Linking Visions

This collection brings together fourteen contributions by authors from around the globe. Each of the contributions engages with questions about how local and global bioethical issues are made to be comparable, in the hope of redressing basic needs and demands for justice. These works demonstrate the significant conceptual contributions that can be made through feminists' attention to debates in a range of interrelated fields, especially as they formulate appropriate responses to developments in medical technology, global economics, population shifts, and poverty. Visit our website for sample chapters!

Presenting recent research on the international integration of infrastructures in Europe, this book combines general and methodological chapters and examples from different a variety of sectors such as transport, electricity and communication networks. Particular focus is on the contrast between the 'Europe of nation states' of the nineteenth century (up to 1914) and the emerging 'integrated Europe' after World War II. Additional contributions provide perspectives from beyond Europe. The wide range of topics gives a good overview of the different challenges posed and the strategies employed in each sector to establish internationally compatible networks, procedures and standards. This work strengthens comparative research as a complement to the detailed analysis of singular cases that often characterises previous works in this field. Methodologically, it therefore contributes to the progress of tools and strategies for comparative historical research. Part of the emerging research area dealing with the mechanisms of international collaboration, this book brings together recent research from European integration history, policy studies, political economy and cultural studies. Considering the growing intensity of international collaboration and exchange in many parts of social and economic life, it is also of topical interest.

Presenting recent research on the international integration of infrastructures in Europe, this book combines general and methodological chapters and examples from different a variety of sectors such as transport, electricity and communication networks. Particular focus is on the contrast between the 'Europe of nation states' of the nineteenth century (up to 1914) and the emerging 'integrated Europe' after World War II. Additional contributions provide perspectives from beyond Europe. The wide range of topics gives a good overview of the different challenges posed and the strategies employed in each sector to establish internationally compatible networks, procedures and standards. This work strengthens comparative research as a complement to the detailed analysis of singular cases that often characterises previous works in this field. Methodologically, it therefore contributes to the progress of tools and strategies for comparative historical research. Part of the emerging research area dealing with the mechanisms of international collaboration, this book brings together recent research from European integration history, policy studies, political economy and cultural studies. Considering the growing intensity of international collaboration and exchange in many parts of social and economic life, it is also of topical interest.

This readable yet sophisticated survey of treaty-making between Native and European Americans before 1800, recovers a deeper understanding of how Indians tried to forge a new society with whites on the multicultural frontiers of North America-an understanding that may enlighten our own task of protecting Native American rights and imagining racial justice.

Thomas Sowell’s “extraordinary” explication of the competing visions of human nature lie at the heart of our political conflicts (New York Times) Controversies in politics arise from many sources, but the conflicts that endure for generations or centuries show a remarkably consistent pattern. In this classic work, Thomas Sowell analyzes this pattern. He describes the two competing visions that shape our debates about the nature of reason, justice, equality, and power: the "constrained" vision, which sees human nature as unchanging and selfish, and the "unconstrained" vision, in which human nature is malleable and perfectible. A Conflict of Visions offers a convincing case that ethical and policy disputes circle around the disparity between both outlooks.

In this interdisciplinary work, William L. Davis examines Joseph Smith's 1829 creation of the Book of Mormon, the foundational text of the Latter Day Saint movement. Positioning the text in the history of early American oratorical techniques, sermon culture, educational practices, and the passion for self-improvement, Davis elucidates both the fascinating cultural context for the creation of the Book of Mormon and the central role of oral culture in early nineteenth-century America. Drawing on performance studies, religious studies, literary culture, and the history of early American education, Davis analyzes Smith's process of oral composition. How did he produce a history spanning a period of 1,000 years, filled with hundreds of distinct characters and episodes, all cohesively tied together in an overarching narrative? Eyewitnesses claimed that Smith never looked at notes, manuscripts, or books—he simply spoke the words of this American religious epic into existence. Judging the truth of this process is not Davis's interest. Rather, he reveals a kaleidoscope of practices and styles that converged around Smith's creation, with an emphasis on the evangelical preaching styles popularized by the renowned George Whitefield and John Wesley.

Many approaches have been proposed to solve the problem of finding the optic flow field of an image sequence. Three major classes of optic flow computation techniques can discriminated (see for a good overview Beauchemin and Barron IBeauchemin19951): gradient based (or differential) methods; phase based (or frequency domain) methods; correlation based (or area) methods; feature point (or sparse data) tracking methods; In this chapter we compute the optic flow as a dense optic flow field with a multi scale differential method. The method, originally proposed by Florack and Nielsen [Florack1998a] is known as the Multiscale Optic Flow Constrain Equation (MOFCE). This is a scale space version of the well known computer vision implementation of the optic flow constraint equation, as originally proposed by Horn and Schunck [Horn1981]. This scale space variation, as usual, consists of the introduction of the aperture of the observation in the process. The application to stereo has been described by Maas et al. [Maas 1995a, Maas 1996a]. Of course, difficulties arise when structure emerges or disappears, such as with occlusion, cloud formation etc. Then knowledge is needed about the processes and objects involved. In this chapter we focus on the scale space approach to the local measurement of optic flow, as we may expect the visual front end to do. 17. 2 Motion detection with pairs of receptive fields As a biologically motivated start, we begin with discussing some neurophysiological findings in the visual system with respect to motion detection.