Tendai Rinos Mwanaka wrote letters to Robert Mugabe, Constantine Chiwenga, Morgan Tsvangirai, The Zimbabweans, Emerson Mnangagwa, Nelson Chamisa, The Police, and in between infused the letters with deeply literary and psychoanalytic essays on the motivations of political players in Zimbabwe. Using this nonfiction literary form, the letter writing form, to protest against Robert Mugabe and the Mugabeism the letters were initially written to protest against Mugabe's continuing clinging to power, the collection has been expanded to include other issues related to Zimbabwe society. As the country moves towards a better multiparty democracy if there is change in thinking in these very important facets shaping Zimbabwe such as constitutionalism and rule of law, change and devolution of government, developmental agenda, and freedom of expression and association.
"After the Revolutionary War ended, the new American nation grappled with a question about its identity: Were the states sovereign entities or subordinates to a powerful federal government? The War of 1812 brought this vexing issue into sharp relief, as a national government intent on waging an unpopular war confronted a populace in Massachusetts that was vigorously opposed to it. Maine, which at the time was part of Massachusetts, served as the battleground in this political struggle. Joshua M. Smith recounts an innovative history of the war, focusing on how it specifically affected what was then called the District of Maine. Drawing on archival materials from the United States, Britain, and Canada, Smith exposes the bitter experience of Maine's citizens during that conflict as they endured multiple hardships, including starvation, burdensome taxation, smuggling, treason, and enemy occupation. War's inherent miseries, along with a changing relationship between regional and national identities, gave rise to a statehood movement that rejected a Boston-centric worldview in favor of a broadly American identity"--
This book traces the emergence of the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) from 1955 to 1963 amid the broader reshaping of the institutional architecture of post-war Europe. It considers the ill-fated Free Trade Area (FTA) proposal, the subsequent creation of EFTA, and the resulting division of Western Europe into two distinct trading blocs. At its core, the book provides an international history of a formative moment of post-war and European integration history, and explores the intense technical discussions among European states as they grappled with the prospect of deeper economic and political unity. It thus provides the first detailed analysis combining the FTA and EFTA negotiations, considering both state and non-state actors. Drawing on archives from Britain, Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, Norway, the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, and the US, as well as the records of the OEEC and EFTA, it examines the decision-making processes of those intimately involved as well as the institutional settings within which they were forced to reconcile their positions. At a key moment of contemporary European friction, the book offers a dialogue between the past and those trying to make sense of events that continue to shape Europe today.
This book follows the public life of Michael Palaiologos from his early days and upbringing, through to his assumption of the Byzantine imperial throne in 1258. It explores multiple narratives, highlighting the various public communities in the Byzantine polity, primarily focusing on intellectuals and clerks rather than the emperor himself. Drawing on insights from power relations, studies of class and the public sphere, this book provides an account of thirteenth-century Byzantium that highlights the role of communicative and symbolic actions in the public sphere, and argues they were integral to Palaiologos' political success. Aleksandar Jovanovic is Sessional Instructor in History at the University of the Fraser Valley in Abbotsford, Canada.
This book provides an end-to-end view of revenue management in the hospitality industry. The book highlights the origins of hotel reservations systems and revenue management, challenges unique to hotels, revenue management models, new generation retailing, and personalization and steps required to remain competitive in the marketplace. This book is intended for practitioners to understand the basics and have a comprehensive view of the impacts of revenue management on product distribution, reservations, inventory control, including the latest advances in the field of attribute-based room pricing and inventory control. There are several aspects of revenue management that are not covered in books and journal articles such as hotel pricing, hotel fully allocated costs, content parity, impact of Online Travel Agencies on hotels, competitive revenue management and attribute-based room pricing and inventory control which represents the last frontier in hotel revenue management with intelligent retailing. Leveraging emerging technologies, such as Artificial Intelligence and Blockchain and the future state of revenue management, are also addressed.
The essential provides a brief introduction to the main features of Richard Rorty's neopragatism. At the same time, it offers a systematic guide to a fruitful reading of Rorty. The author proposes to read it as a fragile balance of pragmatism and romanticism by which Rorty seeks to change our self-image. Moreover, he elucidates this transformative ambition through a sketch of "Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity" and the utopian figure of the liberal ironist. The essential concludes with a reference to Rorty's hitherto unrecognized ethico-political motivation and with a methodological suggestion for further reading of his texts: One must apply the pragmatist method to himself. The content Introduction: Reading Rorty's work as a balance of pragmatism and romanticism Revolutionary language game pragmatism after the linguistic turn The strong romantic dimension of Rorty's neopragmatism The liberal utopia of a combination of public pragmatism and private romanticism in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Conclusion: Democratic Anti-Authoritarianism - Rorty's Ethical-Political Motivation The target groups Students and teachers of social sciences and philosophy The author Dr. Martin Müller is a flight captain and lecturer in philosophy at the Munich Volkshochschule. As long-time Rorty interpreter, he is currently on the board of the Richard Rorty Society.
This book seeks to explain the nature of discrimination and exclusion and why these are so prevalent in our societies. The continued failure to overcome these obstacles prevent organisations from taking advantage of the significant benefits and returns that come from being inclusive in the face of diversity. It explores the key drivers of non-inclusive behavior and how they can be countered before providing guidance on how organisations can successfully pursue inclusive culture change. With a mix of applied academic theory, practical examples and real-world experiences, the book examines the topic of D&I from four perspectives: (I) Why diversity and inclusion matters. (II) The forces of exclusion and isolation. (III)The imperative conditions of change. (IV)The organisation of the culture transformation process. In doing so, the book meets the diverse needs of those involved in corporate governance, board members, executives, and even consultants who want to understand the intricacies of cultural diversity and inclusion and why so many programmes fail. For academics in organisational behavior, equity, diversity, and inclusion, trained in the social sciences and anthropology, the book offers a guide to the practical application of theory and the implementation of policies that cannot rely on the assumption of stability and consistency. This book is an invitation to anyone who wants to take on the challenge of making a difference and organisational change a reality.
Reading instruction is the most legislated area of education and the most frequently referenced metric for measuring educational progress. This book traces the trajectories of policy issues with direct implications for literacy teaching, learning, and research in order to illustrate the dynamic relationships between policy, research, and practice as they relate to perennial issues such as: retention in grade, remediation, intervention, instruction for English learners, early literacy instruction, coaching, and leadership. Using policy documents and peer-reviewed articles published from the 1960s to the present, the editor and authors illustrate how issues were framed, what was at stake, and how policy solutions to persistent questions have been understood over time. In doing so, the book link a generation of scholars with research that illustrates trajectories of development for ideas, strategies, and solutions. Rachael Gabriel is Professor of Literacy Education at the University of Connecticut, USA. She studies the intersections of education policy and classroom practice, prepares literacy specialists and doctoral students, and supports teachers and schools to build systems that create equitable opportunities to develop literacy.
"In the first decades of the twentieth century, print-centered organizations spread rapidly across the United States, providing more women than ever before with opportunities to participate in public life. While most organizations at the time were run by and for white men, women-both Black and white-were able to reshape their lives and their social worlds through their participation in these institutions. Organizing Women traces the histories of middle-class women-rural and urban, white and Black, married and unmarried-who used public and private institutions of print to tell their stories, expand their horizons, and further their ambitions. Drawing from a diverse range of examples, Christine Pawley introduces readers to women who ran branch libraries and library schools in Chicago and Madison, built radio empires from their midwestern farms, formed reading clubs, and published newsletters. In the process, we learn about the organizations themselves, from libraries and universities to the USDA extension service and the YWCA, and the ways in which women confronted gender discrimination and racial segregation in the course of their work"--
This book discusses the role of the property market cycle in real estate valuation. Challenging traditional property valuation methods that rely on current market conditions and economic trends, this book argues for a re-evaluation of the relationship between property valuation and cycles in property markets. The book is divided into two parts. The first part gathers research on property market cycle analysis and the delicate problems dealing with property market information including the development of the real estate market index, appraisal bias, and the use of time series in plotting the market cycle. The second part proposes several possible modifications to the traditional income approach methodologies, including cyclical capitalization and the hedonic price method. Furthermore, this part also addresses the need for amendments to current s property valuation standards and institutional regulations. Written by an international cross-section of expert voices in market cycles and property valuation, the book is a comprehensive resource for any researcher or upper-level student studying economic volatility.
The proposed book comprises 24 chapters by experts from developed and developing countries. The book cover Argentina, Australia, Bangladesh, Brazil, Canada, Fiji, France, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, Papua New Guinea, South Africa, Taiwan, Thailand, the UK and England, USA, West Africa, and Zambia. FOREWORD by David J. Hunter, Emeritus Professor, Newcastle University, the UK.
As basic institutions of human coexistence in the world, the house and the state continue to prove themselves and to change. House (i. e., the domestic setting as the primary economic and social unit) and state are the subject of a comparative study on an ecotheoretical basis. In the global context, the modes of societal regulation have developed differently in the domestic sphere and in the sphere of the state. In them and with them, order is created in the world and for the individual and collective conduct of life. The institutional frameworks of house and state in the world are ways of shaping existence that are juxtaposed in their European-Occidental and East Asian forms: The treatment of the topic takes place along the ancient Greek basic concepts and forms of thought of the oikos, the polis and the cosmos on the one hand and the ancient Chinese categories jia, guo and tianxia on the other. They are discussed with their ethical, political and economic references in their traditional and contemporary meaning and with regard to their ecological viability. The interest in a discursive understanding of sustainable, life-serving orders in the face of global challenges is the guiding motive.
This book introduces a state-of-art approach in evaluating portfolio management and risk based on artificial intelligence and alternative data. The book covers a textual analysis of news and social media, information extraction from GPS and IoTs data, and risk predictions based on small transaction data, etc. The book summarizes and introduces the advancement in each area and highlights the machine learning and deep learning techniques utilized to achieve the goals. As a complement, it also illustrates examples on how to leverage the python package to visualize and analyze the alternative datasets, and will be of interest to academics, researchers, and students of risk evaluation, risk management, data, AI, and financial innovation. Qingquan Tony Zhang is an Adjunct Professor at the University of Illinois at Champaign, R.C. Evan Fellow, Gies Business School, focusing on finance, quantitative investment and entrepreneurship. He is President of the Chicago chapter of the Chinese American Association for Trading and Investment, who has long worked in FinTech, including artificial intelligence and big data. Beibei Li is an Associate Professor of IT & Management and Anna Loomis McCandless Chair at Carnegie Mellon University. Dr. Li has extensive experience at leveraging large-scale observational data analytics and experimental analysis with a strong focus on modeling individual user behavior across online, offline, and mobile channels for decision support. Danxia Xie is an Associate Professor in Economics at Tsinghua University, China. Dr. Xies teaching and research focuses on digital economy, finance, law and economics, and macroeconomics. Dr. Xie has also worked at Peterson Institute for International Economics, a top think tank at Washington, DC.
This book provides a framework of protest handling which redirects our attention away from the strength of protesters and towards the constraints of state power, drawing on detailed case studies randomly collected in 7 provinces in China over the last decade. It finds that the challenges of retaining legitimacy, the propensity for responsiveness, the contradictions of the petition system, and the dynamics of elite alignments are key elements shaping the fate of nail-like petitions. A nail-like person refers to the individual who looks like a stubborn nail on a plank of wood that cannot be easily hammered down. His persistent protest thus is theoretically puzzling, since such individual-based protest is assumed to be too weak to effectively challenge a powerful authoritarian regime. Although this phenomenon is widely observed in China, it is ignored by current studies on collective action. Meanwhile, this book delves into the life politics of nail-like persons and reveals that their escalation of grievance, marginalized social status, inability of pursuing desirable lives through legitimate means, and communication with fellow petitioners also reinforce their determination of contention. This book describes deeply the fate of individual-based protests in China. It scrutinizes the states role in shaping contention at its macro, intermediate, and micro levels, and meanwhile pay more attention to local specifics that are crucial to uncovering the logic of petitioners' actions and consciousness. This book has implications for scholars and graduates who are interested in contentious politics and state-society interactions in China.
This book introduces planning support systems by combining policy decision-making process with the mechanism of urban spatial or functional development regarding to the planning policies on strategic level. By analyzing policy interactions between household agents, the book concentrates on visualizing and forecasting macro phenomenon of policy effects through revealing the discrete, micro human behaviors around the urban functions of dwelling, recreation, working, and transportation. Simulations are created based on these policy outcome assessments, taking into account the influences of energy and resource consumption and CO2 emission on sustainable development in urban environments. The book is geared towards researchers, universities, and urban policy makers. The book begins by presenting a framework of urban growth simulation, and introducing Spatial Strategic Planning Support System (SSP-SS). Then, household lifecycle and relocation models are employed for simulating policy impacts on urbanization, and investigating the impacts of spatial strategic planning. Several projects are assessed using agent-based modeling including shopping centre construction, day-care service for aging populations, and developing of "bus city" for reducing transportation CO2 emission. The final chapter identifies the key planning factors that play effective roles on reducing carbon emission in urban master plan by simulating the carbon emission volume in urban area.
