'A collection of ghost stories in and around Lafayette, Louisiana'--

Europa sì, Europa no, più Europa, meno Europa, l'Europa è morta: quasi quotidianamente, soprattutto con l'accentuarsi della crisi, i commenti si sprecano. Mentre si affrontano importanti scadenze, il 2013 viene dichiarato Anno europeo dei cittadini e si celebra il ventennale dell'entrata in vigore del Trattato di Maastricht. Il libro è una sorta di 'diario di bordo' per capire e farsi un'opinione che non sia solo di pancia: il viaggio comincia proprio con le gioie e i dolori legati al Trattato di Maastricht. Si percorrono poi i successi e i fallimenti, fino alla crisi arrivata dagli Stati Uniti, che ripropone il tema di una governance economica perduta (o mai trovata). L'evaporazione del consenso popolare e la sfiducia dei mercati costringono in qualche modo a riaprire il cantiere Europa, ma gli architetti sono incerti sulla ristrutturazione da fare, sulle ditte da coinvolgere, sui tempi di consegna e anche sui futuri inquilini. Eppure non bisogna fermarsi: gli autori delineano come è possibile procedere. Prefazione di Romano Prodi.

Confronting death means looking it squarely in the face. Contemporary society refuses to do so, preferring to hide it and hide from it. Funeral rites no longer function as a way to mediate death or to maintain a link between the living and dead. Today the disappearance of certain funerary practices attests to the denial of death as such. They reflect a preference for focusing on remembering the life of the deceased in order to neutralize death, thus displacing the value of mourning, now viewed as something to be done as quickly as possible. Moreover, science, like religion before it and like the contemporary 'cult of the body,' has fed our fantasies about immortality, promising us longer lives of better quality, and even the possibility of conquering death altogether.

Despite all these attempts to overcome or neutralize death, humanity has been unable to eliminate its anxiety about death and nothingness. True to her roots in phenomenology, Dastur not only examines these contemporary tendencies with a critical eye but also argues that we must once again learn to assume death, to become mortal, to learn how to die. Death is not the last moment of human life, but rather its essential attribute.

Dastur's skill as a 'translator' of phenomenology into accessible and clear prose is nowhere more apparent than in her 'little book on death'-indeed, the intended audience is less those who specialize in phenomenology or academic philosophy than a nonspecialist public hungry for philosophical reflection on what is closest to us. And nothing is closer to us than the ever-present possibility of our own imminent death.

As its subtitle suggests, this book is an 'introduction to philosophy,' one that obliges the reader to ask what it means to be human and to embrace death and mortality as the defining essence of our humanity.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-workshop proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Languages, Methodologies, and Development Tools for Multi-Agent Systems, LADS 2010, held in Lyon, France, in August/September 2010, as part of MALLOW, a federation of workshops on Multi-Agent Logics, Languages, and Organizations. The 8 revised full papers presented were carefully selected during two rounds of reviews from 11 initial submissions. The papers address issues related to theories, methodologies, models and approaches that are needed to facilitate the development of multi-agent systems ensuring their predictablity and verification.

Critical Care Clinicians can use general drug references (Micomedex, Lexicomp) for data on dosing of high-alert medications in special patient populations but these references are not available to all healthcare clinicians, they are expensive and they are not specific to high-alert medications or critically ill patients. Doctors, nurses and pharmacists in the hospital setting will benefit from having one resource with all of this information. The purpose of this reference manual would be to guide critical care clinicians on dosing of high-alert medications in special patient populations. The most important feature of the book will be a summary of primary literature using tables when possible. This will be useful to readers because currently a reference book does not exist that guides clinicians in these difficult dosing decisions.

Objectivity has a history, and it is full of surprises. In Objectivity, Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison chart the emergence of objectivity in the mid-nineteenth-century sciences--and show how the concept differs from its alternatives, truth-to-nature and trained judgment. This is a story of lofty epistemic ideals fused with workaday practices in the making of scientific images. From the eighteenth through the early twenty-first centuries, the images that reveal the deepest commitments of the empirical sciences--from anatomy to crystallography--are those featured in scientific atlases, the compendia that teach practitioners what is worth looking at and how to look at it. Galison and Daston use atlas images to uncover a hidden history of scientific objectivity and its rivals. Whether an atlas maker idealizes an image to capture the essentials in the name of truth-to-nature or refuses to erase even the most incidental detail in the name of objectivity or highlights patterns in the name of trained judgment is a decision enforced by an ethos as well as by an epistemology. As Daston and Galison argue, atlases shape the subjects as well as the objects of science. To pursue objectivity--or truth-to-nature or trained judgment--is simultaneously to cultivate a distinctive scientific self wherein knowing and knower converge. Moreover, the very point at which they visibly converge is in the very act of seeing not as a separate individual but as a member of a particular scientific community. Embedded in the atlas image, therefore, are the traces of consequential choices about knowledge, persona, and collective sight. Objectivity is a book addressed to anyone interested in the elusive and crucial notion of objectivity-- and in what it means to peer into the world scientifically. Lorraine Daston is Director at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, Germany. She is the coauthor of Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750 and the editor of Things That Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science (both Zone Books). Peter Galison is Pellegrino University Professor of the History of Science and of Physics at Harvard University. He is the author of Einstein's Clocks, Poincaré's Maps: Empires of Time, How Experiments End, and Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics, and other books, and coeditor (with Emily Thompson) of The Architecture of Science (MIT Press, 1999).

Specification and Verification of Multi-agent Systems presents a coherent treatment of the area of formal specification and verification of agent-based systems with a special focus on verification of multi-agent programs. This edited volume includes contributions from international leading researchers in the area, addressing logical formalisms and techniques, such as model checking, theorem proving, and axiomatisations for (semi) automatic verification of agent-based systems. Chapters include: • Using Theorem Proving to Verify Properties of Agent Programs • The Refinement of Multi-Agent Systems • Model Checking Agent Communication • Directions for Agent Model Checking • Model Checking Logics of Strategic Ability: Complexity • Correctness of Mult-Agent Programs: A Hybrid Approach • The Norm Implementation Problem in Normative Multi-Agent Systems • A Verification Logic for GOAL Agents • Using the Maude Term Rewriting Language for Agent Development with Formal Foundations • The Cognitive Agents Specification Language and Verification Environment • A Temporal Trace Language for Formal Modelling and Analysis of Agent Systemns • Assurance of Agent Systems: What Role Should Formal Verification Play? Specification and Verification of Multi-agent Systems is a comprehensive guide that makes a useful tool for researchers, practitioners and students, and serves as a reference work summarizing the state of the art in an accessible manner.

La cantante Francesca della Monica e l'attore e regista Massimo Verdastro creano nel 1999, la Compagnia a loro intitolata. Questo libro, curato da Massimo Verdastro con la collaborazione di Olga Macaluso e Mascha Bom, documenta dieci anni di intenso lavoro fra teatro, musica e scrittura e si avvale, oltre che della presentazione di Luca Scarlini, di testimonianze ed articoli di scrittori, studiosi e critici, e di una galleria di immagini di importanti fotografi.

Multi-Agent Systems are a promising technology to develop the next generation open distributed complex software systems. The main focus of the research community has been on the development of concepts (concerning both mental and social attitudes), architectures, techniques, and general approaches to the analysis and specification of multi-agent systems. This contribution has been fragmented, without any clear way of “putting it all together”, rendering it inaccessible to students and young researchers, non-experts, and practitioners. Successful multi-agent systems development is guaranteed only if we can bridge the gap from analysis and design to effective implementation.Multi-Agent Programming: Languages, Tools and Applications presents a number of mature and influential multi-agent programming languages, platforms, development tools and methodologies, and realistic applications, summarizing the state of the art in an accessible manner for professionals and computer science students at all levels.

Importante opera che narra le vicende storiche di Tarquinia basandosi su una rigorosa documentazione costituita non solo da fonti librarie, ma anche da reperti archeologici, iscrizioni su marmi, antichi resti di decorazioni e mosaici. Il volume è completato dalle biografie degli uomini illustri e dalla narrazione delle circostanze che accompagnarono la costruzione dei principali monumenti ed edifici sacri.

Imagine a world without things. There would be nothing to describe, nothing to explain, remark, interpret, or complain about. Without things, we would stop speaking; we would become as mute as things are alleged to be. In nine original essays, internationally renowned historians of art and of science seek to understand how objects become charged with significance without losing their gritty materiality. True to the particularity of things, each of the essays singles out one object for close attention: a Bosch drawing, the freestanding column, a Prussian island, soap bubbles, early photographs, glass flowers, Rorschach blots, newspaper clippings, paintings by Jackson Pollock. Each is revealed to be a node around which meanings accrete thickly. But not just any meanings: what these things are made of and how they are made shape what they can mean. Neither the pure texts of semiotics nor the brute objects of positivism, these things are saturated with cultural significance. Things become talkative when they fuse matter and meaning; they lapse into speechlessness when their matter and meanings no longer mesh. Each of the nine objects examined in this book had its historical moment, when the match of this thing to that thought seemed irresistible. At these junctures, certain things become objects of fascination, association, and endless consideration; they begin to talk. Things that talk fleetingly realize the dream of a perfect language, in which words and world merge.Essays Lorraine Daston, Peter Galison, Anke te Heesen, Caroline A. Jones, Joseph Leo Koerner, Antoine Picon, Simon Schaffer, Joel Snyder, and M. Norton and Elaine M. Wise. Lorraine Daston is Director at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, Germany. She is the coauthor of Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750 (Zone Books).

Objectivity has a history, and it is full of surprises. In Objectivity, Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison chart the emergence of objectivity in the mid-nineteenth-century sciences--and show how the concept differs from its alternatives, truth-to-nature and trained judgment. This is a story of lofty epistemic ideals fused with workaday practices in the making of scientific images. From the eighteenth through the early twenty-first centuries, the images that reveal the deepest commitments of the empirical sciences--from anatomy to crystallography--are those featured in scientific atlases, the compendia that teach practitioners what is worth looking at and how to look at it. Galison and Daston use atlas images to uncover a hidden history of scientific objectivity and its rivals. Whether an atlas maker idealizes an image to capture the essentials in the name of truth-to-nature or refuses to erase even the most incidental detail in the name of objectivity or highlights patterns in the name of trained judgment is a decision enforced by an ethos as well as by an epistemology. As Daston and Galison argue, atlases shape the subjects as well as the objects of science. To pursue objectivity--or truth-to-nature or trained judgment--is simultaneously to cultivate a distinctive scientific self wherein knowing and knower converge. Moreover, the very point at which they visibly converge is in the very act of seeing not as a separate individual but as a member of a particular scientific community. Embedded in the atlas image, therefore, are the traces of consequential choices about knowledge, persona, and collective sight. Objectivity is a book addressed to anyone interested in the elusive and crucial notion of objectivity-- and in what it means to peer into the world scientifically. Lorraine Daston is Director at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, Germany. She is the coauthor of Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750 and the editor of Things That Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science (both Zone Books). Peter Galison is Pellegrino University Professor of the History of Science and of Physics at Harvard University. He is the author of Einstein's Clocks, Poincaré's Maps: Empires of Time, How Experiments End, and Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics, and other books, and coeditor (with Emily Thompson) of The Architecture of Science (MIT Press, 1999).

Is anthropomorphism a scientific sin? Scientists and animal researchers routinely warn against 'animal stories,' and contrast rigorous explanations and observation to facile and even fanciful projections about animals. Yet many of us, scientists and researchers included, continue to see animals as humans and humans as animals. As this innovative new collection demonstrates, humans use animals to transcend the confines of self and species; they also enlist them to symbolize, dramatize, and illuminate aspects of humans' experience and fantasy. Humans merge with animals in stories, films, philosophical speculations, and scientific treatises. In their performance with humans on many stages and in different ways, animals move us to think.

From Victorian vivisectionists to elephant conservation, from ancient Indian mythology to pet ownership in the contemporary United States, our understanding of both animals and what it means to be human has been shaped by anthropomorphic thinking. The contributors to Thinking with Animals explore the how and why of anthropomorphism, drawing attention to its rich and varied uses. Prominent scholars in the fields of anthropology, ethology, history, and philosophy, as well as filmmakers and photographers, take a closer look at how deeply and broadly ways of imagining animals have transformed humans and animals alike.

Essays in the book investigate the changing patterns of anthropomorphism across different time periods and settings, as well as their transformative effects, both figuratively and literally, upon animals, humans, and their interactions. Examining how anthropomorphic thinking 'works' in a range of different contexts, contributors reveal the ways in which anthropomorphism turns out to be remarkably useful: it can promote good health and spirits, enlist support in political causes, sell products across boundaries of culture of and nationality, crystallize and strengthen social values, and hold up a philosophical mirror to the human predicament.

Winner of the History of Science Society's Pfizer Prize

Wonders and the Order of Nature is about the ways in which European naturalists from the High Middle Ages through the Enlightenment used wonder and wonders, the passion and its objects, to envision themselves and the natural world. Monsters, gems that shone in the dark, petrifying springs, celestial apparitions—these were the marvels that adorned romances, puzzled philosophers, lured collectors, and frightened the devout. Drawing on the histories of art, science, philosophy, and literature, Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park explore and explain how wonder and wonders fortified princely power, rewove the texture of scientific experience, and shaped the sensibility of intellectuals. This is a history of the passions of inquiry, of how wonder sometimes inflamed, sometimes dampened curiosity about nature's best-kept secrets. Refracted through the prism of wonders, the order of nature splinters into a spectrum of orders, a tour of possible worlds.

Alla sensibilità di oggi potrà apparire strano, ma per secoli la cultura europea ha dedicato un'attenzione costante a mostri e prodigi, portenti e miracoli, mirabilia di ogni forma e natura. Uova di struzzo e corni d'unicorno, sorgenti curative e tessuti rari, automi e congegni meccanici sono stati di volta in volta fonti di paura o di piacere, oggetti da esibire in spettacoli o da analizzare con cura. A firma di due delle più autorevoli storiche dell'ultima generazione, il libro ricostruisce la storia e il significato di questo universo popolato di fatti strani e delle reazioni di meraviglia, curiosità e timore che esso ha via via suscitato su scienziati e filosofi, collezionisti e viaggiatori, medici e letterati.

Winner of the History of Science Society's Pfizer Prize'This book is about setting the limits of the natural and the limits of the known, wonders and wonder, from the High Middle Ages through the Enlightenment. A history of wonders as objects of natural inquiry is simultaneously an intellectual history of the orders of nature. A history of wonder as a passion of natural inquiry is simultaneously a history of the evolving collective sensibility of naturalists. Pursued in tandem, these interwoven histories show how the two sides of knowledge, objective order and subjective sensibility, were obverse and reverse of the same coin rather than opposed to one another.'-- From the IntroductionWonders and the Order of Nature is about the ways in which European naturalists from the High Middle Ages through the Enlightenment used wonder and wonders, the passion and its objects, to envision themselves and the natural world. Monsters, gems that shone in the dark, petrifying springs, celestial apparitions--these were the marvels that adorned romances, puzzled philosophers, lured collectors, and frightened the devout. Drawing on the histories of art, science, philosophy, and literature, Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park explore and explain how wonder and wonders fortified princely power, rewove the texture of scientific experience, and shaped the sensibility of intellectuals. This is a history of the passions of inquiry, of how wonder sometimes inflamed, sometimes dampened curiosity about nature's best-kept secrets. Refracted through the prism of wonders, the order of nature splinters into a spectrum of orders, a tour of possible worlds.

What did it mean to be reasonable in the Age of Reason? Classical probabilists from Jakob Bernouli through Pierre Simon Laplace intended their theory as an answer to this question--as 'nothing more at bottom than good sense reduced to a calculus,' in Laplace's words. In terms that can be easily grasped by nonmathematicians, Lorraine Daston demonstrates how this view profoundly shaped the internal development of probability theory and defined its applications.