The strength of Professor Varisco’s work lies in his combination of ethnographic fieldwork among highland Yemeni farmers with an extensive study of medieval Arabic manuscripts on folk astronomy and agriculture. The opening articles discuss the astronomical concept of the ’lunar stations’ in pre-Islamic Arabia and as developed in Arab astronomy and almanac lore; subsequent ones expand on the significance of this for an agricultural society, and examine a unique corpus of Yemeni agricultural...

What is jazz? How does it differ from other kinds of music? To what extent is it an important subject for thinking about aesthetic questions? Philosophy of Jazz is among the first book-length philosophical discussions devoted to jazz. Daniel Martin Feige explores the relationship between jazz and European art music, arguing that in jazz central aspects of musical practice are made explicit, aspects that remain implicit in the tradition of European art music but nevertheless inform...

The institutional procedures for the UN’s decision-making on issues of global peace and security, first and foremost the Security Council (SC), were conceived with the objective of enabling a swift but internationally coordinated response to irregular situations of crises. Today, however, the UN is constantly involved in situations of conflict and has expanded its range of activities.This book offers a concrete and practically applicable answer to the question of how to reform the ...

In the heart of a small, charming village lives a group of makers who create magnificent things and have extraordinary one-on-one relationships with some real-life objects! One of those makers is Theo, an instrument maker and talented musician, who one day finishes creating a mandolin he names Mandy with the sole intention of playing a song on her strings that he has composed specifically for her.The evening Theo creates her, however, is the same night that she is connived into run...

This book serves as an introductory course on mechanisms with robotics concepts for undergraduate students. New concepts are presented that support the mechanical design of robots. Basic concepts from mechanism theory are presented to provide a base for designing mechanisms in general.Part I of the book examines the introductory concepts of mechanisms theory and serves as basis for analyzing and designing mechanisms. Part II presents the analysis of four-bar linkages, including the...

This book is the first in English to survey indigenous knowledge of seasonal, astronomical, and agricultural information in Arab Gulf almanacs. It provides an extensive analysis of the traditional information available, based on local almanacs, Arabic texts and poetry by Gulf individuals, ethnographic interviews, and online forums. A major feature of the book is tracing the history of terms and concepts in the local seasonal knowledge of the Gulf, including an important genre about weather...

This volume explores the connections between John McDowell’s philosophy and the hermeneutic tradition. The contributions not only explore the hermeneutical aspects of McDowell’s thought but also ask how this reading of McDowell can inform the hermeneutical tradition itself.John McDowell has made important contributions to debates in epistemology, metaethics, and philosophy of language, and his readings of Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, and Wittgenstein have proved widely influential. Whil...

This groundbreaking work offers a first-of-its-kind overview of legal informatics, the academic discipline underlying the technological transformation and economics of the legal industry. Edited by Daniel Martin Katz, Ron Dolin, and Michael J. Bommarito, and featuring contributions from more than two dozen academic and industry experts, chapters cover the history and principles of legal informatics and background technical concepts – including natural language processing and distributed le...

A snapshot of ecocriticism in action, Coming into Contact collects sixteen previously unpublished essays that explore some of the most promising new directions in the study of literature and the environment. They look to previously unexamined or underexamined aspects of literature's relationship to the environment, including swamps, internment camps, Asian American environments, the urbanized Northeast, and lynching sites. The authors relate environmental discourse to practice, in...

Is your house full of stuffs? Do you want to have a house that is clean and nice? Or maybe you just want to organize some clutters but don't know where to start? I will teach you how to organize your home, reduce clutters and have a clean and nice home. How else you can call a house as your home if it is draining your energy instead of recharging it. I will teach you: -why an organized home is critical for recharging your energy -why clutters are NOT your fault -7 rules to unclutter your l...

The late Edward Said remains one of the most influential critics and public intellectuals of our time, with lasting contributions to many disciplines. Much of his reputation derives from the phenomenal multidisciplinary influence of his 1978 book Orientalism. Said's seminal polemic analyzes novels, travelogues, and academic texts to argue that a dominant discourse of West over East has warped virtually all past European and American representation of the Near East. But despite the...