The Rapidesign R-140 Circle Template has 45 circles from 1/16 inch to 2-1/4 inch. Read more
Based on Excel 2007, Engineering with Excel, 3e takes a comprehensive look at using Excel in engineering. This book focuses on applications and is intended to serve as both a textbook and a reference for students. Read more
Messy. Clumsy. Volatile. Exciting. These words are not often associated with the sciences, which for most people still connote exactitude, elegance, reliability, and a rather plodding certainty. But the real story is something quite different. The sciences are less about the ability to know and to control than they are about the unleashing of new forces, new capacities for changing the world. The sciences as practiced exist not in some pristine world of "objectivity," but in what Mike Fortun and Herb Bernstein call "the muddled middle." This book explores the way science makes sense of the world and how the world makes sense of science. It is also about politics and culture--how these forces shape the sciences and are shaped by it in turn. Think of Muddling Through as the basic text for a new kind of literacy project, a project to re-imagine the sciences as complex operations of language, action, and thought--as attempts, trials, limited experiments. The sciences provide us with the images and metaphors we apply to myriad situations and phenomena, and create the blueprints we use to make and legitimate crucial social decisions. If democracies are to meet the challenge of the ever more critical world-making role of the sciences, they must fundamentally shift their attention and their attitudes. The quest for social or political mastery of the sciences will have to end; the new journey will begin with a trip to the muddled middle. Travel then, with historian Fortun and physicist Bernstein from the workshops of fifteenth-century England to a present-day quantum physics laboratory. Stop at a military toxic waste dump, a courtroom, a colony of baboons. Along the way you might shed your faith in pure inquiry, see the limits of value-free rationality, and breath the fresh air of change.Does science discover truths or create them? Does dioxin cause cancer or not? Is corporate-sponsored research valid or not? Although these questions reflect the way we're used to thinking, maybe they're not the best way to approach science and its place in our culture. Physicist Herbert J. Bernstein and science historian Mike Fortun, both of the Institute for Science and Interdisciplinary Studies (ISIS), suggest a third way of seeing, beyond taking one side or another, in Muddling Through: Pursuing Science and Truths in the 21st Century. While they deal with weighty issues and encourage us to completely rethink our beliefs about science and truth, they do so with such grace and humor that we follow with ease discussions of toxic-waste disposal, the Human Genome Project, and retooling our language to better fit the way science is actually done.
As anyone who has done science knows, the ideal flowchart from observation to hypothesis to experiment to theory--with each step shielded from outside, irrational influences--is at best only vaguely descriptive of the work. Fortun and Bernstein want us not to worry too much about that, to accept science for what it is and what it does, and to move on, to "muddle through," to accept that today's best answer will probably be tomorrow's second-best. That's harder than it looks, as we've got centuries of either/or thinking to undo, but the authors are confident that we can manage our anxieties and learn to cope with less than absolute truth. They might be right. --Rob Lightner Read more
In his first book, An Introduction to the History of Project Management: From the Earliest Times to AD 1900, the author took an investigative journey through the history of project management of Western history that represented a timeline of over 5,000 years. The study placed contemporary project management into historical perspective and enabled it to be compared with the earlier practices. The conclusions of the study also contributed to the body of knowledge of project management that are absent from today’s science. The author suggested further research to increase the precision and value of the historical understandings of project management. He recommended four separate research studies of the history of project management in the four broad eras of Western history, namely, ancient civilisations, medieval period, modern era and contemporary period. This book is the author’s second research study into the history of the project management. It is an attempt to investigate project management in the ancient civilisations in more detail. The significance is that it adds insight to the existing body of knowledge concerning ancient project management prior to the fall of the Roman Empire in the fifth century AD. Project management applies knowledge, skills, tools and techniques to project activities in order to achieve defined requirements. It is the very deliberate orchestration of areas of expertise to complete a specific project. Investigating the history of project management enables us to reach a comprehensive view of both the historical development of relevant areas of expertise and their application to project activities. As with his previous book, this book is intended for project management professionals who would like to explore the significance of the history of project management. Read more
