The first full-length biography of a brilliant, self-taught inventor whose innovations in information and energy technology continue to shape our world.
The Economist called Stanford R. Ovshinsky (1922–2012) “the Edison of our age,” but this apt comparison doesn't capture the full range of his achievements. As an independent, self-educated inventor, Ovshinsky not only created many important devices but also made fundamental discoveries in materials science. This book offers the first full-length biography of a visionary whose energy and information innovations continue to fuel our post-industrial economy.
In The Man Who Saw Tomorrow, Lillian Hoddeson and Peter Garrett tell the story of an unconventional genius with no formal education beyond high school who invented, among other things, the rechargeable nickel metal hydride batteries that have powered everything from portable electronics to hybrid cars, a system for mass-producing affordable thin-film solar panels, and rewritable CDs and DVDs. His most important discovery, the Ovshinsky effect, led to a paradigm shift in condensed matter physics and yielded phase-change memory, which is now enabling new advances in microelectronics. A son of the working class who began as a machinist and toolmaker, Ovshinsky focused his work on finding solutions to urgent social problems, and to pursue those goals, he founded Energy Conversion Devices, a unique research and development lab. At the end of his life, battered by personal and professional losses, Ovshinsky nevertheless kept working to combat global warming by making solar energy “cheaper than coal”―another of his many visions of a better tomorrow.

The Man Who Saw Tomorrow: The Life and Inventions of Stanford R. Ovshinsky (Mit Press)

Biographies & Memoirs

Hoddeson, Lillian

Garrett, Peter

Professionals & Academics

The MIT Press

Political Blues

Politics & Social Sciences

Politics & Government

Australia in Print

Attitudes to Language (Key Topics in Sociolinguistics)

Just about everyone seems to have views about language. Language attitudes and language ideologies permeate our daily lives. Our competence, intelligence, friendliness, trustworthiness, social status, group memberships, and so on, are often judged from the way we communicate. Even the speed at which we speak can evoke reactions. And we often try to anticipate such judgements as we communicate. In this lively introduction, Peter Garrett draws upon research carried out over recent decades in order to discuss such attitudes and the implications they have for our use of language, for social advantage or discrimination, and for social identity. Using a range of examples that includes punctuation, words, grammar, pronunciation, accents, dialects and languages, this book explores the intricate and fascinating ways in which language influences our everyday thoughts, feelings and behaviour.

Reference

Words, Language & Grammar

Cambridge University Press

Just about everyone seems to have views about language. Language attitudes and language ideologies permeate our daily lives. Our competence, intelligence, friendliness, trustworthiness, social status, group memberships, and so on, are often judged from the way we communicate. Even the speed at which we speak can evoke reactions. And we often try to anticipate such judgements as we communicate. In this lively introduction, Peter Garrett draws upon research carried out over recent decades in order to discuss such attitudes and the implications they have for our use of language, for social advantage or discrimination, and for social identity. Using a range of examples that includes punctuation, words, grammar, pronunciation, accents, dialects and languages, this book explores the intricate and fascinating ways in which language influences our everyday thoughts, feelings and behaviour.

Language Awareness in the Classroom addresses the central educational question of the impact that explicit language knowledge has on learning and language learning.A substantial Introduction defines the issues and key concepts and relates them to contemporary educational policy and practice in Europe and internationally. The papers are organised into four thematic sections: the extent and nature of language awareness in teacher education; school-based language awareness programmes; tertiary education initiatives and modes of evaluation of language awareness programmes.

Language Awareness in the Classroom (Applied Linguistics and Language Study)

James, Carl

Candlin, Christopher N.

Garett, Peter (Lecturer In Linguistics University Of Wales Bangor)

Foreign Language Study & Reference

Routledge

The Gothic has long been seen as offering a subversive challenge to the norms of realism. Locating both Gothic and mainstream Victorian fiction in a larger literary and cultural field, Peter K. Garrett argues that the oppositions usually posed between them are actually at work within both. He further shows how, by offering alternative versions of its stories, nineteenth-century Gothic fiction repeatedly reflects on narrative force, the power exerted by both writers and readers.
Beginning with Poe's theory and practice of the Gothic tale as an exercise (or fantasy) of authorial power, Garrett then reads earlier eighteenth-century and Romantic Gothic fiction for comparable reflexive implications. Throughout, he stresses the ways authors doubled both characters and narrative perspectives to raise issues of power and authority in the tension between central deviant figures and social norms. 
Garrett then shows how the great nineteenth-century monster stories Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Dracula self-consciously link the extremity and isolation of their deviant figures with the social groups they confront. These narratives, he argues, move from a Romantic concern with individual creation and responsibility to a Victorian affirmation of social solidarity that also reveals its dependence on the binding force of exclusionary violence. The final section of the book extends its investigation of Gothic reflections on narrative force into the more realistic social and psychological fiction of Dickens, Eliot, and James.

Gothic Reflections: Narrative Force in Nineteenth-Century Fiction

Literature & Fiction

British & Irish

Cornell University Press

Therapist

Alleman, Richard

United States

Walker Co

A New Kind of Dialogue is a landmark in understanding the pervasive challenges of modern society.\nIt is a serious but easy read, written as a first-hand narrative that encourages dialogic thinking.\nThis is the story of how a new kind of Dialogue was conceived by the author and theoretical physicist David Bohm, and their eight years of participatory research until Bohm's death in 1992. Their seminal paper, "Dialogue - A Proposal", laid the foundation for the author's 30 years of work introducing Dialogue into prison systems and consulting to multinational organisations.\nAcross the span of this remarkable journey, the author's discoveries cover such diverse territory as . . .\nOrganisations. The author explores with compassion and insight the dynamic realities of these complex structures. Organisations are everywhere, and they struc- ture every part of our lives. But we are not running them - they are running us. We may be unaware of the cause, but we all experience the consequences that include social fragmentation and the proliferation of seemingly unresolvable problems.\nFragmentation of thought. It seems humans have changed little since Stone Age times, but our world has changed substantially. It is shaped by the way we now talk and think, that has become detached, fragmented and confused. The proposal that there is a single root cause is radical yet hugely encouraging. It is clear where to place our attention.\nDialogue as a profession. The author shows how one central way forward is the development of Professional Dialogue, which has proven itself to be effective and generative.

A New Kind of Dialogue

Social Sciences

Dialogue Publications Ltd

Peter Garrett's life has been fully and passionately lived. A man of boundless energy, compassion, intelligence and creativity, he has already achieved enough to fill several lives.From his idyllic childhood growing up in the northern suburbs of Sydney, to an early interest in equality and justice; from the height of 1960s culture shock at ANU to fronting iconic Australian band Midnight Oil; from his time as a galvanising activist for the environment to being the only unaligned Cabinet minister in two Labor governments, Garrett has an extraordinary story to tell.He writes movingly about his lifelong mission to protect the environment and his connection with Aboriginal people, about his love for his family and his passion for our what it means to him and what it can become.Provocative, entertaining, impassioned and inspiring, this memoir goes to the heart and soul of a remarkable Australian and raises questions crucial to us all.

Big Blue Sky: A Memoir

Arts & Literature

Allen& Unwin

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