Purdue University Press provides quality resources in several key subject areas, including business, technology, health, veterinary sciences, and other selected disciplines in the humanities and sciences. As well as publishing around 25 books a year, and three subscription-based journals, the Press is committed to broadening access to scholarly information using digital technology. As part of this initiative, the Press distributes a number of Open Access electronic-only journals.
This series contains the Open Access records of some books published through Purdue University Press.
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Understanding the Global Energy Crisis
Eugene D. Coyle and Richard A. Simmons
We are facing a global energy crisis caused by world population growth, an escalating increase in demand, and continued dependence on fossil-based fuels for generation. It is widely accepted that increases in greenhouse gas concentration levels, if not reversed, will result in major changes to world climate with consequential effects on our society and economy. This is just the kind of intractable problem that Purdue University’s Global Policy Research Institute seeks to address in the Purdue Studies in Public Policy series by promoting the engagement between policy makers and experts in fields such as engineering and technology.
Major steps forward in the development and use of technology are required. In order to achieve solutions of the required scale and magnitude within a limited timeline, it is essential that engineers be not only technologically-adept but also aware of the wider social and political issues that policy-makers face. Likewise, it is also imperative that policy makers liaise closely with the academic community in order to realize advances. This book is designed to bridge the gap between these two groups, with a particular emphasis on educating the socially-conscious engineers and technologists of the future.
In this accessibly-written volume, central issues in global energy are discussed through interdisciplinary dialogue between experts from both North America and Europe. The first section provides an overview of the nature of the global energy crisis approached from historical, political, and sociocultural perspectives. In the second section, expert contributors outline the technology and policy issues facing the development of major conventional and renewable energy sources. The third and final section explores policy and technology challenges and opportunities in the distribution and consumption of energy, in sectors such as transportation and the built environment. The book’s epilogue suggests some future scenarios in energy distribution and use.
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Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918: A Social History of a Multilingual Space
Jan University Surman
Combining history of science and a history of universities with the new imperial history, Universities in Imperial Austria 1848–1918: A Social History of a Multilingual Space by Jan Surman analyzes the practice of scholarly migration and its lasting influence on the intellectual output in the Austrian part of the Habsburg Empire.
The Habsburg Empire and its successor states were home to developments that shaped Central Europe's scholarship well into the twentieth century. Universities became centers of both state- and nation-building, as well as of confessional resistance, placing scholars if not in conflict, then certainly at odds with the neutral international orientation of academe.
By going beyond national narratives, Surman reveals the Empire as a state with institutions divided by language but united by legislation, practices, and other influences. Such an approach allows readers a better view to how scholars turned gradually away from state-centric discourse to form distinct language communities after 1867; these influences affected scholarship, and by examining the scholarly record, Surman tracks the turn.
Drawing on archives in Austria, the Czech Republic, Poland, and Ukraine, Surman analyzes the careers of several thousand scholars from the faculties of philosophy and medicine of a number of Habsburg universities, thus covering various moments in the history of the Empire for the widest view. Universities in Imperial Austria 1848–1918 focuses on the tension between the political and linguistic spaces scholars occupied and shows that this tension did not lead to a gradual dissolution of the monarchy’s academia, but rather to an ongoing development of new strategies to cope with the cultural and linguistic multitude.
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Vietnam, Four American Perspectives: Lectures
George S. McGovern, William C. Westmoreland, Edward N. Luttwak, Thomas J. McCormick, and Patrick F. Hearden
This collection of speeches delivered in 1987 presents the widely diverging opinions of four men: an eminent politician, a professional soldier, a government consultant, and a distinguished scholar. The first contributor, Senator George S. McGovern, ran as the Democratic candidate for president in 1972 on a platform that called for the withdrawal of American troops from Vietnam. The second speaker, General William C. Westmoreland, commanded American military forces in Vietnam until growing battlefield casualties and economic costs undermined support for the strategy of attrition in the United States. The third essay is by Edward N. Luttwak, a strong advocate for military reform in the United States and a frequent participant in high-level government discussions about American strategic interests throughout the world. The fourth speaker Thomas J. McCormack, is a diplomatic historian at the University of Wisconsin and an astute critic of American foreign policy. Each lecture is followed by a lively question-and-answer session that highlights the key points of agreement and disagreement with respect to the fundamental issues raised in the lectures. In a stimulating foreword, Akira Iriye challenges readers to think about the Vietnam War in relationship to the current debate about the role that the United States should play in world affairs.
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Voices of Resistance: Communication and Social Change
Mohan J. Dutta
This book re-presents voices of resistance from across the globe to document the communicative processes, practices, and frameworks through which neoliberal global policies are currently being defied. Based on examples, case studies, and ethnographic reports, Voices of Resistance serves as a space for engaging various perspectives from the global margins in dialogue. The emphasis of the book is on the core idea that creating spaces for listening to voices of resistance fosters openings for the politics of social change; interweaving the stories of the local, the national, and the global. The book is divided into chapters addressing the politics of resistance in the contexts of global economic policies, agriculture, education, health, poverty, and development.
Mohan J. Dutta is Professor of Communication and Director of Center on Poverty and Health Inequities (COPHI) at Purdue University.
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Wake Up Your Call Center: Humanizing Your Interaction Hub
Rosanne D’Ausilio
D'Ausilio, an industrial psychologist, uses humor to encourage customer service representatives in call centers, their immediate superiors, middle and upper management, and team leaders, seniors, and supervisors. She offers simple tips on staying sane in the call center environment and on raising quality.
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Why Agriculture Productivity Falls: The Political Economy of Agrarian Transition in Developing Countries
Rashed Al Mahmud Titumir
Why Agriculture Productivity Falls: The Political Economy of Agrarian Transition in Developing Countries offers a new explanation for the decline in agricultural productivity in developing countries. Transcending the conventional approaches to understanding productivity using agricultural inputs and factors of production, this work brings in the role of formal and informal institutions that govern transactions, property rights, and accumulation. This more robust methodology leads to a comprehensive, well-balanced lens to perceive agrarian transition in developing countries. It argues that the existing process of accumulation has resulted in nonsustainable agriculture because of market failures—the result of asymmetries of power, diseconomies of scale, and unstable property rights. The book covers the historical shifts in land relations, productivity, and class relations that have led to present-day challenges in sustainability. The result is arrested productivity growth. Agrarian transition should be understood in the context of the wider economic development in society, including how political settlement and primitive accumulation inhibited the kind of property rights that encourage growth. Why Agriculture Productivity Falls is a much-needed corrective to the traditional understanding, because before we can increase productivity, we must understand the root causes of those challenges.
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Wildlife Science Education for Grades 3–12
Natalie J. Carroll, Theodore Leuenberger, and Katherine Leuenberger
Wildlife Science Education for Grades 3–12 guides and encourages youth to learn about the wildlife around them. The first section introduces the basic wildlife groups to youth in upper elementary school using hands-on and other activity-based learning techniques. Young learners will understand the similarities and differences between mammals, birds, fish, and herptiles. The activities for middle schoolers expand the study to interactions within and between them. The lessons for high school students are based on topics of importance to homeowners, residents of a watershed, food and fiber producers (farmers), mayors, teachers, and policy makers. This section delves deeper into the study of wildlife and will help prepare students to study these topics at the college or university level. This final section is intended for adults who work with youth. It includes suggestions about instructing youth, next-generation science standards, and answers to questions asked in sections 1–3.
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Women Count: A Guide to Changing the World
Susan Bulkeley Butler and Bob Keefe
Throughout history, women have struggled to change the workplace, change government, change society. So what’s next? It’s time for women to change the world! Whether on the job, in politics, or in their community, there has never been a better time for women to make a difference in the world, contends author, mentor, and corporate pioneer Susan Bulkeley Butler in Women Count: A Guide to Changing the World. Through her experience as the first female partner of a major consulting firm and founder of the Susan Bulkeley Butler Institute for the Development of Women Leaders, Butler’s unique insights have changed the lives of countless women. In Women Count, she shows readers how to change the world through a series of inspiring case studies that chronicle how she and other pioneering women in a range of fields have done so in years past. Women represent half of the country’s population, half of the country’s college graduates, and around 50 percent of the country’s workforce. Butler envisions a day when they will also make up their fair share of elected and appointed positions, including in corporate boardrooms. Amid financial meltdowns, wars, and societal struggles, never before has the world so greatly needed the unique abilities of women to lead the way. But as history has shown, to make change, women must step into their power and become “women who count,” Butler contends. Then and only then, she argues, can women truly change the world.
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Women Succeeding in the Sciences: Theories and Practices Across Disciplines
Jody Bart
Ample evidence has been provided that women historically have suffered numerous social, political, and institutional barriers to their entrance and success in the sciences. The articles in this anthology refocus the discussion and reflect the interdisciplinary nature of the issues surrounding women in the sciences. While the barriers that women have faced as researchers, subjects of research, students of science, and theorists have been well documented, this anthology breaks new ground. It presents the ways women succeed in the sciences, overcome these historical barriers, and contribute to the social practice of science and the philosophy of science in both theory and practice.