Karl Deisseroth is pioneering bold new treatments for depression and other psychiatric diseases. By sending pulses of light into the brain, Deisseroth can control neural activity with remarkable precision. In this short talk, Deisseroth gives an thoughtful and awe-inspiring overview of his Stanford University lab's groundbreaking research in "optogenetics".
Learn about the frontiers of human health from seven of Stanford's most innovative faculty members. Inspired by a format used at the TED Conference (http://www.ted.com), each speaker delivers a highly engaging talk in just 10-20 minutes about his or her research. Learn about Stanford's newest and most exciting discoveries in neuroscience, bioengineering, brain imaging, psychology, and more.
Sound Targets: American Soldiers and Music in the Iraq War (BOOK): by Jonathan Pieslak
Though a part of American soldiers' lives since the Revolutionary War, by World War II music could be broadcast to the front. Today it accompanies soldiers from the recruiting office to the battlefield. For this book, Jonathan Pieslak interviewed returning veterans to learn about the place of music in the Iraq War and in contemporary American military culture in general. Pieslak describes how American soldiers hear, share, use, and produce music both on and off duty. He studies the role of music from recruitment campaigns and basic training to its use "in country" before and during missions. Pieslak explores themes of power, chaos, violence, and survival in the metal and hip-hop music so popular among the troops, and offers insight into the daily lives of American soldiers in the Middle East.
"Sound Targets reveals just how pervasively popular music has shaped contemporary U.S. military culture.... This thoughtful and provocative study will certainly attract a wide audience concerned with music's roles in the time of war." – W. Anthony Sheppard, author of Revealing Masks: Exotic Influences and Ritualized Performance in Modernist Music Theater
To Everything there is a Season: Pete Seeger and the Power of Song (BOOK): by Allan M. Winkler
Folk music has long played a vital role in supporting reform movements in the United States. Radical activists, seeking to counter a variety of abuses in mid-to-late 20th century America, often used music to express their hopes, aims, and goals. In "To Everything There Is a Season": Pete Seeger and the Power of Song, Allan Winkler describes how folk singer Pete Seeger applied his musical talents to improve conditions for less fortunate people everywhere. This book uses Seeger's long life and wonderful songs to reflect on the important role folk music played in various protest movements and to answer such fundamental questions as: What was the source of Seeger's appeal? How did he capture the attention and affection of people around the world? And why is song such a powerful medium?
"Winkler's book is obviously a labor of love.... The book is carefully written by a scholar who identifies with Seeger and his causes.... Winkler's fine book should introduce readers to Seeger and encourage further exploration of Dunaway's scholarship. But of greater significance is the encouragement that Winkler gives his readers to listen and sing along with Seeger's music. Bonus benefits with the Winkler book include a preface by folksinger Tom Paxton and a compact disc of ten Seeger tunes."—History News Network
"Allan Winkler...has written the best brief biography of Seeger in print."--PopMatters
"Winkler pays welcome attention to how Toshi Seeger made possible her husband's life as protester and artist -- a fact that can escape Pete.... Winkler's includes a CD of 10 songs, the indispensable way, after all, of apprehending why Seeger's music sounds the chords of our national life."—The Plain Dealer
You can find all of these books on the 4th floor in the Technology and Photography section located in the T's. The range of sub-topics is amazing!
Characteristics Finite Element Methods in Computational Fluid Dynamics (BOOK): by Joe Iannelli
This book details a systematic characteristics-based finite element procedure to investigate incompressible, free-surface and compressible flows. Several sections derive the Fluid Dynamics equations from thermo-mechanics principles and develop this multi-dimensional and infinite-directional upstream procedure by combining a finite element discretization with an implicit non-linearly stable Runge-Kutta time integration for the numerical solution of the Euler and Navier Stokes equations. Based on the mathematics and physics of multi-dimensional characteristics, convection as well as acoustics, and inducing by design a controllable multi-dimensional upwind bias that can be locally optimized, the procedure crisply captures contact discontinuities, normal as well as oblique shocks, and generates essentially non-oscillatory solutions for incompressible, subsonic, transonic, supersonic, and hypersonic inviscid and viscous flows with chemical reactions and work, heat and mass transfer.
Enterprise Governance and Enterprise Engineering (BOOK): by Jan A.P. Hoogervorst
Achieving enterprise success necessitates addressing enterprises in ways that match the complexity and dynamics of the modern enterprise environment. However, since the majority of enterprise strategic initiatives appear to fail – among which those regarding information technology – the currently often practiced approaches to strategy development and implementation seem more an obstacle than an enabler for strategic enterprise success.
IRA, the Bombs and the Bullets: A History of Deadly Ingenuity (BOOK): by A.R. Oppenheimer
I was some-what unacquainted with the history of the IRA so I was overwhelmed with the detail and research that went into this comprehensive work. I began to get a real feel for their struggle and the the absolute ingenuity as I worked my way into the book and was able to absorb the intricacies of the campaigns. This isn't a book to take lightly. I takes you into the details and history of the nuts and bolts of the bombings and the challenges. It also gave me a better insight into the whys and what-fors of the "troubles". If you are looking for a thorough explanation of the bombings and the strife, this is a good book to get you grounded in the subject. – David M. Quintana
Katrina: Personal Objects, Photography (BOOK): by Jarret Schecter
Because of government failure, millions viewed political
ineptitude, social inequity and an unpaved America where the streets were lined with anything but gold.
The images in this book show the abandoned and hardest-hit district of the Lower Ninth Ward over two years later, and still counting today.
Vacant and dilapidated, the city is a shadow of its former self. However, in these seemingly lifeless shadows, and through the broken windows of empty houses, one can eerily see the ghostly reflections of life and death in the form of PERSONAL OBJECTS.
These intensely personal items have been abandoned and left, and in most cases, will never be reclaimed.
This small format book touches on the ephemeral, and
surprisingly often beautiful, remnants of belongings that once made up the memories and precious moments of peoples’ lives.
In 1990 Jarret Schecter purchased a Pentax camera. Since then he has traveled the world. Committed to socio-political issues, Schecter believes that photography can bring awareness to social injustices the world faces today. Schecter, born in 1963, lives in New York City
Water in the 21st-Century West: A High Country News Reader (BOOK): by Char Miller
Water in the 21st-Century West captures the range and nature of the arguments that have defined water politics in the region over the past decade. The collection probes the issues and explores creative attempts to find solutions, bringing a focus and clarity to the most contentious environmental issue the West faces. Water in the 21st-Century West will be an essential primer in assessing and mapping the West’s water future.
Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before (BOOK): by Michael Fried
From the late 1970s onward, serious art photography began to be made at large scale and for the wall. Michael Fried argues that this immediately compelled photographers to grapple with issues centering on the relationship between the photograph and the viewer standing before it that until then had been the province only of painting. Fried further demonstrates that certain philosophically deep problems—associated with notions of theatricality, literalness, and objecthood, and touching on the role of original intention in artistic production, first discussed in his controversial essay “Art and Objecthood” (1967)—have come to the fore once again in recent photography. This means that the photographic “ghetto” no longer exists; instead photography is at the cutting edge of contemporary art as never before.
Manila Men in the New World: Filipino Migration to Mexico and the Americas from the Sixteenth Century (BOOK): by Floro L. Mercene
The Filipino diaspora is at least four hundred years old. For two-and-a-half centuries, Filipinos by the hundreds traveled yearly to Mexico and the Americas, with many electing to stay and find a new life. The chief means for migration was the Manila galleon that sailed between the Philippines and Mexico to carry on a lively trade in Asian goods in exchange for silver from the Americas and the trappings of civilization from the West. The end of the galleon trade in 1815 did not stop the exodus of Filipinos to foreign lands as they began to discover the lure of other exotic ports in Asia and Europe. This book attempts to answer the question often asked: What happened to those Filipinos who started the diaspora? The answers are important because they fill a gap in the long history of this adventurous race.
Mortality, Mourning and Mortuary Practices in Indigenous Australia(BOOK): edited by Katie Glaskin
Drawing on ethnography of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities across Australia, Mortality, "Mourning and Mortuary Practices in Indigenous Australia" focuses on the current ways in which indigenous people confront and manage various aspects of death. The contributors employ their contemporary and long-term anthropological fieldwork with indigenous Australians to construct rich accounts of indigenous practices and beliefs and to engage with questions relating to the frequent experience of death within the context of unprecedented change and premature mortality.The volume makes use of extensive empirical material to address questions of inequality with specific reference to mortality, thus contributing to the anthropology of indigenous Australia whilst attending to its theoretical, methodological and political concerns. As such, it will appeal not only to anthropologists but also to those interested in social inequality, the social and psychosocial consequences of death, and the conceptualization and manipulation of the relationships between the living and the dead.
Popular Opposition to Irish Home Rule in Edwardian Britain(BOOK): by Daniel M. Jackson
This groundbreaking volume sheds light on the complex realities of British politics prior to 1914, showing that from the start of the Third Home Rule Bill crisis, there was considerable popular interest in the Irish issue. Isolating this movement at the end of the long nineteenth century, where communal and confessional identities were just as powerful as class, and native hostility to Catholicism and Irish migration still prevailed, Daniel Jackson demonstrates the power of the enormous Home Rule protests in Britain. Through studying these massive demonstrations, the author captures the opinions of those made voiceless by history and explores how the Ulster question allowed Conservative politicians to gain popular enthusiasm and bridge the gap between elites and the masses.
Russia's Wars of Emergence, 1460-1730 (BOOK): by Carol B. Stevens
Russia's emergence as a Great Power in the eighteenth century is usually attributed to Peter I's radical programme of Westernising' reforms. But the Russian military did not simply copy European armies. Adapting the tactics of its neighbours on both sides, Russia created a powerful strategy of its own, integrating steppe defence with European concerns. In Russia's Wars of Emergence, Carol Belkin Stevens examines the social and political factors underpinning Muscovite military history, the eventual success of the Russian Empire and the sacrifices made for power.
Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus: A Ghost Story and a Biography (BOOK): by Clifton Crais and Pamela Scully
Sara Baartman, a young South African woman brought to London in 1810 and displayed seminude to show off her ample bottom, was named the Hottentot Venus by her captors and managers. Historians Crais and Scully examine the cultural context of Baartman’s exploitation in Europe as Westerners grappled with issues of race and sex and later racialized science. Baartman attracted the attention of prominent British abolitionists and French scientists as well as voyeurs. After five years of researching archives and libraries and conducting genealogical research to uncover some of Baartman’s relatives, the authors also look beyond Baartman’s life as a curiosity and an exhibit to explore her life as a woman. Crais and Scully place Baartman’s contributions in such areas as the rights of the unlawfully detained, global feminism, and later—when her body was returned to South Africa from France—the politics of indigenous identity. Readers who enjoyed African Queen (2007), by Rachel Holmes, will appreciate this further examination of the life of an extraordinary woman. –Vanessa Bush, Booklist
State of Suffering: Political Violence and Community Survival in Fiji(BOOK): by Susanna Trnka
Throughout this book, Trnka focuses on the collective social process through which violence is embodied, articulated, and silenced by those it targets. Her sensitive ethnography is a valuable addition to the global conversation about the impact of political violence on community life.
