Nikolaus Geyrhalter

2019 ◽  
pp. 125-154
Author(s):  
Scott MacDonald

This is the first career interview with Austrian documentary filmmaker Nikolaus Geyrhalter, whose films, like those of Fred Wiseman, often focus on cultural institutions, though with a radically different sensibility. Geyrhalter’s most widely known film in the United States is Our Daily Bread (2005), his astonishing documentation of mass food production within the European community. Geyrhalter’s films are visually rigorous and formal—he was a photographer before he turned to filmmaking and is his own cinematographer. His films have explored cultural realities far and wide, from the aftermath of the Balkan wars of the 1990s to the plight of workers laid off from an Austrian factory during the years after the factory closed. His most elaborate film is Elsewhere (2000), a global survey of the edges of modern life and cultural transformation at the moment of the new millennium. The recent Homo Sapiens is a panorama of ruined places and landscapes across the planet at the dawn of the Anthropocene.

Author(s):  
Sara Moslener

For evangelical adolescents living in the United States, the material world of commerce and sexuality is fraught with danger. Contemporary movements urge young people to embrace sexual purity and abstinence before marriage and eschew the secular pressures of modern life. And yet, the sacred text that is used to authorize these teachings betrays evangelicals’ long-standing ability to embrace the material world for spiritual purposes. Bibles marketed to teenage girls, including those produced by and for sexual purity campaigns, make use of prevailing trends in bible marketing. By packaging the message of sexual purity and traditional gender roles into a sleek modern day apparatus, American evangelicals present female sexual restraint as the avant-garde of contemporary, evangelical orthodoxy.


Modern Italy ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Gilberto Mazzoli

During the Age of Mass Migration more than four million Italians reached the United States. The experience of Italians in US cities has been widely explored: however, the study of how migrants adjusted in relation to nature and food production is a relatively recent concern. Due to a mixture of racism and fear of political radicalism, Italians were deemed to be undesirable immigrants in East Coast cities and American authorities had long perceived Italian immigrants as unclean, unhealthy and carriers of diseases. As a flipside to this narrative, Italians were also believed to possess a ‘natural’ talent for agriculture, which encouraged Italian diplomats and politicians to propose the establishment of agricultural colonies in the southern United States. In rural areas Italians could profit from their agricultural skills and finally turn into ‘desirable immigrants’. The aim of this paper is to explore this ‘emigrant colonialism’ through the lens of environmental history, comparing the Italian and US diplomatic and public discourses on the potential and limits of Italians’ agricultural skills.


1975 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 245-258
Author(s):  
Donald VanDeVeer

In a recent trial in the United States a physician was convicted of manslaughter during the performance of a hysterotomy on a woman pregnant from twenty to twenty eight weeks. Some members of the jury, in their deliberations, were much impressed by seeing a photograph of a fetus of about the same age. The experience apparently provided some jurors with reason to conclude that the fetus which did die during or immediately after the hysterotomy was a human being or a person or, at least, was so like a child that the killing of it was prohibited by the law of homicide. If being a human being is not the same as being a pre-natal progeny of homo sapiens, it is difficult to understand how one could “tell by looking” whether the fetus is a human being. But the sight of a fetus of twenty weeks or longer does, I think, tempt us to think that from a moral standpoint we ought to extend the same treatment to such fetuses, or virtually the same, as we extend to newborn babies and young children. The visual similarities between middle or late stage fetuses and newborn babies is striking.


Author(s):  
Shearer West

This chapter considers the origin and significance of three terms widely used to characterize a decadent periodization in Britain, the United States, and France: fin de siècle, Gilded Age, and Belle Époque. While these terms were used loosely, and in some cases retrospectively, to describe the last thirty years of the nineteenth century, they also highlight dominant social narratives of the period. These decades witnessed unprecedented economic growth, rapid technological progress, and relative peace following such crises as the Franco-Prussian War in Europe and the Civil War in the United States. However, the cultural products of decadence were more likely to emphasize millennial doom, nervous exhaustion, sexual perversion, and scientific failure, while the decadent style was seen as a novel way of expressing how it felt to live in an era in which the pace of modern life brought with it febrile cultural, social, and political change.


Author(s):  
Aneta Ejsmont

Building own business is a long-term and laborious process. A person who leads a startup tries to start with building own business by taking first steps toward financial independence. Analyzing conditions in Poland, on average every second startup sells its services abroad, admittedly it is good news, although half of them do not export at all. Half of the startups which export their services and goods generates more than 50% of their revenues outside Poland. Very interesting is the fact that 60% of exporters have conducted their foreign sale since the moment of establishing their business. On which markets do they sell their services? It turns out that the most popular are markets in the European Union (54%), including the United Kingdom 14% and Germany 9%. Only about 25% of Polish startups exports their products and services to the United States. Taking the United States into consideration, in 2008 the USA lost their leading position in the number of startups which are newly created and achieving success in business. Currently in terms of the number of new startups the USA is on a quite distant place after Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Hungary, New Zealand, Israel or Italy. In short, more companies were closed than created, so it was, as a matter of fact, like in Poland. Therefore, the condition to improve the development of startups both from Poland and other countries all the world is to increase cooperation and coopetition.


2020 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 536-546
Author(s):  
Marina S. Reshetnikova

The rapid acceleration of scientific and technological progress, which started at the beginning of the 21st century, has become a decisive factor in influencing the global economy. Who will lead the global innovation race? This problem is especially relevant in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). At the moment, the United States and China are the main participants in the battle for dominance in this area. The author assesses Chinas innovative potential in the field of AI and identifies its achievements in this area. Based on the statistics provided, Chinas AI leadership has reached a critical point. China is confidently leading the new fundamental research of artificial intelligence, forming its theoretical base and applied research and development, which will contribute to the creation of new high-tech innovative products and services. However, in terms of the number and quality of AI specialists (AI Talents) and the number of companies engaged in AI, China is still lagging behind its main rival, namely the United States. The author proved that, despite the obvious successes of China, the United States still has an equal lead in the global innovation race.


2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 129-135
Author(s):  
Lauren Thomas Quigley ◽  
Monica Cox ◽  
Cynthia J. Atman ◽  
Jennifer Turns

When we reflect on 2020, especially in the United States, the divides in society amplified by the pandemic and laid bare for all to see following the murder of George Floyd in Minnesota in May, 2020 will most likely be the top of mind. We could all see this nation’s history and current complicity for racism, both the systematic and systemic. The moment was not unfamiliar, but markedly different. Initially, we wrote this piece in the summer of 2020, in response to our professional organization’s delay and hesitancy to affirm Black lives, Black students, Black engineers and Black faculty. Many of us were crying out. Allies with commitment to action showed up for and with us -- no questions asked, to ensure that what we felt was at least heard. In nearly a year since our original effort to write this piece together, some things have changed for the better. We saw our professional organization affirm Black lives. We saw some of our colleagues take action, change course and use their influence to make the community better. Some learned, listened and tried to do something new. Others, either remained silent, hopefully in contemplation, but some with a silence that convinces us that they are simply not on the same side. We composed the below entries in the summer of 2020, amid national turbulence and internal reflection. Below we provide four personal stories and some specific calls to action situated in the summer of 2020, but these remain our aspirations and hopes for the field of engineering education.


Author(s):  
Елена Цветкова ◽  
Elena Tsvetkova

The main trend of recent years is the complication of tax administration. In order to improve it states develop forms of work with taxpayers, including alternative tax dispute resolution. The author analyses alternative tax dispute resolution that have already developed in Russia and compares them with similar procedures in the United States, the Netherlands and Germany. To the alternative methods that are applied in Russia the author refers tax monitoring and agreement on the settlement of a tax dispute. Tax monitoring is not seen as a form of tax control, but as a mean of resolving and preventing the occurrence of a tax dispute. The conclusion of an agreement between a tax authority and a taxpayer on the settlement of a dispute in court is possible by reaching a compromise on the qualification of relations, on actual circumstances, on the interpretation of the tax rate. The article contains examples of programs that exist in the US and Germany in the sphere of tax dispute resolution. Also issues related to the implementation of the mediation procedure existing in the United States, the Netherlands and Germany and the possibility of their application in Russia are considered. The author emphasizes the impossibility of applying the procedure of mediation in tax disputes in Russia at the moment due to the lack of legislative regulation.


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