Utopia or dystopia? It’s up to us.
In the 21st century, powerful technologies have been appearing at a breathtaking pace—related to the internet, artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, and more. They have amazing potential upsides, but we can’t ignore the serious risks that come with them.
Brave New Planet is a podcast that delves deep into the most exciting and challenging scientific frontiers, helping us understand them and grapple with their implications. Dr. Eric Lander, president and founding director of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, is a geneticist, molecular biologist, and mathematician who was a leader of the Human Genome Project and for eight years served as a science advisor to the White House for President Obama. He’s also the host of Brave New Planet, and he’s talked to leading researchers, journalists, doctors, policy makers, activists, and legal experts to illuminate how this generation’s choices will shape the future as never before.
Brave New Planet is a partnership between the Broad Institute, Pushkin Industries, and the Boston Globe.

Brehe’s Grammar Anatomy makes grammar accessible to general and specialist readers alike. This book provides an in-depth look at beginner grammar terms and concepts, providing clear examples with limited technical jargon. Whether for academic or personal use, Brehe’s Grammar Anatomy is the perfect addition to any resource library.

Short Description:
During the early days of quarantine, many teachers turned to poetry to process their experiences. Teacher-Poets Writing to Bridge the Distance: An Oral History of COVID-19 preserves this poetry and teachers' experiences as they navigated a new reality in education.

Long Description:
During the early days of quarantine, many teachers turned to poetry to process their experiences. Teacher-Poets Writing to Bridge the Distance: An Oral History of COVID-19 preserves this poetry and teachers’ experiences as they navigated a new reality in education. In the interviews, teachers revisit poems written a year prior, re-witnessing, with perspective offered only by time, the impact of the pandemic on them as teachers and on education more broadly. This anthology offers readers the poems shared across 39 collected oral histories. The full collection of interviews is available for online public access at the Oklahoma Oral History Research Program.

Word Count: 29849

(Note: This resource's metadata has been created automatically by reformatting and/or combining the information that the author initially provided as part of a bulk import process.)

Short Description:
This first-year geography textbook takes a holistic approach to geography by incorporating elements of physical, human, and regional geography, as well as bringing in methods and perspectives from spatial information science. This textbook applies a fundamental geographical approach to understanding our globally changing world by looking at local processes, which are linked to larger global processes and events. The textbook includes numerous case studies specific to British Columbia as well as a number of suggested service learning activities.

Long Description:
Over the course of four days in June, 2014, five faculty members from across British Columbia supported by a facilitator, librarian, researcher, illustrator, programmer, and instructional designer created this book. This involved drawing on our own research, teaching, and experience and working with the team to put it all together into an online format; one which would be accessible to students and educators alike.

Beyond the unique way in which this book was created in a book-sprint process, there are other elements of this book that make it unique. First, it takes a holistic approach to first-year geography, incorporating elements of physical, human, and regional geography, as well as bringing in methods and perspectives from spatial information science.

Pedagogically, this book incorporates elements of service learning and suggested service learning activities, recognizing that the study of geography is deeply connected to the communities we live in. Many of the suggestions for service learning are illustrated through the use of case studies from across BC.

The book is aimed at a first-year or introductory geography student and would be suitable for a first-year geography course on BC.

Word Count: 48187

ISBN: 978-1-77420-018-6

(Note: This resource's metadata has been created automatically by reformatting and/or combining the information that the author initially provided as part of a bulk import process.)

There are several hundred thousand Brownfield sites across the country. The large number of sites, combined with how a majority of these properties are located in urban and historically underserved communities, dictate that redevelopment of these sites stands to be a common theme in urban planning for the foreseeable future. Students form a grounded understanding of the Brownfield lifecycle: how and why they were created, their potential role in community revitalization, and the general processes governing their redevelopment. Using case studies and guest speakers from the public, private and non-profit sectors, students develop and hone skills to effectively address the problems posed by these inactive sites.

Budgeting is the most basic and most important tool in anyone's financial toolbox. With this resource, students are given the hands-on opportunity to create budgets for fictional "Regan" during her sophomore year in nursing school, and, later, as a recent graduate with an apartment and a new car. Using either Microsoft® Excel or Google Docs, the students download our budgeting tool with space for their own budget, as well as the examples they created by establishing Regan's budget.

Designed as a core or supplementary text for upper elementary, middle and high school teachers and students, Building Democracy for All offers instructional ideas, interactive resources, multicultural content, and multimodal learning materials for interest-building explorations of United States government as well as students’ roles as citizens in a democratic society. It focuses on the importance of community engagement and social responsibility as understood and acted upon by middle and high school students—core themes in the 2018 Massachusetts 8th Grade Curriculum Framework, and which are found in many state history and social studies curriculum frameworks around the country.

Responding to Climate Change & Ecosystem Disruption

Word Count: 97221

(Note: This resource's metadata has been created automatically as part of a bulk import process by reformatting and/or combining the information that the author initially provided. As a result, there may be errors in formatting.)

This is the first edition of the open text book Building a Competitive Investment Climate on First Nation Lands. This textbook is for students who are First Nation and tribal government employees or students who would like to work for or with First Nation and tribal governments. The purpose of this textbook is to help interested First Nation and tribal governments build a competitive investment climate. Work began on this text book in early 2012 with a generous grant from the Donner Canadian Foundation. Financial support was also provided by the First Nations Tax Commission and the Tulo Centre.

This course is an intensive one-week introduction to leadership, teams, and learning communities. The class meets daily for five days. The class serves as an introduction of concepts and uses a variety of experiential exercises to develop individual and team skills, as well as supportive relationships within the Leaders for Manufacturing class. As part of the focus on leadership, it discusses the idea of the “Universe Within”, the images, thoughts, and experiences that are internal to all leaders.

The purpose of this class is to advance your understanding of how to use financial information to value and analyze firms. We will apply your economics/accounting/finance skills to problems from today’s business news to help us understand what is contained in financial reports, why firms report certain information, and how to be a sophisticated user of this information.

This class looks at the birth and international expansion of an American industry of political marketing, with a special emphasis on Latin America. We will focus our attention on the cultural processes, sociopolitical contexts and moral utopias that shape the practice of political marketing in the U.S. and in different Latin American countries. By looking at the debates and expert practices at the core of the business of politics, we will explore how the “universal” concept of democracy is interpreted and reworked as it travels through space and time. Specifically, we will study how different groups experimenting with political marketing in different cultural contexts understand the role of citizens in a democracy.

Word Count: 55857

(Note: This resource's metadata has been created automatically by reformatting and/or combining the information that the author initially provided as part of a bulk import process.)

This course is designed for learners with no background in Chinese. It introduces basic structures of the Mandarin Chinese language with emphasis on listening, speaking, reading and writing skills. Students will gain these four skills in standard Mandarin Chinese, attaining approximately the Novice-High level on the ACTFL-ETS (American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages) proficiency scale. Topics of conversation include basic greetings, names, family, work, study, and hobbies.

CHN 102 is a continuation of CHN 101. The four skills of listening, speaking, reading, and writing in standard Mandarin Chinese are further developed. Students will gain these four skills, attaining approximately the Intermediate-low level on the ACTFL-ETS (American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages) proficiency scale. Topics of conversation include education, sports, entertainment, travel, and health.

Upon successful completion of this course, the student should be able to:

* Understand sentence length utterances which consist of recombination of learned utterances on a variety of topics. Content refer primarily to basic personal background and needs, social conversations and some complex tasks.
* Handle successfully a variety of uncomplicated task oriented and social functions. Can ask and answer questions participate in simple conversations on topics beyond the most immediate needs.
* Read consistently with increased understanding simple connected texts dealing with basic personal and social needs. Student will have sufficient comprehension to understand some authentic material as it reflects similarity to specially prepared material and/or to high frequency oral vocabulary and structure.
* Meet a number of practical writing needs. Can write short simple letters. Contents involves personal preference, daily routine, everyday events, and other topics grounded in personal experience. Evidence of control of the syntax of non-complex sentences. Can create a collection of sentences on a given topic.
* List some essential points of Chinese geography, society, and culture.

Created in 2012 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Comprehensive Initiative on Technology Evaluation (CITE) is the first-ever program dedicated to developing methods for product evaluation in global development. CITE produces technology evaluations that provide evidence for data-driven decision-making by development workers, donors, manufacturers, suppliers, and consumers themselves. In addition, CITE evaluations lead to significant developing insights, helping us better understand development challenges.

Long Description:
This pamphlet is part of the series, “Moving Beyond Capitalism – Now.”

The first two parts appear here, and two additional parts by Howard Waitzkin will follow. These four parts show: Capitalist-oriented industrial agriculture and its destruction of habitat are the upstream causes that led to the COVID-19 pandemic as well as other past and future pandemics of devastating, emerging viral pathogens. COVID-19 may trigger a collapse of the global capitalist system but it is not the cause. Health-care and public-health systems organized around capitalist principles don’t do well in pandemics, compared to those not organized around capitalist principles. The current economic collapse, triggered by a pandemic, opens a door for revolutionary transformation.

Several chapters by other authors will appear soon.

Please contact us with any questions or concerns (info@darajapress.com).

Word Count: 14444

(Note: This resource's metadata has been created automatically as part of a bulk import process by reformatting and/or combining the information that the author initially provided. As a result, there may be errors in formatting.)

Short Description:
In this introductory book on CSR and Sustainability Communication, we discuss the evolution of the sustainability story in corporate, political, and environmental discourses as well as paradigms and theoretical approaches to better understand communication about, of and for sustainability. The textbook follows a strategic communication perspective and offers practical examples and exercises for making sustainability and related issues accessible and comprehensible, for co-creating social change. The book offers students and instructors as well as (future) communication strategists and campaigners foundations, strategies, tools and methodologies of sustainability communication to create a new story and take authorship for the new narrative. Furthermore, it attracts professionals, advocates, and academics who are passionate about taking proactive roles in restoratively addressing the pressing interrelated sociocultural and ecological issues if our times, to become reflexive leaders and advocates.

Long Description:
Over the last two decades, sustainability has become a widespread normative framework or regulatory idea – mostly communicated in a context of sustainable development and thus as ‘alternative to’ or ‘fight against climate change’. Sustainability is generally defined as the fact that a given activity or action is capable of being sustained and therefore continued, related to the responsibility for the future, meeting global needs, the protection of the environment, development and ecocultural consciousness as a deeper logic and matter of life, as well as participation and engagement. Thus, sustainability communication encompasses the relationship between humans and their environment and focuses on social discourses (Godemann at al., 2011). Here, a critical approach seems to be fruitful to grasp the largely amorphous concept of sustainability that gets bent into many different shapes in the public sphere (Weder et al., 2019a; 2021; Dimitrov, 2018).

For the introductory book at hand, we focus on the role of strategic communication in shaping sustainability as current narrative of our society in relation to the ‘old’ climate change narrative of destruction and imbalance between human and nature. Therefore, we conceptualize the evolution of the sustainability narrative as core process of strategic communication. We focus on organizations and their responsibility towards the society (Corporate Social Responsibility) and identify the potential of strategic communication for a transition of the old to the ‘new’ narrative.

After the clarification of the basic paradigms of Corporate Responsibility, Environmental and Social Governance, and Sustainability as normative framework and narrative of the future, we introduce the basic paradigms of communication, communication from a functional, rather instrumental and critical, social-constructivist perspective, before we focus on sustainability and CSR communication and related strategies and tactics of content-related, storytelling-focused communication management.

In this introductory book on CSR and Sustainability Communication, we discuss the evolution of the sustainability story in corporate, political, and environmental discourses as well as paradigms and theoretical approaches to better understand communication about, of and for sustainability. The textbook follows a strategic communication perspective and offers practical examples and exercises for making sustainability and related issues accessible and comprehensible, for co-creating social change. The book offers students and instructors as well as (future) communication strategists and campaigners foundations, strategies, tools and methodologies of sustainability communication to create a new story and take authorship for the new narrative. Furthermore, it attracts professionals, advocates, and academics who are passionate about taking proactive roles in restoratively addressing the pressing interrelated sociocultural and ecological issues if our times, to become reflexive leaders and advocates.

Word Count: 36013

ISBN: 978-1-74272-361-7

(Note: This resource's metadata has been created automatically by reformatting and/or combining the information that the author initially provided as part of a bulk import process.)

Café Denj is 14 episodes of short stories made for Advanced Persian Language Learners. The purpose of producing this series of videos that are all linked together was to help those who are learning modern Persian as well as offering a better understanding of the Persian culture as it is in Iran today.

The Cali Chiu course is designed to give undergraduates a working command of Valley Zapotec, an indigenous language of Oaxaca, Mexico, also spoken by many immigrants to California. The course presents a new simplified system for writing Valley Zapotec, along with a guide to pronunciation and information on building Valley Zapotec words and sentences. This book provides background material for an instructor’s class lectures, but it can be used for self-study along with the accompanying audio material.