In this assessment of British imperialism, the underlying social, economic and political forces that facilitated expansion during the key period of 1870-1914 are examined. The book emphasizes that the British Empire was first and foremost established by predatory methods to fulfil the financial goals of imperial power without regard to the welfare of indigenous people. This short volume focuses upon the British empire and the development and growth of the country’s imperial system between 1870 and the outbreak of World War I, in the context of historically unprecedented global expansion by certain European powers.
This book integrates in a unique way all that is known about changing teachers' practice, the key to all educational development. All attempts to ` raise standards' or to 'make schools relevant to the 21st century' rest on helping teachers to develop new skills. The Professional Development of Teachers: Practice and Theory draws on the author's 30 years of experience, on a series of new empirical studies, and on the extensive literature on staff development to develop an integrated model of effective professional development.
Computational Explorations in Cognitive Neuroscience: Understanding the Mind by Simulating the Brain
The goal of computational cognitive neuroscience is to understand how the brain embodies the mind by using biologically based computational models comprising networks of neuronlike units. This text, based on a course taught by Randall O'Reilly and Yuko Munakata over the past several years, provides an in-depth introduction to the main ideas in the field. The neural units in the simulations use equations based directly on the ion channels that govern the behavior of real neurons, and the neural networks incorporate anatomical and physiological properties of the neocortex. Thus the text provides the student with knowledge of the basic biology of the brain as well as the computational skills needed to simulate large-scale cognitive phenomena.
The text consists of two parts. The first part covers basic neural computation mechanisms: individual neurons, neural networks, and learning mechanisms. The second part covers large-scale brain area organization and cognitive phenomena: perception and attention, memory, language, and higher-level cognition. The second part is relatively self-contained and can be used separately for mechanistically oriented cognitive neuroscience courses. Integrated throughout the text are more than forty different simulation models, many of them full-scale research-grade models, with friendly interfaces and accompanying exercises. The simulation software (PDP++, available for all major platforms) and simulations can be downloaded free of charge from the Web. Exercise solutions are available, and the text includes full information on the software.
Scientific American Special Edition: New Light on the Solar System
This special edition of Scientific American provides the latest developments about our corner of the cosmos, in articles written by the experts who are leading the investigations. Let the pages that follow guide your tour of our solar system, and savor the fact that you can visit these extraordinary nearby worlds and still be home for supper.
Scientific American Special Edition : A MATTER OF TIME 2006
More than 200 years ago Benjamin Franklin coined the now famous dictum that equated passing minutes and hours with shillings and pounds. The new millennium--and the decades leading up to it--has given his words their real meaning. Time has become to the 21st century what fossil fuels and precious metals were to previous epochs. Constantly measured and priced, this vital raw material continues to spur the growth of economies built on a foundation of terabytes and gigabits per second.
This reduction of time to money may extend Franklin's observation to an absurd extreme. But the commodification of time is genuine-and results from a radical alteration in how we view the passage of events. Our fundamental human drives have not changed from the Paleolithic era, hundreds of thousands of years ago. Much of what we are about centers on the same impulses to eat, procreate, fight or flee that motivated Fred Flintstone. Despite the constancy of these primal urges, human culture has experienced upheaval after upheaval in the period since our hunter-gatherer forebears roamed the savannas. Perhaps the most profound change in the long transition from Stone Age to information age revolves around our subjective experience of time.
