Author: W. Russell Neuman File Type: pdf Photo opportunities, ten-second sound bites, talking heads and celebrity anchors so the world is explained daily to millions of Americans. The result, according to the experts, is an ignorant public, helpless targets of a one-way flow of carefully filtered and orchestrated communication. Common Knowledge shatters this pervasive myth. Reporting on a ground-breaking study, the authors reveal that our shared knowledge and evolving political beliefs are determined largely by how we actively reinterpret the images, fragments, and signals we find in the mass media. For their study, the authors analyzed coverage of 150 television and newspaper stories on five prominent issuesdrugs, AIDS, South African apartheid, the Strategic Defense Initiative, and the stock market crash of October 1987. They tested audience responses of more than 1,600 people, and conducted in-depth interviews with a select sample. What emerges is a surprisingly complex picture of people actively and critically interpreting the news, making sense of even the most abstract issues in terms of their own lives, and finding political meaning in a sophisticated interplay of message, medium, and firsthand experience. At every turn, Common Knowledge refutes conventional wisdom. It shows that television is far more effective at raising the saliency of issues and promoting learning than is generally assumed it also undermines the assumed causal connection between newspaper reading and higher levels of political knowledge. Finally, this book gives a deeply responsible and thoroughly fascinating account of how the news is conveyed to us, and how we in turn convey it to others, making meaning of at once so much and so little. For anyone who makes the newsor tries to make anything of itCommon Knowledge promises uncommon wisdom. **From Publishers Weekly In this ponderous but informative study, the authors argue that experts who see the public as a passive audience for the media or as uninformed voters ignore the complex ways in which people think about public issues. The authors conducted interviews and surveys regarding five current issues--including drug abuse and the 1987 stock market crash--to determine how people analyze information from newspapers, news magazines and television news programs. From these they conclude that people invoke morality more often than the media do. They found, contrary to accepted wisdom, that television is not the cause of public ignorance rather, people who have lower cognitive skills are more likely to seek news from television. What people learn from the media, the authors suggest, depends on the their skills and education. They conclude that the media should present less salient topics with greater creativity but focus more on providing context and the hard news angle for provocative topics such as the AIDS crisis. Neuman teaches communications at Tufts Just and Crigler are political scientists at Wellesley and USC, respectively. 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Author: Hamza Alavi File Type: pdf

Author: Dirk van Dalen File Type: pdf New corrected printing of a well-established text on logic at the introductory level.ReviewFrom the reviews of the fourth edition This book teaches logic to mathematicians in just the way I would have wished. Beginning with the propositional calculus by means of truth-tables, i.e. the semantics, it proceeds to the syntactics in the form of Gentzens natural deduction. this fourth edition has a long final chapter added, on Godels incompleteness theorem. The chapter follows traditional lines but preserves the excellent quality of the earlier chapters. This is a delightful textbook, with plenty of examples for the reader. (C.W. Kilmister, The Mathematical Gazette, Vol. 89(515), 2005) This is the fourth edition of van Dalens classic textbook on logic in the popular Universitext -series. this book explains clearly all aspects of logic which a novice in this matter should learn by heart. Reading this book was a real delight. A lot of the fun was in the exercises heartily recommend this excellent textbook Current students may have little interest in formal mathematics the problem will solve itself when they all have a copy on their personal bookshelf. (Pieter Audenaert, Bulletin of the Belgian Mathematical Society, Vol. 12 (3), 2005) From the Back CoverA book which efficiently presents the basics of propositional and predicate logic, van Dalens popular textbook contains a complete treatment of elementary classical logic, using Gentzens Natural Deduction. Propositional and predicate logic are treated in separate chapters in a leisured but precise way. Chapter Three presents the basic facts of model theory, e.g. compactness, Skolem-Lowenheim, elementary equivalence, non-standard models, quantifier elimination, and Skolem functions. The discussion of classical logic is rounded off with a concise exposition of second-order logic. In view of the growing recognition of constructive methods and principles, one chapter is devoted to intuitionistic logic. Completeness is established for Kripke semantics. A number of specific constructive features, such as apartness and equality, the Godel translation, the disjunction and existence property have been incorporated. The power and elegance of natural deduction is demonstrated best in the part of proof theory called codecut-elimination orcodenormalization. Chapter 6 is devoted to this topic it contains the basic facts on the structure of derivations, both classically and intuitionistically. Finally, this edition contains a new chapter on Godels first incompleteness theorem. The chapter is self-contained, it provides a systematic exposition of primitive recursion and partial recursive functions, recursive by enumerable sets, and recursive separability. The arithmetization of Peanos arithmetic is based on the natural deduction system.

Author: John Brehm File Type: pdf Over 125 poetic companions, from Basho to Billy Collins, Saigyo to Shakespeare. The poems expertly gathered here offer all that one might hope for in spiritual companionship wisdom, compassion, peacefulness, good humor, and the ability to both absorb and express the deepest human emotions of grief and joy. The book includes a short essay on Mindful Reading and a meditation on sound from editor John Brehmhelping readers approach the poems from an experiential, non-analytical perspective and enter into the mindful reading of poetry as a kind of meditation. The Poetry of Impermanence, Mindfulness, and Joyoffers a wide-ranging collection of 129 ancient and modern poems unlike any other anthology on bookshelves today. It uniquely places Buddhist poets like Han Shan, Tu Fu, Saigyo, Ryokan, Basho, Issa, and others alongside modern Western poets one would not expect to find in such a collectionpoets like Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, William Stafford, Denise Levertov, Jack Gilbert, Ellen Bass, Billy Collins, and more. What these poems have in common, no matter whether they are explicitly Buddhist, is that all reflect the essential truths the Buddha articulated 2,500 years ago. The book provides an important poetic complement to the many prose books on mindfulness practicethe poems here both reflect and embody the dharma in ways that cant be matched by other modes of writing. Its unique features include an introduction that discusses the themes of impermanence, mindfulness, and joy and explores the relationship between them. Biographical notes place the poets in historical context and offer quotes and anecdotes to help readers learn about the poets lives. **Review Savor with mindfulness these poems that shine a light of few essentials in Buddhism that are also embraced by non-Buddhists. (Spirituality and Practice) In his clear and elegant introduction, John Brehm writes that he hopes these poems will come to be spiritual friendsand that seems to me a wonderful way to meet them... Each time you read one of these poems, a path opens to seeing more precisely, feeling more deeply. You dont have to be a poet or on any particular spiritual path to appreciate The Poetry of Impermanence, Mindfulness, and Joy. As Brehm reminds us, Living in the full knowledge that everything changes changes everything. It loosens our grasp and lets the world become what it truly is, a source of amazement. (Ellen Bass, author of The Human Line and Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets ) This collection would make a lovely gift for a poetry-loving or dharma-practicing friend, it could also serve as a wonderful gateway to either topic for the uninitiated. (Tricycle) I simply love this anthology of poetry.John Brehm has mined the hearts and minds of forgotten and famous alike, prompting his readers to stretch ever more gently into this ephemeral existence. These poems, ancient and modern, from East and West, point us to a poignant life, where the gateway to meaning involves learning to notice and include the ten thousand joys and sorrows along the way. (Sarah Powers author of Insight Yoga ) Words have great power to transform human consciousness. This collection of words, mindfully crafted by masters of language, amplifies the possibility of consciousness transformation exponentially. John Brehm has given us a superb selection. (Mark Brady, PhD, author of The Wisdom of Listening ) Jubilant, thoughtful, startling, and pure, the poems in The Poetry of Impermanence, Mindfulness, and Joy remind us that every poem is a pond, and every pond a poem. Slow down. Dip your toes. See the ripples in each reflected moon. Swim a while in the deep brilliance of language, image, and sound. (Dinty W. Moore, author of The Mindful Writer and Director of Creative Writing, Ohio University ) About the Author John Brehm is the author of two award-winning books of poems, Help Is On the Way and Sea of Faith, and the associate editor of The Oxford Book of American Poetry. His poems have appeared in Poetry, The Southern Review, New Ohio Review, The Sun, The Gettysburg Review, Gulf Coast, The Writers Almanac, the Norton Introduction to Literature, and many other journals and anthologies. He lives in Portland, Oregon, and teaches for Literary Arts and Mountain Writers Series in Portland and for the Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver, Colorado.