Books on the topic 'Cams shape design'

The appearance of Dr Vesco’s translation and study of Hokusai’s Ryakuga haya oshie, together with a full reproduction of the original book, is a matter of great excitement in the field of Japanese Studies. Hokusai has been known in Europe and North America for some 150 years. In his own country, he came to public attention about 1800, with youthful work produced under the name of Shunrô. He lived to the advanced age of 88, and when he died in 1849, he was one of the best-known artists in Japan. He was soon to be the best-known Japanese artist in the West, a status that he probably still holds. ‘Under the Great Wave off Kanagawa’ – often referred to simply as ‘Hokusai’s Great Wave’ (from the Thirty-six View of Mt Fuji) – is said to be the most immediately-recognisable piece of graphic design worldwide. Hokusai was a townsman living in a socially stratified society. He was not a member of the elite, though other famous artists were. He did neither depict elite topics, nor work for elite clients. Rather, Hokusai associated with the ‘Floating World’ (ukiyo) that is Edo’s leisure-time distractions. He also made views of his city, its surroundings, and the wider Japanese countryside, but he was not a great traveller, other than in his mind. Rather unrecognised is what Dr Vesco now brings to our attention. Hokusai saw his role as promoting the practice of art. Of course, he had his students, but as we see here, Hokusai also published out-reach volumes, aimed at introducing the joys of picture-making to amateurs who were not being formally instructed. The lessons were easy to follow, and also fun, as he reduced people animals and plants to basic shapes and formulae. Starting with the auspicious subject of Tang lions (kara shishi), Hokusai leads us through a range of topics, down to the demotic, such as clothes washing. Readers today will certainly find a smile crossing their face as they look through the pictures. Thanks to Dr Vesco’s careful translations, we can also understand the advice and commentaries supplied in Hokusai’s accompanying texts. An additional feature of Dr Vesco’s work will be of assistance to more specialist readers, as she has transcribed the original Japanese. This was no simple task, as it is written in abbreviated calligraphy (kuzushiji). At all levels, readers, art enthusiasts and those who love to create pictures will now have access to Hokusai’s most important study aid. We can delve into it, copy from, and chuckle at, just as people did when the volumes first appeared. Western readers might ponder something else: Ryakuga haya oshie appeared in 1812, as European countries were tearing themselves apart.

This analysis of the origins of the Second World War in Europe challenges several key ideas of the historiography: the ‘thirty years war’ thesis, the notion of a European civil war, and the stereotyping of the 1930s as a seemingly unstoppable rush to war after the internationalism of the 1920s. There was no sharp contrast between decades—the period only makes sense as a whole. Churchill’s ‘unnecessary war’ was preventable. Alternatives to appeasement existed. Though the study of war origins starts with Hitler, his policies were decisively shaped by the actions of others and the instability of an international system, heavily impacted by the Great Depression and ideology. Miscalculation rather than design explains the war of 1939. The outbreak of war should not obscure the significance of the 1930s as a laboratory for ideas and institutions that came to fruition after 1945 and which continue to shape international society.

This book analyzes the early stages of the interior design profession as articulated within the circles involved in the decoration of the private home in the second half of nineteenth-century France. It argues that the increased presence of the modern, domestic interior in the visual culture of the nineteenth century enabled the profession to take shape. Upholsterers, cabinet-makers, architects, stage designers, department stores, taste advisors, collectors, and illustrators, came together to “sell” the idea of the unified interior as an image and a total work of art. The ideal domestic interior took several media as its outlet, including taste manuals, pattern books, illustrated magazines, art and architectural exhibitions, and department store catalogs. The chapters outline the terms of reception within which the work of each professional group involved in the appearance and design of the nineteenth-century French domestic interior emerged and focus on specific works by members of each group. If Chapter 1 concentrates on collectors and taste advisors, outlining the new definitions of the modern interior they developed, Chapter 2 focuses on the response of upholsterers, architects, and cabinet-makers to the same new conceptions of the ideal private interior. Chapter 3 considers the contribution of the world of entertainment to the field of interior design while Chapter 4 moves into the world of commerce to study how department stores popularized the modern interior with the middle classes. Chapter 5 returns to architects to understand how their engagement with popular journals shaped new interior decorating styles.

We have long recognized technology as a driving force behind much historical and cultural change. The invention of the printing press initiated the Reformation. The development of the compass ushered in the Age of Exploration and the discovery of the New World. The cotton gin created the conditions that led to the Civil War. Now, in Beyond Engineering, science writer Robert Pool turns the question around to examine how society shapes technology. Drawing on such disparate fields as history, economics, risk analysis, management science, sociology, and psychology, Pool illuminates the complex, often fascinating interplay between machines and society, in a book that will revolutionize how we think about technology. We tend to think that reason guides technological development, that engineering expertise alone determines the final form an invention takes. But if you look closely enough at the history of any invention, says Pool, you will find that factors unrelated to engineering seem to have an almost equal impact. In his wide-ranging volume, he traces developments in nuclear energy, automobiles, light bulbs, commercial electricity, and personal computers, to reveal that the ultimate shape of a technology often has as much to do with outside and unforeseen forces. For instance, Pool explores the reasons why steam-powered cars lost out to internal combustion engines. He shows that the Stanley Steamer was in many ways superior to the Model T--it set a land speed record in 1906 of more than 127 miles per hour, it had no transmission (and no transmission headaches), and it was simpler (one Stanley engine had only twenty-two moving parts) and quieter than a gas engine--but the steamers were killed off by factors that had little or nothing to do with their engineering merits, including the Stanley twins' lack of business acumen and an outbreak of hoof-and-mouth disease. Pool illuminates other aspects of technology as well. He traces how seemingly minor decisions made early along the path of development can have profound consequences further down the road, and perhaps most important, he argues that with the increasing complexity of our technological advances--from nuclear reactors to genetic engineering--the number of things that can go wrong multiplies, making it increasingly difficult to engineer risk out of the equation. Citing such catastrophes as Bhopal, Three Mile Island, the Exxon Valdez, the Challenger, and Chernobyl, he argues that is it time to rethink our approach to technology. The days are gone when machines were solely a product of larger-than-life inventors and hard-working engineers. Increasingly, technology will be a joint effort, with its design shaped not only by engineers and executives but also psychologists, political scientists, management theorists, risk specialists, regulators and courts, and the general public. Whether discussing bovine growth hormone, molten-salt reactors, or baboon-to-human transplants, Beyond Engineering is an engaging look at modern technology and an illuminating account of how technology and the modern world shape each other.

Online social networks have made sharing personal experiences with others mostly in form of photos and comments a common activity. The convergenceof social, mobile, cloud and wearable computing expanded the scope of usergeneratedand shared content on the net from personal media to individual preferencesto physiological details (e.g., in the form of daily workouts) to informationabout real-world possessions (e.g., apartments, cars). Once everydaythings become increasingly networked (i.e., the Internet of Things), future onlineservices and connected devices will only expand the set of things to share. Given that a new generation of sharing services is about to emerge, it is of crucialimportance to provide service designers with the right insights to adequatelysupport novel sharing practices. This work explores these practices within twoemergent sharing domains: (1) personal activity tracking and (2) sharing economyservices. The goal of this dissertation is to understand current practices ofsharing personal digital and physical possessions, and to uncover correspondingend-user needs and concerns across novel sharing practices, in order to map thedesign space to support emergent and future sharing needs. We address this goalby adopting two research strategies, one using a bottom-up approach, the otherfollowing a top-down approach.In the bottom-up approach, we examine in-depth novel sharing practices within two emergent sharing domains through a set of empirical qualitative studies.We offer a rich and descriptive account of peoples sharing routines and characterizethe specific role of interactive technologies that support or inhibit sharingin those domains. We then design, develop, and deploy several technology prototypesthat afford digital and physical sharing with the view to informing the design of future sharing services and tools within two domains, personal activitytracking and sharing economy services.In the top-down approach, drawing on scholarship in human-computer interaction (HCI) and interaction design, we systematically examine prior workon current technology-mediated sharing practices and identify a set of commonalitiesand differences among sharing digital and physical artifacts. Based uponthese findings, we further argue that many challenges and issues that are presentin digital online sharing are also highly relevant for the physical sharing in thecontext of the sharing economy, especially when the shared physical objects havedigital representations and are mediated by an online platform. To account forthese particularities, we develop and field-test an action-driven toolkit for designpractitioners to both support the creation of future sharing economy platformsand services, as well as to improve the user experience of existing services.This dissertation should be of particular interest to HCI and interaction designresearchers who are critically exploring technology-mediated sharing practicesthrough fieldwork studies, as well to design practitioners who are building and evaluating sharing economy services.

Camming is based on a five-year mixed-methods study of the erotic webcam industry, and tells a pornographic story about the multibillion-dollar online sex industry colloquially called “camming.” Through camming, millions of people from all over the globe have found decent wages, friendship, intimacy, community, empowerment, and pleasure. This deeply rich book is filled with the stories of a diverse sample of cam models from around the world. This book is not a utopian tale. Cam models, like all sex workers, must grapple with exploitation, discrimination, harassment, and stigmatization. Using an intersectional lens, Jones is attentive to how the overlapping systems of neoliberal capitalism, White supremacy, patriarchy, cissexism, heterosexism, and ableism shape all cam models’ experiences in this new global sex industry. This thorough examination of the camming industry provides a unique vantage point from which to understand and theorize around gender, sexuality, race, and labor in a time when workers globally face increasing economic precariousness and worsened forms of alienation, and desperately desire to recapture pleasure in work. Despite the serious issues cam models face, Jones’s focus on pleasure will help people better understand the motivations for engaging in online sex work, as well as the complex social interactions between cam models and customers. In Camming, Jones pioneers an entirely new subfield in sociology—the sociology of pleasure. The sociology of pleasure can provide new insights into the motivation for social behavior and assist sociologists in analyzing social interactions in everyday life.

By the 1970s, the Brooklyn piers had become a wasteland on the New York City waterfront. Today, they have been transformed into a stunning park that is enjoyed by countless Brooklynites and visitors from across New York City and around the world. A History of Brooklyn Bridge Park recounts the grassroots, multivoiced, and contentious effort, beginning in the 1980s, to transform Brooklyn’s defunct piers into a beautiful, urban oasis. The movement to resist commercial development on the piers reveals how concerned citizens came together to shape the future of their community. After winning a number of battles, park advocates, stakeholders, and government officials collaborated to create a thoroughly unique city park that takes advantage of the water and the ’Manhattan skyline, combining an innovative design with vibrant cultural programming. From start to finish, this history emphasizes the contributions, collaborations, and spirited disagreements that made the planning and construction of Brooklyn Bridge Park a model of natural urban development and public–private partnership. The book includes interviews with Brooklyn residents, politicians, activists, urban planners, landscape architects, and other key participants in the fight for the park. The story of Brooklyn Bridge Park also speaks to larger issues confronting all cities, including the development of postindustrial spaces and the ways to balance public and private interests without sacrificing creative vision or sustainable goals.

This chapter examines seven case studies of the macabresque during the twentieth century. The macabresque is portrayed within each by adopting the “vignette” as a narrative form. A vignette is a patch, a semiotic sign, representative of a “mentality” that endows genocide and mass atrocity with a “noble” cause or “moral” if not, indeed, a “sacred” purpose. Similarities across cases of the macabresque emerge; but contrasts also appear that demonstrate major political, cultural, ideological, and attitudinal differences. These contrasts are not incidental side effects of violence. They reveal the relationships of social fantasy, specifically “thing-enjoyment” and mimetic desire and rivalry, in shaping not only ideological constructions of otherness but also the psychodynamics of a political ontology in which ideology is ontology. The case studies include the Armenian Genocide, Stalin’s purges, “Hitler’s Diabolical Laboratory,” blood trauma and the Rwandan Genocide, “Confessional Archives and Angkar’s Torture,” the Argentinian neo-inquisition, and “Bosnian Shame-Camps.”

In Domestic Contradictions, Priya Kandaswamy analyzes how race, class, gender, and sexuality shaped welfare practices in the United States alongside the conflicting demands that this system imposed upon Black women. She turns to an often-neglected moment in welfare history, the advent of the Freedmen's Bureau during Reconstruction, and highlights important parallels with welfare reform in the late twentieth century. Kandaswamy demonstrates continuity between the figures of the “vagrant” and “welfare queen” in these time periods, both of which targeted Black women. These constructs upheld gendered constructions of domesticity while defining Black women's citizenship in terms of an obligation to work rather than a right to public resources. Pushing back against this history, Kandaswamy illustrates how the Black female body came to represent a series of interconnected dangers—to white citizenship, heteropatriarchy, and capitalist ideals of productivity —and how a desire to curb these threats drove state policy. In challenging dominant feminist historiographies, Kandaswamy builds on Black feminist and queer of color critiques to situate the gendered afterlife of slavery as central to the historical development of the welfare state.

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) required that each state set up a health insurance exchange or lose control to the federal government. Because Republicans had supported the concept before it became part of Obamacare, virtually every state was expected to cooperate and implement this core part of the law. However, 34 states refused to participate. This is a stunning miscalculation by the Obama administration. This book tells the story of what happened in the final two states to choose state control and the two that came the closest. The most intense split was not between Republicans and Democrats, but within the Republican Party. Governors were the most important people in the fight over exchanges, but did not always get their way. The Tea Party defeated the most powerful interest groups. State-level and national conservative think tanks were important allies to the Tea Party. The relative power of these groups was shaped by differences in institutional design and procedures, such as whether a state has term limits and the length of legislative sessions. Opposition was more easily overcome in states whose conditions facilitated the development of legislative “pockets of expertise.” This is a dramatic example of opponents using federalism to block national reform and serves as a warning of the challenge of inducing state cooperation in other policy domains such as the environment and education. Understanding the state-level fights over the ACA’s implementation is crucial to understanding the impact of future reforms.

What explains state responses to the refugees they receive? This book identifies two puzzling patterns: states open their borders to some refugee groups while blocking others (discrimination), and a number of countries have given the United Nations (UN) control of asylum procedures and refugee camps on their territory (delegation). To explain this selective exercise of sovereignty, the book develops a two-part theoretical framework in which policymakers in refugee-receiving countries weigh international and domestic concerns. Internationally, leaders use refugees to reassure allies and exert pressure on rivals. Domestically, policymakers have incentives to favor those refugee groups with whom they share an ethnic identity. When these international and domestic incentives conflict, shifting responsibility to the UN allows policymakers to placate both refugee-sending countries and domestic constituencies. The book then carries out a “three-stage, multi-level” research design in which each successive step corroborates and elaborates the findings of the preceding stage. The first stage involves statistical analysis of asylum admissions worldwide. The second stage presents two country case studies: Egypt (a country that is broadly representative of most refugee recipients) and Turkey (an outlier that has limited the geographic application of the Refugee Convention). The third stage zooms in on sub- or within-country dynamics in Kenya (home to one of the largest refugee populations in the world) through content analysis of parliamentary proceedings. Studying state responses to refugees is instructive because it can help explain why states sometimes assert, and at other times cede, their sovereignty in the face of refugee rights.

There is an assumption in criminal justice that boxing will immediately work to reduce offending among young men. Many practitioners cite discipline and respect as the desisting elements inherent in a boxing gym. Undoubtedly, these discourses do exist, yet, what if the discipline and the respect garnered in the gym are used for other purposes that are not always conducive to the desistance process? This book will unpick how effective boxing actually is in reducing violent attitudes, and how to ensure that the messages in the gym environment do not support negative attitudes often found outside the ring. Using classic desistance literature (Giordano 2002; Maruna 2001), I make suggestions that are grounded in evidence and theory. Using case studies, and life history interviewing drawn from a psychosocial perspective (Jefferson and Hollway 2000; Gadd 2007; Maruna 2001), this book builds on techniques that uncover the more clandestine reasons for choosing boxing. Working within this psychosocial framework, the desire and the appealing nature of boxing, more often than not, comes from a place of anxiety rather than strength. I will present arguments that suggest boxing’s appeal lies in its capacity to develop ‘physical capital’ (Wacquant 2004), and prevent repeat victimisation. Using case studies, I will reveal stories of men’s victimhood, either via gang violence, domestic violence, or structural disadvantage. I will tell the story of how boxing reshaped their identities and self-concepts, and how the gym came to represent a fraternity and a ‘island of stability and order’ (Wacquant 2004). Additionally, I will present arguments that suggest that boxing is not a panacea for all social ills, and while it has its benefits, it also has a darker side that is coterminous with hyper- masculine discourses of violence, respect, and avoidance of shame.