Books about Passivity from Amazon.com

"Community, Identity, Stability" is the motto of Aldous Huxley's utopian World State. Here everyone consumes daily grams of soma, to fight depression, babies are born in laboratories, and the most popular form of entertainment is a "Feelie," a movie that stimulates the senses of sight, hearing, and touch. Though there is no violence and everyone is provided for, Bernard Marx feels something is missing and senses his relationship with a young women has the potential to be much more than the confines of their existence allow. Huxley foreshadowed many of the practices and gadgets we take for granted today--let's hope the sterility and absence of individuality he predicted aren't yet to come..
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The astonishing novel Brave New World, originally published in 1932, presents Aldous Huxley's vision of the future -- of a world utterly transformed. Through the most efficient scientific and psychological engineering, people are genetically designed to be passive and therefore consistently useful to the ruling class. This powerful work of speculative fiction sheds a blazing critical light on the present and is considered to be Aldous Huxley's most enduring masterpiece.

The nonfiction work Brave New World Revisited, first published in 1958, is a fascinating work in which Huxley uses his tremendous knowledge of human relations to compare the modern-day world with his prophetic fantasy envisioned in Brave New World, including the threats to humanity, such as overpopulation, propaganda, and chemical persuasion.

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Radical Passivity examines the notion of passivity in the work of Levinas, Blanchot, and Agamben, three thinkers of exceptional intellectual privacy whose writings have decidedly altered the literary and philosophical cultures of our era. Placing their use of passivity in the context of Heidegger and Kant, Wall argues that any philosophical understanding of Levinas's ethics, Blanchot's aesthetics, or Agamben's community must begin with an understanding of a "logic" of passivity that in fact originates (in the modern era at least) in Kant's analysis of the transcendental schema..
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Process Controlintroduces an emerging area in process control – control system analysis and design based on the concept of passive systems. Passive systems are a class of processes that dissipate certain types of physical or virtual energy, defined by Lyapunov-like functions. Passivity and associated stability conditions form one of the cornerstones in control theory and have recently begun to be applied in process control. Defined as an input-output property, the concept of passivity implies stability conditions for interconnected systems. Passive systems are minimum phase and thus very easy to control via output feedback, even if they are highly nonlinear and coupled. Therefore, the passivity framework can be used in process input-output controllability analysis as well as control design. Here, the concept of passive systems is also linked to process thermodynamics to provide process engineers with insights into the physical bases of the above results.

In this book, passivity-based developments in the areas of robust process control, decentralized control, fault tolerant control, process controllability analysis and nonlinear process control are addressed systematically for the first time. Written for the industrial, engineering and academic communities, the emphasis is placed on results that enhance insight and intuition. Application issues are illustrated by case studies in all the main chapters. MATLAB^® routines for selected examples and a library of functions that implement the system analysis and control design methods developed in Process Control can be downloaded from springer.com. This book presents the reader with both the conceptual framework and practical tools for passivity-based system analysis and control.

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Robot arms are found in almost every modern manufacturing plant in the world, but their limited dexterity creates problems for their efficient control. Understanding these problems in advance is vital in robotic design. This book concerns itself with the theory and practice of these control problems. It will be of great interest to all robotic researchers and engineers..
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The phantom of inner passivity filters our perceptions of reality and distorts our sense of self. It binds us to a second-hand experience of ourself.

Inner passivity, which affects men and women equally, is much more than just our difficulty in standing up for our rights. It is complex and mysterious, concealed in our psyche beneath feelings of being helpless, overwhelmed, and indecisive.

This unconscious screening system contributes to feelings of being defective or unworthy, and it plays a role in procrastination, failure, and addictive and compulsive behaviors. It is a factor in hundreds of symptoms, including anxiety, fear, anger, and depression.

Free of inner passivity, we connect with out creativity, self-expression, and capacity for intimacy. We clear the way for the fulfillment of our courage, integrity, compassion, and love-and for reunion with ourself..
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This book gives a unified treatment of classical input-output stability theory and recent developments in nonlinear robust and passivity-based control The synthesis between these areas is provided by the theory of dissipative systems. Specifically, the small-gain and passivity theorems and their implications for nonlinear stability and stabilization are discussed from this vantage-ground. The connection between L2-gain and passivity via scattering is detailed.
The passivity concepts are enriched by a generalised Hamiltonian formalism, emphasizing the close relations with modeling and control by interconnection. Feedback equivalence to a passive system and resulting stabilization strategies are discussed.
The potential of L2-gain techniques in nonlinear control is demonstrated, including a compact treatment of the nonlinear H optimal control problem. This book supplies the reader with a succinct, informative summary of a fundamental and rapidly developing area of nonlinear control theory..
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In the present book, Pauline Phemister argues against traditional Anglo-American interpretations of Leibniz as an idealist who conceives ultimate reality as a plurality of mind-like immaterial beings and for whom physical bodies are ultimately unreal and our perceptions of them illusory. Re-reading the texts without the prior assumption of idealism allows the more material aspects of Leibniz's metaphysics to emerge. Leibniz is found to advance a synthesis of idealism and materialism. His ontology posits indivisible, living, animal-like corporeal substances as the real metaphysical constituents of the universe; his epistemology combines sense-experience and reason; and his ethics fuses confused perceptions and insensible appetites with distinct perceptions and rational choice. In the light of his sustained commitment to the reality of bodies, Phemister re-examines his dynamics, the doctrine of pre-established harmony and his views on freedom. The image of Leibniz as a rationalist philosopher who values activity and reason over passivity and sense-experience is replaced by the one of a philosopher who recognises that, in the created world, there can only be activity if there is also passivity; minds, souls and forms if there is also matter; good if there is evil; perfection if there is imperfection..
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