For nearly forty years the United States has been gripped by policies that have placed more than 2.5 million Americans in jails and prisons designed to hold a fraction of that number of inmates. Our prisons are not only vast and overcrowded, they are degrading—relying on racist gangs, lockdowns, and Supermax-style segregation units to maintain a tenuous order.Mass Incarceration on Trial examines a series of landmark decisions about prison conditions—culminating in Brown...

Across America today gated communities sprawl out from urban centers, employers enforce mandatory drug testing, and schools screen students with metal detectors. Social problems ranging from welfare dependency to educational inequality have been reconceptualized as crimes, with an attendant focus on assigning fault and imposing consequences. Even before the recent terrorist attacks, non-citizen residents had become subject to an increasingly harsh regime of detention and deportation, and p...

Introduced in 1894 as a treatment for a deadly childhood disease, the diphtheria serum stands as a milestone in pharmaceutical history. Diphtheria Serum as a Technological Object: A Philosophical Analysis of Serotherapy in France 1894-1900 considers the production and use of this serum in France, analyzing the drug in terms of a technological object. To do this, Jonathan Simon draws on the philosophy of technology, exploring the application of this approach to medical drugs and suggesting ...

This book provides a comprehensive discussion and new insights about linear optimization of content metrics to improve the automatic Evaluation of Text Summaries (ETS). The reader is first introduced to the background and fundamentals of the ETS. Afterward, state-of-the-art evaluation methods that require or do not require human references are described. Based on how linear optimization has improved other natural language processing tasks, we developed a new methodology based on genetic al...

Cultural Analysis, Cultural Studies, and the Law is a field-defining collection of work at the intersection of law, cultural analysis and cultural studies. Over the past few decades the marked turn toward claims and policy arguments based on cultural identity—such as ethnicity, race, or religion—has pointed up the urgent need for legal studies to engage cultural critiques. Exploration of legal issues through cultural analyses provides a rich supplement to other approaches—includin...

The Auditory System at the Cocktail Party is a rather whimsical title that points to the very serious challenge faced by listeners in most everyday environments: how to hear out sounds of interest amid a cacophony of competing sounds. The volume presents the mechanisms for bottom-up object formation and top-down object selection that the auditory system employs to meet that challenge.Ear and Brain Mechanisms for Parsing the Auditory Scene by John C. Middle...

Jonathan Boston and Simon Chapple have written the definitive book on child poverty in New Zealand. Dr Russell Wills, Children’s CommissionerBetween 130,000 and 285,000 New Zealand children live in poverty, depending on the measure used. These disturbing figures are widely discussed, yet often poorly understood. If New Zealand does not have ‘third world poverty’, what are these children actually experiencing? Is the real problem not poverty but simply poor parenting? How d...

Bartimaeus, everyone's favorite (wise-cracking) djinni, is back in book four of this New York Times bestselling series that is perfect for fans of Artemis Fowl and Amari and the Night Brothers.Thousands of years before his fateful service to the magician Nathaniel in London, wily Bartimaeus served as djinni to hundreds of masters, from Babylon and Ancient Egypt to the modern Middle East. Now fans can go back in time with the djin...

France, 1351: Kemp and his men are captured in a skirmish near Calais, and subsequently imprisoned in a French castle. All attempts at escape are punished with death. Then Sir Hugues de Beauconray comes to Kemp with an offer: escort a Dominican friar on a quest to steal a mysterious book from an abbey in Scotland. Fail, and ten of Kemp's friends will be hanged. In the hotly disputed border country, Kemp will need all his skills as a swordsman and archer if he is to return to France and res...

Welcome to the Whoniverse. First stop: everywhere.Six decades may only be a handful of heartbeats to a Time Lord, but for Doctor Who it's the adventure of several lifetimes. Evolving over 60 years, the world's longest-running sci-fi TV show has gifted us a universe of menacing monsters and unforgettable heroes. You might even call it a 'Whotopia'.Now you can roam free through the Doctor's dimension as never before in this special commemorative book...

The untold story of how America once created the most successful economy the world has ever seen—and how we can do it again.The American economy glitters on the outside, but the reality is quite different. Job opportunities and economic growth are increasingly concentrated in a few crowded coastal enclaves. Corporations and investors are disproportionately developing technologies that benefit the wealthiest Americans in the most prosperous areas -- and destroying m...

Taking as its point of departure recent developments in health and social theory Health, Medicine and Society brings together a range of eminent, international scholars to reflect upon key issues at the turn of the century.Contributors draw upon a range of contemporary theories, both modernist and postmodernist, to look at the following themes:*health and social structure*the contested nature of the body*the salience of consumption and risk*the c...