Twenty five years ago, it didn't exist. Today, twenty million people worldwide are surfing the Net. Where Wizards Stay Up Late is the exciting story of the pioneers responsible for creating the most talked about, most influential, and most far-reaching communications breakthrough since the invention of the telephone. In the 1960's, when computers where regarded as mere giant calculators, J.C.R. Licklider at MIT saw them as the ultimate communications devices.
This rhetoric revives the classical strategies of ancient Greek and Roman rhetoricians and adapts them to the needs of contemporary writers and speakers. This is a fresh interpretation of the ancient canons of composing: invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery. It shows that rhetoric, as it was practiced and taught by the ancients, was an intrinsic part of daily life and of communal discourse about current events. This book gives special emphasis to classic strategies of invention, devoting separate chapters to stasis theory, common and special topics, formal topics, ethos, pathos, extrinsic proofs, and Aristotelian means of reasoning. The authors' engaging discussion and their many contemporary examples of ancient rhetorical principles present rhetoric as a set of flexible, situational practices. This practical history draws the most relevant and useful concepts from ancient rhetorics and discusses, updates, and offers them for use in the contemporary composition classroom.
How does a scientist go about solving problems? How do scientific
discoveries happen? Why are cold fusion and parapsychology different
from mainstream science? What is a scientific worldview? In this lively
and wide-ranging book, Gregory Derry talks about these and other
questions as he introduces the reader to the process of scientific
thinking. From the discovery of X rays and semiconductors to the
argument for continental drift to the invention of the smallpox
vaccine, scientific work has proceeded through honest observation,
critical reasoning, and sometimes just plain luck. Derry starts out
with historical examples, leading readers through the events,
experiments, blind alleys, and thoughts of scientists in the midst of
discovery and invention. Readers at all levels will come away with an
enriched appreciation of how science operates and how it connects with
our daily lives.
In this scholarly work, Lauer examines issues that have surrounded historical and contemporary theories and pedagogies of rhetorical invention, citing a wide array of positions on these issues in both primary rhetorical texts and secondary interpretations. Her book presents theoretical disagreements over the nature, purpose, and epistemology of invention and pedagogical debates over such issues as the relative importance of art, talent, imitation, and practice in teaching discourse.
___James Burke, the BBC's chief reporter on the Apollo missions to the moon, was awarded the Royal Television Society silver medal in 1973 and the gold medal in 1974. Connections was over two years in the making, the research and filming taking the author to twnety-three countries. James Burke lives in London. ___You can make all the plans you will, plot to make a fortune in the commodities market, speculate on developing trends: all will likely come to naught, for "however carefully you plan for the future, someone else's actions will inevitably modify the way your plans turn out". So writes the English scholar and documentary producer James Burke in his sparkling book Connections, a favourite of historically minded readers ever since its first publication in 1978. Taking a hint from Jacob Bronowski's Ascent of Man, Burke charts the course of technological innovation from ancient times to the present, but always with a subversive eye for things happening in spite of, and not because of, their inventors' intentions. Burke gives careful attention to the role of accident in human history. In his opening pages, for instance, he writes of the invention of uniform coinage, an invention that hinged on some unknown Anatolian prospector's discovering that a fleck of gold rubbed against a piece of schist - a "touchstone" - would leave a mark indicating its quality. Just so, we owe the invention of modern printing to Johann Gutenberg's training as a goldsmith, for his knowledge of the properties of metals enabled him to develop a press whose letterforms would not easily wear down. With Gutenberg's invention, Burke notes, came a massive revolution in the European economy, for, as he writes, "the easier it is to communicate, the faster change happens". Burke's book is a splendid and educational entertainment for our fast-changing time. - Gregory McNamee - This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Connections by James Burke
