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Agnes Grey is the daughter of a minister, whose family comes to financial ruin. Desperate to earn money to care for herself, she takes one of the few jobs allowed to respectable women in the early Victorian era, as a governess to the children of the wealthy. In working with two different families, the Bloomfields and the Murrays, she comes to learn about the troubles that face a young woman who must try to rein in unruly, spoiled children for a living, and about the ability of wealth and status to destroy social values. After her father's death, Agnes opens a small school with her mother and finds happiness with a man who loves her for herself....

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Fiction, Play, Romance

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Will Barrent awakes without memories just before being deposited on Omega, a planet for criminals where the average life expectancy is 3 years. He’s listed as a murderer and released into the illicit society as a “peon” the lowest class imaginable. A mysterious girl gives him a weapon that starts him on his path to status, a path that requires constant brutality. But it must be borne if our hero is to discover the reason for his imprisonment; A reason that pits him against himself, and involves the sardonically similar but devoutly different creeds of Omega and Earth. - The Status Civilization was first published as “Omega!” in the August and September 1960 issues of Amazing Science Fiction Stories Magazine. (Summary by Gregg Margarite)...

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Science fiction

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The novel tells the story of Agnes Grey, the daughter of a minister, whose family comes to financial ruin. Desperate to earn the money to care for herself, she takes one of the few jobs allowed to respectable women in the early Victorian era – the role of governess to the children of the wealthy. In working with two different families (the Bloomfields and the Murrays), she comes to learn about the troubles that face a young woman who must try to rein in unruly, spoiled children for a living, and about the ability of wealth and status to destroy social values. After her father's death, Agnes opens a small school with her mother and finds happiness with a man who loves her for herself. They have three children at the end of the novel, Edward, Agnes and Mary (Wikipedia)...

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Fiction, Literature

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Beyond Apologies presents a number of myths about mainstream economics and clarifies their focus on consumption rather than on wellbeing. Each myth is followed by a discussion of a different way of addressing the issue. The book then presents various practical ways of remedying the situation. Topics covered include GDP, economic growth, microcredit, aid, and the Bretton Woods Organizations (the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and World Trade Organisation). The book is intended for an international audience. Though filled with references, the book is written in a friendly and accessible rather than academic style, aimed at activists, NGO professionals, and others concerned about the poor, the disadvantaged, the environment, and the preservation of our resource base....

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Society cannot get to a better place without looking at what is holding it back. Conventional beliefs about economics limit people to a few discourses and solutions that, rather than resolve problems, increase their magnitude. It is thus critically important to identify some widely accepted myths that underlie current economic discourse and to offer a more helpful and hopeful way of looking at the issues. Being free from dominant myths can lead to exciting new possibilities....

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INTRODUCTION: Why It Is Important To Learn About Economics PART I. ECONOMICS REVISITED: What we’ve always known about economics may not be so MYTH #1: The World’s Poor Just Need a Few More Dollars Per Day MYTH #2: GNP/GDP Tell Us How Well Everyone is Doing MYTH #3: Economic Growth is Necessary to End Poverty MYTH #4: The World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization Seek Primarily to Alleviate Poverty MYTH #5: Aid Alone, or Aid as Currently Practiced, Significantly Reduces Poverty MYTH #6: Microcredit & Income Generation are Miracle Cures for Poverty MYTH #7: Inequality is Inevitable and is Less of a Problem than Poverty MYTH #8: Mainstream Economists Want Governments to Play Only a Minimal Role in the Economy MYTH #9: Whatever Governments Do, the Private Sector Can Do Better MYTH #10: When Corporations Prosper, Everyone Prospers MYTH # 11: Countries Should Get Rich First, Then Worry about Health and the Environment MYTH #12: The Mass Media Provides Unbiased Reporting on Economics MYTH #13: Greed is Good PART II. Achieving an economics of wellbeing...

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This article seeks to illuminate a commandeering of a design philosophy to serve capitalist property development. It is proposed to contrast various world renowned projects to their Constructivist forerunners highlighting the abandonment of the movement's social ideals for stylistic icon creation. Turning a social philosophy into a capitalist marketing strategy. I believe that little or no attention is being paid to the hallow misappropriation of revolutionary ideas by leading architects....

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About a year ago, the Council of Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH) in Chicago selected the Interlace, a luxury housing development in Singapore designed by the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), as the inaugural winner of its Urban Habitat Award. The development was cited by the jury for breaking down the preconception of stand-alone icons, for creating a ‘topographical phenomenon’ and was hailed for creatively realizing the model of a ‘tower as a park.’ The Interlace is undoubtedly an impressive structure, however this accomplishment clearly owes much to Constructivist architects whose work was achieved nearly a century earlier and was imbued with social and political philosophy which stands in sharp relief against the vapid commercialist structures aping the design vocabulary of Constructivist architecture....

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The magnetic field of the passing asteroid is generating enough energy to pull Grailem towards it. Waking from an aimless sleep he tries to use his precious energy to move closer. It had been aeons since he had stood on, or even felt a solid surface beneath his feet. Grailem had been drifting aimlessly through space since his spacecraft had exploded, maybe a million years ago now. The exploding fuel tanks had thrown him out into the cold of space with such a force that he had almost achieved the speed of light. The clouds of dust and gases of forming nebula he passed through slowed him down as he flew uncontrolled through the cosmos. With no propulsion system to aid him, the friction of forming nebulae of dust and gas eventually brought his speed down to a few kilometres per second. The years passed slowly for him as he had little to distract his thoughts and he had long wished for the release of death. The only part of him that is human is his brain; and this has been incorporated completely into an artificial body. The body had been especially designed to cope with all environments; including the vacuum of space, but with...

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Mankind had been incorporating humans with artificial limbs and internal organs for generations. The more that Man depended on technology, the physically weaker the human race had become. Many humans were regularly being born with disabilities like missing limbs, blindness and also the inability to speak. Substituting the missing limbs with man-made ones and combining computer technology, the blind could see better than with normal healthy eyes (though mechanical and lacking any sign of emotion), and the disabled could walk and run. To have a disability proved to be an advantage in this new world; as the replacement limbs and internal organs were far superior to that created by nature. All those who could afford it had mechanical hearts and kidneys. Some had arms and legs deliberately amputated so that they could be fitted with far superior man-made ones. Life expectancy became measured in centuries rather than years. After three thousand years the human part of the body mysteriously changed, making the body susceptible to disease and death. Not many people lived beyond three thousand years; it was as if the body had an inte...

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Table of Contents Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Chapter Eleven Chapter Twelve Chapter Thirteen Chapter Fourteen Chapter Fifteen Chapter Sixteen Chapter Seventeen Chapter Eighteen The Author...

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What this Book is About There is a commonly held view that the incidence and scale of disasters is increasing in the modern world although some disagreement on whether the incidence of events, such as Tsunamis, earthquakes, fires, floods etc., that can give rise to disasters is increasing. The view is understandable, both population and their built environment are increasing so more is at risk and this trend of increased risk will continue while populations continue to rise. As the World Bank Independent Evaluation Group (IEG) enumerates this: ‘Natural disasters are becoming more costly: in constant dollars, disaster costs between 1990 and 1999 were more than 15 times higher ($652 billion in material losses) than they were between 1950 and 1959 ($38 billion at 1998 values) The human cost is also high: over the 1984–2003 period, more than 4.1 billion people were affected by natural disasters. The number affected has grown, from 1.6 billion in the first half of that period (1984–93) to almost 2.6 billion in the second half (1994-2003), and has continued to increase. Although disasters caused by natural events occur throughout...

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List of figures, table & Abbreviations ix Acknowledgements x What this Book is About 1 Chapter 1 - Key Concepts 7 Disaster Risk Reduction 7 Risk 10 Fast and Slow Onset Disasters 11 Resilience 12 Systems Thinking 13 Self-organising Systems 18 A System for Disaster Risk Reduction 21 Evaluation of Natural Disasters 22 Chapter 2 –Components of Disasters and NRM 27 Economic Analysis – Five Forms of Capital 27 The Significance of Context 31 Ecosystems Functional Analysis ...