Strategic Management of Public and Third Sector Organizations: A Handbook for Leaders (Jossey Bass Business and Management Series)

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Albert Sbragia considers American urban government as an investor whether for building infrastructure or supporting economic development. Over time, such investment has become disconnected from the normal political and administrative processes of local policymaking through the use of special public spending authorities like water and sewer commissions and port, turnpike, and public power authorities.

Sbragia explores how this entrepreneurial activity developed and how federal and state policies facilitated or limited it. She also analyzes the implications of cities creating innovative, special-purpose quasi-governments to circumvent and dilute state control over city finances, diluting their own authority in the process.

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Principles of Hydrogeology, Third Edition presents important concepts of groundwater hydrology with a strong emphasis on problem-solving and field applications of hydrogeology. With newly added and revised content, this volume maintains a broad and current scope of topics, from the history of hydrogeology to the latest trends in managing groundwater contamination, arranged in the most compact and easy-to-use format available. Topics of interest include the role of groundwater in the hydrologic cycle; the nature of water-bearing formations; drilling boreholes and constructing monitoring wells; aquifers, well hydraulics, and aquifer tests; groundwater chemistry and flow; groundwater pollution, contaminant transport, remediation, and management. The author also provides the most current sources of hydrogeologic information, including professional societies, groundwater organizations, government agencies, industry publications, and Internet sites that provide data, software, techniques, protocols, standards, and training opportunities. Concise and informative, environmental regulators as well as groundwater and hydrology professionals will find Principles of Hydrogeology, Third Edition a handy and irreplaceable source for looking up definitions, tools, and equations while working on groundwater problems.

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Acquaints readers with the main concepts and literature of elementary particle physics and quantum field theory. In particular, the book is concerned with the elaboration of gauge field theories in nuclear physics; the possibility of creating fundamental new states of matter such as an extended quark-gluon plasma in ultra-relativistic heavy ion collisions; and the relation of gauge theories to the creation and evolution of the universe. Divided into three parts, it opens with an introduction to the general principles of relativistic quantum field theory followed by the essential ingredients of gauge fields for weak and electromagnetic interactions, quantum chromodynamics and strong interactions. The third part is concerned with the interface between modern elementary particle physics and "applied disciplines" such as nuclear physics, astrophysics and cosmology. Includes references and numerous exercises.

Customer Reviews:

Excellent.......2001-11-01

This book is very nice. Not only does it present the theory and give problems, the problems are solved in the appendix (for the most part) and many references are cited, allowing the reader to review work elsewhere. If you are interested in quantum fields and gauge theory, I would suggest reading and working out of this book.

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Building on the first edition, this updated volume focuses on the personalities, from the founders of Liberia, to the soldiers who are responsible simultaneously for destruction and the hope of stability. Along with these people, various social and ethnic groups, political parties and labor movements, economic entities and natural resources are profiled in this updated work.

Book Description

"In the following pages I lay before the reader a few thoughts that are taken from a larger work on which I have been engaged for years. It had been my intention to use the same method which in The Decline of the West I had limited to the group of the higher Cultures, for the investigation of their historical pre-requisite - namely, the history of Man from his origins. But experience with the earlier work showed that the majority of readers are not in a postion to maintain a general view over the mass of ideas as a whole, and so lose themselves in the detail of this or that domain which is familiar to them, seeing the rest either obliquely or not at all. In consequence they obtain an incorrect picture, both of what I have written and of the subject-matter about which I wrote.

Now, as then, it is my conviction that the destiny of Man can only be understood by dealing with all the provinces of his activity simultaneously and comparatively, and avoiding the mistake of trying to elucidate some problem, say, of his politics or his religion or his art, solely in terms of particular sides of his being, in the belief that, this done, there is no more to be said. Nevertheless, in this book I venture to put forward some of the questions. They are a few among many. But they are interconnected, and for that reason may serve, for the time being, to help the reader to a provisional glimpse into the great secret of Man's destiny."

--- Oswald Spengler

Customer Reviews:

Rage Against the Machine?!.......2003-08-06

The edition of _Man and Technics: A Contribution to a Philosophy of Life_ by Oswald Spengler that I read does not appear to be advertised on this website. It is a small paperback printed in Britain by the European Books Society and features a pen-outline of a burly bald man wearing a suit and holding a cigar (presumably Spengler himself). I found _Man and Technics_ to be a wierd philosophic exposition of the origins of humanity and the organic process of birth, flowering, decay and death that human Cultures inevitably face. The greatest Culture of all is the Western or "Faustian" Culture which far outranks the Classical (Greco-Roman), Arabic, Chinese, Indian, Mexican Cultures. It is something of a manifesto of extreme pessimism regarding the fate of the West and of its people in Europe and America. The Faustian Culture, of which America is a younger shoot, based in Western Europe, began to form around 1000 AD and it is marked by spiritual uncertainty, but an innate ability in Spengler's theme of "Technics." Technics involves the use of the reasoning faculties of the Mind in accordance with the physical use and manipulations of objects by the Hand to make whatever that is outside of man's being in Nature subject to man's will. This provides obvious advantages and also extremely serious disadvantages as well. The more a group of human beings became more machine, material and industry orientated, the more they tried to control Nature--the more Nature will eventually bring about the destruction of the human Culture that builds itself up over time and becomes overgrown, the same as individual plants, animals and plants die--as living organisms. Spengler, in the last page of _Man and Technics_ concludes that there is nothing that can be done to abort the fall of Faustian Civilization, which is ruined by internal decadence, economic competition from without, and the militancy of non-Western peoples who will use Western technology against Europe and America. Spengler regards any notion of optimism about the outcome of human affairs to be cowardly and any hope of utopian salvation to be a flighty dream. The best thing that any man can do in the face of eventual destruction is an honorable end following the choice of Achilles: "Better a short life full of deeds and glory than a long life without content." Spengler, a German philosopher influenced by the works of Nietzsche and contemorary with the National Socialist movement in Germany was a "conservative revoloutionary" opposed to the modern life of artificial material comfort and lack of individuality and spirit. Spengler may be viewed as being "racist," but his outlook on environmental damage was ahead of his time. This book does not, nor is likely to, have a wide audience, but it gives a different view of history in which Cultures and Civilizations are viewed as living organisms which live and die rather than in the liberal/economic interpretations of human affairs currently ascendant in social-political theory. Some of the material is outdated (_Man and Technics_ was written in the 1930s) and innacurate, but remains insightful in an analysis of the fate of the West today.

A profound critique of modern technological civilization!.......1998-11-06

Spengler wrote "Man and Technics" as a short and accessible supplement to his 'magnum opus', "The Decline of the West". Despite being short this is in fact a truly GREAT book. Spengler examines man's way on earth from the perspective of a philosophical anthropology. In agreement with the other exponents of reactionary modernism in Weimar Germany, Spengler focuses on technology as the critical feature of the Faustian Western Civilization. Spengler uses the Goethian hero in order to disclose to the reader the likely outcome of man's blind worship of instrumental technological reason. At the same time he scorns the West for its imperialism and violation of the life-style of other cultures. Apart from the -mostly accurate - prognoses that it makes, "Man and Technics" reveals a detached view of humanity as if perceived from an Archimedean point of view. Spengler remains a great thinker, rather misunderstood, who ought to be rediscovered by modern intellectuals for his penetrating insight and his uncompromising honesty!

Man and Technics: A Contribution to a Philosophy of Life

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Man and Technics: A Contribution to a Philosophy of Life
Oswald Spengler
Manufacturer: The Barnes Review
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000SKQV5U

Man and Technics: A Contribution to a Philosophy of Life. Trans. By Charles Francis Atkinson

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Man and Technics: A Contribution to a Philosophy of Life. Trans. By Charles Francis Atkinson
Oswald Spengler
Manufacturer: Alfred A. Knopf
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000J0RF9K

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The alpha and omega on 1940 British invasion defences.......2006-11-22

After the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force from France in Late May and early June of 1940, there was a very real possibility that an invasion of the United Kingdom was both likely and imminent, In response to the threat, a construction program was initiated to build defensive works. The program consisted of both beach and inland defenses consisting of pillboxes, trenches, and road-barriers amongst other positions.

The invasion of the UK never took place. Instead, the invasion of France occurred in 1944. By then, most of the fixed defenses that had been built in the UK were, for the most part abandoned and forgotten. In a few cases, some of the structures were utilized for more peaceful purposes, ranging from farm storage to public shelters.

In the early 1980s, an enterprising amateur historian named Henry Will brought to the attention of the general public the historical significance and the place in history of these structures. After all, it is not facetious to say that their importance and need for notation can rival that of Dover Castle or the Tower of London. Both of these fortifications were also built to protect the UK, but were never actually tested. In 1985, he published a small volume entitled Pillboxes - A Study of UK Defenses, 1940, which provided an historical context for the defensive structures as well as a rudimentary attempt to catalog the extant remains. Mr. Wills' efforts stimulated interest in the subject and additional privates and government sponsored surveys were undertaken.

This culminated with the English Heritage funded Defence of Britain Project which between 1995 and 2002 attempted to record all known military defense sites. From this and other surveys, it is estimated that some 28,000 pillboxes and other hardened field fortifications were constructed in the United Kingdom of which about 6,500 still exist.

Beaches, Fields, Streets, And Hills...: The Anti-invasion Landscapes of England, 1940 published by English Heritage provides an overview of a number of sites and scores of remains in southern and eastern England. After providing a context for the construction programs and a brief overview of the types of structures built, this 658 page volumes becomes a site gazetteer, showing then and now photos of the structures themselves, directions and how to find the items and comment as to their status. Local maps are included with the various defensive works marked and annotated with grid coordinates.

It is in this aspect that the one fault in the book exists. While there are two or three maps at the beginning that show the locations of the surviving works on a national map, this is not done for the more detailed itemization by location. Instead, one is presented with local maps of areas of a few square miles or less.

This is a significant failing. I have to believe that few Britons would be able to recognize where a majority of these sites are based on the descriptions given. Someone coming to try and find these sites from another country would have to be prepared to ask directions repeatedly.

But, for those students of fortifications and of the summer of 1940, this is the premier source of information.

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