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Book 1 of the Nexus Trilogy - Continued in Book 2: Crux In the near future, the experimental nano-drug Nexus can link humans together, mind to mind. There are some who want to improve it. There are some who want to eradicate it. And there are others who just want to exploit it. When a young scientist is caught improving Nexus, he's thrust over his head into a world of danger and international espionage - for there is far more at stake than anyone realizes. From the halls of academe to the halls of power, from the headquarters of an elite US agency in Washington DC to a secret lab beneath a top university in Shanghai, from the underground parties of San Francisco to the illegal biotech markets of Bangkok, from an international neuroscience conference to a remote monastery in the mountains of Thailand - Nexus is a thrill ride through a future on the brink of explosion. Shortlisted for the Arthur C Clarke Award Shortlisted for the Prometheus Award Shortlisted for the Kitschies Award An NPR Best Book of 2013! "Good. Scary good." - Wired "Provocative... A double-edged vision of the post-human."- The Wall Street Journal "A lightning bolt of a novel, with a sense of awe missing from a lot of current fiction."- Ars Technica "Starred Review. Naam turns in a stellar performance in his debut SF novel... What matters here is the remarkable scope and narrative power of the story."- Booklist "A superbly plotted high-tension technothriller ... full of delicious, thoughtful moral ambiguity ... a hell of a read."- Cory Doctorow "A gripping piece of near future speculation... all the grit and pace of the Bourne films."- Alastair Reynolds, author of Revelation Space "A sharp, chilling look at our likely future."- Charles Stross, author of Singularity Sky and Halting State "The most brilliant hard SF thriller I've read in years. Reminds me of Michael Crichton at his best."- Brenda Cooper, author of The Creative Fire "A rich cast of characters...the action scenes are crisp, the glimpses of future tech and culture are mesmerizing."- Publishers Weekly "Any old writer can take you on a roller coaster ride, but it takes a wizard like Ramez Naam to take you on the same ride while he builds the roller coaster a few feet in front of you."- John Barnes, author of Directive 51 "Michael Crichton-like."- SFX Magazine "An incredibly imaginative, action-packed intellectual romp!"- Dani Kollin, Prometheus Award-winning author of The Unincorporated Man "The only serious successor to Michael Crichton."- Scott Harrison, author of Archangel
This edited collection proposes a common good approach to development theory and practice. Rather than focusing on the outcomes or conditions of development, the contributors concentrate on the quality of development processes, suggesting that a common good dynamic is key in order to trigger development. Resulting from more than three years of research by an international group of over fifty scholars, the volume advocates for a modern understanding of the common good—rather than a theological or metaphysical good—in societies by emphasising the social practice of ‘commoning’ at its core. It suggests that the dynamic equilibrium of common goods in a society should be at the centre of development efforts. For this purpose, it develops a matrix of common good dynamics, accounting for how institutions, social norms and common practices interconnect by identifying five key drivers not only of development, but human development (agency, governance, justice, stability, humanity). Based on this matrix, the contributors suggest a possible metric for measuring the quality of these dynamics. The last section of the book highlights the possibilities enabled by this approach through a series of case studies. The concept of the common good has recently enjoyed a revival and inspired practitioners keen to look beyond the shortcomings of political and economic liberalism. This book builds on those efforts to think beyond the agenda of twentieth-century development policies, and will be of interest to those working in the fields of development, economics, sociology, philosophy and political science.
Invertebrate Zoology: A Tree of Life Approach is a comprehensive and authoritative textbook adopting an explicitly phylogenetic organization. Most of the classical anatomical and morphological work has not been changed – it established the foundation of Invertebrate Zoology. With the explosion of Next-Generation Sequencing approaches, there has been a sea-change in the recognized phylogenetic relationships among and between invertebrate lineages. In addition, the merger of evolutionary and developmental biology (evo-devo) has dramatically contributed to changes in the understanding of invertebrate biology. Synthesizing these three approaches (classical morphology, sequencing data, and evo-devo studies) offers students an entirely unique perspective of invertebrate diversity. Key Features One of the first textbooks to combine classical morphological approaches and newer evo-devo and Next-Generation Sequencing approaches to address Invertebrate Zoology Organized along taxonomic lines in accord with the latest understanding of invertebrate phylogeny Will provide background in basic systematic analysis useful within any study of biodiversity A wealth of ancillary materials for students and teachers, including downloadable figures, lecture slides, web links, and phylogenetic data matrices
Stringent ways of thinking, ‘conceptual frameworks’, are necessary in science. The drawback is that the associated assumptions, concepts, rules and practice may become so deeply entrenched that they turn into tacit knowledge and hence give rise to constraints in scientific thought and practice – that is, a new kind of plethora that seriously blinds and thereby hampers scientific progress. This book, 'A Unifying Theory of Evolution Generated by Means of Information Modelling', presents a methodology for describing complex knowledge domains. It applies a template information model based on a dynamic structure of interrelated functions, called the Mereon Matrix. Application of this template model to the field of evolutionary theories enabled the unification of the sometimes chaotic and competing field of evolutionary theories, large and small, seamlessly in a shared framework. The author has Masters degrees in both biochemistry and computer science, as well as a European Doctorate and PhD in health informatics and has spent 35 years in full-time research. It is her particular combination of professional experience and expertise together with the template information model which has enabled her to write this book. Whilst primarily aimed at a scientific audience, and evolutionary biologists in particular, the book will be of interest to all those looking for new approaches to exploring and explaining phenomena in nature, and because the text is largely non-technical in nature, much of the content will also be accessible to a wider readership.
Basil Bernstein: The Thinker and the Field provides a comprehensive introduction to the work of Basil Bernstein, demonstrating his distinctive contribution to social theory by locating it within the historical context of the development of the sociology of education and Sociology in Britain. Although Bernstein had a particular interest in education, he did not see himself as a sociologist of education alone. By exploring Bernstein’s intellectually collaborative character and the evolving system of ideas, drawing upon anthropology and linguistics, the originality of Bernstein’s contribution to the social sciences can be truly identified. Rob Moore’s text offers a provocative and challenging account both of Bernstein, and of British sociology and education, approaching Bernstein’s work as a complex model of intertwining ideas rather than a single theory. Continued interest in Bernstein’s work has opened up a world-wide network of scholarship, and Moore considers contemporary research alongside classical sources in Durkheim and Marx, to provide a historical analysis of the fields of British Sociology and the sociology of education, pinpointing Bernstein’s position within them. The book is organised into two main parts: The Field Background and Beginnings Durkheim, Cosmology and Education The Problematic The Structure of Pedagogic Discourse Bernstein and Theory Bernstein and research The Pedagogic Device Written by a leading authority in the field, this text will be valuable reading for post-graduate students of sociology and education, along with active researchers and their research students.
This book explores the link between the Food-Water-Energy nexus and sustainability, and the extraordinary value that small tweaks to this nexus can achieve for more resilient cities and communities. Using data from Urban Living Labs in six participating cities (Eindhoven, Gdańsk, Miami, Southend-on-Sea, Taipei, and Uppsala) to co-define context-specific challenges, the results from each city are collated into an Integrated Decision Support System to guide and improve robust decision-making on future urban development. The book presents contributions from CRUNCH, a transdisciplinary team of scholars and practitioners whose expertise spans urban climate modelling; food, water, and energy management; the design of resilient public space; collecting better urban data; and the development of smart city technology. Whilst previous works on the Food-Water-Energy nexus have focused on large, transnational cases, this book explores local ways to use the Food-Water-Energy nexus to improve urban resilience. It suggests tangible ways in which the cities and communities around us can become both more efficient and more climate resilient through small changes to their existing infrastructure. Over half of the world’s population lives in urban areas, and this is expected to increase to 68% by 2050. We urgently need to make our cities more resilient. This book provides a planning tool for decision-making and concludes with policy recommendations, making it relevant to a range of audiences including urbanists, environmentalists, architects, urban designers, and city planners, as well as students and scholars interested in alternative approaches to sustainability and resilience. Chapter 2 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.
The Phylogenetic Handbook is a broad, hands on guide to theory and practice of nucleotide and protein phylogenetic analysis. This second edition includes six new chapters, covering topics such as Bayesian inference, tree topology testing and the impact of recombination on phylogenies, as well as a detailed section on molecular adaptation. The book has a stronger focus on hypothesis testing than the previous edition, with more extensive discussions on recombination analysis, detecting molecular adaptation and genealogy-based population genetics. Many chapters include elaborate practical sections, which have been updated to introduce the reader to the most recent versions of sequence analysis and phylogeny software, including BLAST, FastA, Clustal, T-coffee, Muscle, DAMBE, Tree-puzzle, Phylip, MEGA, PAUP*, IQPNNI, CONSEL, ModelTest, Prottest, PAML, HYPHY, MrBayes, BEAST, LAMARC, SplitsTree, and RDP. Many analysis tools are described by their original authors, resulting in clear explanations that constitute an ideal teaching guide for advanced-level undergraduate and graduate students.
Taxonomists specializing in different groups once based phylogenetic analysis only on morphological data; molecular data was used more rarely. Although molecular systematics is routine today, the use of morphological data continues to be important, especially for phylogenetic placement of many taxa known only from fossils and rare or difficult to collect species. In addition, morphological analyses help identify potential biases in molecular analyses. And finally, scenarios with respect to morphology continue to motivate biologists: the beauty of a cheetah or a baobab does not lie in their DNA sequence, but instead on what they are and do! This book is an up-to-date revision of methods and principles of phylogenetic analysis of morphological data. It is also a general guide for using the computer program TNT in the analysis of such data. The book covers the main aspects of phylogenetic analysis and general methods to compare classifications derived from molecules and morphology. The basic aspects of molecular analysis are covered only as needed to highlight the differences with methods and assumptions for analysis of morphological datasets.
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