s historical development, this volume reveals how these transformations were uniquely Mexican and thoroughly global.
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