The Plant Contract

The Plant Contract argues that visual and performance art can help change our perception of the vegetal world, and can return us to nature and thought. Via an investigation into the wasteland, robotany, feminist plants, and nature rights, this phytology-love story investigates how contemporary art is mediating the effects of plant-blindness, caused by human disassociation from the natural world. It is also a gesture of respect for the genius of vegetal life, where new science proves plants can learn, communicate, remember, make decisions, and associate. Art is a litmus test for how climate change affects human perception. This book responds to that test by expressing plant-philosophy to a wider public, through an interrogation of plant-art.

The wasteland and the wilding: the aesthetic of abandoned and reclaimed green spaces -- Green man: human-plant hybrids -- Robotany and aesthetics -- Bio rights: earth of agonies and eco-punks -- Eco-feminism: plants as becoming-woman -- Ungrounding plant life: the after-effects -- On rhizomes and dead trees

The Conditions of Contract prepared by FIDIC are used extensively as the standard contract of choice in international construction and civil engineering projects. Engineers working on these projects need to be aware of these contracts, but as the forms are complex it can be difficult to draw together all the sub-clauses relating to a particular issue. The FIDIC Plant and Design-Build Forms of Contract Illustrated crystallizes the requirements of the FIDIC P&DB contract into a range of simple to follow flow charts, providing a clear and concise way to rapidly assimilate the requirements of each clause. The relationship between the various clauses in the contract, the concepts, process methods and actors involved in each sub-clause are all easily seen, and key issues around each topic (such as periods allowed, notices, etc) are all documented. In addition, related sub-clauses and/or important additional documents are linked so that the reader has a full understanding of the wider implications of each clause.

Covert Plants contributes to newly emerging discourses on the implications of vegetal life for the arts and culture. This stretches to changes in our perception of 'nature' and to the adapting roles of botany, evolutionary ecology, and environmental aesthetics in the humanities. Its editors and contributors seek various expressions of vegetal life rather than the mere representation of such, and they proceed from the conviction that a rigorous approach to thinking with and through vegetal life must be interdisciplinary. At a time when urgent calls for restorative care and reparative action have been sounded for the environment, this essay volume presents a range of academic and creative perspectives, from evolutionary biology to literary theory, philosophy to poetry, which respond to the perplexing problems and paradoxes of vegetal thinking. Representations of vegetal life often include plant analogies and plant imagery. These representations have at times obscured the diversity of plant behavior and experience. Covert Plants probes the implications of vegetal life for thought and how new plant science is changing our perception of the vegetal - around us and in us. How can we think, speak, and write about plant life without falling into human-nature dyads, or without tumbling into reductive theoretical notions about the always complex relations between cognition and action, identity and value, subject and object? A full view of this shifting perspective requires a 'stereoscopic' lens through which to view plants, but also simultaneously to alter our human-centered viewpoint. Plants are no longer the passive object of contemplation, but are increasingly resembling 'subjects, ' 'stakeholders, ' or 'actors.' As such, the plant now makes unprecedented demands upon the nature of contemplation itself. Moreover, the aesthetic, political, and legal implications of new knowledge regarding plants' ability to communicate, sense, and learn require intensive, cross-disciplinary investigation. By doing this, we can intervene into current attitudes to climate change and sustainability, and hopefully revise, for the better, human philosophies, ethics, and aesthetics that touch upon plant life. TABLE OF CONTENTS// Baylee Brits and Prudence Gibson, "Introduction: Covert Plants" - Prudence Gibson and Michael Marder, "Art Expresses Its Own Appearance: A Conversation with Michael Marder" - Prudence Gibson, "The Colour Green" - Baylee Brits, "Brain Trees: Neuroscientific Metaphor and Botanical Thought" - Dalia Nassar, "Metaphoric Plants: Goethe's Metamorphosis of Plants and the Metaphors of Reason" - Stephen Muecke, "Mixed up with Trees: The Gadgur and the Dreaming" - Monica Gagliano, "Eco-psychology and the Return to the Dream of Nature" - Suzanne Anker, "The Blue Rose" - Susie Pratt, "Trees as Landlords and Other Public Experiments: An Interview with Natalie Jeremijenko" - Tessa Laird, "Spores from Space: Becoming the Alien" - Jennifer Mae Hamilton, "Gardening After the Anthropocene: Creating Different Relations between Humans and Edible Plants in Sydney" - Lucas Ihlein, "Agricultural Inventiveness: Beyond Environmental Management?" - Andrew Belletty, "An Ear to the Ground" - Ben Woodard, "Continuous Green Abstraction: Embodied Knowledge, Intuition, and Metaphor" - Lisa Dowdall, "Figures" - Poems by Luke Fischer, Justin Clemens, Paul Dawson, and Tamryn Bennett.

A comprehensive introduction to contract theory, emphasizing common themes and methodologies as well as applications in key areas. Despite the vast research literature on topics relating to contract theory, only a few of the field's core ideas are covered in microeconomics textbooks. This long-awaited book fills the need for a comprehensive textbook on contract theory suitable for use at the graduate and advanced undergraduate levels. It covers the areas of agency theory, information economics, and organization theory, highlighting common themes and methodologies and presenting the main ideas in an accessible way. It also presents many applications in all areas of economics, especially labor economics, industrial organization, and corporate finance. The book emphasizes applications rather than general theorems while providing self-contained, intuitive treatment of the simple models analyzed. In this way, it can also serve as a reference for researchers interested in building contract-theoretic models in applied contexts.The book covers all the major topics in contract theory taught in most graduate courses. It begins by discussing such basic ideas in incentive and information theory as screening, signaling, and moral hazard. Subsequent sections treat multilateral contracting with private information or hidden actions, covering auction theory, bilateral trade under private information, and the theory of the internal organization of firms; long-term contracts with private information or hidden actions; and incomplete contracts, the theory of ownership and control, and contracting with externalities. Each chapter ends with a guide to the relevant literature. Exercises appear in a separate chapter at the end of the book.

Nuclear Power Plant Development covers the intricacies of developing a nuclear power plant project from a construction and legal standpoint. It deals with structuring, drafting, and negotiating a wide range of standard and specialised contracts relating to the development of nuclear power-generation projects and also covers the other forms of power-generating facilities. It covers the forms of contract, the law involved internationally, and potential areas of pitfalls and how to avoid them in a systematic format covering various forms of projects. It is suitable for solicitors and barristers involved in the contracting for such facilities and the handling of litigation related to them, government officials involved in the commissioning and development of nuclear facilities for regional governments, and engineers and contractors involved in the actual work of design and contract administration and dispute resolution.

Globalization, increased economic and geopolitical uncertainty, technological advancements, and a rise in the number of regulations and legislations have led to a significant rise in the importance, volume, and complexity of modern contractual agreements. Yet, in spite of these profound changes, many organizations still manage the contracting process in a fragmented, manual, and ad-hoc manner, resulting in poor contract visibility, ineffective monitoring and management of contract compliance, and inadequate analysis of contract performance. The net effect of this has been a heightened interest in re-engineering and automation of Enterprise Contract Management (ECM) processes across industry sectors and geographies. Enterprise Contract Management: A Practical Guide to Successfully Implementing an ECM Solution addresses all the questions surrounding ECM, ECM solutions, and the project management, change management, and risk management considerations to ensure its successful implementation. This concise text will help your organization manage the challenges of the contract life cycle and the key success factors and pitfalls in a typical ECM solution. It is a must read for corporate executives, buyers, procurement and strategic sourcing specialists, contract administrators and procurement managers. There is currently no other book available on ECM solutions. All existing books on contract management focus on the legal aspects of contracts, but none describe the functions, features, capabilities of technology solutions that support ECM, nor do they explain the key considerations for ensuring a successful ECM solution implementation.

Meditations on environmental change and the necessity of a pact between Earth and its inhabitants

Many books have been written on negotiation tactics and a few books have been written on contract drafting, but no book has combined the two disciplines into one-until now. Resulting from over 10 years of actual negotiation experience as both buyer and seller, author Stephen Guth offers insight into a world of negotiations and contracts that few ever see. This book isn't a feel-good book on win-win negotiations. It's an insider's view into real life negotiation tactics and ploys. Readers will learn how to use negotiation tactics such as the Columbo, the Price Slice and Dice, and the Signature Limit Lasso. Readers will also learn how to spot and counter vendor ploys such as the Pop-Tart, Mirroring, and the Only Game in Town. To put it all together, readers are instructed on contract drafting tricks such as Expressly Implied Warranties, the Endless Indemnification, and the Unlimited Limitation of Liability. Readers will never look at contracts the same way again.