The Cloud Chamber

Tells the story of Rose Mannion, an Irish woman transplanted in western Kentucky, showing how her legacy of love and betrayal affected succeeding generations of her family.

Originally published in 1951, this book examines the potential of the cloud chamber as an instrument of precise measurement.

Follows three generations of Indian women beset by hardships and torn by angry secrets, yet inextricably bound together by kinship.

When Nate Chance arrives home from school, he sees two police cars and an ambulance in his yard. Before his mother can get him and his little sister, Junie, inside, Nate and Junie witness their father, blood pouring down his face, being led by two police officers into an ambulance. He has tried to kill himself. Home quickly becomes a different place. Junie stays curled up in front of the TV; Nate's mom retreats inside herself; and the rumor of mental illness makes Nate a social pariah at school. Only the promise of winning the science fair holds any hope of happiness for Nate. He's building a cloud chamber, the project that he and his dad dreamed of working on together. Maybe if he can build it, Nate can give his father something that will help him feel better and finally come home.

Leadership and Organizational Climate is a book that shows how leaders impact organizational performance by manipulating the environmental determinants of motivation. Consciously or unconsciously, effective leaders arouse and direct the motivational energy that compels people to action. This book explains how specific leadership practices shape the dimensions of organizational climate and how different climates influence people's energies and efforts. Stringer discusses both the direct and indirect aspects of leadership: how the "memory" or "shadow" of a leader creates a certain atmosphere or climate within an organization, and how this climate impacts motivation. Leadership is too often explained in terms of the leader's direct face-to-face impact on people. This book describes and validates the less dramatic but more lasting impact that certain leadership practices have on people's thoughts, feelings, and behavior. Filled with examples showing how leaders can manage performance by using organizational climate, this book attempts to be a "cloud chamber" for the practice of leadership--it traces the normally unseen, but very real, motivational influences that leaders exert when they move through an organization. For individuals looking for tools they can immediately use to improve their leadership effectiveness and organizational performance.

The militarized legacy of the digital cloud: how the cloud grew out of older network technologies and politics. We may imagine the digital cloud as placeless, mute, ethereal, and unmediated. Yet the reality of the cloud is embodied in thousands of massive data centers, any one of which can use as much electricity as a midsized town. Even all these data centers are only one small part of the cloud. Behind that cloud-shaped icon on our screens is a whole universe of technologies and cultural norms, all working to keep us from noticing their existence. In this book, Tung-Hui Hu examines the gap between the real and the virtual in our understanding of the cloud. Hu shows that the cloud grew out of such older networks as railroad tracks, sewer lines, and television circuits. He describes key moments in the prehistory of the cloud, from the game “Spacewar” as exemplar of time-sharing computers to Cold War bunkers that were later reused as data centers. Countering the popular perception of a new “cloudlike” political power that is dispersed and immaterial, Hu argues that the cloud grafts digital technologies onto older ways of exerting power over a population. But because we invest the cloud with cultural fantasies about security and participation, we fail to recognize its militarized origins and ideology. Moving between the materiality of the technology itself and its cultural rhetoric, Hu's account offers a set of new tools for rethinking the contemporary digital environment.