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Why do anti-corruption efforts routinely fail? What kind of world are they creating? Looking at luxury art, antiquities, superyachts and populist politics, this book explores the connection between luxury and corruption, and offers an alternative to the received wisdom of how we tackle corruption.

The 2011 Kii Peninsula disaster was postwar Japan's largest sediment and flood disaster. This book analyses the disaster and the emergency response and subsequent disaster prevention efforts. It also provides an international comparison and recommendations for mitigation and recovery efforts.

"This book provides an overview of how the field of Linguistic Landscape Studies has emerged and developed over the past 20 years, combined with an in-depth exploration of the theoretical approaches, innovative research methods and major themes that have been central to this dynamic area of research"--

"Sequels, reboots, franchises, and songs that remake old songs--does it feel like everything new in popular culture is just derivative of something old? Contrary to popular belief, the reason is not audiences or marketing, but Wall Street. In this book, Andrew deWaard shows how the financial sector is dismantling the creative capacity of cultural industries by upwardly redistributing wealth, consolidating corporate media, harming creative labor, and restricting our collective media culture. Moreover, financialization is transforming the very character of our mediascapes for branded transactions. Our media are increasingly shaped by the profit-extraction techniques of hedge funds, asset managers, venture capitalists, private equity firms, and derivatives traders. Illustrated with examples drawn from popular culture, Derivative Media offers readers the critical financial literacy necessary to understand the destructive financialization of film, television, and popular music--and provides a plan to reverse this dire threat to culture."

A ground-breaking, personal exploration of America s obsession with continuing human bondage from the editor of the New York Times-bestselling Barracoon.Freedom and equality are the watchwords of American democracy. But like justice, freedom and equality are meaningless when there is no corresponding practical application of the ideals they represent. Physical, bodily liberty is fundamental to every American s personal sovereignty. And yet, millions of Americans-including author Deborah Plant s brother, whose life sentence at Angola Prison reveals a shocking current parallel to her academic work on the history of slavery in America-are deprived of these basic freedoms every day.In her studies of Zora Neale Hurston, Deborah Plant became fascinated by Hurston s explanation for the atrocities of the international slave trade. In her memoir,Dust Tracks on a Road, Hurston wrote: But the inescapable fact that stuck in my craw, was: my people hadsoldme and the white people had bought me. . . . It impressed upon me the universal nature of greed and glory. We look the other way when the basic human rights of marginalized and stigmatized groups are violated and desecrated, not realizing that only the practice of justice everywhere secures justice, for any of us, anywhere.An active vigilance is required of those who would be and remain free; with Of Greed and Glory, Deborah Plant reveals the many ways in which slavery continues in America today and charts our collective course toward personal sovereignty for all

One of the most important works of the Enlightenment-in the first new, unabridged English translation in more than two centuriesPublished in four volumes between 1784 and 1791, Herder s Ideas for the Philosophy of the History of Mankind is one of the most important works of the Enlightenment-a bold, original, and encyclopedic synthesis of, and contribution to, the era s philosophical debates over nature, history, culture, and the very meaning of human experience. This is the first new, unabridged English translation of the Ideas in more than two centuries. Gregory Martin Moore s lively, modern English text, extensive introduction, and commentary bring this neglected masterpiece back to life.The Ideas-which engages with many of the leading thinkers of the eighteenth century, such as Montesquieu, Kant, Gibbon, Ferguson, Buffon, and Rousseau-is many things at once: an inquiry into the unity and purpose of history, a reflection on human nature and the place of humans in the cosmic order, an examination of what was beginning to be called culture, and a narrative of cultural progress across time among different peoples. Along the way, Herder considers a dizzying variety of topics, including the formation of the earth and solar system, species change, race, the immortality of the soul, the establishment of society, and the pursuit of happiness. Above all, the Ideas is an anthropology-what Alexander Pope had termed an essay on man -pervaded by an appropriately humane spirit.A fresh and much-needed modern translation of the complete Ideas, this volume reintroduces English readers to a classic of Enlightenment thought

This volume surveys democracy broadly as a cultural phenomenon operating in different ways across a very wide range of societies in the nineteenth-century world. In the long nineteenth century, democracy evolved from a contested, maligned conception of government with little concrete expression at the level of the state, to a term widely associated with good governance throughout the diverse political cultures of the Atlantic world and beyond. The geographical scope and public range of discussions about the meaning of democracy in this era were unprecedented in comparison to previous centuries. These lively debates involved fundamental questions about human nature, and encompassed subjects ranging from the scope of the people who would participate in self-government to the importance of social and economic issues. For these reasons, the nineteenth century has proven the formative century in the modern history of democracy. Each chapter takes a different theme as its focus: sovereignty; liberty and the rule of law; the common good ; economic and social democracy; religion and the principles of political obligation; citizenship and gender; ethnicity, race, and nationalism; democratic crises, revolutions, and civil resistance; international relations; and beyond the polis. These ten different approaches to democracy in the nineteenth century add up to an extensive, synoptic coverage of the subject

This volume surveys the burst of political imagination that created multiple Enlightenment cultures in an era widely understood as an age of democratic revolutions. Enlightenment as precursor to liberal democratic modernity was once secular catechism for generations of readers. Yet democracy did not elicit much enthusiasm among contemporaries, while democracy as a political system remained virtually nonexistent through much of the period. If seventeenth- and eighteenth-century ideas did underwrite the democracies of succeeding centuries, they were often inheritances from monarchical governments that had encouraged plural structures of power competition. But in revolutions across France, Britain, and North America, the republican integration of constitutional principle and popular will established rational hope for public happiness. Nevertheless, the tragic clashes of principle and will in fraught revolutionary projects were also democratic legacies. Each chapter focuses on a distinct theme: sovereignty; liberty and the rule of law; the common good ; economic and social democracy; religion and the principles of political obligation; citizenship and gender; ethnicity, race, and nationalism; democratic crises, revolutions, and civil resistance; international relations; and the transformations of sovereignty-a synoptic survey of the cultural entanglements of enlightenment and democracy

This volume explores democracy in the 20th century, examining the triumph, crises, recovery, and resilience of democracy and its associated cultures in this period. From 1920 democracy became the hegemonic discourse in political cultures, to the extent that even its enemies claimed its legacy. The end of empires ushered in an unprecedented globalization of democratic aspirations. Barriers of gender and race were gradually removed, and greater equality gave new meaning to citizenship. Yet, already in 1922 democracy was on its back foot with the rise of fascism. Even after the latter s defeat in 1945, liberal democracy died wherever communist democracy triumphed. The situation changed again from 1989, but democratic hubris was then checked by the rise of a new enemy-populism. The paradox is that the century of democracy s triumph was also that of its near final defeat, while the peace and stability that everybody desired and many expected as the outcome of the extension of democracy were, at best, intermittent and geographically limited. Each chapter takes a different theme as its focus: sovereignty; liberty and the rule of law; the common good ; economic and social democracy; religion and the principles of political obligation; citizenship and gender; ethnicity, race, and nationalism; democratic crises, revolutions, and civil resistance; international relations; and democratic politics beyond the polis. These ten different approaches to democracy since 1920 offer a global, synoptic, and probing exploration of the subject

This volume offers a broad exploration of the cultural history of democracy in the Renaissance. The Renaissance has rarely been considered an important moment in the history of democracy. Nonetheless, as this volume shows, this period may be seen as a democratic laboratory in many, often unexpected, ways. The classicizing cultural movement known as humanism, which spread throughout Europe and beyond in this period, had the effect of vastly enhancing knowledge of the classical democratic and republican traditions. Greek history and philosophy, including the story of Athenian democracy, became fully known in the West for the first time in the postclassical world. Partly as a result of this, the period from 1400 to 1650 witnessed rich and historically important debates on some of the enduring political issues at the heart of democratic culture: issues of sovereignty, of liberty, of citizenship, of the common good, of the place of religion in government. At the same time, the introduction of printing, and the emergence of a flourishing, proto-journalistic news culture, laid the basis for something that recognizably anticipates the modern public sphere. The expansion of transnational and transcontinental exchange, in what has been called the age of encounters, gave a new urgency to discussions of religious and ethnic diversity. Gender, too, was a matter of intense debate in this period, as was, specifically, the question of women s relation to political agency and power. This volume explores these developments in ten chapters devoted to the notions of sovereignty, liberty, and the common good ; the relation of state and household; religion and political obligation; gender and citizenship; ethnicity, diversity, and nationalism; democratic crises and civil resistance; international relations; and the development of news culture. It makes a pressing case for a fresh understanding of modern democracy s deep roots

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning for Smart Community: Concepts and Applications presents the evolution, challenges, and limitations of the application of machine learning and artificial intelligence to intelligent systems and smart communities