|
|
|
Ideogram: Chinese Characters and the Myth of Disembodied Meaning
In his latest book, J. Marshall Unger exposes the historical, scientific, cultural, and practical flaws accompanying the widespread belief that Chinese characters embody pure, language-less meaning. Whether one is interested in Chinese characters from the standpoint of language, literature, semiotics, psychology, history, cultural studies, or computers, Ideogram contains new ideas and insights that are sure to challenge preconceptions and provoke thought. "In this informative and entertaining book, once and for all, J. Marshall Unger thoroughly demolishes the notion that Chinese characters directly convey meaning without any reference to specific languages and cultural contexts. To do so, he unleashes an amazing array of weapons, ranging from the perceptions of a famous comedian, the techniques of specialists in memorization, the secrets of shorthand, the mysteries of probability, computer science, and artificial intelligence, to the profundities of philosophy. With a razor-sharp mind and deft pen, he exposes the self-contradictory folly of those who would assert some sort of independent, transcendental status for Chinese characters. Anyone who reads this book from beginning to end--parts of it are easy and fun, others are challenging and demanding--will surely come to the same conclusion as the author: in reality, there is no such thing as an ideogram." --- from the foreword by Victor H. Mair.
Price: $56.00
[Notify me when price goes down.]
|
|
Disembodied Voices: Music and Culture in an Early Modern Italian Convent
Piecing together 200 years of convent history, this engaging narrative tells the story of the nuns of Santa Cristina della Fondazza--gifted singers, instrumentalists, and composers who used music to circumvent ecclesiastical authority and to forge links with the world beyond convent walls. Craig Monson reconstructs the daily lives of Italian nuns, often in their own words, and relates their musical life to the broad social context in which it unfolded. He introduces a virtually unknown nun composer, relating her family history and how the convent allowed her creativity to flower. The study is meticulously researched, marvelously detailed, and entertaining to read. In sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century Bologna, approximately one-seventh of the entire female population lived behind convent walls. Santa Cristina became home for a number of gifted women musicians, many from among the upper classes, who sought "respectable" musical careers. Monson documents the struggle of these women as they fought to maintain their musical and ritual traditions in the face of persistent opposition from church officials. Figuring prominently in the story of Santa Cristina is Lucrezia Vizzana (1590-1662), Bologna's only published nun composer, who entered the convent at the age of eight. This study is as much about social and cultural history as it is about music. The discussion ranges widely beyond musicology to draw upon art, social and political history, labor history, theology, and gender studies..
Price: $148.92
[ Notify me when price goes down.]
|
|
Trade in disembodied technology and total factor productivity in OECD countries [An article from: Research Policy]
This digital document is a journal article from Research Policy, published by Elsevier in 2007. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser. Description: This paper searches for evidence of the importance of international trade in disembodied technology as a specific diffusion mechanism, using a sample of 16 OECD countries from 1971 to 1995. Consistent with previous research, this paper finds that there is international diffusion of technology. The measure for international trade in technology is OECD's Technology Balance of Payments statistics, which are country-level data on international transactions of disembodied technology. The econometric analysis explicitly takes into account non-stationarity of the variables, and for this reason, dynamic ordinary least squares (DOLS) is the estimation method used in the present study. The analysis shows that the effect of trade in disembodied technology on the importer's productivity varies across countries. Specifically, within OECD countries not in the G7 group, technology imports increase the host-country's total factor productivity, with the effect being stronger in the initial years of the sampling period. There is no evidence on this positive effect of technology trade on productivity in the case of G7 countries. .
Price: $10.95
[ Notify me when price goes down.]
|
|
|
|
|