Macrofungi Associated with Oaks of Eastern North America, which was written as a companion to Field Guide to Oak Species of Eastern North America, represents the first major publication devoted exclusively to the macrofungi that occur in association with oak trees in the forests of eastern North America. The macrofungi covered in this volume include many of the more common examples of the three groups—mycorrhizal fungi, decomposers, and pathogens—that are ecologically important to the forest ecosystems in which oaks occur. More than 200 species of macrofungi are described and illustrated via vibrantly colored photographs. Information is given on edibility, medicinal properties, and other novel uses as well. This publication reflects the combined expertise of six mycologists on the macrofungi anyone would be likely to encounter in an oak forest.
A key component in healthy ecosystems, lichens can be found in almost any natural habitat in the Pacific Northwest. This comprehensive guide to the region’s macrolichens is intended for use by beginners as well as specialists: weekend naturalists will be able to identify specimens and recognize the great diversity of lichens, while lichenologists and mycologists will gain greater knowledge of the distribution and abundance of various species.
This revised and expanded edition of Macrolichens of the Pacific Northwest includes includes keys to over 600 species —all the macrolichens known or expected to occur in Oregon and Washington. The keys also provide coverage for lichens of Idaho and Montana, inland to the Continental Divide. Almost all macrolichens known from northern California and southern British Columbia, and from coastal southeast Alaska, are included as well.
Color photographs and detailed descriptions are provided for more than 250 species, emphasizing lichens prevalent in forested ecosystems. The illustrated glossary and introductory material cover the terminology needed to identify macrolichens and provide information on collection and handling. The biology, ecology, and air-quality sensitivity of lichens are discussed. Macrolichens of the Pacific Northwest will prove invaluable to anyone seeking to identify lichens or to better understand these organisms and their vital role in the natural world.
A key component in healthy ecosystems, lichens can be found in almost any natural habitat in the Pacific Northwest. This comprehensive guide to the region’s macrolichens is intended for use by beginners as well as specialists: weekend naturalists will be able to identify specimens and recognize the great diversity of lichens, while lichenologists and mycologists will gain greater knowledge of the distribution and abundance of various species.
This revised and expanded edition of Macrolichens of the Pacific Northwest includes 116 new species and 176 additional illustrations and incorporates an understanding of macrolichens that has advanced tremendously in the past decade.
Macrolichens of the Pacific Northwest includes keys to 113 genera and 586 species of Oregon and Washington macrolichens—all the macrolichens known or expected to occur in the two states. The keys also provide reasonable coverage for lichens of Idaho and Montana, inland to the Continental Divide. Color photographs and detailed descriptions are provided for 246 species, emphasizing lichens prevalent in forested ecosystems.
The illustrated glossary and introductory material cover the terminology needed to identify macrolichens and provide information on collection and handling. The biology, ecology, and air-quality sensitivity of lichens are discussed; regional air-quality sensitivities are provided for 184 species.
Macrolichens of the Pacific Northwest will prove invaluable to anyone seeking to identify lichens or to better understand these organisms and their vital role in the natural world.
Through the ages, rabies has exemplified the danger of diseases that transfer from wild animals to humans and their domestic stock. In South Africa, rabies has been on the rise since the latter part of the twentieth century despite the availability of postexposure vaccines and regular inoculation campaigns for dogs.
In Mad Dogs and Meerkats: A History of Resurgent Rabies in Southern Africa, Karen Brown links the increase of rabies to the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Her study shows that the most afflicted regions of South Africa have seen a dangerous rise in feral dog populations as people lack the education, means, or will to care for their pets or take them to inoculation centers. Most victims are poor black children. Ineffective disease control, which in part depends on management policies in neighboring states and the diminished medical and veterinary infrastructures in Zimbabwe, has exacerbated the problem.
This highly readable book is the first study of rabies in Africa, tracing its history in South Africa and neighboring states from 1800 to the present and showing how environmental and economic changes brought about by European colonialism and global trade have had long-term effects.
Mad Dogs and Meerkats is recommended for public health policy makers and anyone interested in human-animal relations and how societies and governments have reacted to one of the world’s most feared diseases.
Listen to a short interview with Giles SladeHost: Chris Gondek | Producer: Heron & Crane
If you've replaced a computer lately--or a cell phone, a camera, a television--chances are, the old one still worked. And chances are even greater that the latest model won't last as long as the one it replaced. Welcome to the world of planned obsolescence--a business model, a way of life, and a uniquely American invention that this eye-opening book explores from its beginnings to its perilous implications for the very near future.
Made to Break is a history of twentieth-century technology as seen through the prism of obsolescence. America invented everything that is now disposable, Giles Slade tells us, and he explains how disposability was in fact a necessary condition for America's rejection of tradition and our acceptance of change and impermanence. His book shows us the ideas behind obsolescence at work in such American milestones as the inventions of branding, packaging, and advertising; the contest for market dominance between GM and Ford; the struggle for a national communications network, the development of electronic technologies--and with it the avalanche of electronic consumer waste that will overwhelm America's landfills and poison its water within the coming decade.
History reserves a privileged place for those societies that built things to last--forever, if possible. What place will it hold for a society addicted to consumption--a whole culture made to break? This book gives us a detailed and harrowing picture of how, by choosing to support ever-shorter product lives we may well be shortening the future of our way of life as well.
A mother whose child has had a cochlear implant tells Laura Mauldin why enrollment in the sign language program at her daughter’s school is plummeting: “The majority of parents want their kids to talk.” Some parents, however, feel very differently, because “curing” deafness with cochlear implants is uncertain, difficult, and freighted with judgment about what is normal, acceptable, and right. Made to Hear sensitively and thoroughly considers the structure and culture of the systems we have built to make deaf children hear.
Based on accounts of and interviews with families who adopt the cochlear implant for their deaf children, this book describes the experiences of mothers as they navigate the health care system, their interactions with the professionals who work with them, and the influence of neuroscience on the process. Though Mauldin explains the politics surrounding the issue, her focus is not on the controversy of whether to have a cochlear implant but on the long-term, multiyear undertaking of implantation. Her study provides a nuanced view of a social context in which science, technology, and medicine are trusted to vanquish disability—and in which mothers are expected to use these tools. Made to Hear reveals that implantation has the central goal of controlling the development of the deaf child’s brain by boosting synapses for spoken language and inhibiting those for sign language, placing the politics of neuroscience front and center.
Examining the consequences of cochlear implant technology for professionals and parents of deaf children, Made to Hear shows how certain neuroscientific claims about neuroplasticity, deafness, and language are deployed to encourage compliance with medical technology.
A revelatory new account of the magus—the learned magician—and his place in the intellectual, social, and cultural world of Renaissance Europe.
In literary legend, Faustus is the quintessential occult personality of early modern Europe. The historical Faustus, however, was something quite different: a magus—a learned magician fully embedded in the scholarly currents and public life of the Renaissance. And he was hardly the only one. Anthony Grafton argues that the magus in sixteenth-century Europe was a distinctive intellectual type, both different from and indebted to medieval counterparts as well as contemporaries like the engineer, the artist, the Christian humanist, and the religious reformer. Alongside these better-known figures, the magus had a transformative impact on his social world.
Magus details the arts and experiences of learned magicians including Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, Johannes Trithemius, and Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa. Grafton explores their methods, the knowledge they produced, the services they provided, and the overlapping political and social milieus to which they aspired—often, the circles of kings and princes. During the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, these erudite men anchored debates about licit and illicit magic, the divine and the diabolical, and the nature of “good” and “bad” magicians. Over time, they turned magic into a complex art, which drew on contemporary engineering as well as classical astrology, probed the limits of what was acceptable in a changing society, and promised new ways to explore the self and exploit the cosmos.
Resituating the magus in the social, cultural, and intellectual order of Renaissance Europe, Grafton sheds new light on both the recesses of the learned magician’s mind and the many worlds he inhabited.
To most of us, learning something “the hard way” implies wasted time and effort. Good teaching, we believe, should be creatively tailored to the different learning styles of students and should use strategies that make learning easier. Make It Stick turns fashionable ideas like these on their head. Drawing on recent discoveries in cognitive psychology and other disciplines, the authors offer concrete techniques for becoming more productive learners.
Memory plays a central role in our ability to carry out complex cognitive tasks, such as applying knowledge to problems never before encountered and drawing inferences from facts already known. New insights into how memory is encoded, consolidated, and later retrieved have led to a better understanding of how we learn. Grappling with the impediments that make learning challenging leads both to more complex mastery and better retention of what was learned.
Many common study habits and practice routines turn out to be counterproductive. Underlining and highlighting, rereading, cramming, and single-minded repetition of new skills create the illusion of mastery, but gains fade quickly. More complex and durable learning come from self-testing, introducing certain difficulties in practice, waiting to re-study new material until a little forgetting has set in, and interleaving the practice of one skill or topic with another. Speaking most urgently to students, teachers, trainers, and athletes, Make It Stick will appeal to all those interested in the challenge of lifelong learning and self-improvement.
A Chronicle of Higher Education “Top 10 Books on Teaching” Selection
To most of us, learning something “the hard way” implies wasted time and effort. Good teaching, we believe, should be creatively tailored to the different learning styles of students and should use strategies that make learning easier. Make It Stick turns fashionable ideas like these on their head. Drawing on recent discoveries in cognitive psychology and other disciplines, the authors offer concrete techniques for becoming more productive learners.
“If you want to read a lively and engaging book on the science of learning, this is a must.”
—Hazel Christie, Times Higher Education
“Many educators are interested in making use of recent findings about the human brain and how we learn…Make It Stick [is] the single best work I have encountered on the subject. Anyone with an interest in teaching or learning will benefit from reading this book.”
—James M. Lang, Chronicle of Higher Education
An elucidating collection of ten original essays, Making Animal Meaning reconceptualizes methods for researching animal histories and rethinks the contingency of the human-animal relationship. The vibrant and diverse field of animal studies is detailed in these interdisciplinary discussions, which include voices from a broad range of scholars and have an extensive chronological and geographical reach. These exciting discourses capture the most compelling theoretical underpinnings of animal significance while exploring meaning-making through the study of specific spaces, species, and human-animal relations. A deeply thoughtful collection — vital to understanding central questions of agency, kinship, and animal consumption — these essays tackle the history and philosophy of constructing animal meaning.
Drawing on past speculation and present knowledge, reproductive biologist David Bainbridge conducts us through the forty weeks of a human pregnancy, from conception to breastfeeding, explaining the complex biology behind human gestation in a clear and unassuming manner.
Making Babies sets the latest findings in pregnancy biology in a challenging evolutionary, historical, and sociological context, proving that when it comes to drama, pregnancy has it all: sibling rivalry, a battle of the sexes, and a crisis of gender identity. Along the way, Bainbridge revisits some of the key puzzles about pregnancy: What's sex got to do with it? How does the fetus hijack its mother's immune system? What is the point, if any, of morning sickness? Just how does a fertilized ovum develop into eight pounds or so of baby, with ten fingers and ten toes? Does the baby or the mother control the onset of labor, and why is it such an ordeal for them both?
Entertaining and informative, Making Babies shows how the study of human pregnancy can help us understand our genesis as individuals and our evolution as a species, and provide insight into who we are and why we behave as we do.
Americans have access to some of the best science education in the world, but too often black students are excluded from these opportunities. This essential book by leading voices in the field of education reform offers an inspiring vision of how America’s universities can guide a new generation of African Americans to success in science.
Educators, research scientists, and college administrators have all called for a new commitment to diversity in the sciences, but most universities struggle to truly support black students in these fields. Historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) are different, though. Marybeth Gasman, widely celebrated as an education-reform visionary, and Thai-Huy Nguyen show that many HBCUs have proven adept at helping their students achieve in the sciences. There is a lot we can learn from these exemplary schools.
Gasman and Nguyen explore ten innovative schools that have increased the number of black students studying science and improved those students’ performance. Educators on these campuses have a keen sense of their students’ backgrounds and circumstances, familiarity that helps their science departments avoid the high rates of attrition that plague departments elsewhere. The most effective science programs at HBCUs emphasize teaching when considering whom to hire and promote, encourage students to collaborate rather than compete, and offer more opportunities for black students to find role models among both professors and peers.
Making Black Scientists reveals the secrets to these institutions’ striking successes and shows how other colleges and universities can follow their lead. The result is a bold new agenda for institutions that want to better serve African American students.
Popular natural history periodicals in the nineteenth century had an incredible democratizing power. By welcoming contributions from correspondents regardless of their background, they posed a significant threat to those who considered themselves to be gatekeepers of elite science, and who in turn used their own periodicals to shape more exclusive communities. Making Entomologists reassesses the landscape of science participation in the nineteenth century, offering a more nuanced analysis of the supposed amateur-professional divide that resonates with the rise of citizen science today. Matthew Wale reveals how an increase in popular natural history periodicals during the nineteenth century was instrumental in shaping not only the life sciences and the field of entomology but also scientific communities that otherwise could not have existed. These publications enabled many actors—from wealthy gentlemen of science to working-class naturalists—to participate more fully within an extended network of fellow practitioners and, crucially, imagine themselves as part of a wider community. Women were also active participants in these groups, although in far smaller numbers than men. Although periodicals of the nineteenth century have received considerable scholarly attention, this study focuses specifically on the journals and magazines devoted to natural history.
Humans possess the most expressive faces in the animal kingdom. Adam Wilkins presents evidence ranging from the fossil record to recent findings of genetics, molecular biology, and developmental biology to reconstruct the fascinating story of how the human face evolved. Beginning with the first vertebrate faces half a billion years ago and continuing to dramatic changes among our recent human ancestors, Making Faces illuminates how the unusual characteristics of the human face came about—both the physical shape of facial features and the critical role facial expression plays in human society.
Offering more than an account of morphological changes over time and space, which rely on findings from paleontology and anthropology, Wilkins also draws on comparative studies of living nonhuman species. He examines the genetic foundations of the remarkable diversity in human faces, and also shows how the evolution of the face was intimately connected to the evolution of the brain. Brain structures capable of recognizing different individuals as well as “reading” and reacting to their facial expressions led to complex social exchanges. Furthermore, the neural and muscular mechanisms that created facial expressions also allowed the development of speech, which is unique to humans.
In demonstrating how the physical evolution of the human face has been inextricably intertwined with our species’ growing social complexity, Wilkins argues that it was both the product and enabler of human sociality.
In 1969, Jon Beckwith and his colleagues succeeded in isolating a gene from the chromosome of a living organism. Announcing this startling achievement at a press conference, Beckwith took the opportunity to issue a public warning about the dangers of genetic engineering. Jon Beckwith's book, the story of a scientific life on the front line, traces one remarkable man's dual commitment to scientific research and social responsibility over the course of a career spanning most of the postwar history of genetics and molecular biology.
A thoroughly engrossing memoir that recounts Beckwith's halting steps toward scientific triumphs--among them, the discovery of the genetic element that turns genes on--as well as his emergence as a world-class political activist, Making Genes, Making Waves is also a compelling history of the major controversies in genetics over the last thirty years. Presenting the science in easily understandable terms, Beckwith describes the dramatic changes that transformed biology between the late 1950s and our day, the growth of the radical science movement in the 1970s, and the personalities involved throughout. He brings to light the differing styles of scientists as well as the different ways in which science is presented within the scientific community and to the public at large. Ranging from the travails of Robert Oppenheimer and the atomic bomb to the Human Genome Project and recent "Science Wars," Beckwith's book provides a sweeping view of science and its social context in the latter half of the twentieth century.
If there was a new wonder drug on the market that got kids to behave better, improve their grades, feel happier, and avoid risky behaviors, many parents around the world would be willing to empty their bank accounts to acquire it. Amazingly, such a product actually does exist. It’s not regulated by the FDA, it has no ill side-effects, and it’s absolutely free and available to anyone at any time. This miracle cure is gratitude.
Over the past decade, science has shown that gratitude is one of the most valuable and important emotions we possess, and it is a virtue that anyone can cultivate. In fact, researchers have developed many different methods people can use to foster an attitude of gratitude, and the science shows that many of them really work.
In Making Grateful Kids, two of the leading authorities on gratitude among young people, Jeffrey J. Froh and Giacomo Bono, introduce their latest and most compelling research, announce groundbreaking findings, and share real-life stories from adults and youth to show parents, teachers, mentors, and kids themselves how to achieve greater life satisfaction through gratitude. Most importantly perhaps, they expand on this groundbreaking research to offer practical and effective common-sense plans that can be used in day-to-day interactions between kids and adults to enhance success and wellbeing.
Their unique, scientifically-based approach for producing grateful youth works whether these kids are very young elementary school students or troubled teenagers. Not only does the purposeful practice of gratitude increase their happiness, but the research indicates that grateful kids also report more self-discipline, fulfilling relationships, and engagement with their schools and communities when compared to their less grateful counterparts. After reading Making Grateful Kids, parents, teachers, and anyone who works with youth will be able to connect more meaningfully with kids so that all parties can focus on the things that matter most and, in turn, create a more cooperative and thriving society.
Making Nature Whole is a seminal volume that presents an in-depth history of the field of ecological restoration as it has developed in the United States over the last three decades. The authors draw from both published and unpublished sources, including archival materials and oral histories from early practitioners, to explore the development of the field and its importance to environmental management as well as to the larger environmental movement and our understanding of the world.
Considering antecedents as varied as monastic gardens, the Scientific Revolution, and the emerging nature-awareness of nineteenth-century Romantics and Transcendentalists, Jordan and Lubick offer unique insight into the field's philosophical and theoretical underpinnings. They examine specifically the more recent history, including the story of those who first attempted to recreate natural ecosystems early in the 20th century, as well as those who over the past few decades have realized the value of this approach not only as a critical element in conservation but also as a context for negotiating the ever-changing relationship between humans and the natural environment.
Making Nature Whole is a landmark contribution, providing context and history regarding a distinctive form of land management and giving readers a fascinating overview of the development of the field. It is essential reading for anyone interested in understanding where ecological restoration came from or where it might be going.
At the dawn of the twenty-first century, we have become accustomed to medical breakthroughs and conditioned to assume that, regardless of illnesses, doctors almost certainly will be able to help—not just by diagnosing us and alleviating our pain, but by actually treating or even curing diseases, and significantly improving our lives.
For most of human history, however, that was far from the case, as veteran medical historian Michael Bliss explains in The Making of Modern Medicine. Focusing on a few key moments in the transformation of medical care, Bliss reveals the way that new discoveries and new approaches led doctors and patients alike to discard fatalism and their traditional religious acceptance of suffering in favor of a new faith in health care and in the capacity of doctors to treat disease. He takes readers in his account to three turning points—a devastating smallpox outbreak in Montreal in 1885, the founding of the Johns Hopkins Hospital and Medical School, and the discovery of insulin—and recounts the lives of three crucial figures—researcher Frederick Banting, surgeon Harvey Cushing, and physician William Osler—turning medical history into a fascinating story of dedication and discovery.
Compact and compelling, this searching history vividly depicts and explains the emergence of modern medicine—and, in a provocative epilogue, outlines the paradoxes and confusions underlying our contemporary understanding of disease, death, and life itself.
The sociology of science is dominated today by relativists who boldly argue that the content of science is not influenced by evidence from the empirical world but is instead socially constructed in the laboratory. Making Science is the first serious critique by a sociologist of the social constructivist position.
Stephen Cole begins by making a distinction between two kinds of knowledge: the core, which consists of those contributions that have passed the test of evaluation and are universally accepted as true and important, and the research frontier, which is composed of all work in progress that is still under evaluation. Of the thousands of scientific contributions made each year, only a handful end up in the core. What distinguishes those that are successful?
Agreeing with the constructivists, Cole argues that there exists no set of rules that enables scientists to certify the validity of frontier knowledge. This knowledge is “underdetermined” by the evidence, and therefore social factors—such as professional characteristics and intellectual authority—can and do play a crucial role in its evaluation. But Cole parts company with the constructivists when he asserts that it is impossible to understand which frontier knowledge wins a place in the core without first considering the cognitive characteristics of the contributions. He concludes that although the focus of scientific research, the rate of advance, and indeed the everyday making of science are influenced by social variables and processes, the content of the core of science is constrained by nature. In Making Science, Cole shows how social variables and cognitive variables interact in the evaluation of frontier knowledge.
For many college students, studying the hard sciences seems out of the question. Students and professors alike collude in the prejudice that physics and molecular biology, mathematics and engineering are elite disciplines restricted to a small number with innate talent. Gregory Light and Marina Micari reject this bias, arguing, based on their own transformative experiences, that environment is just as critical to academic success in the sciences as individual ability. Making Scientists lays the groundwork for a new paradigm of how scientific subjects can be taught at the college level, and how we can better cultivate scientists, engineers, and other STEM professionals.
The authors invite us into Northwestern University’s Gateway Science Workshop, where the seminar room is infused with a sense of discovery usually confined to the research lab. Conventional science instruction demands memorization of facts and formulas but provides scant opportunity for critical reflection and experimental conversation. Light and Micari stress conceptual engagement with ideas, practical problem-solving, peer mentoring, and—perhaps most important—initiation into a culture of cooperation, where students are encouraged to channel their energy into collaborative learning rather than competition with classmates. They illustrate the tangible benefits of treating students as apprentices—talented young people taking on the mental habits, perspectives, and wisdom of the scientific community, while contributing directly to its development.
Rich in concrete advice and innovative thinking, Making Scientists is an invaluable guide for all who care about the future of science and technology.
A leading philosopher seeks to recover “common sense” as a meeting place to reconcile science and philosophy
With her previous books on Alfred North Whitehead, Isabelle Stengers not only secured a reputation as one of the premier philosophers of our times but also inspired a rethinking of critical theory, political thought, and radical philosophy across a range of disciplines. Here, Stengers unveils what might well be seen as her definitive reading of Whitehead.
Making Sense in Common will be greeted eagerly by the growing group of scholars who use Stengers’s work on Whitehead as a model for how to think with conceptual precision through diverse domains of inquiry: environmentalism and ecology, animal studies, media and technology studies, the history and philosophy of science, feminism, and capitalism. On the other hand, the significance of this new book extends beyond Whitehead. Instead, it lies in Stengers’s recovery of the idea of “common sense” as a meeting place—a commons—where opposed ideas of science and humanistic inquiry can engage one another and help to move society forward. Her reconciliation of science and philosophy is especially urgent today—when climate disaster looms all around us, when the values of what we thought of as civilization and modernity are discredited, and when expertise of any kind is under attack.
Making Sense of Evolution explores contemporary evolutionary biology, focusing on the elements of theories—selection, adaptation, and species—that are complex and open to multiple possible interpretations, many of which are incompatible with one another and with other accepted practices in the discipline. Particular experimental methods, for example, may demand one understanding of “selection,” while the application of the same concept to another area of evolutionary biology could necessitate a very different definition.
Spotlighting these conceptual difficulties and presenting alternate theoretical interpretations that alleviate this incompatibility, Massimo Pigliucci and Jonathan Kaplan intertwine scientific and philosophical analysis to produce a coherent picture of evolutionary biology. Innovative and controversial, Making Sense of Evolution encourages further development of the Modern Synthesis and outlines what might be necessary for the continued refinement of this evolving field.
What do biologists want? If, unlike their counterparts in physics, biologists are generally wary of a grand, overarching theory, at what kinds of explanation do biologists aim? How will we know when we have “made sense” of life? Such questions, Evelyn Fox Keller suggests, offer no simple answers. Explanations in the biological sciences are typically provisional and partial, judged by criteria as heterogeneous as their subject matter. It is Keller’s aim in this bold and challenging book to account for this epistemological diversity—particularly in the discipline of developmental biology.
In particular, Keller asks, what counts as an “explanation” of biological development in individual organisms? Her inquiry ranges from physical and mathematical models to more familiar explanatory metaphors to the dramatic contributions of recent technological developments, especially in imaging, recombinant DNA, and computer modeling and simulations.
A history of the diverse and changing nature of biological explanation in a particularly charged field, Making Sense of Life draws our attention to the temporal, disciplinary, and cultural components of what biologists mean, and what they understand, when they propose to explain life.
A Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist
Most of us learn about science from media coverage, and anyone seeking factual information on climate change, vaccine safety, genetically modified foods, or the dangers of peanut allergies has to sift through an avalanche of bogus assertions, misinformation, and carefully packaged spin. Cornelia Dean draws on thirty years of experience as a science reporter at the New York Times to expose the tricks that handicap readers with little background in science. She reveals how activists, business spokespersons, religious leaders, and talk show hosts influence the way science is reported and describes the conflicts of interest that color research. At a time when facts are under daily assault, Making Sense of Science seeks to equip nonscientists with a set of critical tools to evaluate the claims and controversies that shape our lives.
“Making Sense of Science explains how to decide who is an expert, how to understand data, what you need to do to read science and figure out whether someone is lying to you… If science leaves you with a headache trying to figure out what’s true, what it all means and who to trust, Dean’s book is a great place to start.”
—Casper Star-Tribune
“Fascinating… Its mission is to help nonscientists evaluate scientific claims, with much attention paid to studies related to health.”
—Seattle Times
“This engaging book offers non-scientists the tools to connect with and evaluate science, and for scientists it is a timely call to action for effective communication.”
—Times Higher Education
This is a book about the making and unmaking of sex over the centuries. It tells the astonishing story of sex in the West from the ancients to the moderns in a precise account of developments in reproductive anatomy and physiology. We cannot fail to recognize the players in Thomas Laqueur’s story—the human sexual organs and pleasures, food, blood, semen, egg, sperm—but we will be amazed at the plots into which they have been woven by scientists, political activists, literary figures, and theorists of every stripe.
Laqueur begins with the question of why, in the late eighteenth century, woman’s orgasm came to be regarded as irrelevant to conception, and he then proceeds to retrace the dramatic changes in Western views of sexual characteristics over two millennia. Along the way, two “master plots” emerge. In the one-sex story, woman is an imperfect version of man, and her anatomy and physiology are construed accordingly: the vagina is seen as an interior penis, the womb as a scrotum, the ovaries as testicles. The body is thus a representation, not the foundation, of social gender. The second plot tends to dominate post-Enlightenment thinking while the one-sex model is firmly rooted in classical learning. The two-sex story says that the body determines gender differences, that woman is the opposite of man with incommensurably different organs, functions, and feelings. The two plots overlap; neither ever holds a monopoly. Science may establish many new facts, but even so, Laqueur argues, science was only providing a new way of speaking, a rhetoric and not a key to female liberation or to social progress. Making Sex ends with Freud, who denied the neurological evidence to insist that, as a girl becomes a woman, the locus of her sexual pleasure shifts from the clitoris to the vagina; she becomes what culture demands despite, not because of, the body. Turning Freud’s famous dictum around, Laqueur posits that destiny is anatomy. Sex, in other words, is an artifice.
This is a powerful story, written with verve and a keen sense of telling detail (be it technically rigorous or scabrously fanciful). Making Sex will stimulate thought, whether argument or surprised agreement, in a wide range of readers.
Knowing where things are seems effortless. Yet our brains devote tremendous computational power to figuring out the simplest details about spatial relationships. Going to the grocery store or finding our cell phone requires sleuthing and coordination across different sensory and motor domains. Making Space traces this mental detective work to explain how the brain creates our sense of location. But it goes further, to make the case that spatial processing permeates all our cognitive abilities, and that the brain’s systems for thinking about space may be the systems of thought itself.
Our senses measure energy in the form of light, sound, and pressure on the skin, and our brains evaluate these measurements to make inferences about objects and boundaries. Jennifer Groh describes how eyes detect electromagnetic radiation, how the brain can locate sounds by measuring differences of less than one one-thousandth of a second in how long they take to reach each ear, and how the ear’s balance organs help us monitor body posture and movement. The brain synthesizes all this neural information so that we can navigate three-dimensional space.
But the brain’s work doesn’t end there. Spatial representations do double duty in aiding memory and reasoning. This is why it is harder to remember how to get somewhere if someone else is driving, and why, if we set out to do something and forget what it was, returning to the place we started can jog our memory. In making space the brain uses powers we did not know we have.
The connection between mind and brain has been one of the most persistent problems in modern Western thought; even recent advances in neuroscience haven’t been able to explain it satisfactorily. Historian Larry Sommer McGrath’s Making Spirit Matter studies how a particularly productive and influential group of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century French thinkers attempted to solve this puzzle by showing the mutual dependence of spirit and matter. The scientific revolution taking place at this point in history across disciplines, from biology to psychology and neurology, located our mental powers in the brain and offered a radical reformulation of the meaning of society, spirit, and the self. Tracing connections among thinkers such as Henri Bergson, Alfred Fouillée, Jean-Marie Guyau, and others, McGrath plots alternative intellectual movements that revived themes of creativity, time, and experience by applying the very sciences that seemed to undermine metaphysics and religion. Making Spirit Matter lays out the long legacy of this moment in the history of ideas and how it might renew our understanding of the relationship between mind and brain today.
To illustrate the roles of metaphor in science, Brown presents a series of studies of scientific systems. These range from the atom, historically one of the most important ideas in science, through models in chemistry and biology, including current “hot” topics such as protein folding, chaperone proteins, and global warming. The case studies in Making Truth illustrate the deeply metaphorical nature of scientific reasoning and communication. They provide the basis for far-reaching conclusions about science as an intellectual and social practice and about the nature of scientific truth.
A sweeping global history that looks beyond European urban centers to show how slavery, colonialism, and war propelled the development of modern medicine.
Most stories of medical progress come with ready-made heroes. John Snow traced the origins of London’s 1854 cholera outbreak to a water pump, leading to the birth of epidemiology. Florence Nightingale’s contributions to the care of soldiers in the Crimean War revolutionized medical hygiene, transforming hospitals from crucibles of infection to sanctuaries of recuperation. Yet histories of individual innovators ignore many key sources of medical knowledge, especially when it comes to the science of infectious disease.
Reexamining the foundations of modern medicine, Jim Downs shows that the study of infectious disease depended crucially on the unrecognized contributions of nonconsenting subjects—conscripted soldiers, enslaved people, and subjects of empire. Plantations, slave ships, and battlefields were the laboratories in which physicians came to understand the spread of disease. Military doctors learned about the importance of air quality by monitoring Africans confined to the bottom of slave ships. Statisticians charted cholera outbreaks by surveilling Muslims in British-dominated territories returning from their annual pilgrimage. The field hospitals of the Crimean War and the US Civil War were carefully observed experiments in disease transmission.
The scientific knowledge derived from discarding and exploiting human life is now the basis of our ability to protect humanity from epidemics. Boldly argued and eye-opening, Maladies of Empire gives a full account of the true price of medical progress.
“Maladies of Empire has a captivating writing style, is exhaustively researched, and is persuasive in argumentation. Jim Downs has written a game-changing book.”—Deirdre Cooper Owens, author of Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology
“An eye-popping study of the history of infectious diseases, how they spread, and especially how they have been thwarted by experimentation on the bodies of soldiers, slaves, and colonial subjects…a timely, brilliant book about some of the brutal ironies in the story of medical progress.”—David W. Blight, author of Frederick Douglass
“Brilliant…Jim Downs uncovers the origins of epidemiology in slavery, colonialism, and war. A most original global history, this book is required reading for historians, medical researchers, and really anyone interested in the origins of modern medicine.”—Sven Beckert, author of Empire of Cotton
“[Sheds] light on the violent foundations of disease control interventions and public health initiatives [and] implores us to address their inequities in the present.”—Ragav Kishore, The Lancet
Most stories of medical progress come with ready-made heroes. John Snow traced the origins of London’s 1854 cholera outbreak to a water pump, leading to the birth of epidemiology. Florence Nightingale’s care of soldiers in the Crimean War revolutionized medical hygiene. Yet focusing on individual innovators ignores many of the darker, unacknowledged sources of medical knowledge.
Reexamining the foundations of modern medicine, Jim Downs shows that the study of infectious disease depended crucially on the unrecognized contributions of conscripted soldiers, enslaved people, and subjects of empire. From Africa and India to the Americas, plantations, slave ships, and battlefields were the laboratories where physicians came to understand the spread of disease. Boldly argued and urgently relevant, Maladies of Empire gives a long overdue account of the true price of medical progress.
Weaving together the international and the domestic in creative new ways, The Malthusian Moment charts the explosion of Malthusian thinking in the United States from World War I to Earth Day 1970, then traces the just-as-surprising decline in concern beginning in the mid-1970s. In addition to offering an unconventional look at World War II and the Cold War through a balanced study of the environmental movement’s most contentious theory, the book sheds new light on some of the big stories of postwar American life: the rise of consumption, the growth of the federal government, urban and suburban problems, the civil rights and women’s movements, the role of scientists in a democracy, new attitudes about sex and sexuality, and the emergence of the “New Right.”
Born by mistake, or connivance, to struggling parents in a small Lancashire cotton town in 1903, an uninspired Darlington inadvertently escaped the obscurity of farming life and rose instead, against all odds, to become within a few short years the world's greatest expert on chromosomes, and one of the most penetrating biological thinkers of the twentieth century. Harman follows Darlington's path from bleak prospects to world fame, showing how, within the most miniscule of worlds, he sought answers to the biggest questions--how species originate, how variation occurs, how Nature, both blind and foreboding, random and insightful, makes her way from deep past to unknown future. But Darlington did not stop there: Chromosomes held within their tiny confines untold, dark truths about man and his culture. This passionate conviction led the once famed Darlington down a path of rebuke, isolation, and finally obscurity.
As The Man Who Invented the Chromosome unfolds Darlington's forgotten tale--the Nazi atrocities, the Cold War, the crackpot Lysenko, the molecular revolution, eugenics, Civil Rights, the welfare state, the changing views of man's place in nature, biological determinism--all were interconnected. Just as Darlington's work provoked him to ask questions about the link between biology and culture, his life raises fundamental questions about the link between science and society.
In Managing the Environmental Crisis William R. Mangun and Daniel H. Henning provide a balanced and comprehensive guide to the management of complex environmental and natural resource policy issues. Taking into account new developments, trends, and issues that have arisen in recent years, the authors begin with the recognition, often overlooked, that it is not the environment that needs to be managed but human action relating to the environment.
The authors review issues associated with a range of environmental policy concerns, including energy considerations, renewable and non renewable resource management, pollution control, wilderness management, and urban and regional policy. The history of these issues, recent actions pertaining to their management, difficulties associated with their continued presence, and the consequences of a failure to address these concerns are explored. Though focused on specific political issues, Mangun and Henning direct their attention to two large-scale trends—globalization and the political polarization of the environmental movement. At the level of the decision-making process, the incorporation of values—specifically addressed from multicultural and cross-disciplinary perspectives—is also discussed. International in scope, the book provides descriptions of the roles of both governmental and nongovernmental organizations in the formulations and implementation of national and global environmental policy.
This thoroughly revised second edition discusses various successes in the arenas of environmental cooperation and management strategy while pointing to the new challenges that have emerged in the last decade.
The Mangle in Practice opens with a fresh introduction to the mangle by Pickering. Several contributors then present empirical studies that demonstrate the mangle’s applicability to topics as diverse as pig farming, Chinese medicine, economic theory, and domestic-violence policing. Other contributors offer examples of the mangle in action: real-world practices that implement a self-consciously “mangle-ish” stance in environmental management and software development. Further essays discuss the mangle as philosophy and social theory. As Pickering argues in the preface, the mangle points to a shift in interpretive sensibilities that makes visible a world of de-centered becoming. This volume demonstrates the viability, coherence, and promise of such a shift, not only in science and technology studies, but in the social sciences and humanities more generally.
Contributors: Lisa Asplen, Dawn Coppin, Adrian Franklin, Keith Guzik, Casper Bruun Jensen,Yiannis Koutalos, Brian Marick, Randi Markussen, Andrew Pickering, Volker Scheid, Esther-Mirjam Sent, Carol Steiner, Maxim Waldstein
With their tonsured heads, white faces, and striking cowls, the monkeys might vaguely resemble the Capuchin monks for whom they were named. How they act is something else entirely. They climb onto each other’s shoulders four deep to frighten enemies. They test friendship by sticking their fingers up one another’s noses. They often nurse—but sometimes kill—each other’s offspring. They use sex as a means of communicating. And they negotiate a remarkably intricate network of alliances, simian politics, and social intrigue. Not monkish, perhaps, but as we see in this downright ethnographic account of the capuchins of Lomas Barbudal, their world is as complex, ritualistic, and structured as any society.
Manipulative Monkeys takes us into a Costa Rican forest teeming with simian drama, where since 1990 primatologists Susan Perry and Joseph H. Manson have followed the lives of four generations of capuchins. What the authors describe is behavior as entertaining—and occasionally as alarming—as it is recognizable: the competition and cooperation, the jockeying for position and status, the peaceful years under an alpha male devolving into bloody chaos, and the complex traditions passed from one generation to the next. Interspersed with their observations of the monkeys’ lives are the authors’ colorful tales of the challenges of tropical fieldwork—a mixture so rich that by the book’s end we know what it is to be a wild capuchin monkey or a field primatologist. And we are left with a clear sense of the importance of these endangered monkeys for understanding human behavioral evolution.
A Manual of Aquatic Plants can be said to be a classic; it made the identification of aquatic plants in sterile as well as in flowering or fruiting condition as simple as possible, and covers a region from Minnesota to Missouri and eastward to the Gulf of St. Lawrence and Virgina.
The taxonomy of recent mammals has lately undergone tremendous revision, but it has been decades since the last update to Timothy E. Lawlor’s acclaimed identification guide the Handbook to the Orders and Families of Living Mammals. Integrating the latest advances in research, Douglas A. Kelt and James L. Patton provide this long-overdue update in their new, wholly original work, A Manual of the Mammalia.
Complemented by global range maps, high-resolution photographs of skulls and mandibles by Bill Stone, and the outstanding artwork of Fiona Reid, this book provides an overview of biological attributes of each higher taxon while highlighting key and diagnostic characters needed to identify skulls and skins of all recent mammalian orders and most families. Kelt and Patton also place taxa in their currently understood supra-familial clades, and discuss current challenges in higher mammal taxonomy. Including a comprehensive review of mammalian anatomy to provide a foundation for understanding all characters employed throughout, A Manual of the Mammalia is both a user-friendly handbook for students learning to identify higher mammal taxa and a uniquely comprehensive, up-to-date reference for mammalogists and mammal-lovers from across the globe.
“I love maps. I love math. And gosh, do I love this book, which so beautifully and clearly sounds the depths of both.” —Ben Orlin, author of Math with Bad Drawings
Explore the surprising connections between math and maps—and the myriad ways they’ve shaped our world and us.
Why are coastlines and borders so difficult to measure? How does a UPS driver deliver hundreds of packages in a single day? And where do elusive serial killers hide? The answers lie in the crucial connection between maps and math.
In Mapmatics, mathematician Paulina Rowińska leads us on a riveting journey around the globe to discover how maps and math are deeply entwined, and always have been. From a sixteenth-century map, an indispensable navigation tool that exaggerates the size of northern countries, to public transport maps that both guide and confound passengers, to congressional maps that can empower or silence whole communities, she reveals how maps and math have shaped not only our sense of space but our worldview. In her hands, we learn how to read maps like a mathematician—to extract richer information and, just as importantly, to question our conclusions by asking what we don’t see.
Written with authority and compassion, wit and unforgettable storytelling, this is math exposition at its best. By unpacking the math behind the maps we depend on, Mapmatics illuminates how our world works and, ultimately, how we can better look after it.
From the sixteenth through the mid-nineteenth centuries, Spain, then Mexico, and finally the United States took ownership of the land from the Gulf Coast of Texas and Mexico to the Pacific Coast of Alta and Baja California—today's American Southwest. Each country faced the challenge of holding on to territory that was poorly known and sparsely settled, and each responded by sending out military mapping expeditions to set boundaries and chart topographical features. All three countries recognized that turning terra incognita into clearly delineated political units was a key step in empire building, as vital to their national interest as the activities of the missionaries, civilian officials, settlers, and adventurers who followed in the footsteps of the soldier-engineers.
With essays by eight leading historians, this book offers the most current and comprehensive overview of the processes by which Spanish, Mexican, and U.S. soldier-engineers mapped the southwestern frontier, as well as the local and even geopolitical consequences of their mapping. Three essays focus on Spanish efforts to map the Gulf and Pacific Coasts, to chart the inland Southwest, and to define and defend its boundaries against English, French, Russian, and American incursions. Subsequent essays investigate the role that mapping played both in Mexico's attempts to maintain control of its northern territory and in the United States' push to expand its political boundary to the Pacific Ocean. The concluding essay draws connections between mapping in the Southwest and the geopolitical history of the Americas and Europe.
For many, a map is nothing more than a tool used to determine the location or distribution of something—a country, a city, or a natural resource. But maps reveal much more: to really read a map means to examine what it shows and what it doesn’t, and to ask who made it, why, and for whom. The contributors to this new volume ask these sorts of questions about maps of Latin America, and in doing so illuminate the ways cartography has helped to shape this region from the Rio Grande to Patagonia.
In Mapping Latin America,Jordana Dym and Karl Offen bring together scholars from a wide range of disciplines to examine and interpret more than five centuries of Latin American maps.Individual chapters take on maps of every size and scale and from a wide variety of mapmakers—from the hand-drawn maps of Native Americans, to those by famed explorers such as Alexander von Humboldt, to those produced in today’s newspapers and magazines for the general public. The maps collected here, and the interpretations that accompany them, provide an excellent source to help readers better understand how Latin American countries, regions, provinces, and municipalities came to be defined, measured, organized, occupied, settled, disputed, and understood—that is, how they came to have specific meanings to specific people at specific moments in time.
The first book to deal with the broad sweep of mapping activities across Latin America, this lavishly illustrated volume will be required reading for students and scholars of geography and Latin American history, and anyone interested in understanding the significance of maps in human cultures and societies.
In the nineteenth century, Americans began to use maps in radically new ways. For the first time, medical men mapped diseases to understand and prevent epidemics, natural scientists mapped climate and rainfall to uncover weather patterns, educators mapped the past to foster national loyalty among students, and Northerners mapped slavery to assess the power of the South. After the Civil War, federal agencies embraced statistical and thematic mapping in order to profile the ethnic, racial, economic, moral, and physical attributes of a reunified nation. By the end of the century, Congress had authorized a national archive of maps, an explicit recognition that old maps were not relics to be discarded but unique records of the nation’s past.
All of these experiments involved the realization that maps were not just illustrations of data, but visual tools that were uniquely equipped to convey complex ideas and information. In Mapping the Nation, Susan Schulten charts how maps of epidemic disease, slavery, census statistics, the environment, and the past demonstrated the analytical potential of cartography, and in the process transformed the very meaning of a map.
Today, statistical and thematic maps are so ubiquitous that we take for granted that data will be arranged cartographically. Whether for urban planning, public health, marketing, or political strategy, maps have become everyday tools of social organization, governance, and economics. The world we inhabit—saturated with maps and graphic information—grew out of this sea change in spatial thought and representation in the nineteenth century, when Americans learned to see themselves and their nation in new dimensions.
Though nothing in the natural world would be quite the same without them, microbes go mostly unnoticed. They are the tiny, mighty force behind the pop in Champagne and the holes in Swiss cheese, the granite walls of Yosemite and the white cliffs of Dover, the workings of snowmaking machines, Botox, and gunpowder; and yet we tend to regard them as peripheral, disease-causing, food-spoiling troublemakers. In this book renowned microbiologist John Ingraham rescues these supremely important and ubiquitous microorganisms from their unwonted obscurity by showing us how we can, in fact, see them—and appreciate their vast and varied role in nature and our lives.
Though we might not be able to see microbes firsthand, the consequences of their activities are readily apparent to our unaided senses. March of the Microbes shows us how to examine, study, and appreciate microbes in the manner of a birdwatcher, by making sightings of microbial activities and thereby identifying particular microbes as well as understanding what they do and how they do it. The sightings are as different as a smelly rock cod, a bottle of Chateau d’Yquem, a moment in the Salem witch trials, and white clouds over the ocean. Together they summarize the impact of microbes on our planet, its atmosphere, geology, weather, and other organisms including ourselves, to whom they dole out fatal illnesses and vital nutrients alike.
In the end, Ingraham leaves us marveling at the power and persistence of microbes on our planet and gives credence to Louis Pasteur’s famous assertion that “microbes will have the last word.”
Humans are terrestrial animals, and our capacity to see and understand the importance and vulnerability of life in the sea has trailed our growing ability to harm it. While conservation biologists are working to address environmental problems humans have created on land, loss of marine biodiversity, including extinctions and habitat degradation, has received much less attention. At the same time, marine sciences such as oceanography and fisheries biology have largely ignored issues of conservation.
Marine Conservation Biology brings together for the first time in a single volume, leading experts from around the world to apply the lessons and thinking of conservation biology to marine issues. Contributors including James M. Acheson, Louis W. Botsford, James T. Carlton, Kristina Gjerde, Selina S. Heppell, Ransom A. Myers, Julia K. Parrish, Stephen R. Palumbi, and Daniel Pauly offer penetrating insights on the nature of marine biodiversity, what threatens it, and what humans can and must do to recover the biological integrity of the world's estuaries, coastal seas, and oceans.
Sections examine: distinctive aspects of marine populations and ecosystems; threats to marine biological diversity, singly and in combination; place-based management of marine ecosystems; the often-neglected human dimensions of marine conservation.
Marine Conservation Biology breaks new ground by creating the conceptual framework for the new field of marine conservation biology -- the science of protecting, recovering, and sustainably using the living sea. It synthesizes the latest knowledge and ideas from leading thinkers in disciplines ranging from larval biology to sociology, making it a must-read for research and teaching faculty, postdoctoral fellows, and graduate and advanced undergraduate students (who share an interest in bringing conservation biology to marine issues). Likewise, its lucid scientific examinations illuminate key issues facing environmental managers, policymakers, advocates, and funders concerned with the health of our oceans.
Pioneered in the late 1980s, the concept of macroecology—a framework for studying ecological communities with a focus on patterns and processes—revolutionized the field. Although this approach has been applied mainly to terrestrial ecosystems, there is increasing interest in quantifying macroecological patterns in the sea and understanding the processes that generate them. Taking stock of the current work in the field and advocating a research agenda for the decades ahead, Marine Macroecology draws together insights and approaches from a diverse group of scientists to show how marine ecology can benefit from the adoption of macroecological approaches.
Divided into three parts, Marine Macroecology first provides an overview of marine diversity patterns and offers case studies of specific habitats and taxonomic groups. In the second part, contributors focus on process-based explanations for marine ecological patterns. The third part presents new approaches to understanding processes driving the macroecolgical patterns in the sea. Uniting unique insights from different perspectives with the common goal of identifying and understanding large-scale biodiversity patterns, Marine Macroecology will inspire the next wave of marine ecologists to approach their research from a macroecological perspective.
Conventional fishery management practices have failed to prevent the collapse of numerous fish stocks around the world. Amid growing concern about our ability to protect marine biodiversity and ecosystem integrity, scientists and managers alike are seeking alternative management tools. One of the most promising of those is no-take marine reserves -- areas of the sea where all consumptive use of natural resources is prohibited.
Marine Reserves is the first guidebook on no-take marine reserves, providing a synthesis of information on the underlying science, as well as design and implementation issues. The book, by Jack Sobel and Craig Dahlgren, describes the need for marine reserves and their potential benefits, examines how reserves can be designed to achieve specific objectives, and considers gaps in our knowledge and the research needed to address those gaps. Chapters examine: marine biological and geophysical issues relevant to reserve design; potential economic and biological benefits of marine reserves, and the likelihood of achieving them; influence of social and economic factors on reserve design and implementation; lessons learned from past efforts to establish marine reserves.
Also included are three case studies from California, Belize, and the Bahamas, as well as a review of experiences globally across a broad range of geographical locations, socioeconomic conditions, and marine environments. Case studies provide background on the history of marine reserves in each location, the process by which reserves were created, and the effect of the reserves on marine populations and communities as well as on human communities.
Marine Reserves represents an invaluable guide for fishery managers and marine protected area managers in creating and implementing effective marine reserves, and an accessible reference for environmentalists and others concerned with the conservation of marine resources. It will also be useful in undergraduate and graduate courses in marine ecology, fisheries, marine policy, and related fields.
READERS
Browse our collection.
PUBLISHERS
See BiblioVault's publisher services.
STUDENT SERVICES
Files for college accessibility offices.
UChicago Accessibility Resources
home | accessibility | search | about | contact us
BiblioVault ® 2001 - 2024
The University of Chicago Press