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Books in Social sciences and humanities

The Unreal Life of Oscar Zariski
1st Edition
Carol Parikh
English
The Unreal Life of Oscar Zariski records the life of Oscar Zariski that is based upon Carol Parikh's interviews with his family, colleagues, students, and his own memories from tape-recorded interviews conducted before his death in 1986. This book describes Oscar Zariski's work in mathematics that perpetually altered the foundations of algebraic geometry. The powerful tools he forged from the ideas of algebra allowed him to penetrate classical problems with a clarity and depth that brought a rigor to the way algebraic geometers carry out proofs. The strength of his work was matched by his forcefulness as a teacher, and the students he trained at Johns Hopkins and later at Harvard have made essential contributions to many areas of mathematics. This publication is beneficial to students and researchers interested in Oscar Zariski’s life and work in mathematics.
Networks and Marginality
Life in a Mexican Shantytown
1st Edition
Larissa Adler Lomnitz
E. A. Hammel
English
Networks and Marginality: Life in a Mexican Shantytown describes the life and survival of economically marginal or poor people in Cerrada del Cóndor, a shantytown of about 200 houses in the southern part of Mexico City. The field work is carried out between 1969 and 1971 using combined anthropological and quantitative methods. This book is composed of 10 chapters and begins with an overview of the theoretical concepts essential for an adequate comprehension of the later chapters, followed by a summary of the development and evolution of Mexico City as they relate to Cerrada del Cóndor. Considerable chapters examine the migration process, the economy, the family and kinship patterns, and the reciprocity networks and associated mechanisms of survival value in the shantytown. The remaining chapters discuss some of the relevant theoretical points raised by the findings, including the reciprocity, the confianza concept, and the importance of informal economic exchange in complex urban societies. This book will prove useful to economists, anthropologists, social scientists, and researchers.
Theory of Microeconomics
1st Edition
Trout Rader
English
Theory of Microeconomics provides information pertinent to the fundamental aspects of microeconomics. This book covers a variety of topics, including economic theory, resource allocation, production transformations, producer efficiency, utility functions, consumer efficiency, and trade efficiency. Organized into four parts encompassing 11 chapters, this book begins with an overview of the definition of economics and provides several views of the significance of theory in economics. This text then examines the role of mathematics in economic theory and discusses the mathematical background for the theory of production. Other chapters consider the formal structure of economics, which is elaborated and compared with the theory of resource allocations and with classical mechanics. This book discusses as well the properties of production, the neoclassical model of production, and the problem of producer efficiency. The final chapter deals with capital goods and financial assets. This book is a valuable resource for professional economists and graduate students in economics.
Wolf and Man
Evolution in Parallel
1st Edition
Roberta L. Hall + 1 more
English
Wolf and Man: Evolution in Parallel is a collection of papers that discusses certain crucial attributes of humans including traits that are shared with other social predators. Some papers describe the wolf as the equal of man—the animal is a social hunter of large game, disregards human boundaries and properties, and consume livestock when it is necessary. The wolf's will to survive is as great as that of man, and brings along many resources to the competition. Several papers review the behavior and culture of man, wolf, dog, and the Chipewyan people who hunted caribou. Another paper examines the communication, cognitive mapping, and strategy in wolves and hominids. Hominids have developed cognitive maps, forced by their predation on large animals to cover wider ranges, to communicate and form complex sequences of utterances. One paper notes that the wolf was able to penetrate on every continent except Australia and Africa due to the Australian continent's isolation. In Africa, there is no ecological space for another highly organized social hunter of large game. The collection can be appreciated by anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, and scientists involved in paleontology and human evolution.
Research on Exemplary Schools
1st Edition
Gilbert R. Austin + 1 more
English
Research on Exemplary Schools covers significant research works on effective school learning, with particular emphasis on identifying and analyzing a student's abilities and characteristics on the assumption that student learning was primarily determined by differences in individual potential and needs. The information provided is derived from the assumption that the characteristics of the school learning environment may explain the extent to which students master the outcomes desired from the school teaching-learning experience. This text is organized into three parts encompassing 10 chapters. Part I reviews the history of the exemplary schools research movements and the research findings, as well as policy implications concerning the relationships between private and public schools education, both Catholic and nonsectarian. Part II describes the methods for identifying exemplary schools, school climate, and the roles of the teacher and the school principal. Part III describes the policy issues emerging from effective schools research. This part also provide some critical thoughts on the movement from the perspective of an educational psychologist whose specialties are educational measurement and instructional design. This book will prove useful to researchers and practitioners who wish to improve the outcomes of all students in their schools.
Studies in Neurolinguistics
1st Edition
Haiganoosh Whitaker + 1 more
English
Studies in Neurolinguistics, Volume 2 provides information pertinent to the fundamental aspects of neurolinguistics, which represent a synthesis of the brain sciences, the behavioral sciences, and the clinical sciences. This book discusses the interesting problems of neurolinguistics. Organized into eight chapters, this volume begins with an overview of neurolinguistic analysis of a rare form of language impairment identified as mixed transcortical aphasia. This text then explains spoken language, reading ability, and writing ability in terms of both psychological and linguistic measures. Other chapters consider a theoretical discussion with supporting evidence which concludes that there is a common relationship between sequential movements of the upper limbs and verbal expression. This book discusses as well the linguistic properties of the right hemisphere and the nonlinguistic properties of the left hemisphere. The final chapter deals with analyzing evidence on cerebral localization and the linguistic features of the alexias. This book is a valuable resource for clinical neurologists, psychologists, and speech pathologists.
A Century of Controversy
Ethnological Issues from 1860 to 1960
1st Edition
Elman R Service
E. A. Hammel
English
A Century of Controversy: Ethnological Issues from 1860 to 1960 is an assessment of the history of ethnology in terms of its intellectual progress, with emphasis on the controversial issues that were broached between 1860 and 1960. Two related philosophical or theoretical poses that characterized the prominent ethnological thinkers of this period, and earlier, are related to this phenomenon. One was the prevalent positivism, the other the belief in human progress as a form of social, cultural, and mental evolution. Comprised of 19 chapters, this volume begins by looking at several eminent scholars dealing more closely with the subject of ethnology, including Henry Maine and John F. McLennan in Great Britain; Johann J. Bachofen in Switzerland; and Fustel de Coulanges in France. In particular, the chapter examines the disagreement among Maine, Bachofen, McLennan, and Fustel de Coulanges as to the nature of the earliest society and its form of marriage; the nature of the evolutionary transformations of society (especially from primitive society to civilization); and the actual meaning and function of kinship terminology. The next two chapters describe the positive, useful discoveries as well as the mistakes and weaknesses of Lewis H. Morgan's work, with particular reference to his classificatory kinship nomenclature. Subsequent sections focus on controversies surrounding kinship terminology; social structure; the origins of government; the economic life of primitive peoples; and society and culture. This book will be of interest to scholars of anthropology, archaeology, and ethnology.
Aversive Conditioning and Learning
1st Edition
F. Robert Brush
English
Aversive Conditioning and Learning covers the significant advances in establishing the phenomena, principles, and other aspects of aversive conditioning and learning. This book is organized into three sections encompassing nine chapters. The first section deals with operant and classical conditioning of responses of the autonomic nervous system and with behavioral measurement of conditioned fear. The next section discusses the mechanism of avoidance learning and a number of problem areas, including the effects of response selection on the ease of acquisition and the nature and slow time course of the processes that reinforce avoidance learning. Other problems explore are the influence on avoidance learning of prior experience with uncontrollable shock and with reliable and unreliable predictors of shock, an analysis of avoidance learning in terms of a Markov model of short- and long-term memory, and the nature of retention of conditioned fear and the possible hormonal mechanisms that control performance motivated by fear. The last section examines some of the unexpected effects of punishment, which usually produces suppression of behavior. This section emphasizes the effects of noncontingent aversive stimuli that may account for the suppressive effects of punishment and on the paradoxical facilitation of behavior that sometimes results from response-contingent shock. This book will prove useful to medical psychologists, psychiatrists, and workers in the related fields.
Adaptive Economic Models
Proceedings of a Symposium Conducted by the Mathematics Research Center, the University of Wisconsin–Madison, October 21-23, 1974
1st Edition
Richard H. Day + 1 more
English
Adaptive Economic Models provides information pertinent to the adaptive processes in economics. This book discusses the developments on research in the field of adaptive economics. Organized into 23 chapters, this book begins with an overview of the study of economic processes using concepts of adaptation. This text then explains how concepts arising from biology can be formulated in such a way that they can be a source of insight into man's social systems. Other chapters present a general view of the adaptation of the firm to its environment and discuss how a firm with a definite commodity in mind can decide whether to enter a given established market. This book discusses as well the simple duopoly problem in which firms are in error in the sense that they specify an incomplete model and add a random error term. The final chapter deals with the set of models and problems for the development of a theory of money and financial institutions. This book is a valuable resource for economic theorists and economists.
Genie
A Psycholinguistic Study of a Modern-Day Wild Child
1st Edition
Susan Curtiss
Harry A Whitaker
English
Genie: A Psycholinguistic Study of a Modern-Day “Wild Child” reports on the linguistic research carried out through studying and working with Genie, a deprived and isolated, to an unprecedented degree, girl who was not discovered until she was an adolescent. An inhuman childhood had prevented Genie from learning language, and she knew little about the world in any respect save abuse, neglect, isolation, and deprivation. This book is organized into three parts encompassing 11 chapters. Part I provides a case history and background material on Genie's personality and language behavior. This part describes the interaction between the authors and this remarkable girl. Part II details Genie's linguistic development and overall language abilities, specifically her phonological development, as well as receptive knowledge and productive grammatical abilities of syntax, morphology, and semantics. This part also provides a comparison between her linguistic development and the language acquisition of other children. Part III presents a full description of the neurolinguistic work carried out on Genie and discusses the implications of this aspect of the case. This book will prove useful to neurolinguistics and pyscholinguistics.

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