Altri libri che potrebbero interessarti

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  Global "Body Shopping" - An...

  Xiang Biao

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  How can America's information technology (IT) industry predict serious labor shortages while at the same time laying off tens of thousands of employees annually? The answer is the industry's flexible labor management system--a flexibility widely regarded as the modus operandi of global capitalism today. Global "Body Shopping" explores how flexibility and uncertainty in the IT labor market are constructed and sustained through concrete human actions. Drawing on in-depth field research in southern India and in Australia, and folding an ethnography into a political economy examination, Xiang Biao offers a richly detailed analysis of the India-based global labor management practice known as "body shopping." In this practice, a group of consultants--body shops--in different countries works together to recruit IT workers. Body shops then farm out workers to clients as project-based labor; and upon a project's completion they either place the workers with a different client or "bench" them to await the next placement. Thus, labor is managed globally to serve volatile capital movement. Underpinning this practice are unequal socioeconomic relations on multiple levels. While wealth in the New Economy is created in an increasingly abstract manner, everyday realities--stock markets in New York, benched IT workers in Sydney, dowries in Hyderabad, and women and children in Indian villages--sustain this flexibility.

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  Solitary Seance - How You Can...

  Raymond Buckland

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  Connecting with your departed loved ones doesn't have to mean visiting a medium or taking a specialized course. With the proven techniques in this book, you can contact spirits anytime you wish—easily and safely in your own home.Bestselling author Raymond Buckland guides you through nearly twenty effective methods for communing with spirit, as taught in his popular workshops. No special knowledge is required. Simply follow the steps for each method to see which one works best for you.DreamworkTable-tippingPendulumsCrystal skryingAutomatic writingTarotRunesSpirit photographyDominoesFlame messagesPraise:"Buckland brings his wonderful wisdom, insight, and experience together in this comprehensive guide for personal spirit communication."—Rosemary Ellen Guiley, author of The Encyclopedia of Ghosts and Spirits

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  Analog Superpowers - How...

  Katherine C. Epstein

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  At the beginning of the twentieth century, two British inventors, Arthur Pollen and Harold Isherwood, became fascinated by a major military question: how to aim the big guns of battleships. These warships—of enormous geopolitical import before the advent of intercontinental missiles or drones—had to shoot in poor light and choppy seas at distant moving targets, conditions that impeded accurate gunfire. Seeing the need to account for a plethora of variables, Pollen and Isherwood built an integrated system for gathering data, calculating predictions, and transmitting the results to the gunners. At the heart of their invention was the most advanced analog computer of the day, a technological breakthrough that anticipated the famous Norden bombsight of World War II, the inertial guidance systems of nuclear missiles, and the networked “smart” systems that dominate combat today. Recognizing the value of Pollen and Isherwood’s invention, the British Royal Navy and the United States Navy pirated it, one after the other. When the inventors sued, both the British and US governments invoked secrecy, citing national security concerns.
   
  
  Drawing on a wealth of archival evidence, Analog Superpowers analyzes these and related legal battles over naval technology, exploring how national defense tested the two countries’ commitment to individual rights and the free market. Katherine C. Epstein deftly sets out Pollen’s and Isherwood’s pioneering achievements, the patent questions raised, the geopolitical rivalry between Britain and the United States, and the legal precedents each country developed to control military tools built by private contractors.
   
  
  The America portrayed in this sweeping and accessible history isn’t yet a global hegemon but a rising superpower ready to acquire foreign technology by fair means or foul—much as it accuses China of doing today.

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  Phoney War The: The History of...

  Editors Charles River

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  Though the French would be decisively defeated soon after the Nazi invasion of Belgium and France in early 1940, they had not sat on their hands. As the power of Nazi Germany grew alarmingly during the 1930s, the French sought means to defend their territory against the rising menace of the Thousand Year Reich. As architects of the most punitive measures in the Treaty of Versailles following World War I, France was the most natural target for German retribution, so the Maginot Line, a series of interconnected strongpoints and fortifications running along much of France's eastern border, helped allay French fears of invasion.  
  	The popular legend of the Maginot Line portrays the frontier defenses as a useless “white elephant” project that was prompted by a gross misapprehension of warfare's new realities in the mid-20th century and quickly overwhelmed by the forceful advance of the German blitzkrieg. English idiom today invokes this vision of the Maginot Line as a metaphor for any defensive measure strongly believed in but actually useless. Indeed, usages such as “Maginot Line mentality,” describing an overly defensive, reactive mindset, perpetuate the legend. As a French author and military liaison with the British, Andre Maurois, wrote about his disillusionment with the defensive line he originally enthusiastically supported: “We know now that the Maginot line-complex was a dangerous disease of the mind; but I publish this as it was written in January, 1940.”  
  This was what brought about the stasis along the Western Front near the end of 1939, a short period of time now referred to as the Phoney War, during which the Western Allies awaited some sort of action by the Nazis. Ultimately, the Allies had not expected the Germans would be able to move armored units through the Ardennes Forests, a heavily wooded region spanning parts of Belgium, France and the Netherlands. 

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  Marriage - A Lasting Love Story

  David K. Ewen, M. M.Ed.

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  Immediately following the tragedy of 9/11, the world changed.   Our testimony comes from the ashes of that change.  Many people have asked how the marriage to my wife has been so very happy from the beginning and lasted so long. The amazing testimony isn't related to how that happened, but rather when it happened. In the year that we met and got married it was a time that we would have most unlikely been married at all. We share tips, tricks, and techniques to make a marriage the way dreamed of on wedding days.  The dream of a lasting love story.

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  Parallel Lives - A Love Story...

  Iain Pears

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  An extraordinary love story of two unlikely figures played out against the backdrop of the Cold War. 
    
  Best-selling novelist and art historian Iain Pears enchants readers with the real-life romance between Larissa Salmina, a Russian art curator, and Francis Haskell, a British art historian. His fabulous book brings into sharp focus the strange world of the Soviet Union, and the even stranger world of a certain variety of the English elite. It seeks to show how leaving the Soviet Union was a sacrifice for her and how it was the English man, not the Russian woman, who was set free because of their meeting. 
    
  Larissa was born in northern Russia, the daughter of a Soviet army officer from a noble family who survived the siege of Leningrad by eating cats’ tails and being evacuated over the ice. Francis was the grandson of an Iraqi Jew, forever feeling out of place in his adopted country of England. Parallel Lives is the story of how these two star-crossed lovers met, instantly understand each other, and were prepared to risk heartbreak, and in her case, retribution, to be together. 
    
  Escaping Leningrad, teenage Larissa lived in the Urals surrounded by Spanish revolutionaries, and after the war rose to become the youngest commissar in the Soviet Union and keeper of Italian drawings at the Hermitage. She took the Russian contribution to the Venice Biennale in 1962 and lost it on the journey. She briefly absconded with her supervisor’s corpse, developed a useful sideline in forgery, and stole (“I didn’t steal it. I liberated it”) a Matisse from the Italian government. Francis was a distinguished art historian, comfortably at home in King’s College Cambridge. But he was lonely, self-doubting, and had all but abandoned hope of falling in love. Larissa swept away all the years of anguish in one meal. 
    
  Iain Pears, who was neighbors with Larissa and Francis in Oxford, knew both his principal characters well. In telling Larissa and Francis’s love story, he is also capturing the Europe of a bygone era: a world of dancers, exiles, and the occasional spy, of artists, aristocrats, and academics. It is a tale of a world we have lost.

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