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With a focus on the economic, social, and political impetus for producing monuments to knowledge, this volume recognizes the encyclopedic compilation as the quintessential tool of enlightenment knowledge transfer. From its modern origins in seventeenth-century France, encyclopedic compilations met the need for the dissemination of information in a more flexible format, one that eschewed the limits of previous centuries of erudition. The rise of vernacular languages dovetailed with the demand for information in every sector, sparking competition among nations to establish the encyclopedic "paper empires" that became symbols of power and potential. In this edited collection, Clorinda Donato and Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink evaluate the long-overlooked phenomenon of knowledge creation and transfer that occurred in hundreds of translated encyclopedic compilations over the long eighteenth century. Analysing multiple instances of translated compilations, Translation and Transfer of Knowledge in Encyclopedic Compilations, 1680–1830 expands into the vast realm of the multilingual, encyclopedic compilation, the most tangible proof of the global enlightenment. Through the presentation of an extensive corpus of translated compilations, it argues that the true site of knowledge transfer resided in the transnational movement of ideas exemplified by these compendia. The encyclopedia came to represent the aspiring nation as a viable economic and political player on the world stage; the capability to tell knowledge through culture became the hallmark of a nation's cultural capital, symbolic of its might and mapping the how, why, and where of the global eighteenth century.

"The transfer of knowledge is a key issue in the North as Indigenous people meet the ongoing need for adaptation in their habitat. In eight essays, experts survey critical issues surrounding the knowledge practices of the Inuit of northern Canada and Greenland and the Northern Sámi of Scandinavia. Reflecting the ongoing work of the Research Group Circumpolar Cultures, these multidisciplinary essays offer fresh insights through history and across geography as scholars analyze cultural, ecological, and political aspects of peoples in transition. Traditions, Traps and Trends is an important book for students and scholars in anthropology and ethnography and for everyone interested in the Circumpolar North. Contributors: Cunera Buijs, Frédéric Laugrand, Barbara Helen Miller, Thea Olsthoorn, Jarich Oosten, Willem Rasing, Kim van Dam, Nellejet Zorgdrager."--

Abstract /Summary
In light of the widely discussed issues on the modernization and industrialization of East Asia, it is sometimes overlooked that there has been a constant exchange of knowledge between East Asia and Europe. This "transfer of knowledge" during all known times was associated with the traffic of humans, animals and goods and had an input on skills and techniques, too. And it were not only goods, skills and knowledge, but religions, world views and cultures that were exchanged. Thus is it productive to speak of an "transfer of knowledge"? Is it not rather productive to speak of a constant exchange and thus of an "interchange of knowledge" - and so of a steadily ongoing process of giving and taking? So is the real question what separates East Asia and Europe or what they have in common? It is precisely this general problem that is to be pursued in a special question in time, for which there are no written sources. So it is about the earliest history, possibly even the origin of exchange processes between East and West, which can be achieved with most modern methods. Are the latest methods and results of archeology providing us with information on whether, as of when and in what areas, an exchange of knowledge between East and West existed before the time of writing? This question is being examined in a central region of the exchange, namely the "Oasis Silk Road" with the "bottle neck" of the Taklamakan. The present study / presentation is only a small, highly incomplete "florilegium" - a selection of flowers. Pilot studies with precise questions would be needed. Such preliminary investigations and pilot studies could also be made for other regions of knowledge exchange and cultural interaction in East Asia in general. On the methodical side, all methods of historiography and archeology have their specific advantages, but also their specific disadvantages. In the issue "Eurasian Interchange of Knowledge in Times before Writing", the combined results of historiography, modern archeology, and recent natural scientific and (molecular) biological archaeology are the basis for our current state of knowledge. On the long run the different methods and results from a variety of different scientific areas have to be evaluated in their meaningfulness, reach and validity for the historiography of human action. On the basis of the results from historiography and archeology in the widest sense, can be assumed that there has been an exchange of materials, products, skills and creatures - animals and humans - since the beginning of the early agrarian culture in the Neolithic Age. Exchange processes in the widest sense in the later times of writing therefore seldom meet an almost untouched field. Rather, exchange processes usually build on existing cultural peculiarities, which are already an amalgam and thus an inseparable mixture of previous exchange processes.

"This volume collects some of the papers presented at the Third International Congress on Eastern Christianity, 'Knowledge Transfer in the Mediterranean World, ' which took place in Córdoba in December 2010"--Preface

Whereas most prior research on the learning curve has focused on improvements in efficiency, this paper deals with the impact of learning on product quality. The key data are measures of automobile reliability published in Consumer Reports. Analysis yields three findings: (1) Quality improves over the production life of a car model with the same kind of regularity as an efficiency learning curve. Thus, there is a quality learning curve. (2) Unlike in the efficiency domain, however, learning in the domain of product reliability is primarily a function of time, and not of how many cars have gone down the assembly line. Thus, quality depends not on the accumulation of production experience per se, but on the intensity of "off-line"quality improvement activities and on the transfer of knowledge from the general environment over time. (3) In contrast to the traditional injunction, "do not buy a new car in its first year of production,"the opposite advice actually seems to apply: In any given year, the newest car models have the best quality. That is, new car-model designs typically include significant quality improvements that are more than enough to outweigh any disruption created in manufacturing by the new model's introduction and that even surpass the incremental improvements made to older, existing car models.