The Usefulness Of The Useless

Author : Abraham Flexner,Robbert Dijkgraaf
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 104 pages
File Size : 48,6 Mb
Release : 2017-02-21
Category : Reference
ISBN : 9780691174761

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The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge by Abraham Flexner,Robbert Dijkgraaf Pdf

A short, provocative book about why "useless" science often leads to humanity's greatest technological breakthroughs A forty-year tightening of funding for scientific research has meant that resources are increasingly directed toward applied or practical outcomes, with the intent of creating products of immediate value. In such a scenario, it makes sense to focus on the most identifiable and urgent problems, right? Actually, it doesn't. In his classic essay "The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge," Abraham Flexner, the founding director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and the man who helped bring Albert Einstein to the United States, describes a great paradox of scientific research. The search for answers to deep questions, motivated solely by curiosity and without concern for applications, often leads not only to the greatest scientific discoveries but also to the most revolutionary technological breakthroughs. In short, no quantum mechanics, no computer chips. This brief book includes Flexner's timeless 1939 essay alongside a new companion essay by Robbert Dijkgraaf, the Institute's current director, in which he shows that Flexner's defense of the value of "the unobstructed pursuit of useless knowledge" may be even more relevant today than it was in the early twentieth century. Dijkgraaf describes how basic research has led to major transformations in the past century and explains why it is an essential precondition of innovation and the first step in social and cultural change. He makes the case that society can achieve deeper understanding and practical progress today and tomorrow only by truly valuing and substantially funding the curiosity-driven "pursuit of useless knowledge" in both the sciences and the humanities.

Author : William Morris
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 32 pages
File Size : 48,8 Mb
Release : 1891
Category : Labor
ISBN : UIUC:30112045810139

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Useful Work Versus Useless Toil by William Morris Pdf

Author : Merrill Singer,J Bryan Page
Publisher : Left Coast Press
Page : 249 pages
File Size : 41,7 Mb
Release : 2014
Category : Medical
ISBN : 9781611321180

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Social Value of Drug Addicts by Merrill Singer,J Bryan Page Pdf

In a wide-ranging analysis covering popular culture, policy, and underlying social structures, this book shows how drug addicts are socially constructed as useless burdens on society and who benefits from that portrayal.

Author : Erin Manning
Publisher : Duke University Press
Page : 236 pages
File Size : 53,8 Mb
Release : 2020-10-09
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781478012597

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For a Pragmatics of the Useless by Erin Manning Pdf

What has a use in the future, unforeseeably, is radically useless now. What has an effect now is not necessarily useful if it falls through the gaps. In For a Pragmatics of the Useless Erin Manning examines what falls outside the purview of already-known functions and established standards of value, not for want of potential but for carrying an excess of it. The figures are various: the infrathin, the artful, proprioceptive tactility, neurodiversity, black life. It is around the latter two that a central refrain echoes: "All black life is neurodiverse life." This is not an equation, but an "approximation of proximity." Manning shows how neurotypicality and whiteness combine to form a normative baseline for existence. Blackness and neurodiversity "schizz" around the baseline, uselessly, pragmatically, figuring a more-than of life living. Manning, in dialogue with Félix Guattari and drawing on the black radical tradition's accounts of black life and the aesthetics of black sociality, proposes a "schizoanalysis" of the more-than, charting a panoply of techniques for other ways of living and learning.

Author : Calvin Hui
Publisher : Columbia University Press
Page : 167 pages
File Size : 43,9 Mb
Release : 2021-09-21
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780231549837

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The Art of Useless by Calvin Hui Pdf

Since embarking on economic reforms in 1978, the People’s Republic of China has also undergone a sweeping cultural reorganization, from proletarian culture under Mao to middle-class consumer culture today. Under these circumstances, how has a Chinese middle class come into being, and how has consumerism become the dominant ideology of an avowedly socialist country? The Art of Useless offers an innovative way to understand China’s unprecedented political-economic, social, and cultural transformations, showing how consumer culture helps anticipate, produce, and shape a new middle-class subjectivity. Examining changing representations of the production and consumption of fashion in documentaries and films, Calvin Hui traces how culture contributes to China’s changing social relations through the cultivation of new identities and sensibilities. He explores the commodity chain of fashion on a transnational scale, from production to consumption to disposal, as well as media portrayals of the intersections of clothing with class, gender, and ethnicity. Hui illuminates key cinematic narratives, such as a factory worker’s desire for a high-quality suit in the 1960s, an intellectual’s longing for fashionable clothes in the 1980s, and a white-collar woman’s craving for brand-name commodities in the 2000s. He considers how documentary films depict the undersides of consumption—exploited laborers who fantasize about the products they manufacture as well as the accumulation of waste and its disposal—revealing how global capitalism renders migrant factory workers, scavengers, and garbage invisible. A highly interdisciplinary work that combines theoretical nuance with masterful close analyses, The Art of Useless is an innovative rethinking of the emergence of China’s middle-class consumer culture.

Author : Tim Conley
Publisher : University of Toronto Press
Page : 200 pages
File Size : 54,5 Mb
Release : 2017-10-03
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781487515492

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Useless Joyce by Tim Conley Pdf

Tim Conley’s Useless Joyce provocatively analyses Joyce’s Ulysses and Finnegans Wake and takes the reader on a journey exploring the perennial question of the usefulness of literature and art. Conley argues that the works of James Joyce, often thought difficult and far from practical, are in fact polymorphous meditations on this question. Examinations of traditional textual functions such as quoting, editing, translating, and annotating texts are set against the ways in which texts may be assigned unexpected but thoroughly practical purposes. Conley’s accessible and witty engagement with the material views the rise of explication and commentary on Joyce’s work as an industry not unlike the rise of self-help publishing. We can therefore read Ulysses and Finnegans Wake as various kinds of guides and uncover new or forgotten “uses” for them. Useless Joyce invites new discussions about the assumptions at work behind our definitions of literature, interpretation, and use.

Author : Daniel Cottom
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
Page : 257 pages
File Size : 42,9 Mb
Release : 2013-04-09
Category : Education
ISBN : 9780812201680

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Why Education Is Useless by Daniel Cottom Pdf

Education is useless because it destroys our common sense, because it isolates us from the rest of humanity, because it hardens our hearts and swells our heads. Bookish persons have long been subjects of suspicion and contempt and nowhere more so, perhaps, than in the United States during the past twenty years. Critics of education point to the Nazism of Martin Heidegger, for example, to assert the inhumanity of highly learned people; they contend that an oppressive form of identity politics has taken over the academy and complain that the art world has been overrun by culturally privileged elitists. There are always, it seems, far more reasons to disparage the ivory tower than to honor it. The uselessness of education, particularly in the humanities, is a pervasive theme in Western cultural history. With wit and precision, Why Education Is Useless engages those who attack learning by focusing on topics such as the nature of humanity, love, beauty, and identity as well as academic scandals, identity politics, multiculturalism, and the corporatization of academe. Asserting that hostility toward education cannot be dismissed as the reaction of barbarians, fools, and nihilists, Daniel Cottom brings a fresh perspective to all these topics while still making the debates about them comprehensible to those who are not academic insiders. A brilliant and provocative work of cultural argument and analysis, Why Education Is Useless brings in materials from literature, philosophy, art, film, and other fields and proceeds from the assumption that hostility to education is an extremely complex phenomenon, both historically and in contemporary American life. According to Cottom, we must understand the perdurable appeal of this antagonism if we are to have any chance of recognizing its manifestations—and countering them. Ranging in reference from Montaigne to George Bush, from Sappho to Timothy McVeigh, Why Education Is Useless is a lively investigation of a notion that has persisted from antiquity through the Renaissance and into the modern era, when the debate over the relative advantages of a liberal and a useful education first arose. Facing head on the conception of utility articulated in the nineteenth century by John Stuart Mill, and directly opposing the hostile conceptions of inutility that have been popularized in recent decades by such ideologues as Allan Bloom, Harold Bloom, and John Ellis, Cottom contends that education must indeed be "useless" if it is to be worthy of its name.

Author : George Anders
Publisher : Little, Brown
Page : 352 pages
File Size : 47,9 Mb
Release : 2017-08-08
Category : Education
ISBN : 9780316548854

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You Can Do Anything by George Anders Pdf

In a tech-dominated world, the most needed degrees are the most surprising: the liberal arts Did you take the right classes in college? Will your major help you get the right job offers? For more than a decade, the national spotlight has focused on science and engineering as the only reliable choice for finding a successful post-grad career. Our destinies have been reduced to a caricature: learn to write computer code or end up behind a counter, pouring coffee. Quietly, though, a different path to success has been taking shape. In YOU CAN DO ANYTHING, George Anders explains the remarkable power of a liberal arts education - and the ways it can open the door to thousands of cutting-edge jobs every week. The key insight: curiosity, creativity, and empathy aren't unruly traits that must be reined in. You can be yourself, as an English major, and thrive in sales. You can segue from anthropology into the booming new field of user research; from classics into management consulting, and from philosophy into high-stakes investing. At any stage of your career, you can bring a humanist's grace to our rapidly evolving high-tech future. And if you know how to attack the job market, your opportunities will be vast. In this book, you will learn why resume-writing is fading in importance and why "telling your story" is taking its place. You will learn how to create jobs that don't exist yet, and to translate your campus achievements into a new style of expression that will make employers' eyes light up. You will discover why people who start in eccentric first jobs - and then make their own luck - so often race ahead of peers whose post-college hunt focuses only on security and starting pay. You will be ready for anything.

Author : Ronny Ramlau,Otmar Scherzer
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Page : 469 pages
File Size : 41,9 Mb
Release : 2019-06-17
Category : Mathematics
ISBN : 9783110559514

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The Radon Transform by Ronny Ramlau,Otmar Scherzer Pdf

The series is devoted to the publication of high-level monographs, surveys and proceedings which cover the whole spectrum of computational and applied mathematics. The books of this series are addressed to both specialists and advanced students. Interested authors may submit book proposals to the Managing Editor or to any member of the Editorial Board. Managing EditorUlrich Langer, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria Editorial BoardHansj rg Albrecher, University of Lausanne, SwitzerlandRonald H. W. Hoppe, University of Houston, USAKarl Kunisch, RICAM, Linz, Austria; University of Graz, AustriaHarald Niederreiter, RICAM, Linz, AustriaChristian Schmeiser, University of Vienna, Austria

Author : David Graeber
Publisher : Simon & Schuster
Page : 368 pages
File Size : 51,8 Mb
Release : 2019-05-07
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 9781501143335

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Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber Pdf

From bestselling writer David Graeber—“a master of opening up thought and stimulating debate” (Slate)—a powerful argument against the rise of meaningless, unfulfilling jobs…and their consequences. Does your job make a meaningful contribution to the world? In the spring of 2013, David Graeber asked this question in a playful, provocative essay titled “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs.” It went viral. After one million online views in seventeen different languages, people all over the world are still debating the answer. There are hordes of people—HR consultants, communication coordinators, telemarketing researchers, corporate lawyers—whose jobs are useless, and, tragically, they know it. These people are caught in bullshit jobs. Graeber explores one of society’s most vexing and deeply felt concerns, indicting among other villains a particular strain of finance capitalism that betrays ideals shared by thinkers ranging from Keynes to Lincoln. “Clever and charismatic” (The New Yorker), Bullshit Jobs gives individuals, corporations, and societies permission to undergo a shift in values, placing creative and caring work at the center of our culture. This book is for everyone who wants to turn their vocation back into an avocation and “a thought-provoking examination of our working lives” (Financial Times).

Author : Noel Botham
Publisher : Kings Road Publishing
Page : 337 pages
File Size : 43,9 Mb
Release : 2010-11-01
Category : Humor
ISBN : 9781857829273

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The Mega Book of Useless Information by Noel Botham Pdf

Continuing the sensational success of the Useless Information Series, the Official Useless Information Society bring you another essential compendium of everything you never needed but always wanted to know. If you are a lover of the wonderfully pointless, then this is the book for you.

Author : Daniel E Trathen
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 106 pages
File Size : 43,5 Mb
Release : 2019-11-21
Category : Electronic
ISBN : 1702239187

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The Useless Book of Absolutely Nothing! by Daniel E Trathen Pdf

This book is blank inside. That's correct, no printed pages! A perfect gift for someone who has everything. Kris Kringle, Birthday, Joke present, Leaving gift, for your boss, a family member, a school friend. It's just a book that is useless or is it?

Author : Don Voorhees
Publisher : M J F Books
Page : 200 pages
File Size : 52,7 Mb
Release : 1998-08
Category : Games & Activities
ISBN : 1567312667

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The Book of Totally Useless Information by Don Voorhees Pdf

Provides answers to such questions as "Was there ever a real Aunt Jemima?" "What is the difference between bourbon and Scotch?" "Why do trains have a caboose?" and "Why do we give names to hurricanes?"

Author : Don Voorhees
Publisher : Penguin
Page : 272 pages
File Size : 40,7 Mb
Release : 2009-10-27
Category : Humor
ISBN : 9781101149010

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The Essential Book of Useless Information by Don Voorhees Pdf

More facts! Less substance! The newest entry in the #1 New York Times bestselling Useless Information series. The useless information never ends in the newest, most crucially meaningless entry in the Useless Information series. This latest cornucopia of amazingly pointless facts and figures will have trivia buffs marveling at all the things they never needed to know.

Author : Werner Herzog
Publisher : Ecco
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 46,7 Mb
Release : 2010-06-29
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 0061575542

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Conquest of the Useless by Werner Herzog Pdf

Werner Herzog is one of our most revered contemporary filmmakers, a visionary director who ceaselessly tests the boundaries of art. Fitzcarraldo, his lavish 1982 film about a would-be rubber baron who pulls a steamship over a hill to access a rich rubber territory, was hailed by critics around the globe and won Herzog the 1982 Outstanding Director Prize at Cannes. The text of Conquest of the Useless emerged as if out of an Amazonian fever dream: the crew's camp in the heart of the jungle was attacked and burned to the ground; the production clashed with a border war; two planes crashed during filming; and Herzog had to unravel the logistics of moving a 320-ton steamship over a hill without the use of special effects. More than just a journal or diary of the shooting of Fitzcarraldo, Conquest of the Useless is a work of art unto itself, which charts the inner landscapes born of the delirium of the jungle and offers an extraordinary glimpse into the mind of a genius during the making of one of his greatest achievements.